Eating babies

On a wild romp along Underwood Creek, Idgie disappears into the platoons of dried teasel soldiers who stand guard between the grade school and the business college. When she doesn't respond to my shouts and whistles I come hunting, only to find her finishing off the last bit of some small animal's tasty baby. Judging by the look of the burrow she is poking, it must have been a bunny baby.

A little early for bunnies, but then the timing of most everything seems off these days.

I am a little disgusted and a little proud. She's a good rodent and rabbit hunter, one of the jobs she's chosen as her calling, herding cattle, is not available to her.

But eating other critters' babies, that seems. . . unseemly. Of course, I am not opposed to eating a bit of baby cow or sheep now and then, so there! I can't really scold the dog for her pleasure.

And the night before I'd indulged in a little baby eating myself. The baby dragon has not yet sprouted wings or learned to breathe fire, but his lungs are working up to it. Fretting with a snuffy nose, he squalled his discomfort between fits of uneasy, sweaty, upright dozing on the chest of my daughter, Liz, who was babysitting him, or on mine.

Three months old, he is fat and brown and adorable. Something about the texture and density of baby flesh makes us need to touch it, squeeze it, kiss it,  hold it. We say "I'm going to eat you up," and we mean it, in some metaphorical way. We want to take their baby deliciousness into ourselves.

Thought shift: be like a dog--follow what moves. In Nairobi, WTF stands for Where's the Food? Price inflation makes it harder and harder to buy food. The land is tired and produces less. There's drought and speculation driving costs higher and higher: people raise biofuels instead of human fuels. Babies starve or grow into cheap labor, if there's anyone doing the hiring, any jobs to be had.

Whatever work I do, it can't involve eating other human babies, in any sense of the word. That much I know. WTF: Who's This Feed? That's a good test. My family, of course. But in all the jobs I've ever had was the prospect of doing good for other people's children, too. And not just the children of the parents at the top of the food-chain.

Too much talk. There are branches to drag and things to sniff in the air. My Sunday pack to meet.

Move! Now!!!