The trouble with most talking pigs is that when they finally do learn to speak they just won’t shut up.
One morning a few weeks ago, I went over there to visit. To their pen. To take my mind off things. Yes or no to making an egg salad sandwich every day for lunch, whether tomatoes are a fruit -- c’mon now -- or a vegetable, or why tell me again I should eat cabbage. Things. You know. Things.
It’s true I am always at my happiest hobnobbing with my pig pals. I know I sometimes forget that.
And that morning, right in the middle of the rest of them, was Horatio -- who up to a few weeks ago has been a conspicuous silent sourpuss even amongst this humdrum crowd – now shining forth as the latest example of sombre pig discourse, making endless sombre observations about mashed potatoes and Hallowe’en pumpkins and watermelon rinds.
But, as maybe destiny would have it, I had been so eager to hang out with my buddies I neglected to close the stupid gate all the way behind me.
Horatio, in the midst of his detailed analysis, heard a squeak, looked up to object, spied the open gate, snorted once and charged out. That was the last any of us around here ever saw him.
Later, we did hear from a stranger, a truffle salesman ‘just passing through’, who said he’d chatted with Horatio ‘up the lake a ways,’ not so long ago. He’s calling himself Satin Blue now. Living in the basement of the red brick church up there in the next county. Telling knock-knock jokes and laughing it up long and loud.
Got a lady friend.
Who knows if that’s true.
