I, too, am a feature of tonight, of the garden, and as the rest of the garden sidles up to the lumbering, self-absorbed doves, beating them to the choicest flecks of mango dropped by careless, petty finches and ultraconservative parrots, it’s the rat I admire, leaving and returning in accord with its own calculus, like a preteen no one would miss at the dance. This is preferable, I say, to the lead patina that used to cover every surface, to the lead soldiers, the lead in the bullets they used to give babies as pacifiers. Then I realize that each one is a different rat, and there goes my appetite for takeout. I still get it. We all have responsibilities, and I spent many long years as a charity case, too. It took many more to shake the feeling that, if I could only keep changing deck chairs until shore was in sight, they wouldn’t bother to throw me overboard, even if they’d wanted to. Ships, cities: we grow not by destroying our enemies, but by absorbing them. Each of us is a catalogue of vestigial crimes. Some towns squander their allotment of festivity to honor a fruit even the locals rarely eat anymore, or else a long-extirpated species of badger. Others just shout their own name like the parents of juniors lost at the mall, picturing themselves as they were before civil rights or it was no longer okay to throw rocks at the “crazies” along Fifth Avenue to pass the hours between school and dinner. Not that Fifth Avenue, of course. There was a general disdain for warmer climates then, and as for rats, rats were just a part of daily life. It would have been a much sadder time if it hadn’t been busy being so very, very sad.