Found

That Found guy has gotten some local press lately. Found even came up in conversation with my writers’ group last week, as a source of inspiration for poems, characters, and such. So I decided to pay closer attention to the random bits of flotsam that drift into my path. Here is what I found this week:

• a corroded penny


• a dollar bill


• a handwritten list of places to buy home-brew supplies


• a dead nuthatch with ants crawling out of its eye sockets

The dead bird is the only one I didn’t pick up, though I was tempted, and it would be in my freezer right now if decomposition hadn’t already started. I restricted myself to turning it over with my foot.

I have always had a strange attraction to dead things, even as a child. Perhaps especially as a child. Every shoebox that came into the house wound up buried in the backyard, filled with leaves, grass, and flowers, topped with a deceased chipmunk or defunct sparrow. As I got to be a teenager, I held fewer funerals, but the impulse remained.

After I learned that Percy Bysshe Shelley was cremated on an Italian beach, I wanted to set the little pyres on fire, but never actually did. Perhaps I should have become a chef, arranging quail flambe on beds of exotic greens.

Part of my interest stems from the philosophical pondering that a dead animal induces. Where did that spark of life go? What was it to begin with? If I’m not careful, I can easily lose half a day gazing into the middle distance mulling unanswerable questions.

But mostly I like dead things because they satisfy my earthly curiosity. What does that nuthatch’s bill feel like? Or a squirrel’s tail, or a deer’s tongue? Unless you’re doing scientific research or wildlife rehabilitation, you probably don’t have many chances to find out unless the poor creature’s dead.

Thankfully, I am not alone in this tactile inquisitiveness. At the Field Museum last week, looking up at the bones of Tyrannosaurus rex, my friend leaned towards me with a twinkle in the eye and a whisper, “How fast do you think the guards would be here if we broke the light beam?”