Habits

Habits. We develop these habits as we age. When I quit drinking and smoking, I had to give up sitting on the veranda watching the sun set every evening because it was connected to scotch and Marlboros. Today my gardener asked why I haven’t been over to the garden – across the road from the house – since I came back from Bali. My reply was that my wife isn’t here. That habit of coming home every afternoon from school and going to check on the fruit trees and the goats is part of my non-smoking, non-drinking behavior. My wife isn't here so I am on a different system.

I did notice today that a number of ripe papayas had large holes in them. My first thought was that it was the monkeys. But, the gardener said that bat have been coming in at night and eating the papayas. For an old city boy, it’s an object lesson in the difficulties of having a farm – pests. The monkeys and the bats are our big problems, but they have to live as well, and the problem is coming to terms with them. Su won’t let me shot them because she’s absorbed a lot of the multiple religions that have crossed this island over the centuries. I regularly watch Indonesians shoot gorgeous parrots, hunt protected dolphins, capture protected birds of paradise, but she insists on not killing any living creatures even poisonous snakes and bugs and worms. We captured a millipede one day whose bit is excruciating and she insisted that I put in a bottle. She dumped it in the jungle across the road all the while speaking to it about how she spared its life and it should just go about its life and not bother us again. Sometimes I feel like Su is a hippy transplant.