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.
Poem1991
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!
