Things I've seen with my own eyes

In my line of work I'm continually subjected to people talking about things they think they know because they have some bizarre notion that they've seen these things or heard about them. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people start stories with “I read somewhere…” Now it’s not that I believe people are inherent liars (although, well, enough said), but the frailty of memory and the certainty of youth are a dangerous combination.

But some things I have seen with my own eyes.

I once saw a seagull murder another seagull. A large seagull attacked a smaller seagull in mid-air. Slamming into the small head with its larger beak. The smaller – although not by so much – bird dropped into the water like a hard stone. The aggressor followed the falling bird down and held it’s head under the water until it drowned. The dying bird struggled mightily, wings flapping, trying to pull away from its killer. But the larger bird won. And slowly the flapping weakened until the drowning bird was only rocking from side to side trying to back away from its tormentor. And then it died.

As an aside: this took place day after the malevolent spirit of Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America took over the Congress in 1994; I felt like I was seeing that Republican tumor spreading darkly to other creatures.

I saw this with my own eyes.

Once on a walk in my neighborhood I turned a corner and came upon a squirrel that’d just been hit by a car. It was already dead, lying motionless in the street. It wasn’t squashed, just dead. But with it was a smaller squirrel, trying desperately to get the dead squirrel to get up. I could just feel the smaller squirrel’s panic, “get up, get up!” It was trying mightily to raise its fallen friend from the pavement, first pushing then pulling on it with tiny paws. It almost seemed as if the small squirrel didn’t know how to go on without its larger, now dead, friend.

I saw this with my own eyes.

I know it seems maudlin, but I must tell the tale of when I was at Flint Gregory Hunt’s funeral. Greg Hunt was executed in Baltimore in mid 1997. At the funeral I heard from some of his overexcitable friends that after he died the corrections officers had beaten him to a bloody pulp. Why? Because he’d killed a police officer. Once again, I chalked this up to the circuitous path of rumor. Blood, they kept saying, he was covered in blood.

When we arrived at the cemetery the great group that had formed around the coffin swelled with a deep desire to place him in the ground without the barrier of the enormous and ornate box. Awkwardly, with many moments of near-dropping, yet without letting it touch the ground until it came to rest in its grave, many hands rolled the body swathed entirely in white cotton out of the coffin and into the ground. As the heavy load made its descent, I saw, with my own eyes, about a three-inch round spot of blood seeping through what was clearly many layers of cotton.

This, too, I saw with my own eyes.