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“Things You Learn from Others”
How to stop tucking your T-shirt into your underpants. How to drink from a cup without drooling. How to eat with a fork and not your hands. How to dry yourself off inside the shower so you don’t get the floor wet. How to tie a half-hitch. How to make sure the disc plow overlaps the tire tread. How to tell when a colt is back at the knee. How to drive with one eye shut when you’re skunk drunk. How to sleep all night in a ditch. How to sharpen a knife with a stone. How to gut a deer. How to read the flight of hawks and owls. How to release a greyhound in tall grass when you see the seed heads move in a silken wave. How to blindfold a spooky horse with burlap. How to do nothing but listen when someone wants to do nothing but talk.
What you don’t learn, though, is how to protect others from your own manifestations of cruelty and malice which you’ve learned so insidiously through skin and blood and find impossible to shake free from no matter how much you’d like to be thought of as a decent, wholesome person.
-- Sam Shepard
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