Who Shall Fibrillate the Oatmeals?
H. Harrison
July, 2009
Thursday mornings I wake early, dress in gaudy bike togs, throw
the bike into the car, drive to the ferry, park, then cycle-
ferry to Bainbridge Island on the [relatively] cheap, there to
join a remarkable group of geriatric coots at an Oatmeal break-
fast. We are physicians and lawyers and civil servants and
military and teachers and business men, and one lobbyist and one
gardener. All of us at an age when cardiological defibrill-
ation is a topic of some interest. We’ll probably buy a gadget
[not cheap] and hang it on the wall, just in case.
At coffee, afterwards, one of us challenged the rest to invent a
negative defibrillator .. that is, a Fibrillator .. that when it
detects an apparently healthy, regular heart beat disrupts it
into chaotic arhythmia. Fair is fair: save one, kill one: a
Hindu Goddess Kali [the one with all those arms] who destroys to
make space for rebirth. With 10 Billion people expected this
mid-century, many of us ‘gone-over’ to decay, some pruning of
the garden seems both appropriate and timely.
But who among us, shall bell the cat?
Lilly-livered liberals to a man, or nearly, we Oatmeals flinch
from gerontocide. Is there no Tea-Party stalwart among us to
step forward to do the dirty deed? No? Sigh.
I guess we’ll just have to tough it out, the old fashioned way:
“We wither here with few regrets
still holding hands on autumn ground
as memory goes, and then warm sex,
or was it the other way around?
I’m sorry, Love, but one forgets.”
hh Nov. ’98