by Mike Bendzela Back when our local university still believed that a survey of English literature was a prerequisite for a “higher” education; before a drop in enrollments triggered a huge budget crisis culminating in hiring freezes, “retrenchments,” and amputated departments; I still taught an Introduction to Literature course that allowed me the freedom to…

by Mike Bendzela In a kindergarten classroom in the mid-1960s, a kid named Mikey steered clear of the boys stacking large toy blocks on top of one another and knocking them down again–so obnoxious—and instead went and sat at the table of girls making beads out of salt dough and stringing them together on a…

by Mike Bendzela “. . . I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.” —Thomas Hardy Cultural phenomena such as sports, pop/rock music, movies, television/mass media, politics, and religion/holidays have little hold on me anymore. Over time, I’ve eschewed these largely social activities. Call it adaptation; I’m not fit for…

by Mike Bendzela By “worm” I mean not earthworm but larva of the infamous lepidopteran, Cydia pomonella, or codling moth. The pom in its species names comes from the Latin root “pomum,” meaning “fruit,” particularly the apple (which is why they’re called pome fruits), wherein you’ll find this worm. It’s the archetypal worm inside the archetypal…

by Mike Bendzela During the twelve years I was a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician-Basic in my little town, I arrived onto scenes with patients suffering varying degrees of distress. I would first assess them, then help stabilize and package them for transport to the hospital; and if I was lucky, I would be assigned to…

by Mike Bendzela I lie on a futon in a little room tucked in a turret of an old funeral home-turned-apartment building in Binghamton, New York, listening to election returns coming in over my clock radio. It is a Tuesday night in 1984, the year of Orwell’s never-ending fever dream. Madonna and Prince and Michael…

by Mike Bendzela The words are fine, and some of the concepts they represent rather appealing, actually. It’s the usages to which they are put that bug me, usages that are by turns deceiving, dishonest, obfuscating, bogus, hokey, and euphemistic. There is a theme binding them all together, one concerning us humans’ exploitation of the…

by Mike Bendzela How happy to have discovered the history of other species, as well as our own. How fortunate to be alive during the time when the evolutionary puzzle has been so masterfully worked out, assembling a picture so stunning in its completeness, that mere school children now know more about Darwin’s great idea…

by Mike Bendzela I begin writing this essay the morning after dumping into the woods the sixth porcupine I have had to kill this growing season. It used to be that I would not see any evidence of porcupine damage in my apple trees until early August, but this year I began seeing chewed-off branches…

by Mike Bendzela Today is a bit of an experiment. I take the row covers off of two forty-foot rows of beans (three varieties) as the plants have become so big so fast in the ungodly heat they are pressing against the cloth. Afterwards, in the early evening, I let the chickens out of their…

by Mike Bendzela As you slide toward retirement age, it becomes clear that you have not accomplished what you had hoped by this point in life and that the meaning of it all is still as unfathomable as it was when you were thirty. You have resigned yourself to the fact that you do not…

by Mike Bendzela The week before Memorial Day, I’m back to my old tricks again, poisoning pests in my little orchard. It’s the period after petal fall, when the romance of bloom season gives way to the horrors of war. Commencing in mid-May in Maine, I walk among fruit trees amidst a profusion of blossoms;…

by Mike Bendzela Funny how an object that weighs 8.1 x 1019 tons manages to elude our attention most of the time. But it can be very shy, sometimes crouching on the evening horizon, thin as a filament of copper; sometimes disappearing from view for whole days at a time. Then, one bright afternoon, you’ll…

by Mike Bendzela The term “Little Apocalypse” is borrowed from New Testament studies, referring to the Olivet Discourse in Jerusalem. This speech first appeared around the year 70 CE, in Chapter 13 of the original written gospel, the Gospel of Mark. After the scene of the cleansing of the temple, before the Last Supper and…

by Mike Bendzela We love our antique coal range. Are we bad people? The answer is easily “Yes,” of course, but it has less to do with our infatuation with the coal range than with our membership in the club of approximately 1.5 billion in the industrialized world. Our utter dependence on the energy-intensive collective…

by Mike Bendzela Mother used to say to me when I was growing up, “Mikey, you’re going places! Thursday’s child has far to go!” She was referring to Thursday, February 18, 1960 and the traditional English nursery rhyme. She didn’t seem to realize that “has far to go” could mean “perpetually behind” as well as…

by Mike Bendzela Given that it affects about 2.4% of the population, most of you probably know someone with this disorder. Some of you may even have it yourselves. Continually absenting yourself from others’ company out of chronic fear should come with the preamble, “It’s not you, it’s me,” which in this case is not…

by Mike Bendzela I am a sort of “coincidence theorist”: I think most shit just happens, and our human duty is to be simultaneously appalled and amused by it all. The first gay man I ever met, who died of AIDS in 1985, was of the opposite temperament. He often told me “there are no…

by Mike Bendzela The greatest of stories has no proper beginning, at least none that we can yet discern, but proceeds from a warm, shallow shore some 375 million years ago. There a lobe-finned fish found a way to use its bony limbs to stand up under water. It was thus able to lift its…

by Mike Bendzela An Ape meets a Holy Man who is visiting a zoo. The Holy Man has made a career of debasing such animals as the Ape, and now the Ape sees an opportunity to preempt him. She is a fabulist and must act quickly. “The animals are trying to tell you something.” “I…