If sports is a metaphor for life, it is a pale one indeed. Many of us have experienced real losses as a child, not just lower scores in some game. I was not terribly lucky myself, but I knew two classmates who lost a parent while I was in their class. I was lucky enough not to know one who had developed cancer, or lost a limb, or an eye.
Team sports in grade school and throughout high school had teams but rarely teamwork.
Even Tehran was a bit too rustic for my mother. Most people got their drinking water from the ditch in front of the house… really sketchy, since camels outnumbered motor vehicles a lot in 1960. We had a well with a kerosene powered pump and a sand filter on the roof. Not remarkably hot in summer (just really dry) and we got occasional snow during the winter we were there.
I almost forgot about the three explorers who were captured by cannibals. The chief, who was civilized because he had eaten so many British explorers, told the hapless captives, “We are not entirely savages. Of course, we will strip your skin carefully from your living bodies and cover our canoes with it… that makes the best canoes. However, we will grant you each one reasonable wish.” The first explorer says, “Let me see that knife.” standing back warily, the chief handed it to him. The explorer stabs himself in the heart. The chief sighs, “It is always like that. So dull!” The second follows suit, but the third says, “Let me see that fork.” Nonplussed, the chief says, “You realize this is your last chance to make it an easy death.” The man insists, and is handed the fork. He pokes himself all over with the fork and hands it back, saying, “So much for your canoes!”
Burnt hair is probably as close as we would get to the smell of burned fingertips. Maybe my sense of smell is falling prey to the differences between a whiff and a cloud of odor.
I recall being driven out of the house by a pork roast that was burned beyond recognition. I vomited a couple of times and it seemed to take hours to get the smell out of my system.
I’m pretty sure it was deliberate. It was in Iran, in 1960. My father must have bought the pork roast at the US Army base where we got our drinking water, and for unclear reasons expected our Muslim baji (maid/cook) to cook it for us.
Why were we in Iran? Dunno – but one of my brothers went through Dad’s Army records. He was a radar specialist supporting a program to track Russian rocket tests by comparing returns from our radar and Russian radar.
I have often mused that whatever the world is, it is not what we think it is. My life, and my younger brother’s life on a separate occasion, was spared by the disappearance of dozens of cars when we were doomed to be hit by them.
I suggest the sensation of lost pets’ presence is not the illusion; the world itself is.
From my mishaps with a soldering iron, I can say burning human flesh (fingers, anyway) smells like burning pork. Very different from burning beef or chicken.
If sports is a metaphor for life, it is a pale one indeed. Many of us have experienced real losses as a child, not just lower scores in some game. I was not terribly lucky myself, but I knew two classmates who lost a parent while I was in their class. I was lucky enough not to know one who had developed cancer, or lost a limb, or an eye.
Team sports in grade school and throughout high school had teams but rarely teamwork.