FOOL’S GOLD

Astronomers discovered a large, Jupiter-like planet orbiting three suns. At the Cascades, an iconic local waterfall, a man dove into the plunge pool to save his son, somehow pushed the boy safely to shore, but never resurfaced himself, and drowned. When soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo—who pays his personal hairstylist to style the hair of his likeness at Madrid’s “Museum of Wax”—suffered a game-ending injury during the 2016 Euro Cup, a moth landed on the bridge of his nose, and fluttered its wings; even so, Ronaldo—perhaps because he was so crushed—did not bother to brush it away. In an empty parking lot outside a movie theater, I watched a crow pecking at spilled popcorn—yellow kernels, vivid as tiny nuggets of gold—and thought: lucky. A friend of mine who knows how to hunt mushrooms and has a map in his head of neighborhood trees that produce the best ones—“chicken of the woods” is now in season—told me that some restaurants douse the trash in their dumpsters with gasoline to discourage homeless people from scavenging. As I cycled up a mountain road, I spotted a cup in a roadside ditch that said, “Eat like you mean it,” and once I got home, I slathered a just-nuked corn dog with pimento cheese. At the Blacksburg farmer’s market, Weathertop Farm displays a flip book of photographs that documents the trajectories of their chickens’ lives, from little yellow puffs to stately white birds in orange crates to featherless bodies at a slaughterhouse. Decades ago, one of my cousins, who had been raised a vegetarian for health and religious reasons, informed me that she’d only eaten animal flesh once in her life—a single bite of fried chicken—after which she’d promptly thrown up, a proclamation she’d delivered proudly, as if her body’s automatic rejection of meat was proof of a kind of innate and irrefutable purity. The ACLU wants to know if I think people’s religious beliefs are oppressing others in my community but the quiz they sent via mail was too long, so I slid it sheepishly—albeit responsibly—into the recycling bin. The sight of the American flag, I’m unashamed to say, does not fill me with hope. Still, I can’t get these lyrics—from the song “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes—out of my head: “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique / Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see / And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be / A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.” The phrase “Fiddler’s Green” may refer to an afterlife of perpetual mirth, an extrasolar colony in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, a regimental poem of the U.S. 2nd Calvary Regiment, or the community of newly and garishly unimaginative homes spaced too closely together and that surround the original block of houses built in the 1960s where my family lives, and that also block our view of the horse hill in the distance; whenever I see the brick columns that designate the edges of this neighborhood, and which are decorated with a capital F and a capital G, I can’t help but think: “Fool’s Gold.” For the first time in ten years, I hit every light on Main Street while it was still green, and though I silently cheered every time I made it safely through another intersection, I was disappointed to have arrived at my destination so early, because it meant then I’d have more time than I knew how to kill.