Doc

My dear old Dad made it to just past 102. His mind stayed sharp until the last year or two, and even then he could still carry on an interesting conversation. But because he slept so much and his dreams were so vivid, the boundary between reality and imagination became blurred. Really blurred.

One evening I dropped into the Perley to check up on him. He was wide awake in his chair, the lights dim. I turned up a few lights, and greeted him, “How ya doin’, Pop?”

“Oh, great, Norm! The people who bought Doc were in to see me this morning!”, he responded, referring to Doc the Bull, once the pride of his prize Holstein herd. Sired from the Rag Apple line, Doc in his day was national class.

Now, the problem with this story is that Doc was already in his prime when I was an infant, so this would place Doc in the record books not only for producing prize calves, but for longevity. I reckoned that if Doc were really still alive, he’d be at least seventy-five years old, and Guinness would know of him.

Apparently Doc was doing really well, still throwing prize calves, and his new owners could not be happier. Except for one thing. Because the new owners were francophone, Doc was having a hard time learning French. I can see that– bulls aren’t all that great at second languages, especially in their eighth decade.

Dad and I chatted on for fifteen minutes or so about Doc, and what a sweet-natured old fellow he was (which was definitely true). And then I drove home, contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasy of reality.

It’s good, I think, to give ourselves and everyone around us a little slack when it comes to the certainties we hold dear. Certainties of politics, of religion, of the best way to paint a wall, of music, and of literature. Everybody has their own Doc.

Even the certain certainties of math and physics are, out at the edge, much fuzzier than we may think. Is there one infinity, or are there infinite different infinities? And just as we discover one new physical particle, someone conjectures several more. In fact, are they even truly particles?

So, yeah, we can have a chuckle about Doc the elderly non-francophone bull, but in truth we could all be a little more gracious about the different realities believed by those around us. Who knows, some of them may even be right!

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