of high school. He served the last few months of the Pacific War stationed in a
Navy recovery camp in the Philippines. He became well acquainted with some of
the locals and told us a story about how he was invited to dine with some of
his friends on a local holiday. One of the principal delicacies served that day
could be described, politely, as monkey sushi.
One of us kids asked "where did they get the monkey?" My father said that was a
very good question and that he has asked it himself. No one asked if he ate the
monkey, we knew that he had. It would have been bad manners not to.
These were very brutal times and there were still Japanese soldiers in the
surrounding jungles who had not surrendered. Consequently, discharging a
firearm in the jungle was a very risky transaction. The monkeys could not be
shot, so they were trapped, in a most unusual way.
The hunters would shuck a coconut and then drill a hole at either end of the
seed. One hole was just large enough to pass a rope through it. The other hole
was wider. It was big enough to let a knot in the rope pass through, and in
that way, the coconut was attached to the rope. The rope was then tied to a low
tree branch.
The larger open hole was sized, so that the type of monkey that they were
hunting could put their open hand through it. Then a favorite hard fruit, or
nut was jammed into the coconut, so that it was inside the nut loose and
clearly visible, but was impossible to shake out. When the monkey found the
treat and could not shake it out, sooner or later, they would stick their hand
into the coconut and grab it. With their hand wrapped around the bait, it was
now too wide to pass back through the hole. Trapped by their own greed, the
rascals would not let go of the bait, even when the hunters would lift the
monkey up by the rope and drop them into a burlap sack. Monkey sushi had to be
very fresh, after all.
We all laughed at how stupid those monkeys were and then my dad said, "Ya, they
were almost human."
And what does this have to do with paid parking in a retail wasteland?