August 22: Tired of Living, Quiet Night, Fairy Tale of Onwee

"There's never anything to do around here," he thought.  He walked slowly to his food trough and sniffed to see if anything had been overlooked at lunch.  He found a small strip of potato skin and ate it.  His back itched, so he leaned against the fence and rubbed against the boards.  When he tired of this, he walked indoors, climbed to the top of the manure pile, and sat down.  He didn't feel like going to sleep, he didn't feel like digging, he was tired of standing still, tired of lying down.  "I'm less than two months old and I'm tired of living," he said.  He walked out to the yard again.

Wilbur is having an existential crisis in this paragraph.  He's questioning the meaning of his life, and he's finding no answers.  None of the normal pig occupations seem to satisfy his empty heart.  Not eating.  Not scratching himself.  Not climbing the manure pile.  Not sleeping or digging.  As he says, he's simply tired of living.

E. B. White is dealing with a little more than Wilbur's loneliness for Fern here.  He's touching upon a very modern dilemma.  Every person wants to make some kind of difference in the world.  I know I do.  I don't want to spend my life in meaningless activity.  When I die, I don't want the last thing said about me to be "Marty who?"

This evening, I sort of feel like Wilbur.  My son is with my brother at our family's camp.  My daughter is spending the night at grandma's house.  My wife is working.  And I'm sitting home alone, typing a blog post that will be read by at least three or four people.  Five, if I'm lucky.  I actually scratched my back against the wall a few minutes ago, but I don't have a manure pile on which to roost.

Of course, I know that my life has meaning.  All I have to do is look at my son and daughter to know that.  But, in quiet moments like this, I question some of the choices I've made in my life.  For instance, I have three college degrees (two of them advanced), and I'm working two part-time jobs that barely pay my bills.  What the hell was I thinking?  Who in his or her right mind gets a terminal degree in poetry?  Where's the meaning in that?

Don't worry.  I'm not about to leap from the top of the manure pile.  I'm just tired, not suicidal.  Summer is slipping into autumn.  The days are getting shorter.  Some of the leaves in my maple tree are already looking a little yellow.  Change.  It makes me a little unsettled.  Sad sometimes.  But I'll roll with it.  I really don't have a choice.

Once upon a time, a turnip farmer named Onwee lived in the Kingdom of Nodd.  Onwee came from a family of turnip farmers.  His father, his father's father, and his father's father's father farmed turnips.  One day, Onwee stood in the middle of his turnip fields and thought to himself, "Who the hell wants to eat turnips?!"

Just then, a beautiful young milkmaid came running to him, exclaiming, "Oh, turnips are so sexy.  I love a man who knows how to grow root vegetables."

Onwee dropped his hoe.  "I have the biggest turnips around," he told the milkmaid.  "I inherited them from my father."

"Can I pull a few of your turnips?" the milkmaid said.

Onwee nodded.  "We can pluck in this field as much as we want."

And they did.  They plucked all afternoon and far into dusk.

As the moon rose into the sky, Onwee looked at the milkmaid and said, "Would you marry me?"

The milkmaid laughed.  "Are you kidding me?" she said.  "I was just looking for a free pluck.  I'm not going to marry a turnip farmer."  And she went skipping off into the night.

Onwee stood there, turnips piled at his feet, and thought, "Shit."

Moral of the story:  milkmaids are tramps.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

She's a sexy bee-atch.  And the milkmaid isn't bad, either.