gassing the goat

Earlier this week I received an email from a reader who posed a question I am occasionally asked.

"What's a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like Melaque?"

I chuckled. It was not just the clever use of a line from Blazing Saddles that amused me. It was the fact that the question proceeded from a false assumption.

I am far from an urbanite.

Don't get me wrong. I love big cities. New York. London. Paris. I even considered retiring in two of them until I realized it is not the cities I like. It is what they have to offer. And I can always fly there when I have the urge to indulge in their offerings of haute culture.

There is a bit of Oliver Wendell Douglas in me, though "farm living is [not] the life for me." Given a choice, I will always choose the virtues of Jeffersonian agrarianism over effete urbanism.

That is one reason I appreciated the sight yesterday of a small famliy of goats wending their way through our local filling station. It is not a sight I would see in Manhattan -- or even Salem. Here, it did not seem a bit unusual.

And that is as good an answer as any to the question of why this faux-sophisticate finds moments of grace in his rural hermitage.