I’m out sitting in the sun reading a book my wife had left on the tub. Anne Lamott‘s Grace (Eventually). I’m just beginning page twenty when my eyes get pulled off the page by a moving blur coming towards me. It’s two dragonflies; they’re stuck together, and by God, they are going to land on me come hell or high water. I reflexively extend the open book, pages 20 and 21; they take the top of 20.
They’re not really stuck together; they’re humping. The male is connected to the very end of the female’s abdomen; she’s behind him on her back, her legs all wrapped around the last bit of his abdomen, which is plastered right between her eyes.
He pumps her rhythmically, one might suspect affectionately even, in a mechanical way, and this continues for awhile. He takes this time to groom his head like insects like to do; no reason to get caught up in procreation. Their wings look finely drawn, as if with crow quill pen and ink. There are fiery amber reflections glistening on their wings, and the sunlight adds their images to the page, their translucent shadows gently touch the words “first-aid” and “miniature.”
As I marvel at the delicate shadows hovering about the written word, the air is suddenly filled with raven calls, and several dozen of them circle our tall trees; maybe something is dead on the dirt road. Just as suddenly the female’s abdomen drops to the paper, pulsing fast; hard to say if he released her or she pulled away. A few seconds tic off and they vanish.
Today’s dilemma seems less pressing now. I don’t know why. But my anger at the criminals begging for a bailout has somehow dissipated in the passionless mating of dragonflies. These processes can bear no earthly relevance to the moral hazards of Wall Street fucking Main Street, and yet, it seems the one has power to defuse the other; at least in my mind.
Still. . . You Fat Cats are in for it.
