|
I heard this story, or the essentials of it, not
long ago, at a retirement party for a judge in Oregon.
(“Good Lord!” said another judge that night, when
this little tale was told to all assembled there. “Promise me,
please, if I ever call it quits and invite my friends to celebrate,
tell me you won’t let that woman anywhere near the microphone!”)
One autumn night, after attending a town council meeting
that had run long, in a woodsy suburb of Salem, two
lawyers—middle-aged women with poor night vision,
weak kidneys, and presumably more than just those five
attributes in common—were heading home, sharing a ride
in one woman’s automobile, on a dark road in a rainstorm.
As they approached the Interstate, and rounded the
curve on the on-ramp, the passenger cried out in alarm.
“Stop!” she said. “There’s a deer!”
The driver slammed on the brakes, the car skidded onto the shoulder,
and the engine stalled. The wipers continued to slap.
Slip-slap, slip-slap.
Slip-slap, slip-slap.
The deer, a large, antlered male,
stood stock still,
up the slope in front of them.
“Whoops,” whispered the woman in the right-side seat.
And the two began to giggle.
The wipers slip-slapped along, while the big buck took not a
single step from where he stood. He just stared the gigglers down.
But the two lady lawyers (according to the one who
testified at the party), giggled and giggled,
till they both had peed their pants.
And this was because it was suddenly clear,
through the rain and the firs and the pines,
that the big buck deer was nothing to fear,
as he stood stock still, up on the hill,
on the Hartford Insurance billboard sign.
♦
|
