I imagine that I've established the fact that things happen to me and I happen to things -- or sometimes things and I happen to each other simultaneously.
Someday I'll tell you about the time I was an Air Force officer stationed at the Presidio of Monterey in California during World War II and worked in a fish cannery during my off hours when the fishing fleet came in loaded with sardines in the middle of the night.
I fell off a slippery plank crossing a vast tank full of fish innards I'd just helped create by filleting those sardines on the canning line upstairs. Thank goodness my head didn't go under, but there I stood up to armpits and the other employees thought the uppity lieutenant's catastrophe was hilarious. I did this because I'd read "Torilla Flat" by young John Steinbeck about Cannery Row and the Mexicans who worked there and I wanted to live their experience.
But what follows happened years later when I lived with my young family in a suburban town on the Chicago north shore. I was a fitness nut and bicycled all over the neighboring towns on weekends on a tandem bike with my wife peddling behind me or my little son with his feet dangling because they couldn't reach the peddles. One Saturday afternoon on a brisk, bright fall day, we were following a path parallel to a railroad track that would take you to Wisconsin.
Stop! I'm getting ahead of myself. The "north shore" is a series of small lakeside suburban towns beginning with Evanston (where the women's temperance league commenced its operations). Then came Wilmette, Kenilworth, where I lived, and on up to Highland Park where the symphony played in summer. We had a weekly newspaper where I'd read that on a recent Saturday a wild hawk had flown down and plucked a hat from the head of a women in a grocery store's parking lot in Wilmette and flown off with it. The police found the hat in a tree.
Now back to father-son on tandem bike following the railroad track. There came on a sudden storm of flapping wings and a large hawk landed on my bare but not yet bald head and just sat there adjusting his claws behind each of my ears.
My first reaction was passivity. What else was thinkable? I had a precious boy behind me as the seconds ticked by. A sudden stop would bounce him in his restraints. So might a yell or violent head shake cause the hawk to dig in his talons or attack my face. This was no ordinary wild bird. It was a crazy hawk (good name for an Indian).
So there the three of us sat, me in the clamped headlock of a prehensile predator's claws, the malign tentacles, the clutches of a savage, virulent, untamed, eagle-eyed feral, manic bird of prey. Anyway he finally flew off, launching himself with a last dig. When I got home my wife inspected my head. There were tiny abrasions, no blood. I called the Winnetka police. They said, yes, the hawk was still at large and enjoying himself immensely.
To this day I keep an instinctive lookout above, whether for bird droppings, crashing tree limbs in an ice storm, flying squirrels or attack bats.
Attorney Austin Cunningham has been the president of five business companies and in 1988 was named Outstanding Elder Citizen of the Year for South Carolina.