The day was proceeding along at a pretty even pace. I figured I’d produced about 45 productive minutes for every hour that had passed. For sure, I’d had worse days. As a bonus, at least as far as I knew at the time, all of the cows were in, and none of my neighbors were particularly angry with me. It was early afternoon, and my day had gone so well that I’d even had time to put the daily train wreck on hold for a half-hour lunch break.
I was stringing out a hotwire along one of my fences that was hovering in that gray zone between being a real fence and simply a random assortment of rotted-out cedar posts, bent and crooked steel posts and gnarly, rusty stretches of old barbed wire. In the springtime as the ground starts to show even a tinge of green, most of my cows, it seems, have little respect for even a decent five-wire fence. Surprisingly, though, a little electric discouragement in the form of a single strand of polywire electric fence usually proves quite successful in persuading them to stay where they belong.
The grass was actually flirting with greening up and growing a little, but turnout on the mountain was still a little farther down the road than I could see from where I stood. I was sick of feeding hay, to say nothing of the fact that the haystack was dwindling at a rate faster than the grass was growing. I needed to take advantage of any piece of ground I could find with a blade of grass on it that might support a cow for an extra day or two.
Other than all of the walking it requires, stringing out a single strand of polywire along an old fence is not really a bad job. It doesn’t take much thinking, and if there’s a bit of moisture in the ground, the little fiberglass posts sink right in, defying the cement-like consistency that normally rules the summertime soil of the high desert. The real bonus is that once it’s in place, and as long as I’ve established a good ground, my belligerent bovines have a healthy respect for it, and I can temporarily rest at ease knowing my neighbors aren’t cussing me.
I kept up a pretty steady pace, alternately sticking a little temporary post in the ground about every 50 feet and patting myself on the back for actually getting something done that day. I felt my phone buzz in my back pocket, and fearing it may be a text from an irritated neighbor who has little appreciation for roaming cows and the open range laws of rural Cassia County, stopped what I was doing to anxiously take a peek at the text message.
To my great relief, I immediately saw that the message was from Alex, a good friend of mine who lived in town, several miles from where any of my wanderlusting cows might possibly be roaming. I opened the text and clicked on the link that was attached. It led me to a meme posted on a Facebook post of someone I didn't know. I knew instantly, however, that this dear soul was a kindred spirit. The meme read: “My life is a constant battle between wanting to correct grammar and wanting to have friends.”
I laughed out loud in a spirit of insightful empathy because, as Alex was fully aware, I too am afflicted with this particular ailment. He felt especially traumatized by the malady, as his schoolteacher wife has little patience for improper grammar, spelling and punctuation. Although Alex is a highly successful businessman who thrives in his private, professional and civic life, he’s never lost sleep on account of a misplaced apostrophe.
It’s tough to live the life of a grammar purist. Hypersensitivity to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the crazy English language can drive one to madness. As if it weren’t bad enough to be troubled by the harmless improper usage of words like your, you’re, it’s, its, they’re and their, one leaves oneself open to a mountain of criticism with every tiny typo. The implications of constant vigilance can be exhausting.
When I ran into Alex a week or two later, we were able to laugh about it all as we held an impromptu therapy session. I hope I’ve come to the realization that I shouldn’t discount the validity of a heart surgeon’s greatness because he may have used a dangling participle in a hastily-sent text message. In addition, I’m fully aware of the folly of chucking rocks from the dining room of a glass house. I may be able to spell chrysanthemum, but that does little to keep my cows behind a dilapidated fence in dire need of repair.
I’ll never meet a soul who wasn’t granted some divine gifts. Just because I may be unable or unwilling to recognize the talents of another doesn’t minimize the worth of the person or the gift. I still cringe every day at the everyday grammatical errors of well-meaning bloggers and social media warriors, but my contempt has been downgraded to sympathetic apathy.
