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The Past Is Never Dead
Until I was ten years old, I lived in Los Angeles, just a few miles from the LA Coliseum. I still remember the address: 1711 W. 60th Street. Isn’t it weird that I would remember that address? I haven’t lived in that house for 72 years, yet there it is, 1711 W. 60th Street, a permanent little memory in my brain, probably occupying space that I might have used all these years for other things.
My home was located in one of those quintessential LA neighborhoods you see in movies every now and then, a row of palm trees in front of little pastel-colored stucco bungalows. I visited there a few years ago and the neighborhood looked exactly the same. Apparently, time doesn’t pass when you’re a little pastel bungalow in LA.
There was an Italian woman down the street, the mother of my buddy Pat Smaldino, who bought live rabbits from a farmers’ market downtown. She would come home with a rabbit and hang the poor thing upside down on a tree in her backyard and then club it to death with a baseball bat.
I usually avoided Pat’s backyard when her mother did the clubbing, but one day I walked into the backyard by mistake and, before I could avert my eyes, I saw Pat’s mother swing her club and hit the wriggling and squealing rabbit on the shoulder instead of the head. She swung again and hit the head of the rabbit a glancing blow. All this time, this rabbit was screaming like a baby. If you’ve ever heard a rabbit in distress, you know that terrible sound. I finally turned my head away but still heard the thwack of the coup de grâce. I ran home, crying all the way.
I’m now 81 years old and two clear memories out of that little downtown LA neighborhood have traveled with me all these years: an inconsequential address and a traumatic scene of horror.
I suspect the image of the rabbit who cried before he died had much to do with me being overly sensitive to animal suffering to this day. There’s a particular television advertisement for a non-profit animal rescue outfit that shows an emaciated dog chained to a post. As soon as I hear that ad’s familiar music, I either turn away, as I should have years ago in Pat Smaldino’s backyard, or grab for the remote to turn the channel.
It’s also possible that the image of the screaming rabbit had something to do with my desire not to be complicit, in even the smallest way, in the killing of animals for my food. I’ve been a vegetarian, off and on, for a good part of my life, and my conscience nags me when I’m off my vegetarian diet. That screaming rabbit won’t even let me enjoy a hot dog.
As Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Published in General
The first winter we had sheep, when it was about time for the ewes to give birth for the first time, I went out to the barn a couple of times each night to check on them. It got to be tiring after a while. Those were sheepless nights. When the first lambs were finally born the mothers seemed to be having trouble, so while wondering why we had got ourselves into this, I consulted our homesteader books again, washed up in disinfectant water and helped pull the babies out. After the first one came out and appeared to be a healthy lamb, I was more excited than when my own children were born.
The next year the babies just seemed to pop out without any fuss or bother, so I quit going out to check every night.
The bunnies being beaten to death broke my heart. I’m sorry you had to experience that. How devastating!
It’s nice when they just pop out like champagne corks. These two surprised me, because it’s been unseasonably warm. The first lambs usually come on the absolutely worst day of winter. Perhaps that means there won’t be one this year, She said, hopefully.
Retic, I know you feel for animal suffering more than you let on here.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
Even those “ethical or humane considerations” have at their core such an abundance of food choices that they are, in effect, luxury goods. Luxury being having so much more than is needed that alternative factors can come into play such as “ethical or humane” considerations that proscribe the eating of meat.
This is different than the ethical or humane considerations that come into play at all times when animals are slaughtered for food.
I was talking about the past, not the animal. You said the past is never dead. I’m telling you how to make it dead.
Reticulator, I don’t know how to hit the past with a club.
Do it metaphorically.
I have my doubts about whether swinging a metaphorical club against a metaphorical past will erase the image of a battered rabbit from my memory.
Just because I offered advice doesn’t mean I ever had any success with it myself. I still have occasional nightmares about animals dying at my hand. I woke up to one earlier this week and couldn’t get back to sleep. Not quite sure where it came from as it didn’t resemble anything I ever did. It happened maybe the day before you posted your article. Maybe they result from the time as a kid when I shot a sparrow with my BB gun and found that I didn’t care for killing animals, but that’s pretty far fetched. Not that I can’t make myself butcher chickens for the table. I have done that, and at first found it very difficult but got used to it. That was in the 80s. It has been so long that I am probably unused to it again.
That happened to me too. Still bugs me.
Flying bombing missions, not at all.
That happened to me too, but I shot a lizard sunning himself on a rock on the Los Angeles River. I felt for the lizard, and they’re not even as cute as little birds.