The dog, Chicago, dropped the bone which turned out not to be a bone but a stone on the Humanist Hall’s floor in Oakland. There were about twenty people sitting around four rectangular tables making one large rectangle with an empty space in the middle.
Chicago paid the discussion no mind which had it been orchestrated went from Democritus and Homer to Newton and Einstein. But Chicago was not impressed. He walked around the quadrangle of tables twice and dropped his stone and sat down and relaxed.
Was he an independent being or had his master with Green Peace trained him to be so inclined? It was a hot August night which would be followed two nights later by the meteorites known for nineteen hundred years as St. Lawrence tears which would shower down upon this blue green ball. A short man dressed like a Bantam Rooster opened the double doors to the darkened lawn filled with agapanthas, Easter lilies and trees and one faded blue van. A cool breath of night spirits streamed into the heated Hall -– heated from the day’s solar energy which was a new experience in the East Bay for the last month the daytime had been overcast with clouds which prevented the sun from directly stroking the earth. But as you probably know this sun was shrouded during the month because of the volcanic ash from the eruptions in the Philippines and from the air pollution from the burning oil wells in the Persian Gulf. Some people might think this blue green ball was turning black and of course it was now for it was night of August sixth the anniversary of Hiroshima.
Chicago still played with that stone pretending to be a bone. Chicago was about two feet tall and about two feet long and weighed about fifteen pounds. Chicago was a brown black and white stomached terrier. Beautiful little cur and I petted Chicago and thought of my shepherd Joey who had died the month before. There was a question and answer period after the two speakers had spoken on all eleven kinds of humanism but had mainly polarized between intuition and atheistic materialism. Certainly the stone bone made a noise when Chicago placed it on the wooden floor. From the far corner of the Hall the eyes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Ingersoll and Tom Paine looked at that stone pretending to be a bone asking the question if there had been a revelation. A bone is of calcium this stone was concrete. Martin Luther King had faith enough to move a nation’s two hundred year tradition on race relations. Did Chicago have faith to believe his stone could become a bone? Up in the rafters one missed the presence of the pigeons. It was dark now. The electric lamps were brightening up the faces of the participants as the mainly male audience drifted to the kitchen in twos to get coffee and apple pie. The moderator was summing up the evening events and explaining that his discussion would continue next month in Humanism. Why did Chicago carry that stone in his mouth. He was eleven years old and certainly knew better than to pretend a stone was a bone!
