Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Catherine Hoffman see you!’

‘Why, thank you.’ She drawled in American. And we three

laughed.

What’s better than that?

At dinner in the banquet hall, the couple from America waved me over, and I sat at their table with them. We had a conversation about the insanity now rampaging on the planet, the cruelty of laws, the brutality of borders and bans, the con of legality, the insanity of guns, the vicious scam of all military stipulations, the split of refugees into rich and poor, black and white, good and bad, the deadliness of all separation and dominance, and how the push for prestige and status was pathetic and dangerous. The man, he was a bank teller in Ohio, leaned forward on his elbows and said, ‘Power is boring,’

I couldn’t believe it. ‘What’d you say?’

He said it again.

We three hooted with the relief of recognition, wriggled on

our seats, and nearly danced.

The next day, we exchanged emails, and they took off to see

the ancient inner city of Sopron.

I’m beginning to guess: if you want to be invited to the real ‘Feast’, don’t judge. Stay open, just watch, and shut up. There may be something outside all your knowings that will let you live.

*

And … I’m also getting it, why people pull faces at all and any talk of animal pain. Because anguish makes you look at the tragic, the outrage to animals by humans, at the hideous and wasted suffering that slinks through a lot of what is never said, seen, known,

124