Free Saving Simon by Jon Katz

back into his corral, just in case he needed some respite from his new barn mates. He didn’t, really. This was another human projection—another faulty human perspective on the animal world. From the first, Simon wanted only to be with Lulu and Fanny, and after a few nervous days, we did what we always tried to do: we let them work it out.

SEVEN
 
The Theater of Chance
    I was walking Simon down toward the path one afternoon when a minivan pulled past and slowed. A woman rolled her window down and looked at Simon, and asked me “Is that a mule?” No, I said, mules are hybrids between horses and donkeys; this is a donkey.
    “What does it do?” she asked. I was uncharacteristically at a loss. Simon gawked at her, hoping, as he often does with strangers, for a carrot or an apple, or even a scratch on his nose. His ears went straight up at her high-pitched voice, his eyes wide.
    It goes on walks with me, I said. Disappointed and puzzled, she rolled up her window and drove off. “You are a ghost,” I said to Simon, “a myth, you don’t really exist for most people in America.”
    What does it do?
I kept wondering what a good answer might have been. A good question, it requires a thoughtful answer. A few years earlier, I might well have asked it myself.
    We kept on walking, the donkey and the wanderer, two ofthe oldest clichés in the world.
This
is what he does, I thought. This is what donkeys have always done.
    I can’t blame people for not knowing much about donkeys. Why would they? It is a commentary on our time that few people have ever seen a donkey walking around, as they do in so much of the world and have for so many thousands of years. We don’t love our history; we are too busy coping with now.
    Simon’s ancient ancestor is the African wild ass,
Equus africanus asinus;
the
“Equus”
signaling that donkeys belong to the horse family. Domesticated in Egypt or Mesopotamia circa 3,000 B.C. , they’ve been working animals ever since. A male donkey is called a jack; a female is a jenny, and today there are more than forty million donkeys worldwide.
    In their book
Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus
, authors Michael Tobias and Jane Morrison point out that artists have long viewed donkeys as “spiritual companions in an ethereal realm of life and death; the donkey equals man in the theater of chance and is equally a part of that divine force in the universe.” The idea of this equality, this partnership, speaks to the very particular place donkeys have held in our imagination. “The theater of chance” is an apt term for the donkey’s dramatic, arduous, and adventurous journeys with men. The theater of chance is nothing more or less than life itself, erratic and unpredictable, filled with love, hope, opportunity, disaster, illness, war, and uncertainty. Every day, we enter the theater. Every day we learn what is in store for us.
    There are many representations of donkeys in our collective cultural history, but few set the tone more than the legend of Jesus Christ and his small and ungainly donkey. How much of the story is true? Jesus was known to ride a donkey on his travels through the Holy Land, but as for the rest, I have no way ofknowing. I do know that this legend changed the lives of donkeys for all time.
    The story of Jesus and his donkey is perhaps the first recorded rescue of an animal by a human. Thousands of years old, passed down largely by word of mouth, the story has shaped some of our deepest feelings about the care of animals, and created a template for the bond between animals and humans that still exists today.
    A poor farmer outside of the city of Jerusalem owned a sickly donkey too weak and small to do much work at all. Few farmers could afford to keep animals that do not work for them or earn money. Over time, he grew increasingly angry at his donkey, telling his family he couldn’t afford to feed such a worthless creature, as the donkey could do him no good at all and was not worth