Karma. It’s a killer. You wouldn’t know it, but it’s everywhere.
Even on farms in Iowa.
City people
sometimes don’t understand electric fences. My friend, Delilah and I, were walking around inside the grounds
of a Catholic church in Tirana. The sky was clear, the sun was bright,
and the air was fresh. It was the first time we had meet at this courtyard the
size of a football field where the public is allowed to walk /run/exercise any
time before 7:00.
As we walked along
the outside wall, she said, “Don’t you like this?” Delilah gestured toward the
8-foot high concrete wall—true, it was a crumbling concrete wall, but when it
starts out to be 4 feet thick, it can crumble quite a lot before there is any effect.
With no sarcasm, she had mentioned earlier how much she loves the place. It’s
something only a local could love, there are rusted pieces of children’s play
equipment, a rimless basketball court, a net-less tennis court, splotches of
grass and mud, a couple piles of sticks, and broken down soccer goals.
I said
immediately, “Yes,” (it was like a demonstration of one tenant from
improvisational theater—you always agree with whatever the other person says).
And then with a bit of sarcasm, “The coils of barbed wire at the top make me
feel very safe here.” Delilah is woman who knows English extremely well, and
she is always on the look-out for new words and ideas.
I said, “You know
what ‘barbed’ wire is?”
“Yes, and it has electricity
running through it.”
“Sometimes, but that’s
not electric. You see those little (I poked a finger out and made a hook) things
sticking out? Those are barbs.”
“Oh, ok,” she
answers. “And you spell it just like you say it?”
“Yes, b-a-r-b.
Barb.” I continued, “On the farm, we made fences with that stuff. We’d have
woven wire at the bottom with squares, like a net about 3 feet high. Above that, we’d have two strands of barbed,
electrified wire.”
“People tried to
come into your farm?”
“This wasn’t for
people. This electric wire was for animals, pigs and cows and sheep.”
I told her a little
story about the electric fence. One of
the biggest hassles was having to check the fence all the time to see if it was
‘hot’. We’d have to find a screwdriver,
and a spot where we could short out the fence, and then try to make the current
jump from the wire to the screwdriver.
Once, I decided I
would outsmart the wire. Actually, I was surprised that neither I, nor any of
my brothers had ever thought of this easy, time saving, trick. I decided to simply “pick up one of the
piglets and touch the pig to the wire.”
“Oh!! That’s
cruel,” Delilah said accusingly.
“No, no, no. The
shocks weren’t great, nothing more than a smack on the arm.” I was sure that the pig would survive this little shock like a trip to the butcher. Heck, at one day old, we would cut four pair
of colossal teeth out of their mouths, cut their tails off, give them two
injections and castrate them. After
these operations, done in under a minute usually, we would put them back down
among the long line of brothers and sisters, sucking at the teat and they would
charge right back in as if nothing had happened.
While it’s true that I
wasn’t out of high school yet, I had taken physics, so I should have predicted
the outcome. But I didn’t. The electric current flowed through the pig—flesh
conducts electricity well—and into me. I was very well grounded. You guessed it, I
got the shock. POW! Like a sock from your brother.
Delilah had the
last word, with a smile, “Ah! Karma.”
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