There’s a fascination with the helplessness I guess, and to some extent this feeling of power that comes with being able to help, to rescue, a whole being. Interesting too how it isn’t quite right to seize and exert power, how often the helping itself has to be framed from a place of helplessness. It followed me home. Well I couldn’t just leave it there. There’s some kind of grandstanding when you call it a rescue that is vaguely distasteful. Well we just fell in love at first sight is how you have to sell it, like you were equals somehow. For me, to the extent that I understand it, part of it is probably a kind of karma, a hope that if I were myself someday so helpless I would not be abandoned. Maybe also the feeling that if one is not able to help one is closer to needing help than one wishes. It’s a balance too because I have seen people who could not genuinely help rush forward with outstretched arms and then yell over their shoulders that they can’t do it alone. I have opinions about that. I have opinions about a lot of things. Also one does not want to be taken in. One does not want to see the beggar getting into a limo and riding off into the urban legend sunset. They have to need it and they have to deserve it. And what is need, what is deserve. Earlier this summer I sat in a home with birds, cats, humans, all saved from worse fates, and thought to myself that I am not such a sucker or more likely my heart is not so generous, the two sides of why I could never. I could never, but then nobody has asked me, no creature dropped on my doorstep or into my arms, nose softly pushed against the palm of my hand, and it occurs to me that if I have not rescued much perhaps I am the creature being rescued. Broken wing, tendency to be underfoot, odd smells, pitiful. Grateful mewling, licking the sugar from your plate.