Member-only story
Hope, Gratitude & the Time Pigs Saved Me — Fledgling Adult pg85–87
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
The rest of that summer in San Francisco is lost in a fog. Then Tony called and invited me to come visit him in Ithaca, New York. Once again I didn’t ask important questions like, “Why is the ticket only one-way?” I hopped on a plane and flew east.
Tony was studying all the time and I was friendless and lonesome through a frozen, cabin fever winter of record snowfall — seventeen feet of it. On particularly bleak nights I would bundle up and trudge over to the pig barn, where dozens of animals were awaiting shipment to someplace worse. There was an empty pen between all the others, separated by widely spaced horizontal boards the pigs could get most of their faces through. It became the stage where I sang to them and danced.
I belted out off-key show tunes in a bombastic Ethel Merman voice I am never allowed to use in front of actual people. Those beautiful pigs listened in a state of rapt concentration. All their snouts poked through the boards all around me, then they snorted their applause after every big finish. I imagined they asked for one more, but I could have been wrong. Pigs saved me. I stopped eating them. — From Chapter 4
