Bob and Grace

2003-03-30 - 12:38 p.m.

Last night I had a fairly interesting dream. There was this black man in his seventies who had come down with a very severe pneumonia. I went with my parents, my brother, and my paternal grandfather to visit him. When we saw how bad off he was my grandfather crossed himself. I talked to the patient's doctors and they told me that the bug that was causing his pneumonia was nothing they'd ever seen before. In fact, it was so different, they were convinced this bug had come from another planet. They were sending our ID team up on a space shuttle to track down the source. I went with my family to the launch pad to watch the shuttle take off. A whole lot of people were there including a lot of the hospital staff. The launch pad was next to a river at the base of a dam. As we were waiting for the launch, it started to rain. Then it started to pour. The water started pouring over the dam's spillway and the water level in the river was rising. Large chunks of the river bank were washing away. Finally the shuttle started to launch. As it went up it was blocked from my view by some tree branches. Then it exploded like the Challenger. I gasped and grabbed my brother for support. The ID team was on that shuttle. Plucky was dead. Daisy was nearby screaming and bawling.

My high school is one of the few, if not the only, high schools in the Sacramento area to boast an agricultural department. At my school kids practiced their lasooing skills during lunch and when the wind was wrong you got to smell the pigs. Recently I was dismayed to read an article in the paper regarding Bob and Grace. Bob and Grace were a couple of lambs being raised by students in the ag department at my high school. A little while ago, two boys in their early twenties broke into the school to "have some fun with the sheep." Their "fun" left Bob dead at the scene and Grace died shortly therafter despite the best efforts of a local vet. The perpetrators were caught and there has been an outpouring of goodwill from the community including the donation of replacement lambs, but sometimes I wish I could understand what goes through the minds of some people while they are doing some of the things they do.