All morning at the barn I was really hurting from lower back pain.  It wasn’t enough to keep me from working with our small flock of sheep, but I still felt it. So I noticed and noted and noticed some more about the pain.  I wondered, “I feel the pain, so where is the story that usually springs to mind from that pain?”

Then my wife becomes my Muse and tells me about a story she heard at her ranger job at Mammoth Cave National Park last week. It came from a former student of mine who now works with her for the Parks Service, too. It all started 25 years ago when I was a sheep shearing demonstrator one summer at a local animal park, Kentucky Down Under (we called it Kentucky Down Yonder).  And this story is about the quietest moment in my life. It was a bit akin to the silence between waves of pain and no-pain I was feeling that moment.

I was definitely the B-Team shearer, the relief shearer.  The main shearing dude was a Kiwi who made it look easy.  Me, on the other hand, I could get the wool off…just.

It was the first sheep demo of the day. The cutters and combs were super sharp and ready to go. I tumped the ewe on its butt no problem.  At least for me it wasn’t, but I had to tell the assembled school group and smattering of tourists who had gathered that I was not hurting the sheep.

“Are you sure?” someone would always ask.  The tender-hearted children… you could always suss them out with their body language.  You would have thought I was shearing them.

Then the ewe began to get a bit over excited as the whirring, metalacious shears  got closer to actually cutting wool and lanoline and you hoped nothing else.  Fractious might be a good word to describe her eyes at this point.

I always start with the topknot between the ears then work around the the front and back of the neck.  The ewe wasn’t the only animal getting excited. The school crowd was beginning to appreciate the wrestling match involving a 175 pounder and me… and the whirring shears.

I was not losing this wrestling match, I told myself, but the sheep took that moment to go “all of a sudden” on me. She jerked her head one unpredictable way and my happy shears jerked the other. In that moment in movies that goes slo-mo including the half-speed voice, I snipped the end off her ear.  As I recall, it was only the size of a small puzzle piece as it tumbled through the air.

That is when I heard the largest silence I had ever heard voiced.  My school trip kids and I watched as the now bloody piece arced end over end off my stage and in front of the most trepidacious. Sorry, there is no better word to describe them.  One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand…a dead silence like cutting a kite string on a blousy March day. Then the realization by all and sundry of how bloody sheep shearing can get as I pulled my now wet shears toward my face to study upon.  The mile deep quiet was replaced by a rising chorus of screaming, a veritable tsunami of upper range screaming.

I certainly had their attention now.  I assure you that in my sad shearing life up to this point, I had never had this happen, but I can tell you this: it was as bloody as a forehead cut on a boxer. And that is bloody. Also, to my surprise, it took quite a while to start clotting.

I tried to turn the sheep’s head away from my tender school group, but then the brave and bloody-minded kids crowded forward and wanted a much closer look.  I was a bit distracted as I carried on as if nothing was wrong, saying to the unbelievers, “She’s ok, she didn’t feel it.”

I would like to say that I pulled off a perfect rest of the shearing. Alas, that would not be true.

When the abattoir session was over, I overheard one kid saying to another, “Man, that was so cool!” Perhaps that was the little boy who, now grown, was relating the story to my wife. Perhaps not, but my wife then remembered a similar incident a few years ago that occurred in our own flock.

She turned to me and said, “So that’s what you meant .”  I looked at her uncomprehending.

She continued, “Remember Snips?”  I did.  She earned that sobriquet after I performed a similar ear-ectomy on her.  “Don’t you remember telling me?,” she continued.

“No, what did I say?”

“Well, I think you said, ‘Didn’t expect to see that again.’ ”

“I asked you what you said and you just muttered, “Just thinking out loud.”

“Well, now you know,” I admitted.

It was one of those utterly incomprehensible ‘complete the circuit’ moments: a student just happens to be at a shearing demonstration 25 years ago, he remembers it, and in a conversation 25 years later he flips the circuit in my wife’s memory to explain something curious that happened from a similar bloody incident.  Jung called this ‘coincidence that isn’t a coincidence’, synchronicity.  This undercurrent of memory syncs up like some artesian well in a geyser of mysterious signal.  I just hope this is the last damned bloody conjunction of shear and ear.