Still Life

Finish Line

"What on earth is that?" says Virginia.

It's what I collected at the end of my run this morning, littering the roadside along the edge of our field. I decided it would make a nice still life. Several titles crossed my mind, including "Dr. P Rejected."

"Were you feeling rejected this morning?" says Virginia.

Not at all, nor was I feeling like a "doctor." The Dr. Pepper bottle struck me deepest because there it lay, barely touched. Who threw it and why?  

Maybe a rich man had seen soft drinks on the shelf at Tee Pees and bought a bag of a bunch of brands. After he mounted his Mercedes, he grabbed a bottle and took a sip. "Yuck," he said as he threw it out his window.

Perhaps a poor fellow had reached into his pocket and found barely enough coins to buy one bottle. He savored the first sip and another as he walked down the road, carefully screwing the cap on after each drink. "Oh no." He pretended to trip and set the bottle on the ground. A car stopped to give him a ride. "Close one," he thought, knowing the driver, his "fiancee," would have leveled him with a tongue lashing if she'd seen that he'd wasted money on a Dr. Pepper.  

"You're being too kind," says Virginia.

All right. Some slob threw the thing out his window with no thought, the same kind of attention he gives most of his life as he gripes about government spending, how much trouble he goes through to get his disability claims paid, and how seldom his wife cleans house. 

Did you know still lifes were popular in ancient Greek tombs because some people believed the subjects in a still life would become real with reincarnation?  May "Finish Line" or "Dr. P. Rejected" be the first thing our litterbug sees when he or she begins the his next life.

Keri, our Great Pyrenees Pup