The Puzzlement Of The Peacock

THE PUZZLEMENT OF THE PEACOCK A Christmas Fable by Barbara J. Olexer Once upon a time, in a garden of incomparable beauty and tranquility, there lived a peacock. This peacock – his name was Sam – was no longer a fledgling and had passed his mid-life crisis so he had time to reflect on the things he experienced and to contemplate the mysteries of life. When he was young, he had spent most of his time strutting around with his tail feathers open in a wide, gorgeous fan to impress the peahens. And they were impressed, too! But even then he noticed that the peahens were not the only ones who were impressed. Humans were, as well. Humans watched him raptly as he stalked about in great dignity, holding high his enormous fan of iridescent blue and green and gilt with all the colorful decorations on the tip of each feather. It was heavy and

sometimes he got very tired but everyone loved to look at him so much that he didn’t really mind the inconvenience. And sometimes, even in his giddy youth, he would think about the humans. He felt so sorry for them. Poor things, they were not even as decorative as the peahens, who had no tail feathers to speak of, or even the mallard drakes with their fairly fine feathers. In fact, they weren’t even as pretty as the swans, who were graceful and regal, even if they were plain white. The poor, drab humans. Oh, a few of them had skins that were kind of bright and shiny but they were big and awkward-looking. They had no wings and no feathers at all, much less gorgeous tail feathers. They didn’t even have slim legs and toes. Theirs were bulbous and very funny looking. Sam often wondered how humans managed to walk, they were so oddly-shaped, sticking way up in the air as they did with their upper appendages flopping around with every step. Sam liked to fly up into the weeping willow that grew beside the garden pond. He would sit there for hours, watching what went on below him on the ground and in the water and thinking long, deep, profound thoughts. He smiled at the ducks who broke into excited quacking many times every day and all over nothing at all as far as he could tell. He smiled at the humans, too, in a tolerantly scornful kind of way. Although they didn’t look like ducks, they resembled ducks in other ways. They were incessantly quacking and chasing one another and pecking at one another and moving restlessly to and fro. Sam knew, of course, that each entity on earth has a purpose but he could not imagine the reason behind the creation of humankind. There was a rhythm to life in the garden. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter came and went, year after year. Sam enjoyed each season in turn. He was attuned to the rhythm and accepted the weather pattern of each season without wishing it were different. Only one time of year brought disharmony to Sam. Every year after the willow leaves had turned from green to golden and had all fallen to the ground; when the days grew short and the nights long, the humans seldom came to the garden. And some of them – this was the part that puzzled Sam and unsettled him – turned hard as stone. And, what’s more, they stayed in

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the garden all day and all night. At no other time of the year did humans behave in such a fashion. In the twilight, Sam could see the top of the big fir tree that stood in the front garden from his perch in the willow tree. It was glittering with lights – blue and red and green and golden. He loved it when the fir tree bloomed. He flew down to the ground and walked around to the front of the garden, his tail dragging behind him. That was bad for the beautiful feathers but his vanity had abated somewhat with the years and anyway the peahens were all in the poultry house where it was warm and there were long troughs of grain. He would go there himself for the night but first he wanted to see the whole of the fir tree with its dazzling blossoms. The tree was very lovely in the night, a tall cone of glory. As he had expected, because it appeared every winter, next to the tree stood a small shelter, open on the front. There were a cow, a donkey, some camels, and a couple of sheep in front of the shelter, looking at two humans inside. One human stood, leaning on a staff, the other knelt; both were staring at a manger filled with hay. There were a few other humans outside, also staring at the hay. Some had brightly colored coats and some had plain brown coats. Some knelt, some stood. One was sort of hanging over the two inside the shelter and to Sam’s intense confusion, this human appeared to have some sort of wings. Wings. On a human. On a human who’d been turned to stone. The reason Sam knew the humans and animals had been turned to stone was because he’d pecked them. Every year when they came out to stand in the garden, he pecked them and every year they were hard as stone. He walked back and forth and around but had to admit that he was just as baffled as he’d always been by this weird human behavior. He sat down in front of the shelter, gazing alternately at the fir tree in full bloom and the people and animals who had turned to stone. He hoped that someday it would be given him to solve the mystery in the scene before him.

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