No goats were harmed in the writing of this column
Last week I was working in my upstairs office when I heard four very loud gunshots. I jumped out of my chair and went to the window. I worried there was a shooter tromping around in our woods, picking off our deer.
When I looked down into my side yard, I saw a disturbing sight. My white metal goat was lying on its side next to the wide, flat stump on which it’s usually perched. I posted a photo of the goat to Facebook. I stated clearly that the goat was metal, and therefore unharmed, but still, folks were concerned. If the gunfire was close enough to strike the goat, it could strike me or my husband or my dogs.
“I wouldn’t live anywhere gunfire could possibly infiltrate my yard, no matter how beautiful the surroundings,” wrote one Facebook commentator.
To be clear(er): The goat was not hit by gunfire. He had been lying beside the stump for many weeks, as a result of a windy day. My whole intention (poorly stated) was to say that the juxtaposition of loud gunfire shots with the vision of the goat lying on its side was disturbing. There was no cause and effect. But the mind searches for connections, and mine, though it knew better, briefly felt the gunshots and the lying-down goat to be related and reacted with alarm.
But to the Facebook commentator’s point, about never living where danger lurks
… do I even need to point out that danger lurks everywhere? That unsuspecting neighborhoods (and grocery stores and schools and houses of worship) are frequently targeted by gun violence, that unsuspecting countries are ravaged by earthquakes, that unsuspecting towns are incinerated by wildfires and lava flows and buried under floodwaters? We have a whole lot less control over our surroundings and our safety and our loved ones than we like to think we do.
When I was in graduate school, I had to perform a certain number of IQ and personality assessments as part of my coursework. We were encouraged to reach out to people beyond friends and family, as the assessment instruments are revealing and it’s not a good idea to create an imbalance of power within your closest relationships (i.e. to know more about friends’ and family members’ intellectual functioning and motivations than they know about their own and yours).
With this is mind, I asked one of my neighbors — a quiet, kind-seeming, reclusive man in his thirties — if I could use him as a test subject. He agreed. Trust me when I say that if you don’t want to know what lurks in the minds of friends and family, you absolutely don’t want to know what lurks in the mind of your quietly seething, paranoid neighbor.
After graduate school, I went to great pains to control the neighborhoods where I lived. As I had three dogs, I did not want to live off of (or anywhere near) a busy street. As I wasn’t a fan of children, I did not want to live where I could hear their gleeful shouts and cries. For years I managed to inhabit homes on rural, dead-end, child-free roads, and as such, I lived with the illusion that no harm or disturbance would ever come to me or my dogs.
And for the most part I have, in fact, lived without harm or disturbance. But I give only partial credit to my carefully chosen environs for that. The rest of the credit goes to good fortune. I’m not forced to live where crime rates are high, where earthquakes ravage, where tornadoes are a frequent occurrence, where extremes of temperature wreak havoc and threaten my life.
I wish I still lived with the illusion of safety and control. It was a naïve time of life, the halcyon days of my youth and early middle age. But today I look out my office window at the metal goat still lying on its side, the result of a windy day, and realize that while there was comfort in the belief that I could avoid danger and nuisance, there’s an odd sense of freedom in knowing that I can’t.
It means I’m not in charge. That I don’t manage the world’s dashboard. Misfortune and malfeasance will do what they will, when they want. All I can do is set my goat back on its perch, and be grateful that, for now, the winds are calm.