every little thing

while visiting monalisa's blog, i read a speech given by harold pinter on the occasion of his being awarded the nobel prize in literature. i'm sure monalisa won't mind if i also include a link to it in my weblog; in the interests of having as many people read it as possible, here it is.
my sister-in-law is visiting so i slept on the couch last night. it was remarkably comfortable, reminiscent of childhood times when sleeping in a different part of your house, setting up your bed, getting sheets and blankets and putting them where they didn't normally go, using couch pillows instead of bed pillows, was a really exciting, cozy activity which changed the quality of your dreams. in this case i don't remember any of my dreams last night. but make no mistake: there were dreams.
last night when i told my sister-in-law the title of my new blog, she said, "what's a life-changing event?" and i said, "every little thing." and she said, "i had one of those yesterday."
she was driving from waco to san antonio and decided to stop off at the illustrious snake farm which is located on I-35 somewhere south of new braunfels. she wanted to get a t-shirt for her husband (my brother) for christmas. she went in and saw that all the t-shirts were kind of nice; they didn't have ugly ones anymore. she bought one anyway, striking up a conversation with the guy at the counter. she said, "i remember coming here when i was eight, and i had bought a new camera, but all of the pictures came out as just flashes because they reflected off the windows the snakes were behind... i remember there was a buffalo."
the guy said, "oh yeah. there was a buffalo... and a lion... and a bear... he had all kinds of animals here."
the guy went on to tell her that next door, where the man who started the snake farm lived, there was a graveyard out back, with gravestones, and all the animals who had ever lived at the snake farm were buried there.
the guy said, "i guess all those animals were sort of like his only family."
and as my sister-in-law told me, she was a little melancholy about it, which means it was sad but beautiful at the same time: some old guy, living out in the middle of the texas nothingness, with his rinky-dink snake farm, burying his family in his back yard. a little bit of a life-changing event.