A Carnival of Snackery

 

I pulled together a few excerpts from A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003 to 2020) by David Sedaris because his writing always amuses me:

March 22, 2007 Paris

      A few months back (Hugh's mother) Joan broke her shoulder. She started physical therapy a week ago, and last night over dinner she questioned whether or not it was working. "I haven't been in pain like this since that horse bit me on the breast!" she said.

"What horse?" I asked "Where?"

"Oh, it was years ago, in Ethiopia," she told me. "He didn't mean to do it, though. I think he was just hungry."

"For what?" I asked, "Milk?"

      She told me she'd had a sugar cube in her shirt pocket, and insisted again that it was an accident. "Satan would never have intentionally hurt me."

"That was the horse's name?" I asked. "Satan?" She nodded.

 "Satan bit you on the breast and it surprised you?"

      She nodded again and picked up her fork. "From our other horse, Charlie Brown, I'd have expected it."

January 29, 2010 London

    For the past 20 years or so Nancy (my cousin) has served as the principal of a troubled elementary school in Florida. I recently asked how things are going, and yesterday she e-mailed me pictures of a miniature horse, a live one, who wears sneakers over his hooves and comes in twice a month to be read out loud to by second- and third-graders.

“But why in sneakers?,” I wondered.

“So he won’t slip on the floors,” she wrote.

    My next question concerned his purpose. “Why read out loud to an animal, something that can’t correct you or even recognize your mistakes?”

“Well,” Nancy explained, “this is a certified therapy horse.”

    That’s how we educate in the United States. A child has trouble reading, so we put sneakers on a horse, give him a certificate, and send him in to fix things. 

August 26, 2015 Copenhagen

    Over dinner last night at a place called U Formel (“Oof Ormell”) I learned about a Danish man who had recently killed a rabbit live on the radio. “Listeners complained afterwards that they were traumatized,” said Charlotte, a woman my age who works with my publisher. “His point was that they’re murdered every day in the slaughterhouse, so how was this any different?”

    I guess it’s a question of doing something in the place where it’s not usually done. You don’t shit on the floor at the airport or practice archery in a library, so his point seems pretty weak to me. The restaurant was fancy, and while eating I learned that having sex with animals was only very recently outlawed in Denmark.

“So it was O.K. before now?,” I asked.

    My companions looked at each other and shrugged. “I think it was always … frowned upon,” Susanne, my publisher, said. “Law-wise, I guess the government had other things to get to first.”