Goats

My new friend Amanda lives in New York City, and though I haven’t seen her in her home environment (we met elsewhere), I’ve started to think of her whenever something especially Southern crops up in my life. Of course, you have to be careful about talking to New Yorkers as though they’ve never seen a blade of grass—I imagine such assumptions are as insulting to them as are assumptions that Southerners have never seen a big city.

(Once at my former job, a bigwig from the corporate office in NY came to join us for a holiday meal. His idea of a way to get acquainted with us bumpkins was to gaze glumly around the table and ask, “So. What’s the farthest from here you guys have ever been?”)

Still, I keep finding myself thinking, “I wonder what Amanda would think of this.” Or, “I bet this would seem weird to Amanda.” Congratulations, Amanda, you are my official representative of the city of New York.

So I could not help but think of her when, one day last week, a coworker of mine received a telephone call from a neighbor, alerting my coworker that her goats were on the loose. It was raining heavily that day, and the mental picture of my short, round coworker stampeding around the yard trying to rustle wayward farm animals was hilarious to me. (Though she told me later that they actually began turning circles of joy as soon as they spotted her car.) It must be hard, I suppose, for one to maintain a professional demeanor at the office, knowing that one might be called away at a moment’s notice to corral one’s goats. I bet that never happens in Manhattan.