After an interesting day of job interviews – one each for me
and my wife – I sat down in front of the TV to put my mind in vacation mode for
a while. Flipping through the channels, I stopped at our COZI-TV
affiliate, and they were showing Lassie.
Now, I say the following in jest. Well, partly in jest anyway. I remember watching the show as a kid, and
you couldn’t help but like Lassie. Say
it with me folks, “Good girl, Lassie”!
What I saw tonight wasn’t one of those “Timmy fell down the
well…again” episodes. Apparently some
calamity had happened in the woods – maybe a forest fire – and Lassie took it
upon herself to go around and check up on the little woodland creatures, and
set things to rights if necessary.
(Hey, you know what you can find in the woods? Squirrels!
I saw one on Lassie. Okay, yeah I’m
sure that’s true, but they’re not what you’d call exotic. It’s not like you’d hear, “Dad! Let’s go to the woods. I know it’s a long way to drive, but I really
wanna see a squirrel. Please?” Look kid, just come over to my yard. We got your squirrels. Bring your traps along, and you can take as
many of those tomato thieves with you as you want! But I digress.)
Where was I? Oh yeah,
the woods…Lassie…little animals.
By the way for those of you new to our fine world, Lassie
was a big, good natured collie dog who apparently communicated by a combination
of body language and barking.
So a fox walks into the woods. Which sounds like a setup to a joke, “A fox,
a dog, and Indiana Jones walk into the woods”.
No, no, no. No joke, this fox was
a skinny, scrawny thing. Really pathetic
looking. Lassie watches the fox for a while,
then harangues it with a few barks. The
fox pauses, then ambles on a bit.
Then we see a quail. The
camera pans over a bit, and there’s the quail’s nest, with five eggs out in the
open, unprotected! Lassie looks at the
nest, then looks at the fox looking at the nest.
Foxes gotta eat too, you know.
For some reason this made me think of Solomon, preparing to
pass judgment on a difficult dispute.
What will Lassie’s decision be? “Okay
fox, you can eat two quail eggs, but no more than that. Got it”?
Then the camera cut to the branch of a nearby tree, where
sat an owl and two owl chicks in the nest.
“Okay, two quail eggs, and I’ll throw in one of the owl
chicks. But don’t you even think about
going for the other one”! But of course,
all you heard was barking. More barking.
It’s as if Lassie expected all the different forest animals
to understand Doggish. That would be
like one of us traveling to France or Germany and expecting everyone to
understand English.
What must be going through the minds of these animals? It wouldn’t matter much to them that Lassie
lived on a farm. No, when you live in
the woods you have to be tough. I can
almost hear them thinking, “Just who does this softy from the suburbs think she
is, coming here and poking her nose into our business”?
