Lately, a little voice inside me persists in suggesting, gently but firmly, that it’s time to become vegan. The voice sounds, in fact, a lot like Zvi, my yoga teacher in Jerusalem, who loves to lecture anyone who cares to hear about the value of cutting out fat, sugar, spices, chocolate, alcohol and every other yummy thing from one’s diet. And truly, if you look at him, you can see the effects of a life of diligent healthfulness. On the other hand, having no body fat makes him feel chilly all the time, and since I now live in Canada, it would be unwise, I think, to put myself at increased risk for hypothermia. Still, the voice carries on while I make an innocent cheese sandwich, or poach some Salmon for the family dinner. It may also be my succeptability to cult propaganda at work. I’ve been frequenting the Loving Hut restaurant near work, one of a chain of (delicious) vegan eateries established by the Vietnamese cultess Chiang Hai, where “Supreme Master TV” is streamed in on two screens with subtitles in about twelve languages, praising the Supreme Master’s good works, pleading the case for suffering animals, and providing both sensible and nonsensical explanations for the ways that veganism can solve the world’s worst problems.
But above all, I think that since my father’s death I want to remove myself as far as possible from all dead things. A friend pointed out to me last night that vegetarianism deals with the problem of dead things fairly well. But I have been vegetarian (mostly) for nearly twenty years, and suddenly I find that I in putting on a pair of leather sandals, washing with soap, grating parmesan onto my daughter’s spaghetti, I am haunted by a ghostly reel of images, cows standing flank to flank in a vast warehouse made of corrugated metal, every article I have read about slaughter, about bunnies in laboratories with infected eyes, about the extinction of the planet’s insect life. The last straw was the robin who broke its neck against the children’s bedroom window in the full light of afternoon, and heaved its last diminishing breaths on the back patio while my children and I ate our early dinner. Seeing that tiny body struggling into stillness I could feel the dam that holds back of a river of grief, of infinite tiny griefs, preparing to break, to spill out right there, over the white ikea table, and the applesauce-spattered floor, and the children and their visiting cousins, and all the toys and furniture, out through the screen door, over the robin’s broken neck, the sickly plants on the balcony, the sheared lawn, the brambles and weeds in the back of the garden, the endless crisscrossing fences of the hundreds of housees and streets stretching out from ours. I could feel it all about to go under and I knew then, at least for a moment I knew, that I cannot bear to kill, directly or indirectly another living thing. That if I keep on doing it, the floodwall will not hold.
Minibus 