Your mom was slightly hotter than a border collie

The other day, I was thinking back to the days when your mother and I used to stroll hand-in-hand through the gardens of Westchester, PA. I don't know how we got there, since neither of us has ever lived east of the Mississippi River, let alone in Pennsylvania, but it was rapturous. Until the pumas appeared. I don't know how they got there either, since they definitely do not inhabit anywhere near Westchester. But after the tragedy, I was not inclined to ask questions. I wasn't inclined to much of anything.

It's been difficult to think about pumas the same way since. It's strange--I always thought of myself as a rational person, not someone prone to fly off the handle. Why should I blame the pumas for killing my lover? After all, that's what pumas are made for--ruining your day. Every muscle from their snouts to their tails is tailored to the purpose of making people miserable. Wouldn't it be wrong to let such an efficient and beautiful machine go to waste? No, I should not blame the pumas. I should feel sorry for them. I'm sure seeing the woman I love ripped untimely from my arms and devoured with evident glee by hungry mountain lions before my eyes as I stood helpless hurt them far more than it did me.

And yet I am weak. I should respect and honor pumas' function. But I don't. I can't get past the turning of my viscera and see the event for what it really was--a harmless accident of the jungle. My brother is stronger than I. He spend all of one day in March looking forward to enjoying a delicious spumoni at the end of the day. He worked hard in the mines with that confection in mind, licking his lips even as the sinews in his back and arms strained against the bowels of the earth to craft the fuel that drives our industry. Without this green, pink and brown vision, who is to say he could have made it through? And yet, when he gets home, he finds his roommate, a puma, sitting at the table, whiskers dripping with school cafeteria green ooze. The puma had devoured the pistachio out of the spumoni. Everyone knows that pistachio makes or breaks a spumoni.

But my brother accepted this as a fact of life. He moved on. All I had to do was withstand the death of my beloved and I didn't--I am weak, I am sorry. So to try and make it up to pumas, I've given them the win in this week's "Who's hotter?" against Johnny Depp.


-eleanor