Love For A Milk Carton And A Found Leg

It’s almost true that anyone can fall in love on a walk. It happened to me twice today.

By the middle school, on the asphalt next to the big field overlooking the golden grass mound across the inlet, oblivious to balls rolling into nets as kids collided and dispersed beneath a cloudless sky, a carton of milk rested on its side. It lay corpse-like in a corner of the blacktop by the chainlink fence between me and its curdling innards. Sun baked, it didn’t move. It had been tossed aside, neglected. Anyone could have kicked or stomped on it, squeezed it until it exploded. But in its ignorance of others, it appeared neither sad nor dismayed. It simply existed.

In a field somewhere in Northern California, a cow chewed grass, licked from a trough of water, lay down beneath a tree to stare at the distance. Not long before, she had given up her milk — meant for a calf born sometime that year — to the mechanism, a teat cistern, that latched onto her nipples and pulled in regular, continuous intervals. The milk traveled through many pipes, discovering pasteurization and homogenization in a plant nearby. Milk, falling like rain into more cisterns, and then into small paper cartons someone manufactured in a different plant; milk finding temporary rest in the folded remains of trees.

Someone crated the milk cartons, rolled them into trucks, and had them delivered to schools, stores, or charities. The milk waited in freezers whose motors ran on energy siphoned from solar farms in the desert, wind turbines spinning on hillsides overlooking freeways, or power plants whose oil came from hydraulically fractured shale up north or the reserves lying beneath seabeds off the coast. Milk, the liquid that sustains life at the beginning — Milk, like a pearl, waiting to be admired — Milk that could have been as magnificent as the Milky Way spreading across the blackness of space-time if it had been ingested to power the body of a young player running across a field — Instead, it slept in its carton, discarded and certainly no longer useful.

I fell in love with that carton of milk. I fell in love with its lost opportunity, with its mother — the cow — and its father — the process that made it a product. I fell in love with its creation and its destruction. I am moved from one way of seeing the world to another because of that carton of milk. My walk was more than a walk. It was a progression, a small view expanding outward. It tugged at my heart….So that when I saw the tan-gray limb lying on the path by the water’s edge, I could not continue.

I stopped to notice it: a paw, the kind that children used to give each other for good luck. A rabbit’s foot. A graceful bundle of four toes extended upwards to a leg that went nowhere. But this wasn’t possible. I had observed that leg hopping about the area several times, most recently that July. The jack rabbit nearly galloped over the path and the grass surrounding it, its high ears rigid, its kangaroo-like posture and bounce something to admire.

Now, only its leg remained after an unknown killer had filled its stomach. Perhaps two hungry jaws or several beaks fought it out, pulling the jack rabbit’s body in two. Split down the middle, the innards certainly would have poured out, the eyeballs glazing over. Or maybe the rabbit’s head had been pecked by a raptor, knife through skull for an almost-instant death. Or maybe a coyote had wandered into the development, waiting for shadows to distract before pouncing. Caught, the struggle would have been dramatic: neck held by teeth, the wiggling legs, the call of alarm stilled in a bleeding throat.

A beautiful and unusual rabbit is now like the milk: discarded on asphalt.

Discarded like the woman I met at a local political gathering a few years ago. I spoke to the woman over a platter of crackers and cheese, mini carrots and cherry tomatoes. For most of her working life she organized events for companies and nonprofits. She knew the best caterers, which venues had lousy acoustics but good lighting, how to organize name tags. Yet by the time she turned sixty, she had zero clients, zero social security coverage, and zero family.

We invited her over for Thanksgiving dinner. We delivered homemade chicken noodle soup when she was ill. We checked up on her throughout the pandemic. She has no plan, like most Americans, for the last years of her life. Over tea one afternoon, she confessed that she didn’t want to live to be an old woman. “It sucks for people like me.” Her stare was fierce as she explained that sixty-something was enough for her. I protested, speaking of renewals and endless possibilities, only later realizing that I must have sounded like the ghost of Ivanka Trump whose heartless self-help advice during the last administration was reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake!” It was equally heartless to summon self-help platitudes in an attempt to cloak the desperation I have felt.

Yes, I feel desperate. Perhaps this is because a nearby tent city by the freeway, now a shanty town, regularly catches fire. It turns out old palettes covered by sheet metal are excellent conductors of flame and devastation. Most of my adult life has been surrounded by the institution of homelessness. Most of us can admit that it started to get bad in the 1980s with Reagan’s trickle down economics. Now, minimum wage, even at $15 an hour, plus zero job security equals a growing population of run-down souls whose throats oftentimes sound permanently sore, raw, and troubled. Croaks for song. Sores for faces. It’s no wonder tent cities are excellent bicycle chop shops.

Chopped to pieces, this country. Supply chains may be crumbling under the weight of the pandemic but none of this is surprising. I look out at the divides, the many cracks in the faberge egg that is the nation, each rift spewing anxiety, distrust, and violence that can be seen everywhere, even during celebration.

A friend — a lawyer — shared the story of a client. At a recent Hip Hop concert, his client — a family with tickets by the stage — fell into one of the country’s many cracks. During intermission, the family went off to explore the concert venue, leaving their seats empty. A woman decided that she belonged there. When the family returned and confronted the woman, things turned ugly. The woman pulled out a knife and began stabbing the mother, father, and son, who were hospitalized. Stabbed for seats. Seats that murder — or should I say, “killer seats?”

Let me end with a little more drama. I am sitting at a desk. You may or may not agree with me that it’s time to stop flagrantly discarding and disregarding. Yes, here we are. I have walked and written. You have done your business, whatever it is, and have read to this point. And now, here’s the point:

Could it be that falling in love in America is hard? Could it be that the milk of the country is curdling in its carton? Could it be that the view forward is sullied by the backward vision of those who think only of themselves? Could it be that our legs have been cut off as we’ve been eaten alive by economics and expectations that no longer make sense? Could it be that runaway greed has raped the land, the people, and our future, leaving us far from pregnant with hope? This lament, this cry for love, is invisible — like so many tent cities — in its internet cage. I write for those who might stumble upon this blog. And I will continue to write to you as long as I can because I must continue to love.