My Day In The Wild Kingdom

I spent Tuesday at World Golf Village. Not golfing but bird watching... I counted 31 cormorants in a single Cyprus tree. I also saw scads of heron, crane, red-winged blackbirds, a thrasher and (maybe) a pine warbler.

I also encountered a cotton mouth moccasin between three and five feet long (I did not stretch it out to measure it, you understand).

When Ginny got off work, we drove back via State Road 16 and stopped in Green Cove Springs for a delightful seafood supper.

We strolled in the park adjacent to the spring, chatted with fishermen on the public pier and sat on a park bench reminiscing about the year when the children were tiny and the six of us spent a week’s vacation in a Green Cove Spring whore house.

No, that’s not a typo.

We’d made reservations a by phone and paid in advance not knowing what kind of place it was. So we stayed anyhow and the girls fawned over our children and treated us – and we them – with utmost courtesy. It was one of our happiest family vacations ever.

Rick came over this evening telling us more about that young mother on the block whose husband died suddenly last month: Her parked car was totaled by a hit-and-run driver of a stolen truck. She and the baby had just got out of the car moments before it was hit. Rick’s not sure about her insurance situation.

No sooner had Rick left than Wanda, our friend from Savannah, dropped by with a burning theological question that’s bothering her.

She lives in a ritzy, gated community up there and here’s what she asked:

How should decent people handle it when one person’s cats track footprints all over another person’s just-washed car?

Wanda, a natural born mother hen, finds herself in the middle of this because she likes both parties and wants them to like each other.

Wanda leaves for home tomorrow. She casts herself in the role of peacemaker and is upset about the situation there.

The cat-lover and the car-lover , both decent folk, are adamant in their obsessions.

Emotional buttons have been pushed.

By-standers are taking sides.

Cops have been called.

Nuclear war threatens.

Savannah may be destroyed.

The pope is dead.

Billy Graham is not in town.

So Wanda, asks me for advise.

Duhh!

I can’t think of a single Scripture passage that might relate.

If King Solomon, world’s wisest man, counseled these people he’d take a sword and cut the cat in half and give each… No, Solomon’s solution only worked with babies.

Maybe if you tied the adversaries’ left hands together, then placed a meat cleaver in their right hands….

No. No, that’s not a Christian solution.

Of course, after my friend was well on her way up I-95 – then, too little, too late, as usual when I try to think of answers to problems – I had an idea:

Perhaps Wanda – who, for some reason beyond me, finds herself involved in trying to reconcile the parties — might ask each of these adversarial parties this question:

“Is your neighbor’s eternal soul, health, well-being and good will more important than your car/cat?”

“Really?”