By Lee Ostaszewski<\/p>\n
I went to my wife\u2019s 15th Reunion, and we took the boys along, because the kids\u2019 program looked exciting \u2014 fireworks, a magician, an outing to play miniature golf, and swimming. The adults, on the other hand, had to attend an awards ceremony held outside in 107-degree heat. This year\u2019s Reunion just happened to be scheduled on the hottest day ever in the history of the world. The high temperature was probably the reason we never saw the Bates mascot, the bobcat, which in reality is probably just a person, or perhaps a student, dressed in a bobcat costume. That was just as well, since we forgot to take the advice offered by the Reunion organizers, who sent a letter to parents suggesting that we warn our children beforehand that there could be a seven-foot-tall bobcat lurking about over the weekend, and that it should be considered extremely dangerous.<\/p>\n
But none of that mattered once we got there and discovered, to our delight, that there were goats present.<\/p>\n
The goats came with the Class of 1951, celebrating its 50th Reunion. They (the alumni, not the goats) wore bright, yellow T-shirts that read \u201chot diggity dog\u201d on the front and \u201cwe can still cut the mustard\u201d on the back. During the parade, they held signs that had similarly clever puns making use of the words \u201cketchup\u201d and \u201crelish.\u201d How the goats fit with the overall hot dog theme, I dared not ask.<\/p>\n
In any event, the goats were a big hit, especially at 10 o\u2019clock that night. That\u2019s when the goats were being taken around campus to do their goat business. They came up to us while we were hanging around outside, making sure not to stray too far away from the official class keg.<\/p>\n
The day had already been eventful for most of my wife\u2019s classmates \u2014 especially for the ones who hijacked the tour trolley. (A tour trolley is a bus disguised as an old-fashioned train trolley, and is thus not constrained by such things as tracks.) This trolley was commissioned by the Class of 1941 for the parade and to give campus tours. My wife\u2019s classmates convinced the driver to forgo the official route and instead race the trolley several times around the Garcelon Field track. Joggers and bicyclists using the track scattered as if suddenly finding themselves in the middle of a NASCAR time trial for trolley-class stock cars.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know if it was the heat or the beer, but when the goats wandered up to us, it seemed like a perfectly natural occurrence. We were standing around talking and someone said, \u201cHey, look, goats.\u201d The goats came up to us, and had we been plant life, they would have tried to eat us. See, that\u2019s a goat\u2019s thought process. A goat looks at something and thinks, \u201cCan I eat that?\u201d Sensing that we were not green and leafy, the goats ignored us and instead ate the shrubbery. After chomping on that, the goats took on a tree.<\/p>\n
To see a goat eat a tree is a strange sight, even by college reunion standards. The goats stood on their hind legs, stretched their necks, and bit off the lower leaves. Seeing the work a goat does to eat gave me an idea of how insatiable their appetite is. This behavior, combined with their apparent ability to treat adults as an irrelevancy, makes them the animal-kingdom equivalent of a teen-ager.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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