I Chop Some Parsley while Listening to Art Blakey's
Version of "Three Blind Mice"
And I start wondering how they came to be blind. If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister, and I think of the poor mother brooding over her sightless young triplets.
Or was it a common accident, all three caught in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps? If not, if each came to his or her blindness separately,
how did they ever manage to find one another? Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse to locate even one fellow mouse with vision let alone two other blind ones?
And how, in their tiny darkness, could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife or anyone else's wife for that matter? Not to mention why.
Just so she could cut off their tails with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer, but the thought of them without eyes and now without tails to trail through the moist grass
or slip around the corner of a baseboard has the cynic who always lounges within me up off his couch and at the window trying to hid the rising softness that he feels.
By now I am on to dicing an onion which might account for the wet stinging in my own eyes, tough Freddie Hubbard's mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"
which happens to be the next cut, cannot be said to be making matters any better.