When I was in college, I worked at the front desk of my dormitory for a time. I had many responsibilities, but among them was renting out pool balls and cues to people who wanted them. One day, a gentleman came in from the law school, which was next door. He said that he was missing some balls, and asked to see ours. I was young and naïve, and so I showed them to him. He immediately grabbed the two he said he’d missed, stepped back, called them his own, and said that possession granted him the assumption of ownership.
And he left.
I hate conflict. I avoided it as much as I could when I was growing up, but this was too much. I headed down to the pool room after I got off work - picking up one of my friends along the way - and there was the man who had robbed me. One of the balls he had taken was near to me, and I grabbed it. He grabbed the other one, and we argued while his friends watched, silently. I was shaking. I didn’t want to get into a physical confrontation, so eventually I left with my friend. The ball he still had was an eight-ball anyway, and we had spares of those
A partial victory, and also a partial defeat.
Years later, the other day, I was walking through a nature preserve. It used to be a garbage dump. Actually, it used to be a nature preserve, and then it became a garbage dump. Then they spread dirt over it and planted wild seed, and now it’s turned back into a nature preserve. It’s a wetland again, next to a lake, and the whole thing is high grass, ponds, marshes, and occasional stands of cottonwoods and willows. Birds rest there on their spring migrations. Pheasants and coyotes and geese live there, too. You can see the freeway across the water.
There is a gravel path that cuts through it, and I was walking up from one side. Down from another side came a man, perhaps sixty years old, with a gimlet eye, an air of authority, and a dog trailing about fifty feet behind him. Unleashed dogs are prohibited in the park, because they chase the birds for fun and blood, and the birds have nowhere else to go for miles around. I’ve seen people with dogs romping freely through the park before, and the worst I’ve ever done is give them a dirty look. I don’t think they’ve ever noticed.
Approaching that man, though, I felt different. I felt myself to be in the right and felt him to be in the wrong. I took another step, and I knew I was going to say it. It burbled out of me like bubbles out of a deep
“Your dog should I really be on a leash,” I said grimly.
The man eyed me. “He knows how to behave,” he said.
“This is a bird sanctuary,” I said, and never breaking my pace, and then we were past each other.
Another partial victory. At least I’d made his day worse.
I look back at those now, and I regret not standing up for myself more - or more exactly, not standing up for my university’s property, and not standing up for those weary birds. I should have kept with that man until his dog was leashed. I should have wrestled that last ball away from that law school student. I failed to do so.
,kkmkABBBBBGN R1EW
There are many things I love about this city, but there are also many things about it that are wrong. There are many things which I feel besmirch my city’s honor, and for these, justice and my emotions have demanded a channel in which to vent their spleen.
I wonder sometimes, if I meet those men in other circumstances, if they will remember me and resent me. And then I wish I had punched that law school student in the mouth.
Le Mensonge? Tiens, tiens! - Ha! ha! les Compromis! Les Préjugés, les Lâchetés!