As a child...
I learned to hold spiders, snakes, toads and lizards, the feel of life, stroking their small bodies with care. Years later at an inland college I saw a teacher in the faculty lounge kicking a cricket side to side, enjoying its terror.
I dodged his shoe and picked it up; a scream from across the room whipped deep into my back -- other teachers had been watching (and crickets didn't belong except in poems).
I took it outside and put it on the grass, faded, its presence scattered, but still beautiful and black.
(Childhood learning was at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.)
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