Overheard Starbuck

"I can picture her or one of her clones reading my blog. She's in her thirties or older. Perhaps she's not quite twenty years old. She's a Christian or a Jew but never an other. Although in California, parts of Up-state New York, Vermont and the Pacific Northwest she could be an other. She may be married or not; she may be a mother or not, but she looks like somebody's daughter. She'll always look like some man's daughter. She's the keeper of the secrets, the one that keeps things right.
When she was a little girl her Daddy asked her to keep a secret and she did! As she grew there may have been times when she was asked to keep the secrets of her Daddy's friends too, or not. Keeping secrets was important.. and fun! She got gifts for being a good girl.
When she was a young woman away at school, she learned everyone had secrets to be kept; even clubs, organizations and institutions. And helping the right people keep their secrets was just something she knew how to do. She couldn't explain it but there it was.
She's so finely tuned she can sense the questioning stare of someone who should know better but doesn't, as well as the yearning burning eyes of any one among the unwashed masses murdering each other to get a glimpse of the gate in the wall of the castle where her nightly banquet is set.
When she hears or reads an impertinent question barbed like a hook that once set and reeled-in would bring to the surface a secret from the world she's sworn to protect--the world she's devoted her life to keep pure and inviolate--she becomes annoyed. And when she's annoyed women's legs around the country close like scissors and the men who watch fight each other like dogs to prove who's the best to make things right again. Of course they never know what displeased her or if it was a question or something else again, but they will drain every lake, pond and moat and scour the earth to find and punish those who're responsible. She and the secrets are that important.
Questions are like knives: you can poke, slash, stab, cut, butcher, dissect or perform surgery with them."
---"What a load of crap."
"You don't see aspects of paganism at work in most institutions then?"