Category Archives: animals

Liver

Although I ate chicken, steak and hamburgers often during my childhood, and particularly loved fried chicken, flank steak, deliciously marinated, and burgers char-grilled over coals, I have been a vegetarian now for seven or eight years.  As they say, just because you’re a vegetarian doesn’t mean bacon stops smelling delicious.  The smell of burgers on a charcoal grill still gets to me, though I haven’t eaten one in years.  Same for pastrami (a childhood delicacy) and barbecued brisket (which I discovered very late in my meat eating life), damn that stuff smells delicious.  As for my vegetarianism, a friend corrects me, I am a pescatarian, since I eat fish a couple of times a week.  

I zestfully ate the lean muscle of many animals over the years, what we call meat, but was always squeamish about eating internal organs, feet and necks.  My mother loved to gnaw on a neck, or chicken feet, working her way around the tiny bones and sucking out the marrow with a smile of pleasure; I’d watch in horror.  Squeamish is defined as a “prudish readiness to be nauseated” and no Victorian lady was ever more ready to recoil prudishly than I was from the smell of a calf’s liver frying with onions.   The odor would literally sicken me and drive me from the house.

Why did I stop eating meat?  I heard Michael Pollan on the radio, a long interview on WNYC, I think he was speaking to the gourmand Leonard Lopate, a man who will seemingly try any food.  Pollan described something I’d witnessed as a teenager and was able to ignore at the time: animals we eat are raised in death camps not much different in spirit than places like Auschwitz.  

Yes, this was an uncomfortable fact, and I’d seen the brutal treatment of tiny chickens and turkeys on kibbutz in Israel, but then Pollan described the intelligence and suffering of these meat animals and I looked over at my cat, a handsome carnivore, and he seemed to nod.  Pigs become very depressed, they are much smarter than dogs, smarter than cats.   They have to be restrained and drugged to stop them from freaking out in the weeks and months before their painful slaughter.  

Delicious, yes, but also way smarter than this cat I like very much. The cat has a personality, preferences, moods, a certain brutal sense of humor.  I will cry when he dies, hopefully many years from now.  Sekhnet will be inconsolable, she cries at the thought of how inconsolable she’ll be.  I suddenly could not eat pork, delicious as it is.  Or cows for that matter, large gentle animals who, raised by the millions for meat, are big players in global warming with their ruminant farting.  Human love of burgers has incented (as the capitalists now say) the destruction of the Amazon jungle, the earth’s lungs, for grazing land for cows.  They say a vegetarian who drives a Humvee has a smaller carbon footprint than a bicyclist who regularly eats cow.  That is another matter, also important, but it was the idea of the terrible lives these sentient animals raised in industrial death camps lead that instantly made me unable to eat meat.  

I recalled the way we chased down baby turkeys, sometimes they were kicked, take four or five in each hand, upside down by the feet, pass them to someone with a pair of clippers who’d snip off their beaks.  A spurt of blood and they’d be passed to someone with a syringe who’d shoot them full of antibiotics, hormones and who knows what else.  Then they were thrown into another section of the enclosure with their squawking, blood spattered colleagues.  I have a vivid memory of these birds, all with blue eyes, suddenly turning into a friend of mine, a beautiful girl with blues eyes.  I excused myself and went into the bathroom to write this up in my journal.  I was eventually rudely called back to work in the turkey coop.   There were thousands more turkeys to get ready for meat and I was a needed volunteer.  Eventually, decades later, after hearing Pollan’s description, I had to stop eating birds too.

This does not make me highly moral, of course.  Hitler was a vegetarian for the last fourteen years of his hideous life.  He gave up meat in penance for his part in the death of the young niece he was obsessed with.  The only woman he ever truly loved, he said later in his life.  At twenty-three Geli Raubal finally shot herself in the lung in 1931, with Hitler’s gun, during the last leg of Hitler’s marathon to power.  Who could blame her?  Hitler was obsessed with her, jealously kept her virtual prisoner in his apartment, and though we may like to think of him looking at her through a bathroom keyhole and jerking off, her nauseated face as he rubbed against her sometimes, it is probably just because Uncle Hitler was fucking Hitler that she chose death over life in the end.   In any case, when he snapped out of his depression and got back to his life’s work, he gave up meat.

So, although I can’t eat meat these days (fish, a hypocritical compromise) I’m not on a moral high horse about it.  I’m on a moral high horse about many other things, of course.  I also wish people would stop eating so much increasingly poisonous and earth-damaging meat, but enough on that.  

Toward the end of my mother’s long death from endometrial cancer she lost a lot of weight.  She had always been very heavy, but after my father’s death, nibbled at by cancer, she lost most of her excess weight.  “The widow’s diet,” she called it, a lost interest in cooking and eating, for the most part.  She was almost gaunt by the end.  

A few years before she died we were driving in her Cadillac in sunny south Florida and she suddenly said “I feel like Golden Corral all of a sudden.  Do you want to go?”   I was hungry, and she expressed so little interest in food, that I immediately I swung the car toward Golden Corral and we got our trays and giant plastic cups.  

Golden Corral is a large scale buffet with many stations.  It’s possible to eat semi-healthily there, if one sticks to three or four foods, but that’s not why people go there.  My mother was thinking of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, a bunch of other things I wouldn’t necessarily put on my plate.  I had not yet heard Michael Pollan’s description of the suffering of animals raised and slaughtered in Auschwitz and I took some fried chicken along with some side dishes.

I’d had a tasty steak there a few weeks earlier, and I took a thin well-done steak as well.  I did not notice the tell-tale onions.   My mother ate the chicken happily for a moment, and then pretty much lost her appetite, the cancer was all over her and probably had something to do with it.  She watched me eat and asked me how I liked this, wasn’t the macaroni and cheese good, and so forth.

I sliced into the thin steak, took a morsel on my fork, put it in my mouth and chewed it.  It tasted funny, it tasted bad.  This was not the tasty steak they’d served for dinner a few weeks earlier, this was some kind of horrible lunch time meat.  

“It’s liver,” I said right after swallowing it, with a nauseated face that made my mother laugh.

“It’s not liver,” she said dismissively.  For some reason I’d swallowed the foul tasting dark meat and I was feeling sicker by the moment.   A waitress passed by.  I asked her if it was liver.  

“Yes,” she said with a big smile, “isn’t it delicious?”   I gave her the expression of Woody Allen about to go into the MRI.   My mother laughed again and told me to grow up, that it wouldn’t kill me.   I wasn’t so sure.  

Not long afterwards I heard Pollan describe the torment of literally tens of millions of animals raised in factories to be killed so we might cook and eat them and I could finally stop worrying about eating liver.

Ten Minute Drill

“So are you working hard?  Busy?” asks one of my few living cousins, now in her ninth decade.  She means, I suppose, ‘are you still delusional?’   I tell her cheerfully that I’m working hard and busy, I describe the marketing and this week’s well-received unveiling of the new pitch I’ve been working on all summer.  I explain breezily that I’m currently focused on marketing, a necessity my team would have been working on all along, if I had a team.  The program itself runs very smoothly, done over 100 times now all over, without a glitch.   She likes this, a retired teacher, does not sneeze at it.  Tactfully avoids asking if I’ve made a dime in 2015, usually her husband’s second or third question.

“Still working alone?” she asks, and I cheerfully tell her that, except at the sessions themselves where I have assistants, yes, still delusional.

“And how is Sekhnet?” she asks cheerfully, and we’ve successfully negotiated the minefield of my difficult mission.  Now we are in the lush backyard farm that farmer Sekhnet lovingly tends for hours every day, before and after her long hours at work.  I can see that colorful oasis spread out under the window.  A paradise of color and deliciousness, brought forth from the dirt.  

Then, after talking about the organic fruits of this magical garden, and the health it brings, we’re on to raccoons, possums, feral kittens.  They have them too, in New Jersey and the Berkshires, plus a litter of baby skunks and their mother.  Luckily for everybody the mother skunk took her babies and left the garden after a while, there would be no need for any violence against them, just as the exterminator had predicted.

Downstairs almost all the components for garden fresh sauce are prepped, waiting in their metal bowls for the first pop of garlic in the olive oil and then the sauce making begins.   Sekhnet is out buying onions, we’ve used up the ones she grew this season.  I have to go down and pick some fresh oregano (delicious), chop it, get it ready for the sauce.  Two large bowls of perfectly ripe tomatoes, red, yellow and green, all zipped out of their skins, wait patiently for the Saucier to begin.

Life moves at its own pace, if you can walk calmly and excitedly with it, you’re blessed.  Ideas take time to germinate, must ripen into action.   At least this is what I have been philosophically brushing into my drawing book lately.  If you are in something for the long haul you must develop a philosophy that helps and doesn’t hurt your chances.  

That said, I need to get a few hours in punching the heavy bag of revising the pitch, starting on the next one, much shorter and sweeter, showing the fun and the therapeutic value of working in a creative team helping each other animate ideas, still objects miraculously taking life on a colorful screen while cancer waits impatiently outside, ready to continue its assault, pissed off to be outside waiting to return to the center of the merciless universe.  

A good thing, I believe, keeping that killer waiting in the hall for a while as kids and their families get a break, play, have some goddamn fun.  Now I just have to sell the excellent means I’ve invented to do that.

It’s Like Riding A Horse

Thinking of the famous difficulty of managing people, I recall an incident from when I was 19 or 20 that serves as an excellent illustration.

I was in California for the summer and hitchhiked to L.A. for a brief visit with my girlfriend at the time, a sturdy and elusive young woman I’d been attempting to have a love affair with from a very long distance.   We were staying at the beautiful home of friends of her family in a wooded area of L.A. on cliffs high above the Pacific.   They were gone for the weekend.  

They had a horse and she asked me if I’d like to ride it.   I said I would, though since a pony ride as a child I hadn’t been on horseback.

Having grown up out west, she expertly saddled the horse for me, then explained that she was allergic to horses and rushed inside to shower before the hives became unbearable.

I sat on this large animal’s back and was struck by how high off the ground I was.  I gave the giddy-up signal and the horse began to walk. Having been in the area less than a day I had no idea where to ride, so I let the horse go where he wanted.  It only took a minute or two, and we’d gone a very short distance, when the horse stopped.  I was confused.  The horse as much as said “well, then, fuck you, my friend,” did an about face and jogged back to his stall at a good clip while I held on for my life.

Horses, it turns out, need to know that the rider is in charge, confident and knows exactly what to do at all times.  Much like any humans you might find yourself managing, as much as they might also like to be treated with deference to their feelings, opinions and initiatives.

What Happens to Anger that is Swallowed?

Bad things happen when anger is swallowed but not digested.   Anger that is not acknowledged seeps out in ways that are famously bad for the health, the body, friendship, peace between individuals, groups and nations.  It is threatening and highly toxic, possibly the nastiest emotion humans have to deal with.   Anger that is swallowed fills us with a bitterness that banishes mercy and makes us capable of justifying any cruelty.  

Ask the guy who feels how viciously unfair I was to express how hurt I was by his failures to keep promises I depended on, and his subsequent inability to take responsibility.   And I didn’t even swallow my anger — I was like a cat determinedly hacking up an indigestible hair ball– and it took days, and it’s still not completely out of my craw.  Being treated unfairly is indigestible, and when done by a good friend who insists you are at fault for being over-sensitive, it can lead to an inner tumult that is hard to quiet.  

Hacking up the hair ball I did, in the form of words on this blahg setting out exactly why I’d felt so hurt, filled the meditator with rage, which he barked at me when I tried to leave the door open for a conversation between old friends.  His rage was justified, you see, because no matter what he may or may not have accidentally done to me, I had no right to be deliberately mean to him in return.  I had betrayed him by not being content with his repeated assurances of friendship and instead making an unfair public accounting of his disappointing shortcomings, things he already hates himself for.  Anger always justifies itself.

I open this hideous and uncomfortable subject not to give useless advice or even insight, just to point out one popular way unprocessed anger seeps into the world.  This provocative technique is done passively, “innocently”, and I will illustrate its mechanism as clearly as I can.  It is either this exercise or finding a way not to snarl “what the fuck?!” at the sender of a recent email that rankled me by unconsciously employing this very technique.

My father had a colleague who became very close to the family when I was a boy.   My sister and I found this brilliant woman funny, and caring, and she seemed to relate to us as a peer.  She was like a very cool big sister to us.  My mother was very fond of her too. Then, seemingly out of the blue, my father was done with her, for reasons he was too disgusted to detail for his disappointed kids.  We never saw her again.

Years later my father and I spoke about what had happened to their close friendship.   “She is pathologically competitive,” my father said, his face very much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic mask of hatred when he is confronted by an on-screen enemy.  “She will fight to the death over everything and never gives an inch, especially when she’s wrong.   Her reflexive self-justification makes her impossible to deal with, even after years of therapy and supposed introspection, she still has no insight into how damaged and enraged she is.  She is always primed to fight and she fights even the smallest things to the death.  She’s one of the most maddening and provocative people I’ve ever met, and I finally just had enough, after a particular incident at a conference we did with Gladys Burleigh.”  That the same could be said for my father, minus the years of therapy, did not need to be spoken by me at the time.

My father had come to another breaking point with a good friend, part of the pattern of his life that troubled me greatly growing up.  It seemed to me he never gave these close friends a chance to make amends.  It took me decades to see that things sometimes advance beyond the point where amends are possible, much as it saddens me to see this.   When things become ugly enough between two people trust is torn and it can become almost impossible to make amends.  Anger puts each of them on the defensive, they become the worst versions of themselves and can justify their behavior down to the snarl.

Back to the point then, what happens to anger that is swallowed?  My father executed a sentence of death on this woman my sister, mother and I felt so close to.  He felt 100% justified.  Decades later I was talking to Sekhnet about how close I’d felt to this one time friend of my father’s and she urged me to look her up on the internet.   I found her easily.

We had a mutually delightful reunion by email which led to Sekhnet and me spending several days in her guest house in Santa Monica during a trip to California.  In her version of that conference my father had alluded to as the last straw, it was my father and Gladys who had set-up, sabotaged and betrayed her.  Unbelievable! she’d laughed, when I gave her my father’s version.

A great animal lover, she had a rescue dog, a lovely, skittish black lab, smaller than your average black lab– possibly still not full grown at the time.  She named the dog Boo!  Boo! was immediately very friendly with Sekhnet but seemed afraid of me.  Our host explained that Boo! had been abused by the man who owned her and that she was skittish around men.  By the end of our stay my cooing at Boo! to come over and not be afraid turned into “get off me, Boo!” as the affectionate dog would not leave me alone.

Had the story ended on this lovely note it would have been a wonderful tale of redemption.   My father had been wrong about many things, as he sadly admitted on his death bed, and his banishment of this wonderful woman was just another of them.  Except, the story did not end on this lovely note.   I have written about this at length elsewhere and it wearieth me too much at the moment to dig it all up, but I offer you the bones, which are hopefully illustrative enough to illuminate my point.

An unflinching advocate of social change when I knew her, a crusader for the underdog and righteous fighter for the oppressed, she had become, several decades later, a deeply conservative supporter of Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, Glen Beck and a host of other characters that would have made her earlier self recoil.  She asked if I’d be willing to have a dialogue about politics, which she’d had a revelation about after 9/11, as a favor to her, since we had such excellent communication and all of her other liberal former friends had cut her off (and she had new ones who were, like her, political independents of the far right).  To my eternal regret, I agreed.

The correspondence did not go well.  She and I found no common ground, and worse, for me, whether she had a coherent answer or not (and I eventually tried to reduce our Bush era correspondence to two questions:  why Iraq?  How do you justify torture?) she was vehement.  She insisted she was right, whether her answers made sense or not.  All of the experts she believed in told her that if we did not rain death and torture on those who hate our freedom they’d literally be upon is in our beds, literally cutting our throats.  Besides, we never tortured anyone, she insisted, and we only water-boarded three people (which she didn’t consider torture, in any case) and only because they desperately needed it and there was, presumably, a ticking time bomb and it was us or them.

A difference of opinion, we might say, and not something that should lead to the end of an otherwise wonderful friendship.  Our disagreements escalated.  My detailed emails were dismissed for their hopelessly misguided liberal bias, the larger points unanswered.   It soon became an exercise in masochism for me.  I eventually had enough.  We had a long falling out, I came to see her exactly as my father had described her– pathologically competitive, incapable of giving an inch of ground and irrationally spoiling for a fight.  

After years of silence I sent her a piece about Ahimsa that I’d written, she wrote back very moved, and grateful for the chance to renew a warm and mutually beneficial friendship.  She agreed 100% that we would no longer discuss politics, that it was a third rail we would not allow to electrocute our friendship again.

Except, even though she continually renewed her promise not to send political emails, darn it,  she could not resist once in a while (sometimes accidentally, she claimed) sending me something she really thought might change my mind.  She’d apologize most of the time when I reminded her I didn’t want provocative political emails and she promised each time not to do it again.   But she simply couldn’t help herself, darn it, sometimes a given piece was just too convincing for me not to be convinced by.

During all the turmoil over the deaths of unarmed black young men at the hands of police she sent me a piece that complained about how these same agitators who protest against the police conveniently ignore the hundreds of times more deaths black young men inflict on each other.  An opinionated and simplistic response I found not only irrelevant, but idiotic and inflammatory, and not even well-written.  A self-appointed American pundit compares killings by the police, sworn to serve and protect, with killings by violent criminal gangs, sworn to get rich or die trying?  This is your response to protests against police killings of unarmed civilians?  Really?

But, see, she couldn’t help it, you dig?  She was still earnestly trying to convince me she was right, get me to see the truth, get me on board with those who see the light, no matter how many times I’d expressed how these attempts make me feel.  I was so willing to have frank dialogue about so many things… why so closed minded about politics?

To me, there is only one explanation for this seeming irrationality that makes sense.  This is one thing that happens to anger that is swallowed whole:  it comes out as otherwise unexplainable tone deaf determination to be right that cannot consider the provocative effect it will have on the person it is directed to.  

The expression is very often directed at someone who had nothing to do with the original swallowed anger, which starts early in childhood, goes into a mass of general anger and creates the conditions for this kind of righteous moral tone-deafness.  And it’s “innocent”, you dig, and it conveniently becomes another proof that the person who gets upset over it is just an irrationally angry hot-head himself.  

The People rest.

The World is Just the World

“I’m going to finish that book I started,” he said resolutely.

“Not ‘Bird Wins’, I hope.  You’ve learned so much since the days you carried a piss bucket for pompous jerks too lazy to walk down the hall to the urinals,” he said hopefully.  “Besides, you realize now what it takes to sell a book idea, to get an advance.  You have to give them something positive, a fantasy they will enjoy, something uplifting and inspirational that can be made into a movie people will plunk down $20 to see.  Nobody wants a book where everybody dies, where the character we’re rooting for gets brutally screwed and there’s not even anybody to get revenge.  Tell me it’s not ‘Bird Wins’.  For the love of God, please tell me that’s not the book you’re talking about.”  He smiled at his old friend hopefully.  

“I hear what you’re saying.  The only trouble is, the fucking bird always wins,” he said.

“You realize it’s confusing to anybody reading this that you’re referring to us as ‘he’ and ‘he’,” she said, suddenly.  

“Oh?” he said, raising a single eyebrow, “you is a woman now?”  

“Not at all,” she said, “I’m a beautiful cat-faced female cat who can talk.”  

“You really are,” he said, taking her in with a nod and a smile.  

“Now that that’s settled,” she said “tell me you’re not talking about ‘Bird Wins’ again, or that soul-crushing book about the narrator’s doomed battle with the fascist Minnie Frego,” and as she looked at him it really was remarkable how cat-like her sweet face was.  

“Are you really a cat?” he asked.  She smiled and rubbed her face against his, her tail caressed his arm.

He petted her soft fur.  “The ceiling is still leaking.  Yesterday the super promised to come by.  I told him to come by today any time after 1:00.  He said he’d be working in the building all day and would stop by.  There is a bucket in the living room and one in the bedroom.  Both leaks are intermittent.  One begins to go ‘drip, drip’ while the other is silent.  Then they drip together for a while.  Then the second one goes ‘drip, drip’ while the first says nothing.”

“Hmmm,” she purred, “slightly troubling, but not very interesting.”  

“Right,” he said, “exactly!  That’s the deal with all of this shit, the accumulated drips and dribbles of a hundred leaking orifices, each one a nuisance but all together a demonic symphony that will not stop til the audience is howling.  It’s Bukowski’s swarm of trivialities that are always there and kill quicker than cancer.  One drip doesn’t get you, you can deal with one leak.  But as you turn your attention to that one, the other starts, and then another, a robot calls on the phone to tell you about some mysterious debt you owe, another week’s delay on something you were counting on, suddenly a jet of hot steam you don’t have a tool to stop, or if you did, you don’t have the heat resistant suit to avoid getting scalded, something flies into your eye, the eye is lost, down to one eye, you step backwards, the rake flips up with brutal self-caused force and opens a gash on your forehead with a mule-like kick.”  

“Did the super come by this afternoon and take a look at the new leak?” she asked, trying to rein in the torrent of his real and imagined troubles.  

“Of course not,” he said.  

“Well, I hope you called him,” she said, hoping gamely to get to some kind of resolution.  

“Yeah, I called him at 4:29.  He said ‘we knocked on your door at ten to one,'” he aimed a glob of spit and expertly dinged the spittoon, “I was sitting five feet from the door from noon onwards.  He never knocked on my door.  Then he promised to come by this evening, around nine.”

“He didn’t come by around nine,” she said, licking her paws and rubbing them over her face, cleaning herself.  

“No,” he said, “so I called him a bit after nine, and he was drunk.  Said he’d be by at ten, between ten and ten thirty, ten thirty the latest.  He’d call when he was on his way.”  

She continued grooming herself.  

“Have no fear, though, I am confident the early-rising lying sack of shit will be banging on my door at 7:30 a.m.,” he predicted bitterly.  “I’ve already told him I won’t be around tomorrow morning.  Of course, I’ll be in my bed cursing him, the useless prick.  And why shouldn’t he be a useless prick?   I’m sure they don’t pay him, yet he’s up at 6:30 every morning banging the garbage cans under my windows.” 

She curled up and rested her cat face on her soft paws.  She looked at him with a mysterious expression.   Her eyes said “you don’t really expect me to say anything, do you?”

Making it Right (and the difficulty of anger)

The world is not right, though it will insist it is, bashing you in the face as many times as necessary to prove it.  History does not proceed by justice, the law does not concern itself with trifles, like the American lynching that was winked at for a century after the Civil War.  You get a flawless receipt from every ATM you will ever visit, along with the exact amount of money you ask for, plus applicable fees, yet the same company that makes the ATMs will insist it’s impossible to guarantee the same accuracy in counting electronic votes in US federal elections.  There are a billion examples, literally, more than that if you go inside families, friendships, workplaces.

In a world as insistently corrupt as our own, how does an individual make it right?   We have the serenity prayer, which at times may guide us to accept the difference between truly maddening things we must fight and things that will only madden us.   I have nothing much to offer here, except to consider for a moment the role anger plays in these proceedings.

A friend’s recent reaction to anger caught my attention.  This cheerful, agreeable woman got angry, years ago, over something she took as a slight.  Her unusual show of temper was mentioned recently (note how slyly the passive voice is used) and she became very apologetic about it, almost worked up that we recalled it.   The words angry and mad are used interchangeably, and both are emotionally fraught words.  A stigma is attached to both, and for understandable reasons.  Angry, mad people often do terrible things.  Seeing people out of control, or feeling out of control ourself, strikes terror.

You read the book Everyone Poops?  A delightful Japanese book pointing out the obvious and showing various creatures pooping.  Here’s an illustrated post about it, keeping it classy, as the author says.  We all poop, very important.   It is clear what must be done regarding poop and we do it as often as necessary.   A very good thing it is, too.   We all get angry, and even funnier, we all have a right to be angry much of the time when we feel it.  It’s what to do with the anger that is the perplexing puzzle.    

It often gets turned inward, which goes badly almost every time.  We blame ourself for something as natural as pooping and wind up using it against ourselves– very bad, as bad as not pooping.  It gets barked at the wrong people, also bad, for at least two reasons.  The source of the anger remains untouched and a person who did not deserve blame got barked at.  Very fucked up.  It’s threatening to express anger to someone who can retaliate, so those who can’t or won’t fight back are often targets instead.  Speak truth to power?  Want to get fucked up, go right ahead.  Unless of course, that truth flatters power; power doesn’t mind that.

My old friend was determined, when he became the father of a brilliant and provocative child, to learn not to react to his child’s provocations with anger.  This sounds easy, but try it for twenty years or so, every waking moment, tired and distracted, in sickness and in health.   His mother had not done well in this department, not well at all.  Not many angry people do well in this department.  My friend did the hard work, I am always proud of the job he did in not repeating what was done to him.

We get mad when somebody hurts us in a strikingly unfair way, or in a way they know will hurt us.  This happens.  What we do after that makes all the difference.  I think of that wonderful line I saw at Buddha Bodai restaurant, under the glass on the table:  remain soft spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.  Wonderful advice.   Hard advice, but consider– if you care about the person who made you angry, what better way is there to respond?  If you have reason to be mad at yourself, what better way to speak than softly and with a tender willingness to forgive?

Lovey Cries for all of Us

Another one of the things I used to write.  Lovey, a ten pound poodle, had a short, tragic life, fighting with my mother, often bullying my mother.  My nephew, a boy of few words, said as we were leaving the apartment “that dog’s a tyrant.”  

It was not, strictly speaking, the dog’s fault.  My mother in the last years of her slow death from cancer was in no condition to give a puppy the care and patient guidance it needed and they both suffered for it.  Lovey died at five, a month before my mother, and it was a tragic blow, like losing an affectionate, troubled teenager.

 

Lovey cries for all of us

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 4:31:57 AM

My father told me the last night of his life that he’d never seen love or affection exchanged in his home. He said “I have no idea how it’s even done.” I did not have my hand on his as he spoke to me that night, with all the tenderness he could muster. He was not the cuddly or even affectionate kind.

When he was feeling maudlin, after a particularly stupid and bloody battle with his children over the dinner of steak he provided every evening, he would look at me with hurt in his eyes and say “you should read ‘I Never Sang for My Father”. He’d tell me to read this play with all the bitterness he could manage and I’d snort.

I had the play on the bottom shelf in my room in my parents’ house, it rested halfway on the floor, covered in dust. I never so much as cracked the cover of the old paperback.  I have no idea what the play is about, except for the sense my father, someone who never sang for his father, gave me of it.

I saw my father cry twice in life.  Once was during a seder, when he was talking about God pouring out His wrath against every tyrant who persecuted His People, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians to the Inquisition to Chmelnitski to the Nazis.  His tears were bitter as the Dead Sea, pouring out of his surprisingly light hazel colored eyes, and I’m sure my sister recalls that moment as clearly as I do.

The other time was during a visit in Israel.  I’d gone there for a year after High School and my parents came to visit the new kibbutz where I was living and working.  It was a historic occasion, the kibbutz was about to celebrate its first Passover, and so my parents and my sister came to visit.

My father swept the dining hall and helped lay the table cloths and set the hundreds of places for the seder, my mother worked in the kitchen, my sister probably did too.  I was out in the field picking the crops.  I spent most of the long seder in a friend’s room, listening to Jimi’s beautiful Axis: Bold As Love for the first time, then the second, then the third.

I got a day off for my parents’ visit.  We drove in a rented car to a stretch of the beautiful Aravah desert, an oasis.  It may have been Ein Gedi, I can’t think of where else it could have been.  It could have been the walk down to the Dead Sea, now that I think of it, judging from a picture I have from that day.  It is a picture of us standing on the rocky shore of some dark water at low tide.  My father, with big, black sideburns, my sister, thin with a big new bust in a yellow tank top, and me, skinny as a whippet, with a scraggly beard and veins roping down my arms.

My mother and my sister were walking ahead on the dusty trail.  My father motioned for me to hang back by the car a minute, then we began walking slowly.  The color of the land was like wheat, but there was no wheat.  It was dry, parched, biblical terrain that did not look kindly on strangers.

My father was trying to talk to me but I was seventeen, lean, tanned, and impossible to engage.  I’d hardened my heart to him, as he’d required me to do, and appealing to me was like appealing to a thug, a stone-faced adversary who gives no quarter.  I had the demeanor of someone who’d rather smash your face than listen to your side of the story.

Taking this in, what he knew in that moment was largely his own handiwork, he suddenly began to cry.  It lasted only a moment, long enough for him to beg me not to become like him, to let my mother hug and kiss me, to be humane to my mother.

“I’d have to hold his head, but your father would let me kiss him,” my mother told me after my father died.

I was on the plane tonight, the cranky old woman next to me had gotten on standby.  She was in the middle seat, spilling over to my seat, she’d firmly taken the entire armrest and part of the area where my shoulder and arm should rightfully have been.  I didn’t muscle her.  I’d already let another old woman ahead of me on the walkway to the plane.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told me with a lovely smile and an accent from the old country that told me she’d seen much more terrible lines than this one.  She truly didn’t care if I went first or she did, but she took my small gift, to make me feel better.  She was very gracious about it.

I’m sitting on the plane and it occurs to me that my mother finally said the words “I’m dying.”  Words easy enough to say when you are depressed, or angry, or manipulating somebody.  But to say it when you are dying takes a lot of work, and when she said it the other day, angrily and to manipulate me, she meant it and understood it.  Said the awful thing aloud for the first time.

A few hours later I was sitting at the computer keyboard and she rested her face on the back of my forearm as I typed.  Gently, it didn’t disturb my typing. And with infinite tenderness.

Sitting next to the fat old lady who crowded me on the plane it came to me.  Her relentless touch and the heat of her meaty arm reminded me.  I hadn’t hugged my mother much, perhaps two or three times while I was there.  I’d probably hugged my nephew as much, or my niece, and these were hugs like hipsters give each other in greeting.  Stylized, barely touching, they take a few seconds to execute and are done for the look and the gesture rather than for the feel.

I leaned into the car and kissed her goodbye on her cheek as she kissed me on mine, the way I kiss Ida whenever I see her.  Her dog cried like a human being, beside herself to see me leaving.  My mother for her part did not cry, neither did I.

The dog sat up on her lap, staring at me, stretching toward me, inconsolable, crying, imploring me not to leave.  The dog wept without shame or restraint, like a creature acutely conscious of love, affection and companionship and crying because it was losing someone it loved.

Metaphor for a life

A human life is a universe.  It is (re)written:  she who saves one life saves the world.  The death toll numbers you see on corporate TV are from Stalin’s calculus– a million ended lives are an abstraction.  For every American journalist with a name whose face we see on video before a psychopath cuts his head off, thousands of nameless, faceless children and old people are killed in the name of fighting beheading psychopaths.   These kids and their grandparents have names, faces, universes, of course, but it is much more comfortable to think of them as collateral damage, necessary deaths to, theoretically, prevent our own murder, you dig?  Better not to dwell on what the nation does in our names, you say?  OK.  

So lie back on the couch and tell me the metaphor that best describes your life at the moment.  

“Waiting for a cat to shit to determine whether I’ll be able to go home today or continue waiting here for the cat to shit, possibly take him back to the vet tomorrow.”  

What?  

“He had diarrhea for a few days, I took him to the vet Saturday.  He took a loose crap Saturday night and then– nothing.   He’s regular as an atomic clock with that short digestive tract and his habit of waiting til Sekhnet gets back before hunching to uncork his turds into the sand, kicking the sand a bit until Sekhnet diligently scoops the shit away.  She calls herself the Elephant Sweeper, the one who follows the elephants in the circus parade with a shovel and bucket.   She got home yesterday, nothing.  Overnight and so far today, and it’s going on dinner time 48 hours later, nada.”

So a cat doesn’t have his daily bowel movement and you are stuck in place?

“Afraid so.  The vet’s girl said to call tomorrow mid-day if the cat hasn’t gone by then.  Trouble is, nobody will be here until late tomorrow night.  The cat could have real problems by then.”

So you are acting out of concern for another living creature you are attached to rather than in your own, strict self-interest?  

“Afraid so. The phrase is really apt, I am afraid.  Afraid of this metaphor that so accurately captures what my life has reduced itself to, with the help of an unrealistic goal of being the director of my own destiny.  Today my destiny is to wait until a cat takes a crap.  Not the destiny I had in mind for myself when I went to bed last night.”  

Not entirely fair, this waiting for the cat to pass some turds, while on the surface not a bad metaphor for your slow-motion, extreme close-up life at the moment, is not expressed in the way most fair to you.  Be fair.  

“This act of kindness to an animal who cannot help himself, while seemingly sentimental to some, is also an act of kindness to Sekhnet, worried sick about the handsome little animal she affectionately serves.  There is nothing I can do at my place that I can’t do here, or little, anyway.  I like the waiting for a cat to shit metaphor, though, it fits so perfectly.”  

Fits your self-mocking foolery, maybe, but not the larger purpose of supporting your powerful but delicate dreams and putting them out into the world.  

“True, my powerful but delicate dreams do not appear in the flattering chiaroscuro light they deserve when the metaphor is expressed this way.  I am clearly more than a man waiting for a cat to shit, although I am also, clearly, a man waiting for a cat to shit.”

Just so. 

 

My boy hisses at me

My boy hisses at me with surprisingly threatening teeth for somebody that small. I have tried to be an affectionate and supportive father to him, and also a friend and caretaker, but it seems to make no difference. It is a question of temperament, I suppose, his and mine, and beyond either of us to change. I know very well that I am not the only man to have had this kind of difficult situation with his kid.

There are a few factors that complicate our relationship as well, and I’m aware of these. He’s not my natural son, I had nothing to do with his coming into the world and that lack of biological connection can be a factor. I basically found him, helpless and hungry, and we adopted him. Sekhnet is very attached to him, and the two of them cuddle, snuggle, and are thicker than thieves, but he has always regarded me with some distrust. There’s another thing, and I know this adds a poignant note, and may strike some as hyperbole but I mean it literally– we are of different species. This does not affect his relationship with Sekhnet, but it seems to come into play in his and mine.

When I reach out to him he hits me. Softly at first, then with his claws unleashed. Sharp damn fingernails the wild little bastard’s got. Then there’s the hiss, resembling a cobra’s hiss more than anything else, the mouth wide open and those sharp canine teeth ready, like fangs. He will not hesitate to sink those fangs into a hand, if it comes to it. Rough little bastard, and outside of making his feelings perfectly clear by his expression and actions, he never says a word.