I enjoy birding. But I am definitely not a "birder." I also have birds in cages. My friend Raoul, a serious Buddhist, doesn’t like cages.
"But they’re happy," I tell him. These are big cages, you see, and my birds eat really well. And they have plenty of toys. Some of them even build nests and lay eggs. But Raoul is not won over, so I try a different tack:
“Raoul, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll let the birds go free if I can put you in a cage for a year.”
Anyways, this is all just foreplay to the next dream:
I walk downstairs and Lord!——there’s Ron Silliman, naked, in a cage. Without missing a beat, though, I call out to him. “How’s it going, Ron?” “Beautiful, beautiful,” he twitters. “I’ve never been so happy.”
And, really, he does look radiant.
So, I pull up a chair and we start talking-- and I think to myself that is the most civil and satisfying conversation I’ve had in my entire life. Some of the details are fuzzy now but here are some impressions and details I remember about this conversation:
Ron is extremely well-fed. I order him Chinese, Thai, Italian, etc. On certain Sundays the cooks from the local restaurant, La Cucaracha, take over the kitchen here and prepare treats for Ron to sample.
Ron is still writing and blogging. And it doesn’t bother him in the slightest that everything he writes and blogs has to go through me. “O, what does it matter,” he says, “when you’re so damned happy.”
Ron has had many epiphanies here in this cage by my turtles. But the "Everest" of these epiphanies, he tells me, is that “Freedom and flying are way overrated.”
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