Entirely Adequate

I don’t have a thing for goats. Really. The photo at the top of this blog just struck me as a cool image, a unique moment in time.

The husband and I had just finished making our way through a north Alabama corn maze (an especially bad idea, given that I grew up spending summers on a Mississippi farm and knew how miserable a cornfield was in August). Making our way back to the car, we stopped at the advertised “goat walk,” and this is what we found. A lone goat on an elevated walkway. He wasn’t picking stocks or diving into a plastic pool. He was just walking. On the goat walk.

When I was about 2 years old, I’m told, I developed a terrific fear of goats. I got my signals crossed with the “Billy Goats Gruff” fairy tale and thought that goats were the bad guys. This may or may not have had anything to do with my grandfather, whose story embellishments were legendary.

At any rate, my fear of goats led me to pull my feet up anytime I sat down, proclaiming that the billy goats were going to get me. This lasted until my dad took me to the nearest petting zoo and introduced me to the goats, decidedly non-scary furry creatures. My phobia was cured.

So goats and I go back a long way.

The goat on the goat walk seemed a little embarrassed, like he knew how ridiculous the whole contraption really was, how futile it was to be part of a rural circus put on for city folk. I felt a little embarrassed for him, too.