Cow Now
We say holy cow, and might as well say sacred cow, or if we are talking about a French Cow, a Quebecois cow, say sacre cow. It all comes to the same thing , that the cow is somehow special and important to those of us who drink real milk, rather than the chalky stuff you get at the supermarket, done up in square, harsh cardboard containers. I mean that I buy my milk each and most every weekend at Briggs', up in West Medway. Skim, in heavy glass bottles, with a grip on the side of the glass, to heft the darn thing into the morning fix, the coffee for the day , that will straightaway begin to move the limbs, uncork the brain and lead to some amiable efforts that day to make the world a better place for human and for beast. My milk comes from the Briggs farm, Shady Oaks in good ole West Medway.
This exegesis is more about the farm, in general, than it is about Briggsy. The cows are his and his Nancy's, but they could be someone else's. By generalizing, I can say what I feel with out casting any shadow on my good friend, Bob, or his amiable kin and his estimable employees. I have been in thought about farms a while now and located with the help of the intrepid researchers at the Wellesley Free Library, the work of Noel Perrin whom I will now engage. His five biographical volumes on the good life and the people who lead it are truly inspirational, easy to read, and quite wonderful.
Here is what he says. I paraphrase and sneak a few of my own ideas and feelings in. Most of what I say is lifted from his work. I feel only slighty guilty to borrow from this literate farmer, as he confirms a number of my own prejudices, gained over a decade or so of being around old people who remember the farm as it was once.
The words of this or that elder I know, rebound in my near-empty cranial bowl, as I think about why Perrin has got it right. Why could I not have thought it myself? Because I am not that smart. Not dumb though. As an old friend, not gone from my mind at least, used to say, "You may be crazy, but you're not stupid." I go to the farm I mentioned above for the smell and the feel of a thing I barely can comprehend. Bob and the staff, mostly family, are ever kind to me, as they are to the animals they tend. The gentle spirit draws me every week, as does the milk they quietly offer the world.
I call it the alternative drink, the one for those who demand the best to get on with making the world once again safe for human and large beast.
Milk as sacred fluid and all that.
For no good reason, I turned to Perrin's most recent, great work, "Last Person Rural, " for confirmation and for comfort. I sure as heck was not going to read his four other books on the farm. It was too upsetting a subject for me to be able to wade through. The lost culture of the curious breed, called the New England farmer. The farmer and his or her kin got lost on the freeway somewhere between Mac Donald's and the xyz car agency up on the big road, named of all things with a number, 9 or 93 or 95. Why can't they at least be named something else?
Rooster roadway or cow procession road, or hen highway or happiness path or lovely lane. I guess because the old feeling just doesn't apply to the new roads that lead from one place that looks just like another place, all across this country of ours which used to be so different, one area to the next, but isn't any more.
So now to play. Cows remind us, play is the nectar of the gods. That to see and stand and just be, are what life is about at the most basic and pleasurable level. The frantics jump and curse and complain about Gingrich and non-Gingrich. They buy this or that car, see this or that video, buy this or that from this or that supermarket and remain permanently running.... a cow would say , in place. You see, the modern alternatives are really no alternatives at all. Just a mad race to get from the NFL and the Doritos, to a hurried church attendance, to Midas Muffler and jiffy-lube. One thing is another and and the two, are the same.
Humans rush to some goal, but the cow stands, or sits there, and knows all the answers the humans don't. Perrin and Bob Briggs and his colleagues on the farm, Buddy Gay and Marshall, know the facts, so to speak.
It's about cow. Cow-now, not later. Perrin starts out on our advertising in America. He is wise enough to know what we put on labels in our land carries the truth, how we really feel, advertising-wise. That is to say, truth counts the most, sells the most cans, and is an American duty.
From the time we began to market Coke, Lysol, Luckies and Betty Crocker, we knew that truth in advertising was not just honorable. It sold product and, moving stuff off the shelves is what made this country great. So on the side of the Carnation milk it says, "from contented cows." That is the key. If you partake, it will make you contented too. Generations of us Americans have sought to be contented. Alas, we turn to religion, politics, alcohol and tv for this rare feeling, when all we really need do is crack a can of Carnation. Beer companies beware.
The cow is a contented spirit-form. A new age dilly. A pretty package that has the answers.
Perrin say, "cows are a happy lot."
Cows are happy.
They are genuinely sociable , when they feel like it. Take the sheep. When have you ever heard of the line, in the advertising lingo, "wool from contented sheep?" Sheep are slavishly and compulsively group-minded, like today's corporon. Like those of us who work for big organizations and mostly hate it. Sheep group because they feel they have to.
The cow, on the other hand, mostly groups, when it wants to. Only there are the blessed exceptions, the ever -observant Perrin tells us, ones who stand alone because their deeper self tells them to. This business on the difference between cows and sheep is drawn from Perrin's book.
And we receive, in addition from Mr. Perrin, an etymological lesson. He proffers the derivation of the word, gregarious. Which surely applies to the cow, as it does to few other beasts. The cow is down-deep friendly and sociable , except when occasion calls for it to be lone, or mischievous, or balky. Any farmer knows the cow has its mind and is thus unlike a sheep in its approach to the serious matter of living. The latin is grex, gregis. Nominative and genitive. Means flock. And the adjective, egregious means "out of the flock." The cow is mostly grex, only sometimes, for reasons hard to fathom, it is egregious. Because they don't talk like us, we lack a few answers as to major motivation.
So sheep are compulsively gregarious, says our farm expert, Noel Perrin. The cow is more an individual who exercises a free choice. Perrin speaks of the sacred deviant of the flock, the one he may call an egregious actor. He asserts with a kind of whimsy, that one or more of these cowish nonconformists, "have nearly always skipped off in search of pleasure. "
What a nice way to put it. Do you know any people who so glibly and innocently slip off to have a sort of fun that will not hurt or embarrass anyone.?
Well, Perrin , where do they go, these folks who do not stand with the mass of the bovine kin?
He says some lie in the shade beneath a set of trees. Just there, half hidden from the inquisitive view of the human observer.
Three or four are up to their cow-knees in the pond, standing and thinking as cows do.
Three or four are up to their bellies in same pond.
One or two are up to their neck, forming another cow-clot on the bucolic landscape.
And the human observer, the animal sociologist says, "They all look blissful." That is the thing. Cows look blissful, because they are. When you drink milk cows give.... cows you can see and touch, there is the promise you too will be blissful. Humans always need a lesson in bliss. Perhaps we need to call the thing we need, not stress management, but the flip side, the positive side, bliss management.
Cows have it. We can have it , but for the asking. Any farmer knows what I am talking about. That is why they stay on the gosh darn farm, when the way of life is long past as a viable and sane way to make a living. The farmer feeds off the cow, as does the customer who goes up there, week after week, for the milky fix. From cows that are contented.
Now Perrin goes to take in the mass of cows he has been watching. There is nothing to worry over. The mass of the cows, the ones together, so to speak, the massed bunch of cows, "is nearby, busily eating clover blossoms. It's members look pretty blissful too." Thank goodness, someone is happy in this busy, harried nation of ours.
For as long as Carnation has been around, we have stated the truth about the cow being content. Truth in advertising. It is right there as clear as a quote from the Bible. Cows are, and always have been able, to teach us how best to live, to live contented. Only we seem to forget and get lost in the aisle with the Ragu, Fruit loops and canola oil. Supermarket truth can get, truly tricky.
I must say that cows don't like shots of penicillin to cure some ill the farmer fears. They get unhappy, until the fact of the shot and successive threats of follow-up doses, cease. Perrin tells of cows showing displeasure towards the fearsome needle. Pinning our poor farmer against the wall, for instance.
He also speaks of cow intelligence. The four-leg is not only willing to defend its honor and safety by balking in an ominous manner, it has some other stuff figured out as well.. Eric turned on the radio in the barn, or so it seems, when the silence was deafening one night. This is only a story , but it is possible. Imitation is something cows understand. It was a horrid talk show, but the cow didn't mind. It was noise to pass the time . One may not believe the story, but you never know. The author says, not to trust the story, because it "was only a cow."
The point is, we need cows and farms. The cow, we are told, by the author, Neal Perrin , does not take up your tax dollars, to fill a seat in the school. Cows seem self-taught, and barely comprehensible to their farmer-keeper.
The study that was done in Virginia, for example. Tax dollars from farm and woodland are toted up and the municipality spent around 70 cents to keep them in services, roads etc. Now take developed land. Tax dollars are added and at the other end it takes 1.11 cents to keep it all humming. Schools, safety, roads and all that. Playgrounds, bicycling paths, chic European languages in the high school. You know the need the moderns have of keeping up with the Joneses and some of the others.
So it makes deep sense, when the bottom line is considered, to keep hold of the farm, amid the great changes around us. Not to, not have places folk can live, but to keep some land sacred forever, as place where the miracle of creation can be on display.
As long as some long fool of a New Englander, cares to subject him or herself to economic masochism, to satisfy some suicidal urge , to play Joan of Arc against a social scene that has almost no use for the bucolic life style that accompanies dairy life.
Perrin states the existence of the local farmer as a wonder of the civilized world. How could we have any left? The farmers are like folk of old. They are in this anachronistic cluster called the family. What is it, this thing they called the family? Only the farmer knows. When you add New England farmer to the monicker, family, you get a thing called the New England, family farmer.
Old Perrin tells of the farmer whose wife is his nemesis. He's limping around, in his seventies, a mess to look at. Disheveled, I imagine, reading between the lines of Perrin's prose. He stands there, scratching a nervous itch, an imaginary thing, thinking about what ,she who must be obeyed, will surely say now.
"The old fool fell off the roof.": Tis a fact, the fool , the old fool went up to fix a leak. Who else was gonna do it? There is on the old farm a ubiquitous person named "someone," who has a slate of jobs to accomplish. So, " someone had to fix it" It is ever thus; the local farm type has to be stolid, tough , funny and good. Mostly good. My old people of the farm era are good people. Lest we forget. Good people who remember the stories and who model their lives after the animals' lives around them. The animals are our best teachers. Watch the local cat for the trait of patience. The cow for its happiness, the dog for its love. Experts all who make the plain ordinary farm person into a genius, one who knows how to live right.
I will finish with Perrin on the New Englander. About the farmer. "There were 16,727 dairy farms in Vermont in 1932. There are 2, 447, as I write." He is writing as the 1990's begin.
He has the familiar litany about tech food, as he calls it. Artificial maple syrup flavoring, hormone-stuffed, corporonic chicken, fake bacon bits, you quickly get the point.
And this fool, the farmer, keeps on struggling. Oh, it is not a gendered fool, a woman or a man or a child of one gender or the other. It is the generic fool, the farm person, if I may be politically correct. The disease, the one of the urge to farm, strikes men or women the same, with the same intensity. Funny how Perrin describes the dissected fool, the farmer.
First on her\his soul. ":Something inward, fiercely determined and even more fiercely protective. Almost relishing discomfort. Able to endure almost any adversity and just get stronger." Strong words for this vanishing breed. The farmer in the farm family. The above is on the soul , that of the one gone past, yet fondly remembered by today's living old, who gather in musty historical society meetings to reminisce. Who visit a real farm once in a while, to remind them, of how it was, and how, it one day can still be.
Oh, holy farmer. Relent against the odds. There are admirers, pulling for you yet. May you and your wise charges, the cows, stay among us always in our funny , terrific New England.
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