‘Like a Greyhound after a Rabbit’

My stepfather had passed just before my parent’s Sleepy Hollow house was up for sale.  They had purchased another house a couple of miles further south, two blocks north of Midway Airport in Chicago near Archer Avenue and Cicero Avenue where they planned to move.

It was a situation where I was somewhat estranged from the family and had been put into a “house sitting” position. The first day, after I moved in during the first half of the 1990s, I had time to relax, sit atop my car in the garage, and stare across the alley at a prairie yard that filled between the railroad tracks and a printing business. It was time to lay back and read.

For some reason, the book at hand was a 1964 book, The Conscious Mind written by Kenneth Walker. In 1971, the teacher of my Introduction to Logic class was also named Kenneth Walker (same name, but not the same person as the author).

As I was reading, behind my mother’s 2nd house, I started to doze off, and the last thing I remember before putting the open book face down on my chest was,

“The mind ‘bloweth where it listeth’.  Instead of remaining silent as we wish them to remain
during contemplation, our lower associative minds, or what the Hindu calls ‘manas’,
continue their ceaseless chatter about totally irrelevant matters.  We may manage to
interrupt this mechanical flow of talk but a new theme immediately presents itself,
and off ‘manas’ goes again, like a dog after a rabbit” (The Conscious Mind, p 145).

I’m not sure, perhaps 10 minutes or so later, as I was still resting, I started to feel something wet on my right cheek.  A second or so and I realized there is a big dog leaning over the side of my car licking my face. Then someone comes from the alley and yells at the dog and the dog goes off and the man said,  “I’m sorry, he’s a greyhound, he went after a rabbit.”

I said,  “Look at this.” And pointed at the line in the book that reads “like a dog after a rabbit.” He said, “Wow, that’s a coincidence!”

That was the first time I met my neighbor Tony.