![]() “God,” I explain, “blessed me with the capacity to be a great and entertaining sinner.” Alas, I buried those gifts in the ground, disappointing God, who expected gossip about my doings to perk up pedestrian evenings around the Great White Throne. I tell Vicki I save creatures to get right with God. ![]() They glance at me for a moment, then shuffle off, thankful, I like to think, for the warning. When I suggest they dig a nest of yellow jackets out of a field, they obey. ![]() I lean over to get their attention, then I tell them to leave the roadside. I draw upon my elementary-school experience in the Safety Patrol. I am especially good at discouraging skunks from trundling along the shoulders of roads. I cannot finish the sentence, because almost everything in the public realm I once knew to be significant no longer matters to me. In the summer when Vicki and I rusticate in Nova Scotia, I pluck countless creatures off country roads: green frogs, dragonflies, garter and red-bellied snakes, woolly bears and white hickory tussock moth caterpillars, red efts, fledglings of all sorts, most recently a cedar waxwing, and even slugs-yes, slugs. Snappers go to the Barrows Pond, spotted turtles to vernal pools, and wood turtles to the banks of the Fenton River. Rarely do I see turtles on the roads today, but other people do, and they bring them to me and ask me to turn them loose. I brought home bushels of box turtles and released them far from highways. Whenever I saw a snake sunning on a road, I made my parents stop the car, and I chased it off the asphalt. To emend John Greenleaf Whittier, I saw “how the tortoise” bore “his shell” and discovered where the freshest berries grew. I hid them in cookie tins and buried them beneath the icing on holiday cakes. I stuck the shells of cicadas on flowers in the middle of the dining-room table and under the arms of chairs. I filled aquariums with cocoons and pupae. My parents encouraged “boyhood’s painless play.” They allowed me to roam and grow weedy, trying this and that, and pulling books off library shelves at random. “I can see no advantage (particularly to a young naturalist) in this over-organization of childhood.” I was fortunate to be born with no athletic ability or any precocious gifts. “My childhood was more casual than that of most children today, who are forced into some sort of regimented play,” he recounts. “I believe that a large amount of unorganized time is valuable in life,” the great horticulturist David Fairchild writes, describing his boyhood. At best they are the stuff of humor, “Sammy’s Shebang.” What is true, however, is Shaw’s assertion that the person who writes about his own life also writes about the lives of others. My comments about snakes don’t interest her. In The Sanity of Art (1895), George Bernard Shaw says, “the man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.” Shaw was both right and wrong. She is fluent in French and Italian, but she is too frank to speak with a forked tongue. For her part, Vicki has never held a snake. Once the reunions end, the metaphoric snakes go to ground, and during the rest of the year Princeton is a snake-less place. ![]() At reunions, Princeton alumni wrap themselves in orange and black and parade down Elm Street looking like king snakes. If you don’t, people in Connecticut will think you insane.” Vicki is from Princeton, New Jersey. Medicate yourself before you pick up a pencil. “A shebang of snakes-long ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones, yellow, green, and red ones, snakes down your shirt and around your neck. ![]() “You are going to write about snakes?” Vicki said when I mentioned this review. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can’t come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. Men and women are not only themselves, Somerset Maugham writes in The Razor’s Edge (1944), “they are also the region in which they were born, the city or apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. ![]()
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