Aspiration

I wish I were a
plant, so I could live on light
and soil and your breath.

Harvest Moon

It's the beginning of the end of September, and summer and autumn are lying together in their egalitarian embrace, tongue-kissing.  Autumn breathes her misty chill into the final nights of summer, but the first weekend of the new season promises to be as hot as anything we've had all year, temperatures rising into the nineties.

I have been walking at night again, enjoying the coolness, the exhilaration of mist caressing my face, the edges of the world muted and softened and brought a little closer.  My soul rises up in me at how beautiful things are, while remaining so ordinary.  The trees and the houses and the drab sidewalk neither brown nor gray seem to possess a rare inner radiance; surely it's just the glow of the streetlight reflecting off the moisture in the air, but it transforms everything like new love.

It's been too long since I have felt so keenly the magic lonely loveliness of night, the stillness and solitude that ache with a plaintive yearning more sweet than any fulfillment I can even imagine, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry, or simply fall to my knees.  Breathing in brisk swaths of mist, I feel myself restored to my native state, my natural condition, small and dark and vulnerable yet vast enough inside my skin to contain a universe of joy and awe.

The evening of the equinox, the sky is clear and cold, and the moon is full, shining pure and bright atop the black dome of night.  This is one of only two days on the calendar in which day and night are of equal length all over the globe, the other being of course the first day of spring.  North of the Arctic Circle the sun set today for the first time since March, and the scientists and penguins in Antarctica were treated to the only sunrise they'll see this year.  Here in southern California, the difference isn't so pronounced; the only thing you might notice if you happened to be paying attention was that the days have been getting shorter and shorter awfully fast lately.  The change in the length of the daylight hours relative to the hours of darkness isn't consistent throughout the year; for a month on either side of the solstices, in June and December, you can hardly see a difference at all from one day to the next, but immediately before and after the equinoxes, the darkness is pushing back the daylight hours (or vice versa) so fast you can't help but feel a little dizzy.  It's something to do with geometry, with the properties of a circle, but poetically I like to imagine it as an eternal power struggle, the victor already predetermined, slithering up suddenly from the dull lull of a prior defeat and quickly beating the enemy into a hasty and indisputable retreat before settling down to rest on its laurels awhile.

Today, the night got the upper hand.  The night, my time.  I know it's foolish, but I can't help enjoying a slight vicarious thrill that I've been rooting for the winning team.  The night is mine, and the autumn - the season of my birth, the season of moist overripeness and the air scented with the glory of demise.  This is the season of the flourishing of everything I stand for and believe in, the season of my flourishing at last.

The Antenatalist

Curled up in a warm
bath, I find myself wishing
I was never born.

In Defense of Pessimism

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Behind the Wheel

There's a nightmare I have, over and over, although it's never exactly the same twice.  There are no monsters in this dream, no killers, no public nudity.  What I am doing in my dream is something hundreds of millions of people do every day, without thinking twice about it, certainly without a glimmer of fear.  Yet several times a year, times when I feel tense and out of control of my own life, I wake up from this nightmare with a knot in my stomach, a cold sweat on my brow, relieved to find myself tangled safely in the bedclothes.

It's the dream in which I am behind the wheel of a car.

A lot of people assume I ride the bus because it's cheaper than owning a car, and I don't usually bother to correct them.  It's when they learn that I never got my license in the first place that the questions begin.  "Medical reasons," I usually say, and then people want to know what those reasons might be.  I explain that there's something about being in motion that sends my mind reeling, detaches me from my surroundings and thrusts me into realms of thought and imagination - and the faster I'm moving, the faster my brain spins.  As a writer, I have always done much of my creative "prep work" while staring out the window of a moving vehicle; occasionally I become so disconnected that I find it difficult to carry on a conversation with another passenger, like a helium-filled balloon pushing to soar off into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, only to find itself jerkily tethered by a thin piece of string to some child's grubby hand.  Some people find this difficult to believe, but most agree that if I find it so difficult to stay focused on my immediate environment I'm probably better off sitting in the passenger seat.

A few good friends know a further piece of the story.  They know that in my mid-teen years, the age when most young people are eager to start driving, I had a bigger problem than lack of transportation.  Although I kept it concealed as well as I could, I was severely depressed, and frequently suicidal.  Although I'm not at all an impulsive person, I experienced frequent brief agitations (like a mixed state of sorts) during which I felt wild, uncontrolled, and self-destructive.  It was bad enough that I would do things like smashing my hand into a brick wall or going into a screaming rage at the slightest provocation.  To be in such a state while driving would make me nothing less than a public menace.  In my clear-headed moments, however much I wanted to die, it was important to me that my death cause as little trouble as possible - and I certainly didn't want to take anyone else with me.

In my nightmares, though, I'm not suicidal, and I'm aware of my surroundings with an acuteness bordering on panic.  I'm not afraid that I'll decide on a whim to slam into a concrete barrier, or that I'll smash into a kid on a bike while plotting my next short story.  It's the driving itself that terrifies me - the knowledge that I'm in control of a massive, swiftly-moving object I have only the faintest clue how to handle, that I'm committing a crime by driving without a license or permit.  Something terrible could happen at any moment.

It's a feeling I've had before, during waking hours.  I remember it all too well.

I think I was ten or eleven years old.  My mother had taken my brother to my grandparents' house that morning, and my father and I were to join them there for dinner.  As I buckled myself into the passenger seat of his ugly old Toyota, my father set the book he had brought with him on the dashboard.  Like me, he was in the habit of carrying a book with him everywhere.  Sometimes in the car, he would pick up the book for a moment when we were stopped at a red light.

I remember exactly where we were when it happened.  We were on Interstate 10 in West Covina, only about ten minutes from our destination.  "Take the wheel," my father told me suddenly.

"What?" I sputtered.

"Take the wheel," he said, more insistently now.

"I can't!" I protested.  "We'll crash."

There was irritation in his voice as he glanced over at me.  "Look, we're going straight.  All you have to do is put your hand right here on the wheel and just keep the car from veering off course."

"I can't do that!" I repeated.  "I don't know how."

"The car's going to continue to go straight unless something happens to make it turn," he snapped.  "You don't really have to do anything.  Just hold the wheel."

My stomach flipped over as I looked out the windshield at the wide and unforgiving road, thickly populated with our fellow-travelers at this afternoon hour.  If it's as simple as you say, I couldn't help wondering, why don't you just take your hands off the wheel and keep me out of it?  But I was a meek and obedient child, and my father's anger and displeasure frightened me more than anything.  Tentatively I reached out my left hand and placed it on the steering wheel.  It felt as though the whole car was vibrating under my fingers as my father took his book off the dashboard and turned to the page where he'd left off.  Too keenly I felt the speed, the motion, the weight of metal and volatility of gasoline, all concentrated in my thin and trembling hand.

I took one breath at a time, and watched the road, and to my horror it seemed the car was slipping closer and closer toward the lane markers on the right.  I let out a wordless cry, and my father put his hand over mine and nudged the wheel with confident mastery, setting the car back into its straight course.  Really, it was that simple!  Now why couldn't I have done that myself!  And he went back to his book, and there I was sitting in the passenger seat with my hand once again a girlishly inadequate player in the supremacy of man over machine.

I don't believe I had ever lived so completely in the present.  I don't believe I often have since.  Nothing in all my little life's experience could help me now, and the future stretched before me like the road, in my hands and full of dangers.  There was no way I could nudge that wheel just right if the car got off track.  This wasn't like the Autopia ride at Disneyland, where you could turn the wheel with vigor and pretend you were a grown-up, only to feel the mechanism spin the wheel back into place, and your hands along with it, if you turned it too far as you conveyed yourself, more or less at the rate of your choosing, down the predetermined path.  Surely if the car went off course again I would push too hard and send us spinning furiously the other way, or I wouldn't push hard enough and we'd slide into the next lane over.  Guilt gnawed at my vitals, along with fear: I knew it was a crime to drive without a license.  If the police knew what I was doing, I'd get a record as a juvenile delinquent.  But that almost didn't matter.  Because any second now, everything could slip entirely out of my tenuous control, and disaster would turn my universe upside down.  We were seconds away from being immolated in a horrible crash, which would be all my fault.  This could be the end of me, I could die!  Or we could crash, and not die.  And if I could feel the potential of my father's rage simmering now under his irritation with my incompetence, just imagine what he would do if I crashed his car.

I don't remember how long it was.  It can't have been more than a minute or two.  For an interminably short eternity, I held the wheel of that car.  Finally he took it back from me.  I wasn't arrested and I didn't die.  I turned my face back to the passenger's side window, relieved and marvelling.

After that, whenever I was in the car with my father, I always tried to sit in the back seat if I could get away with it.  If my brother was with us, it was easy; I'd concluded long ago that the unspoken prestige of sitting up front wasn't worth fighting over.  When it was just my father and me, it was harder, unless he had a bunch of junk piled in the front seat, which, fortunately, he often did.  A few more times in my adolescent years, I found myself asked to handle the wheel while he looked something up on the map.  I was sometimes able to get out of it by offering to do the map-reading instead, though under the pressure of his scrutiny I was rarely able to do it quickly enough for his satisfaction.

It wasn't much better when my mother was driving, as long as my father was in the car.  A far more cautious driver on her worst day than my father on his best, she infuriated him with what he perceived as her timidity and gas-guzzling inefficiency.  Unlike me, he didn't seem to have any qualms about taking control from the passenger seat, even if it was only through direction and intimidation.  Very often, I would cringe in the backseat, part of me guiltily grateful that his angry attention was directed away from me for once, but still absorbing his wrath and her tension in my spongy heart, my primal core reduced instinctively to trembling by his volume and tone even if I was, for the moment, relatively safe.  I couldn't imagine how she could be on the receiving end of that tirade and keep her hands steady on the wheel.  I knew I couldn't do it.  I resolved that when (if) I ever learned to drive, he wouldn't be the one to teach me and I would never, ever drive with him in the car.  Even if he punished me for refusing, I just couldn't take that kind of risk.

Then, as the years passed, something happened, or rather didn't happen.  I grew taller, developed a womanly figure, started high school, experienced the sweet pain of unrequited love for the first time.  But inside, I hadn't changed a bit.  I was the same soft little girl.  The world expected me to conduct myself in a matter befitting a young adult, and for the most part, I lived up to their expectations and sometimes exceeded them.  Within myself, though, I was bewildered.  It had been many, many years since I was small enough to be carried or even to sit on someone's lap, but now my mother didn't even want to cuddle and stroke me as she used to.  No one wanted to tuck me in at bedtime, or sit with me for hours when I was sick, reading to me and fussing over my comfort.  My intelligence came across as pretentious now, not precocious.

And when I was fifteen, people expected that I would want to learn to drive.  Didn't I want more freedom?  Didn't I want to be able to go places too far away to walk without having to depend on someone to drive me?  And as awful as it sounds, the answer was no.  No, there was nowhere I really wanted to go that was too far to walk.  No, I was too free already in a world too large and wide and fast for such a tiny thing as I.  All I wanted was the yelling to stop, the expectations and demands placed on me not to shift without warning.  I needed roots, not wings.  I needed structure and nurturing.  I feigned confidence and competence as well as I could, hoping everything would just "click" and I would become the secure, independent woman life would require me to be.  And when I could, I curled up under the blankets in bed to get away from myself for a little while, my imagination the only conveyance that could transport me where I needed to go.

So I never learned to drive.  It was safer that way.  It's still safer that way.  I know how to use the bus system.  It's a hassle, but it's familiar by now.  Only sometimes, in my dreams, do I ever find myself behind the wheel - sometimes getting in trouble with the law, sometimes crashing and jerking awake just at the moment of impact, sometimes just driving and driving for what seems like hours, my guts in a tight knot - but always, always alone.  And I open my eyes, and for just a moment relief washes over me as long as I don't allow myself to remember, just yet, that it still falls upon me and only me to steer my course through life: that I still am, and always will be, alone behind the wheel.

The Five Stages of Heartbreak: The Soundtrack

Four months ago, when I was still crying every day, I wrote a short piece called "The Five Stages of Heartbreak," applying the Kübler-Ross model of the grieving process to the experience of getting dumped.  When I wrote it I wasn't nearly so far along in the process as I imagined myself to be, but I am immodestly pleased how well it holds up in the light of a little more perspective.  Of course, writing was one of the things that helped me get through those first difficult weeks and months.  Music was another.  It was in June that I discovered the great deals and rich variety to be had from Amazon's MP3 Downloads department, and I immediately began accumulating songs that spoke to my moods and conditions.  Listening to the soothing melodies and the sad lyrics, hearing my rough-edged pain reflected in a thing of beauty, helped ease me through the hard times and remember how much there still was to make life worth living.

This playlist includes many of the songs that sustained and nurtured me through the loss of my first love, as well as a few others that in one way or another capture the unique feelings of each stage of grief.  I present them in the conventional order suggested by Kübler-Ross (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), though my own journey through the stages took a somewhat different order, starting with bargaining and denial, passing through depression to anger, and coming finally to a place of acceptance.  I've chosen three songs for each stage, with one bonus song for acceptance - which is, of course, the longest stage, the one that never truly ends.

TRACK LISTING:
Don't Speak (No Doubt)
It's No Good (Depeche Mode)
Someday Out of the Blue (Elton John)
Harden My Heart (Quarterflash)
Smile (Lily Allen)
I Survived You (Clay Aiken)
Everything I Own (Bread)
Pour Que Tu M'Aimes Encore (Céline Dion)
If Ever You're in My Arms Again (Peabo Bryson)
Just When I Needed You Most (Kurt Darren)
The End of the World (Skeeter Davis)
Look What You've Done (Bread)
Missing You (Amy Grant)
Please Remember Me (Tim McGraw)
Someone That I Used to Love (Barbra Streisand)
The Dance (Garth Brooks)

I'm not going to go into too much detail on what these songs mean to me.  I already told my story.  Instead, I prefer to let the songs speak for themselves.

Denial:

Don't Speak - One of the best breakup songs ever, this one is self-conscious in its denial of the inevitable: "I can't believe / This could be the end / It looks as though you're letting go / And if it's real / Well, I don't want to know . . . Don't tell me 'cause it hurts."

It's No Good - It's embarrassing to admit now, but I went through a phase after my breakup where I took everything as some kind of Sign from the Universe.  Bombarded constantly by coincidences that reminded me of her, I allowed myself a touch of comfort alongside the fresh spurt of pain: surely all of this meant that we were meant to be together, and she would want me back as soon as I had suffered enough, learned my lesson.  She just didn't know it yet.  The lyrics of this song come to mind: "It is written in the stars above / The gods decree / You'll be right here by my side . . . Don't say you're happy / Out there without me / I know you can't be / 'Cause it's no good."

Someday Out of the Blue - Even after I accepted that the conflict between us really wasn't just going to blow over this time, I hoped that with time and effort, we would find our way back to each other.  There were a few days I spent humming this song under my breath, over and over.  "I still believe / I still put faith in us / We had it all and watched it slip away . . . Maybe years from now / Or tomorrow night / I'll turn and I'll see you / As if we always knew / Someday we would live again."

Anger:

Harden My Heart - This is a nice, vigorous song to sing out loud when you're feeling angry - or pretending you're not the sorry little sad sack who just got dumped.  (It's actually a good thing if you're mad enough to howl when you sing this one - it makes it easier to hit those drawn-out high notes.)  "You gave me your word - but words for you are lies . . . I'm gonna harden my heart / I'm gonna swallow my tears / I'm gonna turn - and - leave you here."

Smile - This is the song I think is the likeliest contender to replace Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" as the unofficial anthem of angry female dumpees everywhere.  The two songs are quite similar - vigorous and catchy beats, a dollop of profanity that packs an effective punch without coming across as gratuitously crass.  While Alanis's lyrics pack far more angst than Lily's, there's a winsome sweetness to "Smile" that belies its fundamental nastiness: "At first when I see you cry / It makes me smile / Yeah, it makes me smile / At worst, I feel bad for a while / But then I just smile / I go ahead and smile."  (Even if you're not much of a fan of music videos, this one is worth checking out.  And if you enjoy it, the Sims 2 version is equally delightful.)

I Survived You - This one is simultaneously resentful and triumphant.  "I see the picture clear now, the fog has lifted . . . couldn't help mistaking / That you could ever care for anyone / Anyone but yourself . . . But you would have to have a conscience, baby . . . And when you wrote me off like I was doomed / I survived you . . . I'll be damned if I have thoughts of you / Rain on my new beginning."

Bargaining:

Everything I Own - The evening my partner threw me out, my mother came to pick me up.  I waited for her down by the curb, shivering in the cold air of the late winter night - hoping to distract myself from my agony through physical discomfort, and perhaps on some level atone by my suffering for the hurt I had caused.  And while I was standing there, this was the song that was running through my head.  "I would give anything I own / Give up my life, my heart, my home / I would give ev'rything I own / Just to have you back again."

Pour Que Tu M'Aimes Encore - This is bargaining at its most desperate, plaintive, and poetic: "I will seek out your heart if you carry it away . . . I will seek out your soul through fire and ice . . . I will make myself new to rekindle the flames / I will become those others who please you so much / We'll play their games, if that's what you want / Shinier and more beautiful, to ignite a new spark / I will turn myself to gold so you'll love me again."

If Ever You're in My Arms Again - It was only that she didn't want to hear me say these things that kept me by and large from saying them, a fact for which I am now grateful.  "We had a once-in-a-lifetime / But I just couldn't see until it was gone . . . I swear from now on / If ever you're in my arms again / This time I'll love you much better."

Depression:

Just When I Needed You Most - This song so perfectly captures the feeling of desolation and loss that follows a breakup that it's hard not to quote the whole thing.  "Now most every morning I / Stare out the window and I / Think about where you might be / I've written you letters / That I'd like to send / If you would just send one to me / 'Cause I need you more than I / Needed before and now / Where I'll find comfort, God knows / 'Cause you left me / Just when I needed you most."

The End of the World - This is the sort of song I used to regard with a sniff of superiority.  I thought a person would have to be a bloody sentimental fool to equate the end of a relationship to the end of the world.  Well, it would seem that I am a bloody sentimental fool.  "I wake up in the morning and I wonder / Why everything's the same as it was / I can't understand, no I can't understand / How life goes on the way it does / Why does my heart go on beating? / Why do these eyes of mine cry? / Don't they know it's the end of the world? / It ended when you said goodbye."

Look What You've Done - There was a short time, as our love was crumbling around me and in the first weeks after the breakup, that I had vivid fantasies about her killing me - stabbing me in the heart.  It wasn't really that I wanted to die, and I certainly wouldn't have wished her to have to suffer the legal ramifications and emotional aftermath of such an act.  Perhaps the best way I can explain it is that, in a very real way, I had given my whole self away to her when I promised her the rest of my life, and I would rather see her consume that gift into oblivion than return it to me battered and rejected.  Or perhaps this song explains it better: "You have taken the heart of me / And left just a part of me / And look, look, look what you've done / Well, you took all the best of me / So come get the rest of me / And look back, finish what you've begun."

Acceptance:

Missing You - When acceptance finally comes, at first it takes the form of a sort of sad resignation - at least, that was how it came at first to me.  "I guess that I had dreamed / We would never be apart / But that dream did not come true / And missing you is just a part of living / Missing you feels like a way of life / I'm living out the life that I've been given / But baby I still wish you were mine."

Please Remember Me - One of the things that most helped me to carry on without her was the thought that she would be better off, happier, without me.  I felt, as long as she was somewhere in the world, happy and thriving, then I really had no right to complain about anything at all.  This song reduced me to tears over and over again, and at the same time, the gentle music and powerful lyrics lifted my spirits.  "You'll find better love / Strong as it ever was / Deep as the river runs / Warm as the morning sun / Please remember me."  And when one day, I listened to the song and couldn't decide whether it felt like the last message of my soul to hers or her soul to mine, I knew that hope had been reborn.

Someone That I Used to Love - The hardest part of moving on, I think, was losing my ex-partner as a frame of reference.  For over a year - even before we became a couple, when she was just my closest friend - she was the one who was always with me in my thoughts, even when I was alone.  When I had a decision to make, I asked myself what she would think.  When I went shopping, I was constantly on the lookout for little gifts I could bring home to her.  Suddenly, all that was over.  Even now, sometimes, "if I'm ever the least unsure I always remind myself / Though you're someone in this world that I'll always choose to love / From now on you're only someone that I used to love."

The Dance - This is acceptance, final and complete.  A trace of sadness, but no regret.  This may be the finest expression of the last stage of grief since Tennyson's In Memoriam was published in 1850.  This song has consoled me through times of loss for over ten years, and I find it almost comforting to think that it will be there through many more to come, reminding me what really matters in the end:  "I'm glad I didn't know / The way it all would end, the way it all would go / Our lives are better left to chance / I could have missed the pain / But I'd have had to miss the dance."

How to Bark Abroad

When I was in elementary school, a teacher informed my class one day that in France, the sound a dog makes is written as "oua-oua."  One of my classmates raised her hand to ask: If a French dog came to the United States, would it learn to bark like an American dog?  Our teacher looked straight at the poor girl and sputtered, "Are you serious?"  Oh, the joys of onomatopoeia.

The only reference I could find online to this funny piece by Leslie Lieber and Charles D. Rice, which was first published in This Week Magazine in 1953, was a claim that it had been "widely anthologized."  Perhaps it has been, but I've only ever found it once, in one of my mother's old textbooks.  I reproduce it here for your enjoyment.

Leafing through a book in the Italian language the other day, we were suddenly brought up short by the following passage: "The little dog ran through the streets of Naples barking boo-boo, boo-boo, boo-boo at all the passers-by."

We expected the next sentence to announce that this dog who spouted boo-boo had been whisked away to the nearest canine psycho ward for observation.  But when the author failed to comment on this pooch's peculiar behavior, a disconcerting thought dawned on us.

Could it be that all the world doesn't see eye-to-eye on the fact that dogs say either bow-bow or woof-woof?  Could it be that roosters cock-a-doodle-do in one country and cock-a-doodle-don't in another?  We had always taken it for granted that even though the world was divided on many issues, at least everybody agreed that cows go moo and ducks say quack-quack.

Deciding that these questions merited a survey, we immediately phoned the Italian Embassy in Washington.  Our question as to how dogs bark on the Italian peninsula caused a flurry of embarrassment at the other end of the line.  A chargé d'affaires refused point-blank to bark over the telephone.  Finally, however, an underling agreed to bark.  It came through sharp and unmistakable: boo-boo, boo-boo (spelled in Italian bu-bu).

The news that 45,000,000 Italians are convinced that their dogs bark like Bing Crosby was provocative enough to warrant a full-scale investigation of the whole international barnyard.  So for the next few days, the telephone wires between us and foreign embassies, consulates, and U.N. delegations buzzed while diplomats alternately barked, neighed, mooed, roared, and meowed into the telephone.

We must admit that our hopes for world unity have not been greatly heartened by our findings.  Take the cow, for instance.  Here's a simple-minded galoot who has gone around for centuries uttering one measly word.  If you think people see eye-to-eye on what that word is, you're sadly mistaken.  Moo is American.  The French have the piquant notion that Bossy gives out with a nasal meuh (pronounced as "mur" in demur).

To give meuh a fair test, the writers eavesdropped on a shipment of Normandy cattle being unloaded from a transatlantic freighter.  All we can say is that these cows may have been saying meuh when they left Cherbourg, but they certainly were moo-ing like mad by the time they reached Hoboken, New Jersey.

In India, a country where cows are sacred, they never say moo.  Ganges cows say moe (rhymes with "schmoe").  This is pretty hard to believe.  In fact, if America had cows who said moe, we'd probably worship them, too.

Frankly, we don't know what to make of the rooster situation.  Maybe Americans are too sleepy at four o'clock in the morning to give a hoot what these squawky alarm clocks are shouting.  But we'll tell you one thing: The rest of the world is sharply opposed to us in the cock-a-doodle-doo department.  In fact, Europe presents a more united front on roosters than on any issue since Charlemagne.  Germany, Spain, and Italy are all agreed that what this brid is trying to say is kikiriki (kee-kee-ree-kee), quiquiriqui (kee-kee-ree-kee), and chicchiricchi (keek-kee-reek-kee), respectively.  In Spanish-speaking countries, young roosters say quiquiriqui, but the old ones go quiquiriqoooo.  France deviates slightly in favor of cocorico; Japan votes for kokekkoko - all far cries from cock-a-doodle-doo.

Most of the Western world goes along with the U.S. conviction that ducks quack.  But you can't argue a Chinese out of the certainty that Cantonese ducks say ap-ap.  Ducks in Japan go around spouting ga-ga; Arabic ones - bat-bat; Rumanian - mac-mac.  If you should ever go duck hunting in Germany and hear a quack-quack, don't be too quick to shoot.  In Germany, ducks go quack-quack all right - but so do frogs.

The cats of the world present a fairly solid front.  Should you, on a trip around the globe, be suddenly awakened in the middle of the night by a miaow, it would be pretty safe to throw a shoe at the back fence.  You would hit a cat.  This holds true everywhere except in Arabic-speaking countries and Japan.  A diplomat from The Land of the Rising Sun insisted that Nipponese cats say nyah-nyah.  In Arab territory. felines express themselves under ordinary circumstances with nau-nau.

The dog is supposed to be man's best friend.  That's why it's so flabbergasting how people have managed to garble this message this poor animal has been trying to convey all these years.  Spanish dogs, for instance, seem to have some kinship with American Indians.  In their native habitat, Spanish cockers say how-how (jau-jau written in Castilian).  French poodles in Alsace sit on the banks of the Rhine barking oua-oua (wa-wa).

As one goes progressively eastward, the ways of the dog become more and more inscrutable.  The Turks are under the impression that their hounds say hov-hov, hov-hov.  Nor is there any arguing with the Russians.  Wolfhounds invented barking.  And believe it or not, dogs in Moscow gather around the Kremlin at night and bay vas-vas, vas-vas at the moon.

It is in China, however, that the canine kingdom goes completely berserk.  We checked and double-checked our information.  In short, the people of China will swear on Confucius' name that their dogs say wang-wang, wang-wang.  Personally, the vision of settling down in any easy chair after dinner with a pipe, slippers, and a dog at our feet who looks up and says wang-wang does not appeal to our sense of domesticity.

We wouldn't want to conclude without mentioning one encouraging sign on the horizon.  The Nutka Indians of Vancouver Island claim that whales say hux under normal conditions, and peu-wu when excited.  Surprisingly enough, the Russian Eskimos living on the Siberian side of the Bering Strait are in perfect accord with the capitalistic Nutka tribe on this point.

From the mouth of a whale, then, comes our brightest promise of world accord.  The whale's hux is the only fact on earth regarding animal sounds which observers accept without a quibble.  If someday we could all attune our ears to accept hux as belonging to a whale - and not to the otter, the sloth, or the Afghanistan loon - it might be the rallying point for a glorious era of peace on earth and good will between men and all the animals in the zoos the world over.

September 10

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, may have been the last great hurrah for the business of print journalism.  People were buying newspapers.  I know this for a fact, because they were reading them on the bus, or at the bus stop, and leaving them there.

I was a student at the time at a community college, no more than half an hour's drive away from home, but as much as a couple of hours by bus - and as a non-driver, I found myself spending three or four hours on buses and at bus stops, four days a week.  Although I often brought a book with me, and always carried a little notebook for recording my thoughts and observations, it was always a special pleasure when I happened upon some discarded reading material left on a bus bench.  Usually it happened once a week, maybe twice.  After the terrorist attacks, however, I would come home almost every day with an abandoned newspaper or two.  Lying on my bed in the evenings, I would scan the headline news and browse the comics.  It was at least a week before the comics started being comical again.  I guess, with the names of the dead only just beginning to be confirmed and the air still thick with smoke at Ground Zero, there was something almost embarrassing about making a living drawing talking dogs and wisecracking babies.

One day, there was an article in the Los Angeles Times entertainment pages about a cake-decorating contest at the L.A. County Fair.  Now, although in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks my family had been concerned about my delicate mental health, I hadn't been hit all that hard emotionally on September 11.  Oh, I had watched the news in horror like everyone else, and written long reflections in my journal about hatred and anger and survivors' guilt.  But although I have always been one to fold easily under the pressures of my own life, there is something about a time of crisis that brings out the strength in me.  I am there to be a support and a help to others - as long as they have need of me - and only afterwards does my own emotional response rise to the fore.  I had been in strong-supportive mode for a week and a half when I read the article about the cake-decorating contest.  When I read how third-place winner Laura Palomino had considered backing out of the competition, feeling guilty about enjoying something so frivolous, I felt a familiar burn of anger.  "We have to show [the terrorists] they can't stop us," she concluded, and then my anger boiled over into a tearful rage.  Everything I had been quietly feeling since I sat in front of the television and watched the second plane fly into the World Trade Center rose up in me at once.  Who are these people? I raged.  How could they want to hurt us so badly - take things away - not from the government or from media or from big business, but from plain ordinary people!  Who are they to change our lives like this?  Can't a woman even decorate a goddamn cake now without it having to be some kind of political statement?  What did I ever do to them, that now I have to see the world through newly wary eyes, that I have to live surrounded by all this grief and horror and fear, that my world - I already know it - will never ever be the same again?  And for a long time I cried, for my country and my world and my species, but finally, most of all, for myself.

Everyone has a 9/11 story.  For the first few years after the terrorist attacks, my mother had her seventh-grade students start the school year by writing about theirs: where they were, how they learned about it, what they felt.  Of course, she can't use that assignment any longer.  Her current class was a gaggle of toddlers on that fateful day.  As far as they're concerned, the terrorist attacks might as well have happened back in "history days."  For those of us who were young adults at the time, however, 9/11 will be the defining moment of our generation, as the Kennedy assassination was for our parents and Pearl Harbor for our grandparents.

I remember where I was, of course.  I was sitting in my bedroom, flipping idly through a book I'd already read, when my father came knocking on my door.  He and I had never gotten along well, and I didn't really want to have to deal with him this early in the day, so my first feeling was one of irritation.  My mother had called, he said, and told him to turn on the TV so I could see the news.  He was annoyed that she had seemed to feel the need to make sure I was informed, inferring that she didn't care whether he was kept in the loop or not.  I remember thinking this was incredibly petty.  I followed him out to the living room and sat down while he turned on the TV, and there was the World Trade Center with smoke pouring out a hole in the side.

Yes, I remember where I was on September 11.  And so do you.  And so does everybody else.  But how many of us can say how we spent September 10?  How many of us remember the last day of our innocence, our security, the world the way it used to be?

I do.

Ironically, I woke on the morning of September 10 feeling tense and anxious, having tossed and turned even more fretfully than usual.  I considered simply staying in bed.  It would have been so easy.  It was Monday, the one day of the week that I didn't have classes.  Normally, on a Monday, I would sleep all morning, if I didn't have plans.  Although today I did have plans, no one knew about them.  My psychiatrist knew, of course, as did the people with whom he'd made the appointment.  But it would be no skin off their backs if I chose to stay in bed today.  What, to them, was one more noncompliant patient, one more no-show?  I intentionally hadn't told any of my family or friends what I had promised to do today, in order to give myself this very option: to not do it, without having to justify myself or hear their urgings or bear their disapproval.

Giving myself that out, however, meant that I would have to face this ordeal alone.

Because, although I could, I wasn't going to stay in bed all morning.  I was going to get up.  I was going to take a long, hot shower, as close to scalding as I could bear, and come right out of the shower and get dressed, pulling a heavy red wool sweater on over my t-shirt.  I was going to walk up to the corner and wait for the bus.

After all, I told myself as the bus came into view, and a chill passed through me in spite of the late-summer heat and my unseasonable choice of clothing, I was an adult.  A free agent.  I could change my mind right up until the last second.  No one was going to force me to go through with it - except myself.  If I could.

Why on earth had a trypanophobe like me ever agreed in the first place to go on a medication that would require semiannual blood monitoring?  Surely I had to know that this day would eventually come.  My new doctor wasn't going to take "I don't care if I get liver damage, really" for an answer.  Last week, I had allowed him to make an appointment for me to have a blood sample drawn at a local clinic.  All weekend I had struggled with myself over whether to go.  I really didn't want to do it - no!  And yet, I did want to prove to myself that I was capable, that my willpower was strong enough to overcome my fears, even in the absence of external encouragement or compulsion.

It was because I wanted to know that I could do it - not because I was worried about my liver, or even eager to impress my new psychiatrist with my treatment compliance - that I got up that morning, took a hot shower to dilate my blood vessels, and pulled on a thick sweater to try to hold in the heat.  The wider my veins were, I reasoned, the easier it would be for them to get it over with.

The ride to the clinic seemed endless.  I started out on one of the same buses I took to get to school four days a week, but the familiar scenery seemed to blur before my eyes under a veil of terror barely contained.  When I changed buses at Pomona TransCenter, I gave some serious consideration to getting right back on a bus going right back the way I had come.  Or out to Los Angeles, or anywhere at all - except to the clinic where I had that appointment.  Somehow, though, I pressed on.  I had made up my mind that this was the thing to be done, and I was going to do it.  No choice, no other way.  It was a mindset that had served me well through high school, the years of undiagnosed and carefully concealed depression, the dissolutions of my first real close friendships, the humiliations of emotional abuse.  With my penchant for neologism, I had even coined a word for this state of dutiful endurance: statofficiality.

I had never done anything like this before, going voluntarily to face my worst fear, alone.  But my years of practice in the art of stalwart compliance had prepared me better than I might have thought.  I got on the second bus.  I rode to the clinic.  The endless ride suddenly over much too soon, I got off.  I walked through the doors.

That was the hardest part, of course: the waiting room.  Checking in, sitting down to wait.  They told me it would be about twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes!  That was too long!  It wasn't nearly long enough.  I tried to flip through a magazine, to watch whatever mindless talk show was playing inaudibly on the television.  I went into the bathroom and ran the water over my arm, as hot as I could get it.  I wondered irrationally if a team of practiced and muscular nurses would grab me and drag me back in if I made a run for the street.  I tried to write in my little notebook, but my eyes kept wandering up to the clock, where the minutes ticked away with excruciating precision.  It was more than twenty minutes before they called me in, of course, and everything after the twenty-minute mark was pure torture.  Finally, I just wrapped my arms around myself in a tight hug and waited.

Then they called my name.  I rose on my unsteady legs, arms crossed stiffly in front of me, each hand painfully clutching the opposite elbow, as I made my way to the sterile white room where the phlebotomist waited.  It wasn't too late to turn back.  No.  The decision was already made.  What would happen was going to happen.  And in a minute . . . it would be over. . . . I focused on my breathing, keeping my mind focused on the afterwards, as if I could propel myself there through sheer force of effort.

Well-meaning family, friends, and nurses always tell me not to look.  And I tell them, every time, that I have to.  If I can't stop it from happening, at the very least, I can know exactly when and where it is going to happen.  Knowledge becomes my last vestige of control in the face of unendurable anxiety.  I had to watch every step of the process, as the phlebotomist swabbed the inside of my left elbow with an alcohol wipe and tied a rubber strip around my arm.  I watched him pick up the little needle and angle it over the glistening, freshly-swabbed skin.  I watched it slip beneath the surface.

"It doesn't hurt," I hear over and over again when I tell people about my phobia - as if the phobic response had anything to do with rational dangers.  At any rate, whereas I freely admit the pain probably isn't enough to justify the intensity of my response (I have endured much greater pain with forbearance, if not aplomb), I stand by my repeated observation that having a needle stuck into one's flesh does hurt.  Only once have I ever had an injection without any pain to speak of - and that was the day.  I watched, only a little uncomfortable, as my blood flowed through the tube attached to the needle, rapidly filling a little vial.  When the vial was nearly full, the phlebotomist seamlessly replaced it with another.  I sat very still, the needle still in my arm, as he took several vials of my blood.  Then I felt a little twinge as he slipped the needle out of my vein, out of my arm.  And it was over.  I'd done it.

I'd done it!  I'd done it!  I had been anxious for several days, ever since my doctor had made the appointment.  I had woken that morning in full-fledged fight-or-flight mode, and all at once, as the phlebotomist untied the rubber strip from around my arm, the tension was gone.  Although I was out of "danger," however, my bloodstream was still thick with the stress hormones that had kept me so tightly sprung all morning.  Pride at my accomplishment was quickly amalgamated into the heady euphoria of adrenaline rush.  My muscles felt stiff and sore, but I was fidgety and too giddy to care.  Back at the bus stop, I giggled and chattered volubly to myself.  "I did it, I did it," I sang under my breath.

By the time the bus had carried me as far as the TransCenter, I had recovered my self-possession, but the blissful feelings had yet to fade away entirely.  I was waiting on the bench, writing in my little notebook, grinning broadly, when I sensed someone sitting beside me, a little closer than made me altogether comfortable.  I looked up into a familiar face: the first man I had ever kissed.  No, correction: the first man who ever kissed me.

Owen and I had met on the bus, back in July.  We'd started talking, and it had gone well at first.  When I'd arrived at my stop, he had gotten off the bus to walk with me.  We ended up in the park just north of my old high school, sitting on the grass and talking.  I wasn't at all attracted to him - he was too young for my tastes, and a little too slick, but that didn't matter - after all, we had just met.  Up until a couple of months earlier, I had never been on the receiving end of any sort of romantic or sexual attention, and, frankly, it was still so new to me that I hadn't yet started to resent the attentions of unappealing men; I was just glad that anyone had seen fit to notice me at all.  I was enjoying the conversation with Owen, enjoying the feeling of being female and desirable, even if I didn't much care for the one who was doing the desiring.  Then, suddenly, he leaned over and put his mouth on mine.  It wasn't at all the way I had imagined a kiss would feel.  It was wet.  Slimy.  I was too stunned to do anything but sit there and take it.  When he pulled away, I sputtered, "That was my first kiss."  He apologized; that hadn't really been much of a kiss, he told me, and then he did it again, this time at length, sort of sucking on my mouth.  Since I hadn't put up any protest the first time, I didn't feel I really had the right to refuse him now, so I just sat there and let him do it.  Apparently he didn't notice any difference in me afterwards, but I felt sick, just sick.  He rested my head on his shoulder, and I let him do it.  After all, I'd let him kiss me.  Before we parted ways, he sucked wetly on my mouth once more.  He gave me his telephone number, but I knew I was never, ever, ever going to call him.  And if he called me . . . ever since I was a little girl, I'd been lying to my father's clients for him, telling them he was out of the house.  It was high time for my father to return the favor.  I needn't have worried.  He never did call.

The man who had stolen my first kiss was gone from my life forever - and good riddance to him.  Or so I thought, until I looked up that Monday at the TransCenter and saw Owen sitting beside me, leering at me with that smooth, confident look of his.

"Hey, baby," he drawled, "you never called me."

"No," I said flatly.  "I didn't.  I decided you were a jerk."

He made a face of suave outrage, but before he could muster up some glib defense, I spotted the bus pulling up to the stop, and went to catch it.

I couldn't have felt more triumphant and proud than I did on the final leg of my bus ride home.  I had walked with dignity into a confrontation with my greatest fear - and come through splendidly.  I had had an unexpected encounter with someone who had treated me unpleasantly, and I had acted for once with unhesitating confidence to put him in his place, instead of sucking up my true feelings to play sweet and nice.  I was courageous.  I was awesome.  I deserved ice cream.

I stopped at Bert & Rocky's Cream Co. in the Claremont Village to order myself a sweet treat, enjoying the cold dessert as I walked the rest of the way home.  Back at my house, I called several close friends and family members, eager to brag about my triumph.  The rest of the day was pleasant and low-key.  I did some reading, ate some dinner, did a little homework.

I didn't sleep well that night, but then, that was nothing unusual.  I tossed and turned a bit, managed to get a couple of hours' rest, then got up before sunrise to poke around for a bit, expecting that after an hour or two I would get tired again and go back to bed for a couple more hours of sound sleep before I had to get up for school.

Instead, I looked up with irritation when, a little before 6:00 A.M., my father came knocking on my door.  With a sigh, I set my book aside and followed him out to the living room.  I knew whatever had happened must have been something tremendous, for my mother to call at this hour.  I could not have imagined just how tremendous.  We sat down together in front of the television, and that day I learned, with the rest of the nation and the world, what real terror, real suffering, real bravery looked like.

Handy

He lived his life in miniature,
One heartbeat at a time,
And nose to nose I held him close
Believing he was mine.

Some thoughts may be too grand for me,
But not a day goes by
I don't demand to understand
Why he should have to die.

Are You a Skid-Talker?

This article by Corey Ford appeared in 1954 in Reader's Digest.  I couldn't find it online anywhere, but it deserves to be available to a new generation of readers.  Enjoy.

"You can't blame me for making a mistake," my friend Bunny said the other day.  "After all, none of us are human."  I was trying to figure that one out when she added thoughtfully, "I may be wrong but I'm not far from it."

Bunny is a skid-talker.  Skid-talk is more than a slip of the tongue.  It's a slip of the whole mind.  In effect, it puts one idea on top of another, producing a sort of mental double exposure - and my friend Bunny is a master of the art.  When her husband, a prominent Hollywood director, completed a screen epic recently she told him loyally, "I hope it goes over with a crash."  She was very enthusiastic after the preview.  "It's a great picture," she assured everyone.  "Don't miss it if you can."

That's the insidious thing about skid-talk - you're never quite sure you've heard it.  Skid-language is like a time bomb; it ticks away quietly in your subconscious, and suddenly, a few minutes later, your mind explodes with the abrupt realization that something about the remark you just heard was a trifle askew.

"If George Washington were alive today," Bunny told me once, "he'd turn over in his grave."  On another occasion she opened a debate with this challenging sentence: "For your information, let me ask you a question."

The simplest kind of skid-talk consists of mixing words.  For example:

"Too many cooks in the soup."

"From time immoral."

"There I was, left holding the jackpot."

"It was so dark you couldn't see your face in front of you."

"I want some hot-water juice and a lemon."

A devoted mother added another gem to my collection: "I'm going to have a bust made of my daughter's head."  And a stranger whom I discovered feeding pigeons in Central Park explained to me with quiet dignity: "I believe in being dumb to kind animals."

Sometimes a skid-talker will turn an entire sentence inside out so effectively that the listener can't possibly set it straight again.  I keep wondering about a statement I overheard the other day at the station: "He tells me something one morning and out the other."  And I have yet to discover what's wrong with Bunny's advice to a young married couple: "Two can live as cheaply as one, but it costs them twice as much."

Bunny is a natural skid-zophrenic.  "I'm a split personality all in one," she describes herself happily.  She lives in a handsome country place of which she says dreamily, "Isn't it pretty?  The lake comes right up to the shore."  "I went to a wonderful party," she said of a recent celebrity-studded banquet.  "Everybody in the room was there."  She made sure to thank the hostess as she departed.  "Darling, that was the best dinner I ever put in my whole mouth."

Bunny's insults are equally bewildering.  "I never liked you, and I always will," she told a prominent screen star frankly.  And a perennially young starlet is still trying to decipher Bunny's candid appraisal, "You're old enough to be my daughter."

The best skid-talk fuses two thoughts together, creating a new short cut which speeds up the language.  I remember a New Year's Eve party when Bunny became fearful that the sounds of midnight revelry might disturb the neighbors.  "Don't make so much noise," she told the celebrants.  "Remember, this isn't the only house we're in."

I had an affectionate note from Bunny recently.  "Come see us again soon," she wrote.  "We miss you almost as much as if you were here."

Under Pressure

"Sometimes I feel like a basket case," a friend of mine confided yesterday morning.  This is a man I have always known, over the several weeks we have been acquainted, to be confident and self-controlled.  Lately, he's had more than a few challenges thrown his way, and he has been feeling the strain.  When I told him I had always admired him for his strength, he was a bit skeptical.  I stood my ground, though.  After all, he has told me over and over again how strong I am, and I don't think of myself as strong at all.  I reckon turnabout is fair play.

I've been getting a lot of that lately, from my family and friends.  Everyone seems to think I'm tremendously strong.  I'd love to know what they see that I don't.  All I know is that I'm the first to concede in any argument, I spent my childhood getting picked on by the kids everyone else picked on, and I recently got out of a relationship with a partner who hit me twice and berated me constantly - but I got out only because she dumped me.  Apparently, when the going gets tough, the tough resort to appeasement gestures.  And when the going gets really tough, they curl up under furniture in the fetal position.

But maybe that's the thing about strength: it doesn't matter how strong you are until push comes to shove and you're already feeling the strain.  Think about an Olympic weightlifter.  He braces himself physically before he picks up the weight, then takes a few deep breaths before lifting it slowly from the ground.  As he brings the weight higher, he makes whatever minor alterations or corrections are necessary in his posture, his grip.  He feels himself fighting the force of gravity, wrestling deep in his muscles with the very laws of nature.  The sweat of exertion beads on his forehead.  His teeth are clenched; his breaths are heavy and loud and sometimes come out as involuntary groans.  The sinews in his arms, working at full capacity, scream achingly for relief.  But the athlete focuses away from the pain of the moment, letting his goal push all other thoughts from his mind.  And when he finally does set down the weight with one last loud gasp, the cheers of the crowd ringing in his ears, he finds himself the holder of a new world record.

Now, I have experienced all those things myself: the sweat, the ache, the clenched teeth.  But the burden I struggled to carry - a large box of books, perhaps - was a mere fraction of the weight our athlete had to lift.  If the athlete had been there to carry my books for me, he would have swept them up easily, made it seem effortless.  There would be nothing in his demeanor that would suggest he was performing what would be, for me, a tremendous feat of strength.  In testing his own limits, though, he feels and shows the strain.  The moment in which he performs his most difficult feat, one that most of us could never hope to achieve, is the moment in which he struggles as much as I do just moving the couch to vacuum under it.

It is not the lack of stress in our lives that determines our mental fortitude, but the amount of stress we are able to endure without breaking.  The more pressure there may be on us, the more we show the strain: anxious, fretting, irritable, skittish, self-indulgent, and cowering, in whatever combination suits our temperament and condition.  These are not symptoms of weakness, but the manifestations of strength in action.

Born to Be Tame

I celebrate his birthday on the 30th of August, although he was probably born about a month before that.  Because, in a very real way, it was the 30th of August, 2006, that his life began.

That was the day he met me.

At that time, I was living in the group home that was my place of residence for much of the past decade.  As one of the highest-functioning residents in the facility, I had been given a private room in one of the Independent Living houses.  This house had a kitchen, so I usually prepared my own meals, but occasionally I would go over to the main kitchen for a snack or dessert.  That evening, the cook had prepared bread pudding; I was given several pieces, wrapped in a napkin, to take back to my room with me.

As I crossed the driveway separating the Independent Living houses from the rest of the facility, a flicker of motion caught my eye.  Out from under the dumpster at the end of the driveway scampered a pair of scraggly kittens.  They raced directly to me, rubbing up against my legs with a chorus of little mews.  Charmed, I stopped to pet them for a few minutes, then continued on my way home to enjoy my bread pudding.

The next evening, when I crossed the driveway on my way home after visiting a friend, only one kitten ran out from the shadows to greet me.  Nuzzling against my legs as if for dear life, he was obviously sickly, and I knew I couldn't leave him to his fate.  Scooping him up, I carried him back to my friend's room.  The kitten snuggled in my arms and purred faintly as we tried to decide what to do with him.  Since we weren't allowed to have pets in the group home, the best option seemed to be for me to take him home for the night, then call the Humane Society to pick him up in the morning.

He was a tiny thing - just the right size to fit in the palm of my hand.  I decided to call him Handful.  Handy, for short.

Upon closer inspection indoors, Handy turned out to be even sicklier than I had known him to be at first glance.  He was painfully scrawny, he had little appetite for the milk I procured from the kitchen to give him, and, worst of all, his eyes oozed with pus.  I sat down on my bed and held him, stroking him and cooing to him softly.  Although I gave him a chance to wander around a bit, explore this unfamiliar territory under my supervision, he wasn't particularly interested; after a bit of perfunctory poking about, he came back to snuggle up against me.  I cuddled him, running my fingers over his scruffy, matted fur.  Drifting off to sleep, he lay so still at times that I gently poked him awake just to be sure he was breathing.

I kissed the top of his head, stroked his tissue-thin ears, turned him over to caress his belly, and rubbed his paw between my fingers.  Despite his poor health, he was not too feeble to put up a protest when he didn't care for something, as I discovered when I made an empty box into a cozy bed for him and left him alone in it, only to watch him climb right back out to snuggle up to me again.  My physical ministrations, however, he received without a struggle.  His trust in me, his baby faith, was greater than the instinct of the wildborn animal to resist any form of constraint or external control.  I was very aware suddenly how little he was, and how helpless, and how easy it would be to hurt him badly if I wished.  There were people in this place who might choose to hurt him, I knew.  I was grateful that he had come to me.

When the pus that oozed from his eyes hardened into a dry, crusty scab, I held his head gently in my hand and peeled it away.  So much fresh pus flowed out from behind the crust that for a moment I feared I had been too rough and crushed his eyeball.  Finally, however, the last of the pus was wiped away, and I could see his eyes, a little pair of lackluster pearls.  For all their dullness, though, his eyes, and his whole face, shone when he gazed upon me with the pure light of complete and overwhelming adoration.

If I had still cherished any illusion that I would be calling the Humane Society in the morning, it vanished in that moment.  Handy was mine.  Not because of any great virtue on my part, or anything I had to offer, but because he had given himself to me.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy.  I would have to find some way to get him to the vet - soon.  I would have to get some proper food for him, fix him up with a litter box.  And it was easy to keep him concealed in my room for now, but he would grow quickly.  For now, his little mew was hardly more than a squeak.  When I had to leave the room, I could keep him safely contained in a large cardboard box with a laundry hamper turned upside-down over the top.  Soon, however, he would need more space than even the run of my bedroom would allow, and it would become impossible to keep him a secret.

I had tried finding a room to rent before.  It hadn't gone well.  Homeowners with an extra room always wanted to know my source of income.  When I told them I had a disability and lived on a government stipend, they always asked for details.  Legally, of course, I didn't have to tell them anything, but that would hardly have made me more appealing as a prospective tenant.  Instead, I was honest: clinical depression.  I might as well have told them that I was prone to uncontrolled homicidal rages.  Once the word "depression" passed my lips, the conversation was over.  Friendly openness became guarded reserve, every single time.  The prospect of finding someone willing to rent a room to a depressive with a cat was daunting, to say the least.  But I knew I would do what I had to, to keep Handy.  I didn't want to lie outright, but I could claim that I had a disorder of the nervous system.  If all else failed, maybe I could move in with my father, an emotionally abusive man whom I had repeatedly tried to put out of my life.  For my own part, I would rather have had my teeth pulled without anesthesia than live under his roof ever again, but if it was the only way I could manage to keep Handy, I would do it.

I spent as much time with Handy as I could.  Whenever I had to leave the room, I put him in his box, but as soon as I returned, he leapt up and began nudging his head against the laundry basket, mewing for my attention.  When I was in the room, we were in constant contact.  Handy's favorite place in the world was the juncture of my shoulder and neck.  When I slept, he slept too, his little body warm against my chin.  When I curled up in bed to read, he curled up on my chest to be stroked with one hand as I held the book with the other.  When I used my computer, I draped a towel over my shoulder to protect my clothes from his little "accidents," then let him nuzzle into my neck to his heart's content, his stiff little brush of a tail hanging down over my breast.  Sometimes we listened to music together, and there were songs I came to think of as "ours": "Two of Us," by the Beatles, and, most notably, "Because You Love Me" by Jo Dee Messina.  Often I would focus on him completely, savoring his warmth, his purr, the immensity of love and trust I could feel in that tiny, delicate body.

My friend came over once, and I let her hold him.  Although she was gentle and affectionate, Handy was unimpressed: like any baby, he wanted his own mommy, and he wiggled and squirmed in her arms until she handed him back to me.  For reasons I could not fathom, that orphaned kitten had made me the center of his world, and even as I was elevated in his eyes, I felt myself humbled.  He hadn't run out to greet everyone who crossed the driveway between the buildings.  Somehow, he had by his own criteria judged me to be Worthy.  Well, then, I was determined that Worthy I would be.

Handy seemed to grow healthier as the days passed, though I never saw him eat much.  For a while I offered him soy milk, which is what I happened to have in the kitchen; he didn't much like it, the poor little carnivore, so I got a carton of cow's milk from the main kitchen, which he seemed to like better, especially after I began warming it slightly in the microwave before giving it to him.  It was hard to tell, he was so little and scrawny, but I thought maybe he was growing just a tiny bit.  After the first couple of days, the infection in his eyes seemed to be clearing up; although they were still a bit filmy, his eyes were never so thick with pus that I had to peel the crust off.  Although I knew he would still have to be taken to the vet, it no longer seemed a matter of greatest urgency, particularly in the light of the practical obstacles (money and transportation) that stood in the way.  I made some telephone calls, found a low-cost veterinary clinic close by, and began to plan how I would get him there.  I made some more telephone calls, looking for a room to rent, but without any luck.  At least my father was willing to take us in, despite his lack of enthusiasm for my new companion.  Predictably, he cited that awful old verse by Ogden Nash: "The trouble with a kitten is / THAT / Eventually it becomes a / CAT."

I would have given anything to see Handy become a cat.

On the evening of September 7th, I wasn't in a very maternal mood.  After having hardly stepped out of my room for a week, I was eager for a change of scene.  When a friend the next city over invited me to visit, I very much wanted to go.  I couldn't leave Handy alone, though.  I decided to hide him in my backpack and take him onto the bus with me.  It was a pleasant visit, and Handy seemed unusually active and interested in his surroundings.  When my friend went into the grocery store and I waited outside, Handy seemed to want to leap down from my lap and explore.  I restrained him easily with a finger or two, but inwardly I rejoiced to see him looking so healthy and alert.  On the ride home, however, the bus driver noticed the little head poking out of my backpack and put us off the bus, too far from home for me to walk back.  An employee of the bus line finally gave me permission to take the bus home, but I was so tense and frustrated by then that I accidentally got on the bus going the wrong way.  None of this was Handy's fault, of course, but by the time I got home, I wasn't feeling very patient and nurturing.  I decided I needed a little time for myself, and that night I put Handy in his box to sleep, instead of letting him curl up on my shoulder.  It was a decision I will regret for the rest of my life.

The first thing I did when I woke the next morning was to reach into Handy's box.  I knew immediately that something was wrong.  As I lifted him up, his body was entirely limp.  The faintest of mews was the only reassurance I had that he was still with me.  Anguished, uncaring now if anyone happened to see I had a kitten in the house, I cradled him to my chest as I raced to the telephone to call my friend who lived on the other side, in the main part of the group home facility.  All I could do was moan, "Handy. . . ."  She came over right away.

We considered taking Handy on the bus again, to go to the vet, but we knew he wouldn't last that long.  We begged one of my housemates, who owned a car, to give us a ride, but she was preoccupied with matters of her own.  There seemed to be no help for my kitten, none at all.  The miracle that had slipped so unexpectedly into my life was being taken from me.  As we sought a solution, I continued to process the horror of this little creature I had come to love so deeply, lying so limp and still.  Every few minutes I would prod at him gently, needing to hear his weak, almost inaudible, mew.

"Truth," my friend said finally, "that kitten is holding on for you."  I knew it was true.  His love for me was the only thing still holding body and soul together.  He could feel the tension in my hands, my anguish and longing, and with everything he had, he was trying to make it right for me again.  Selfishly I wanted to hold him closer, squeeze him harder, keep him fighting, make him stay with me.  But truly I knew that he was beyond help.  I could let him take his final breath sensing that he had displeased me, or I could let him go in peace.

I carried him back to my room and sat down with him on the bed where we had spent a week sleeping and nuzzling and playing and cuddling, and spoke to him gently as I stroked him from head to tail.  "I know you can't stay with me, baby," I told him.  "I wish you could.  I wish we could be together forever.  But we can't.  Not now."

I told him he was going to a place where he would be healthy and strong.  "There'll be some new friends for you there," I told him.  "They'll smell me on you, and love you right away. . . ."  I told him about Robitaille, my first dog, with whom I had overcome my fear of animals.  I told him about Houdini, with whom I had shared, for a few brief months, a degree of affection and affinity that every dog-lover dreams of knowing, but few will ever experience.  I spoke of my mother's partner's cat, Buster, a friendly fellow right up until the end of his seventeen-year lifespan, and of the neighbor's sweet dog Hyena, who had been hit by a car the year before.  "And one day, baby, I'll see you again," I promised him.  "Not for a long time.  But someday. . . . I love you, Handy.  It's okay for you to go now, to be at peace."

I continued stroking my kitten as I reached over to the bedside table and picked up my favorite book, Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  I turned to the twenty-first chapter and began to read out loud.

It was then that the fox appeared.

"Hello," said the fox.

"Hello," the little prince replied politely.  "What are you?  You're very pretty. . . ."

"I am a fox," said the fox.

"Come play with me," the little prince invited him.  "I'm so sad. . . ."

"I can't play with you," said the fox.  "I am not tame."

"Oh! I'm sorry," said the little prince.  But, after some thought, he added, "What does 'tame' mean?"

"It's something too often forgotten," said the fox.  "To tame means - to form bonds. . . ."

"Form bonds?"

"Of course," said the fox.  "Right now, you're nothing more to me than a little boy just like a thousand other little boys.  And I don't need you.  You don't need me either.  To you, I'm just a fox like a thousand other foxes.  But, if you tame me, we will need each other.  You will be one-of-a-kind for me.  I will be one-of-a-kind for you. . . ."

The fox continued: "My life is dull.  I hunt chickens, men hunt me.  The chickens are all alike, and the men are all alike.  Naturally, I'm a little bored.  But if you tame me, it will be like the sun shining into my life.  I will know a sound of footsteps different from all the others.  The others will send me hiding underground.  Yours will call me out from my den, like music.  And look!  Do you see that wheat-field, there?  I don't eat bread.  Wheat is useless to me.  The field of wheat means nothing to me.  And that's sad!  But you have golden hair.  What a wonderful thing it will be, when you have tamed me!  The wheat, which is gold, will remind me of you.  And I shall love the sound of the wind blowing through the wheat. . . ."

The fox fell silent and watched the little prince for a long time.  "Please . . . tame me!" he said.

"I wish I could," said the little prince, "but I don't have much time.  I'm trying to find friends - and there are so many things I want to understand."

"You only truly understand the things you tame," said the fox.  "If you want a friend, tame me!"

"How do I do it?" said the little prince.

"You must be very patient," the fox replied.  "First of all you must sit down in the grass, just so, not too close to me.  I'll watch you out of the corner of my eye, but you don't say anything.  Language is the source of misunderstandings.  But every day, you can sit a little bit closer. . . . It's better if you come every day at the same time.  If you come, for example, at four in the afternoon, at three o'clock I will start to feel happy.  As the hour goes by, the happier and happier I'll be.  When four o'clock finally comes, I will be bursting at the seams with anticipation!  But if you come just any time, my heart will never know when to prepare itself. . . . Ritual is important."

So the little prince tamed the fox.  And when the time came for him to leave . . . "Oh!" said the fox.  "I'm going to cry."

"It's your fault," said the little prince.  "I didn't wish you any harm, but you wanted me to tame you. . . ."

"Of course," said the fox.

"But you're going to cry!" said the little prince.

"Of course," said the fox.

"Then you're no better off at all for it!"

"I'm better off," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat."

When I finished the chapter and set the book back down on the nightstand, I lifted Handy off my lap.  His body was as stiff now as it had been limp when I began.  My voice and my touch had soothed him to sleep for the last time.

I will always be grateful to my friend for how wonderful she was that sad day.  She took care of the arrangements that needed to be made to have Handy's body collected by the Humane Society for disposal.  While she was on the telephone, I sat alone in my bedroom with the dead kitten in my arms, listening to "Because You Love Me" on repeat.  I don't remember how long it was before my friend came back.  She told me it was time to let go, and I wrapped the body in my pillowcase and left it on my bed.  I followed her out to the living room, and she sat on the couch, and I lay with my head in her lap and cried.

It might have been five minutes, or it might have been an hour before the man from the Humane Society rang the doorbell.  My heart heavy, I returned to my bedroom to bring out the tiny white bundle that had been my dear companion.  As I opened the door, I found myself hoping irrationally that it was all a mistake, that the pillowcase would be lying crumpled on the bed and Handy would poke his head out of my blankets and scold me with his squeaky little mews for my long absence - as if there were anything in the world I could have confused with rigor mortis.  Of course, what I found inside the room was exactly what I had known I would find: the improvised shroud folded lovingly around the little body, unequivocally silent and still.

"His name was Handy," I told the man as I handed him the bundle.  He took it gently, with the dignity due a living creature that had been cherished and loved, and promised to keep the body wrapped in its pillowcase.  My friend held me as the man drove away.  I couldn't let myself think too hard about where they were going.

For the rest of the day, I saw him every time I closed my eyes: more vivid than life on the backs of my eyelids, every detail.  That evening, and into the night, I kept hearing little sounds in the yard, like the cry of a kitten.  Handy?  No.  No.  Handy was dead.

The days passed. I threw away the cardboard box where Handy spent his last night of life, but I kept the little bowl from which he had lapped milk. (It really wasn't mine to keep, it belonged to the group home kitchen, but I figured they could do without it more easily than I could.) I told my father Handy had died, and the first words out of his mouth were, "Well, that solves your housing problem, then." The friend I had taken Handy on the bus to visit wasn't much better. "That's too bad," she said, "but you should hear what happened to me," as she launched into yet another account of a massive, violent fight with her husband, something that happened every few days on a regular basis. It wasn't long before I realized in horror that I couldn't see Handy in my mind anymore. Not only did I not see him big as life with every blink, I couldn't even remember his exact coloring. In the week he had lived with me, I hadn't had any opportunity to get a picture of him.

Almost as bad as the grief was my guilt.  Had his death been my fault?  If I had let him sleep on my shoulder that last night . . . if I had found a way to get him to the vet sooner . . . if I had handed him over to the Humane Society in the first place, instead of trying to keep him for myself . . . Was I wrong to have given him soy milk?  Was he too weak to have spent several hours out of the house around strangers?  Was I wrong to have taken him in at all, instead of leaving him there by the dumpster where he might have been adopted by one of his own kind?  "You are responsible for everything you have tamed," the fox tells the little prince as they part ways.  Had I failed in my responsibility to this sweet, affectionate kitten who had placed his life and well-being entirely in my hands?

It was several weeks after his death that Handy came back to visit me one last time.  I was lying on my bed, the bed where I had slept with Handy on my shoulder, and thinking about how much he had loved me, and how badly I had let him down.  Then, nothing changed, really, but I felt Handy's presence in the room.  Whether it was a spirit or a memory-trace or something that bubbled up from my subconscious, I'll never know in this lifetime, but it was very real to me.  In my heart I knew the words that he would say to me, if he could speak.  My own lips gave them voice, as the tears fell softly down my cheek.

I was alone.  I had nothing.  I was surviving from day to day as best I could.  Some cats are happy like that, living by their teeth and claws and wits.  Not me.  The only goodness I had ever known was the gentle roughness of my mother's tongue, her large sleek warmth and the fluttering little warmths of my littermates' bodies against mine as we nudged ourselves into her to nurse.  Everything else was pain: the scorching heat of day under the metal dumpster where we made our home, the gnawing ache in my belly that began the day my mother didn't come back, the fear I felt at loud noises and sudden movements in my vicinity.  I was so little and helpless, you see.  And then I saw you.  And you picked me up and held me like I was something that mattered.  You took me home.

Because of you . . . I was a pet.  I had a name.  I belonged to someone.  There was a hand to peel the crusted pus carefully away from my eyes, and a face to look up into that would look back on me with love.  For one week . . . I was somebody's pet.  I had a shoulder I could curl up and sleep on, warm and safe, without fear.  I had the space under your chin, just the right size for me, where I could nuzzle up and be surrounded by you all over.  Because I loved you, you know.  For one week, I had everything I wanted: a home, a name, someone to care for me.  I wouldn't have traded that one week with you for a dozen years of life under the dumpster.  All I wanted was someone to tame me.  You were the realization of my fondest hopes.  You tamed me.  And when I died, it was in your arms.  Not alone in the dust, where the flickering out of the only light I had would matter only to the hungry scavengers biding their time.  I lay on your lap, so small and fragile, and let your voice carry me beyond my sufferings.  And when it was over, you wrapped me in a shroud and made sure I was treated with dignity, even in death.

I was a pet.  I had a name.  I belonged to someone - to you.  You loved me as best you could, and that was enough for me - more than enough - it was everything.

It was four years ago that he lived and died: Handful, my tame little prince.  I haven't stopped wondering what sort of cat he would have grown up to be.  And although time has long since stolen away nearly all my recollection of his physical features, I still can see his spirit plainly: scampering from the dark into the light, running towards me, unafraid to love, unashamed to need, unhesitant and beautiful in giving himself away.  I can hear his soft little mews floating to my ears over the night, their meaning unmistakably clear.

"Please . . . tame me!"