Archive for August, 2010

babies

Posted: August 21, 2010 in babies
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“When we got to the hospital, my eyes were dilated to five. When my very pregnant wife got on the scales, my eyes dilated to nine. The nurse came into the delivery room and asked if we wanted an epidural. I said, ‘Yes,’ I’ll take one at the base of my skull.’ ”

“When our first baby, Rosalind was born, I cried. I really did.  And that’s the part Rosalind likes to hear. She always wants me to tell that. I cried because she was a girl, and I wanted a girl because I was sick of boy children, having grown up with too many of them, and having been hit way to many times on the arms by them. And maybe I cried too, thinking of all the loads of diapers headed our way.”

This is my first baby’s birth story, and it’s true, well some of it. Some of it is just my trying to act like a Bill Cosby dad,  because I admire him so much as a dad, well, as a TV dad, because on TV he was so funny and cool and had money — and a smokin’ hot wife.

But if you have a baby you have a story and you tell it to other parents, to your children and to whoever will listen all your life. As a new dad, I watched my wife with other moms, telling our babies birth stories, reliving the glory, the hours of labor, listening to the other mom’s hospital stories.  I felt left out. I didn’t seem to have a labor and delivery story because I hadn’t been in labor. Duh! Enough of that, I made a story up, well kind of, because I really was there, even if I didn’t have to pant and push and suffer. But I went through it; I had pain in the delivery room; I had bruises on my arms, and the birth of our baby was my story too.

We waited seven years after we were married to have babies. I was about to start a PhD in literature and my wife said, “It’s now, my clock is ticking, and the alarm is ringing and it’s saying, “Babies!”

I was faced with a decision, to go for the degree, and win knowledge, wealth and influence  or have children and live in ignorance, disease and poverty. I choose children, and I have never, ever regretted that. Well, once or twice, I did, but not now. I am the proud farther of Rosalind and Laurel Hasper.

 I needed them and I found out that they needed me too.  It’s a wild claim, I know,  but I have proof.

So many times when my little daughters, Rosalind and Laurel, reached their little hands up to me, fingers and arms and eyes all saying so very clearly what they wanted. I picked them up and then they were  good, there, in the right place, with me, their dad

Last week my mom told me that Ruby, her great grand-daughter from my brother Steve’s oldest son and his wife, woke up in church in her lap to a huge, high cathedral-like ceiling over her head. Her little lower lip trembled. Her eyes began to tear. My mom told me that she pulled Ruby to herself and held her tight and then little Ruby’s lower lip calmed and her eyes closed again. Good, all good.

They need us, and we need them too.

Last Wednesday, Aryah, a friend’s little daughter ran over to me and threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek with all the three year-old innocence in her little brown arms and silky, soft cheeks and fuzzy pulled-up hair, as cute as cute can ever be.  I couldn’t have felt more honored.  She is so adorable that her momma took her out recently and a modeling agency representative asked if she could be brought to the studio for pictures. Her mom said, “No.  Aryah doesn’t need more of that kind of attention.” She is already well on her way to a princess syndrome, thinking she is all that, having perhaps too many times overheard, “She is so cute.”

Babies , we love them — madly, instantly, unmitigatingly, and they love us back. We love holding them, looking at them, feeding them, taking pictures of them, comforting them. Babies – we even love the ones we have just seen for the first time and whose names we don’t even know. The cute ones in commercials, the sweet ones passing us in their mother’s arms on the street, the funny looking eighteen month ones, hand-held, staggering like drunks alongside their mom’s in the malls – we adore them all. They turn our heads; they get our second looks. Their little bald heads and beady eyes stop traffic in the grocery store and bring people together in little huddles on the street. “Ah, he is so adorable.”

When babies aren’t so loved, most of us are pretty much undone. When Ceausescu fell from power in Romania in 1989, and the scale of his social experiment to increase the population came light we were stunned — babies with no doting parents! “No!” According to NGO estimates, more than 170,000 orphans were languishing in orphanages under appalling conditions. The plight of the unheld, the unkissed, and the unfussed over shocked us and broke our hearts. It broke theirs too.

All babies should be brought home, even though it is a fearsome decision.  Bringing Rosalind home was a thrill and a scare. It was like Christmas and Halloween combined. It was Christmas because we brought her home, like a wrapped and beribboned gift; it was Halloween because we were afraid a scary problem would come to our door that we couldn’t get rid  of even with “phone” advice from the on-call nurse.  And it happened. She cried, at night, late, and into the night. But we had to figure it out for ourselves. They said she had “colic,” which basically meant she cried and they didn’t know why. So we figured out or were told about a “colic hold,” or football hold, as we came to think of it. We tucked Roz under an arm in much the way a running back carries a football, lying on her stomach, head toward the arm pit, keeping her in place along the arm by getting a firm grip on one of her ankles. This hold is very handy, as the baby then just kind of rides along with you, near your body, and you have one hand free to do other things, like eat, hold a book, run the remote and other essentials of good living.

As you can see from this, babies aren’t always fun. Take diapers, for instance – not fun. Before we had our first baby, I was told that we would need about ninety diapers a week. I was num-chucked, floored, down because of the count . “Ninety diapers a week! What would a person do with ninety diapers?”  I was to find out. But even hearing it pronounced like that, like some terrible, negative prophesy, scared me. That would mean that there would be a whole lot of something around my house that I preferred to not keep around the house, but to consign to a private, discrete, proper porcelain place.

I threatened to move to the garage. I was told that if I didn’t stop it and step up I would be banished to the garage.  It was not to be, the garage, a way out. Flat, smashed, runny – we took turns managing it. It was only fair. “Gag me. It’s your turn.”  We had friends with a rule about this, “Finders, keepers.” You do what you have to do, but you don’t like it. I used to give Rosalind “Giraffe Man to play with,” a little stuffed orange giraffe, while I changed her diaper. At least this could be fun for somebody.

But there was also the good stuff, the other end. Both our girls were both bald for the first year, with that nice soft layer of fuzz topping them off.  We loved it, the fuzzification, the fuzzosity, the fuzzitude of their tops. Male pattern baldness doesn’t attract much attention, but total baby baldness is a big hit and people instinctively run their fingers over this soft warmth. With our babies, we teased that we were rubbing vitamins on their little, bald heads to make the hair grow. We weren’t. We were rubbing our lips on their sweet heads and kissing the stuffing out of them every chance we got. That is what eventually made their hair grow.

To compensate for not having hair, we got our girls cheeks — big, fat, sweet, rosy, downy cheeks. I like to say, “Love some cheeks.” It came from a time when one of them said, “Want some cake,” or something like that, and then in our family, post that, we say, “Love some cake, love some kitties, love some… “whatever it is that we love. We pointed out the cheeks to other people, and we told people we paid extra for them, as if cheeks were an upgrade, like a sunroof or leather seats that we could brag about.

Sum it up for yourself; do the math, fat soft cheeks, bright eyes, oversized, fuzzy topped heads, short and chubby arms and legs, miniature fingers and toes – these things pretty much avalanched us down the slope of total baby adoration.

Take baby toes. Baby toes are an instant hit everywhere. “Look, they are so perfect,” we gush. Baby toes are a miracle to most people, like the appearance of the virgin, or like bread and fish multiplied. They are so small and fresh, but exactly like ours, well, not quite. I was recently standing around with some young adults who were all wearing flip-flops. Their toes weren’t perfect, but instead, even in their mid twenties many of their toes were already bent to the side, headed toward old age and perhaps a hobble.

But the babies, in miniature, the toes, the fingers, the silky soft skin, it is so often so good, so right, so fun. Fun, fun, fun – babies are so fun, some of the time. You can see that they aren’t always when you see their sleep-deprived moms and dads just trying to get through the next day.

I remember being a baby; I don’t. It’s surprising, our brains are growing so fast then, learning so much, but remembering so little. But my mom remembers and I remember through her. I woke in the morning hungry, starving, begging, “Circee, circee, mama circee.” I so I got my Cheerios and I was so grateful that I dropped some over the edge of my chair to the dog, and they picked me up and let me out and I turned around and I was shoveling Cheerios into my babies mouths and sitting on the floor playing with their toys with them. And I’m still eating “circee.” I love my Wheat Checks and Honey Nut Cheerios and Shredded Wheat with soy milk and Splenda.

One of the best things about having babies around the house is having their toys around the house. Adults love the toys — nothing new here. In the Indus Valley Civilization, (c 3000-2,500 BCE to c1500 BCE), at the ancient site of Mohenjo-Daro, archeologists found children’s toys, small carts, whistles shaped like birds, and toy monkeys which could slide down a string. We have long loved miniature, and we have loved the motions that make our babies laugh.

The first mobile we bought was as much for us as for baby Rosalind. When we had a room with a crib and a mobile, we got smug and knew it was for real.  We were parents. I was particularly thrilled with “Discovery Cottage.” When we put the little cylindrical guy down the chimney of the plastic house and out the slide he came, Rosalind laughed and laughed with delight, and we laughed too watching her laugh, this little slice of laughing reality reprising all the laughs of the ancient children, the ancient Indian child pointing and delighting in the monkey flying down the string or the ancient Greek child tossing her yo yo’s out from her little person with joyful abandon.  

As the girls got older, early grade school, we took them to the pool.  At that point we had moved to a master-planned community for all the usual reasons: the good schools, the walk around the block without crossing any major streets to get to school and the pools. The pools were worth the mortgage payment alone. The girls grew up in the water, as all kids should. Water and kids mix really well.  We played bucking bronco. The girls sat on a bogey board, wrapped their little fat legs and finger around the edges and held on for the wild ride. Back and forth, up and down, twisting and bucking and rearing back and diving forward, then the flip. I’d flip the board upside-down, their heads pointed to the bottom of the pool, then on through the spin and back up to air and sun again, and then back under and back up, fifteen, twenty twenty-five times. I forget the record, but it was high, over thirty times under water without falling off, the screaming and laughing and water flying and high-fives at the end. Babies and big babies are fun to play with.

Besides toys, the other entertainment was language. The fun and the cuteness of big babies is the fun found on their lips and tongues. The first smiles blew us away. The first “dada” and “mama” melted our hearts. And then they really talked —  funny-cute. Laurel loved a, “Yion” (lion) and had an “owie” on her “yeg” (leg). When we were driving Rosalind would often shout out “Gog, gog,” and sure enough ten cars away, hanging out the window, there was a dog. She was never wrong. Rosalind wanted to go on a walk and see “naturous” things, and so we did.  It’s hard to remember all the cute things said and done. We don’t, but when we are again around babies, some of the special moments and movements come back.

Audrey came to our house last week. Audrey is eight months. She is all eyes and she misses nothing. She crawls fast, throws a leg under herself and sits out and up like a college wrestler making a move on his opponent. She smiles and claps and everybody wants to hold her which she doesn’t mind at all. At the end of the night, as the celebrity in the house, she didn’t want to leave. She arched her back and had to be bent into her car seat. Babies are strong and strong-willed–  sometimes. Odd, how similar Audrey is to me, to adults everywhere; we never grow out of not liking being pushed down. And so we understand her when she doesn’t want to go in her seat; sometimes when the party has been fun, and she has been the center, a girl just doesn’t want to go home. Audrey is writing her story.

When you have a baby, you get stories, and the stories just happen to you, you don’t have to make them up, but they shape and change and define too. One day we went up to the mountains for a hike.  A bicycler crashed along of the road. A Life Flight Helicopter came for the rescue. People gathered in a dirt parking lot nearby. It was exciting to us, but not too little Laurel. She reached up, eyes up, hands up, I took her up, she clutched me with the tightest grip ever and said,  “Scared of dat, daddy, scared of dat.”

I took her to the car. We sat there through the chopper loudness and dust-churning craziness. She didn’t quickly forget it. For several years thereafter, when a helicopter would fly over the house, she was wild-eyed with fear that it would fly in the window.  This is it; calming our children’s fears, trying to make clear to them what is dangerous and what is not.  But a good childhood is not much fear, more fun than fear.  It was for us.

The first smile, the first time sitting up, the first clap, the first crawl, the first step,  the first word, the first party – whew the fun is nonstop.

I remember our first vacation that required a flight. We flew to Kauai, a good place to take kids, because it is surrounded by warm, clear, beautiful water with bright fish in it, and turtles. We snorkeled with them, nonstop. I remember snorkeling with Laurel, at tunnels, a reef very close to shore, very shallow, but with an edge. We were swimming together, and suddenly we came to the outer edge of the reef, and a cliff, and deep, darker blue water. Out over the edge of the nothingness we swam, and Laurel looked down with me, floating with her floaties and she grabbed my arm hard with her little fingers.

I pulled her close and we cruised in a little circle and back over the safety of the beautiful reef, with its little fish and plants, her size.

This is it, the swim together, the fingers grabbing us tightly when they are afraid, the arm circling, the guided tour back to safety.

We love our babies, and when it works out the way it should, they so love us back. We need them. They need us. You can tell from the red finger marks pressed into your arm when you take them out into the wonders.

aristotle

Posted: August 17, 2010 in catagorization
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Several nights ago,  I drove from San Diego, out Interstate 8 East and into the mountains. I cleared the foggy marine layer at about 1,000 feet and saw the magic belt sitting white and hot on the horizon. At about 1,500 feet a fireball fell through my windshield. 

I stopped above Alpine and got out. Alpha Tauri, or Aldebaran in Arabic, meaning “the follower,” was burning an orange hole in the face of the bull. It was 4:00 am.

I lay down on my back in front of my car on a folding lounge chair. It wasn’t that weird; other people where gathered there at the viewpoint for the same reason, on cots, blankets, sitting on the roof of cars. I could feel the heat from the Lexus on one side of my face, radiating from the hood. My horse was near me, Pegasus run long and hard uphill and now grazing quietly by me, her master. A night breeze blew over my toes carrying a sweet fragrance up from the canyon below me. The coastal sage scrub chaparral had her perfume on.

In the tradition of Adam and Linnaeus and all the great name makers, I looked up naked eyed, my binoculars on my chest and my coffee cup on the sidewalk beside me, and I named the ancient names of the named: Perseus, Cephus, Andromeda, Cygnus and Orion.

And down through the ancient celestial places fell the Perseids — fast, hot and beautiful, looking like dollops of lava or flaming jelly fish streaming to earth. Wow, did I feel good. I was glad I had woken up at 3 am out of a dead sleep and decided on the pre-conscious, sleep-drunk spot to drive up into the mountains in the dead of the night.  It made me glad that I knew that August 12 and August 13 were the days for the Perseids and that I knew the names of the constellations that the tiny pieces of comet dust were falling through.

I stayed under the stars until the sun came up, a light glow over the Cuyamacas in the east, gently erasing Castor and Pollux, the twins of Gemini.  I drove home full of streaks and points, clusters and a blazing image of Jupiter in my mind. I fell back into bed at 7 am and got up at 9 am feeling like I had some mutant version of the Perseid flu for the rest of the day.

That night I told my wife, “If I get up in the middle of the night tonight and wander around the house like I’m getting ready to leave, hit me in the head with a stick. If I get back up and start walking again, hit me until I stop.”

Sleep matters, as well as marital bliss, but so does seeing stuff and so do their names. To name is to know. To name is to differentiate, to similarize and sometimes to name is to see at all. Do you really see the Willets and Black Stilts and American Avocets in the salt mash if the only net you have to catch the lot of them is, “Look, birds!” Yes, you do see something but you do not see as much as when you know and love their names and their distinguishing features. I love learning the names of things, saying them out loud, pointing them out to the uninitiated, to my students, to my disciples, to whatever peripatetic followers will gather ‘round.

I religiously read Smithsonian magazine. Their writers name stuff. A recent article exposed the truth; jelly fish are taking over the world. It sounds more like something you might read in the National Inquirer. But no; it’s science; jellies around the planet are multiplying and asphyxiating fish, clogging nuclear power plants, disabling aircraft carriers and sinking fishing trawlers. There are too many jellies now.

But it was the names of the jelly fish, not the mayhem, that stuck with me from the article – “blue blubbers, bushy bottoms, fire jellies, jimbles. Cannonballs, sea walnuts. Pink meanies, a.ka. stinging cauliflowers. Hair jellies, a.k.a. snotties. Purple people eaters.”  I love them (although not in the water when I’m snorkeling or boogy boarding), and I love their names, the snotties and the bushy bottoms. There are 1,500 jellyfish species. There are the true jellies, and the comb jellies the other gelatinous animals like the Portuguese man-of-war, a colony of stinging Cnidarians in the category siphonophores. Yes, yes, yes – it’s a knock in the head, the multiplicity of jelly, the variety of jelly, the weird expressions of jelly, the names that the jellies draw to themselves by the fabulous wardrobes they sport.

I love the siphonophore; that’s what I am; that is what we all are as we suck in the bits and pieces of life that swim near us in our seas, and toss a net of taxonomy and nomenclature over them. Then we can fish them out with their names when they pass our way again. In this way I wish to think of myself as Aristotelian. Aristotle made direct observation of nature and detailed categorization of his observations. He spent time categorizing things, dividing the world up into elements (earth, air, fire, water and aether) or types of creatures such as egg bearing or life bearing.

I want to follow Aristotle; it’s been argued that those who do succeed. I want to observe the things resident in the particular cusp of creation I inhabit and revel studiously in the names of local bits of reality and draw general conclusions from their unique identities — the California Buckwheat in all its rusted glory, thriving along Interstate 8 and throughout San Diego county, the Blue Knobby Starfish luxuriating in the tide pools off Point Loma, the California Alligator Lizard running on the white stucco wall in my backyard in Eastlake. I wish I could run on walls.

Two springs ago I trekked out to the Azza Borrego Desert with some friends. We were in search of a Native California fan palm grove and some water, a little oasis tucked back up in the quiet desert hills. The sky was a perfect Southern California cornflower blue. The desert was smoking hot and rocky and dusty. We started through some creosote flats and then went up though some ocotillo ridges.The trail was steep at points and full of large rocks to scramble and hobble over.

My teen friend Daniel was having a rough go of it, so I took his hand and we hiked together, me easing him along the trail. He had trouble judging the terrain, the height of rocks I think. His Down Syndrome didn’t help him process the desert. Now there is a  name the parents of a new born baby don’t want to hear, “Downs.” I’ve been there, I know. I was there when my friend Peter Anthony was born and “Down Syndrome” was said in a private room and his parents heard the name and held it in their minds, like a diver holding his breath underwater and then they came back up to the surface and cried and went home and made a life out of making a good life for Peter. They’ve done really well, as has Peter Anthony.

Daniel and Peter have been in the same class, as well as my daughter Rosalind, a class that we parents didn’t imagine we would ever place our babies in. I know what it is like to get the diagnosis you don’t want to get and the label you don’t want your child to have, but which they have to have to get what we call “services, and how it feels to put them in the special needs class and to live there everyday with disability and a different classification than you ever expected to have live within. But we got it, the category, the label, the classification; it’s life, the categories and names and places that fall to us. And so now our kids are in the same classes together, at school and church, and the truth is that now I like it and so do our children – much of the time. We have a place, with the disabled community, a pain family that shares life.

But you have to watch out for Peter Anthony. At church, he escapes to the front to whack on the drums on the stage. I think it is because he can barely hear, and he that likes the vibrations from the drum heads. He also likes to sneak away to the bathroom and get toilet paper and put it in his hat for safe keeping until a time when his mom isn’t around and he can pull it out and wave it. It’s good to wave things, our hands, a mobile phone at a concert, it’s soothing, in the air, back and forth for a moment.

One morning, Peter was seated in church, in the front row, waving a small streamer of torn toilet paper. I saw his mom, toward the back, watching. I said to my wife. “Take a good look at Peter Anthony, because you’ll never see him again.” But we did because his mom loves him, but you know he caught it for the public waving of things not made to be waved in public, whether stuck on the bottom of a shoe and waving unwittingly behind or held high in the front of the church for everyone to see. I once saw a trailer with an outhouse on it being towed down the street and a long streamer of toilet paper had snuck out of the outhouse door and was unspooled in the wind and waving in a wildly free undulating motion for twenty feet or so down the street behind the trailer, practically reaching all the way to my windshield. It was a hoot, unexpected, a party in the bathroom on the street. But for the most part, some things should be kept to the bathroom, on the roll – “Really now!”

But on the day in the desert, hiking out to the Palm grove, Daniel and I labored together up and down the rocks, making a trek together, not staying in the place we were assigned to, leaving behind whatever classification we usually carried with us and streaming out into the middle of nowhere like toilet paper blowing in the wind from a traveling outhouse. The final stretch down to the native fan palms was steep but worth it. There water ran from pools in the palmy shade and our feathered friends came for it all, the shade and the water and the replenishing ambience. I spotted a Phainopepla with its striking black crest. I love this feathered friend and its name. It sounds noble and Greek and exotic me, Phainopepla. And then we saw the Lazuli Bunting, with bright blue head and back, just a little lighter in shade than Christy’s Red Hot pipe glue, and  his white wingbars, as white as PVC pipe newly laid and his rusty breast and white underside. “Wow “ again and again.

What at day! We hiked to the oasis and saw it and named it and carried a memory of it back home. Like seeing a weird jelly in the ocean, we saw a weirdly named and colored bird in the desert and claimed it as our own. In my Audubon Field Guide To Western birds I checked it off the Lazuli Bunting as I did the brilliant yellow Hooded Oriole, another bit of feathered color and another name that I have stored in my mind to encourage me in my journey over the rocks and steep descents.

But of course not everything we name is a “Wow”; certain thing are not. When my daughter Laurel was little, she fell in love with Melissa and Julie her Sunday morning preschool teachers. But she didn’t feel the same about Dan, Julie’s husband. One day she told us, “I like Julie, but Dan is yucky.” Life is a process of growing up and figuring out what is yucky and what is not.

When I was little I too ended up thinking a couple of people at church were yucky – the one of the guys who sung in the choir and worked his jowls in a comical way and also the pastor. The pastor was probably a fine man; but I didn’t identify with him at all. He wore a dark suit, talked too long, and gave long invitations at the ends of services, pleading for someone to come forward as he called for just “one more verse of ‘Just As I Am.’” I was tempted to go forward and accept Christ on many occasions, although I had already done that earlier in life, just so we could all go home. It seemed like a humane and righteous thing to do, for the pastoral staff and the rest of the congregation.

The deal was that the pastor seemed to me to be in a classification of his own, a “Pastor,” or “Priest” or “Reverend.”He seemed to me to be a kind of spiritual impresario, a resident stage actor, not really authentic, not human the way the rest of us were. This may have been a classification I imposed on him, but the way I saw it became a problem for me and made me not want to be a Christian if to be a Christian was about scaring people into heaven and talking them out of being human. Something about too much talk and not enough story didn’t work for me. Something about talking without being funny or crude or descending  into the dust and sweat of the particular, the earthy and the loamy — it didn’t work for me. To me, he was “yucky.” He seemed to fly too high; his talks were like planes with no landing gear, soaring up into the theological sky and never coming down to what I was thinking  about – about girls, fast cars and Saturday nights out with my friends, about the big bass I caught with a top water lure in the lake near the house, about the ground hog I shot with my 22 and then felt bad about, about Zane Grey, about the homerun I hit over third base and about Roy Coons. Roy was the\  boy I shamed and humiliated on the playground by chasing him and calling him names. 

And so church didn’t go so well for me, most of the time. I remember one time in particular. It was a Sunday evening service. My older brother Steve and I were sitting in the back, and it came to pass that he released a pestilential vapor, a noxious effluvium of a very particular variety, the one that cause the Black Death of the 14th Century in Europe, a thing so earthy, disgusting and dangerours that it was never given a name. After he did this, I began to shake and he did too. Whether it was from nerve damage or because the whole thing was so funny, it was hard to tell, but we sat together in a repulsive ambience, jerking convulsively, shaking the pew, and all the while silently praying that we wouldn’t lose it and howl with unholy laughter and bring unwanted attention to his sin. It was so wrong in so many ways to do what he did in church and therefore so interesting and so very delectable that we could barely fathom it, but the fun ended when my dad came to the back. He then commanded us  to the front, with everybody watching with quick glances, to sit with my him and my mom between us, because we couldn’t be trusted to have class when we were alone. We simply could not be trusted to carry off a disciplined life, to live within the rarified sphere of ecclesiastical rectitude.  

I have spent much of my life trying to recover from church, to both stand in the front and laugh in the back, to negotiate the space between the profane and the scared. And I am still trying to get past those names, “pastor,” and “Christian,” without getting past them at all.  I am a Christian, to the core, and I have now been a pastor for twenty-two years, but I am still trying to define those terms, to live with those labels, to understand those classifications in ways that fit the reality of life and the unique essence of what it means to be human.

Aristotle divided life into creatures with blood and creatures without blood.  I want to be in the class of creatures with blood, a pastor with blood in him, a Christian who knows he has blood in him and must have blood on him, who is connected to God and yet still connected to what it means to be fully human. I want to deeply understand what it means to be a man with a rich range of emotions and a fabulously diverse range of thoughts. I want to understand the divine as it smacks up hard against the human, as it did in the life of Jeremiah and Isaiah and the other great prophets, and I want to learn something of the interface between God and man. I have always thought that what was interesting to study was the overlap between distinctions, the land where classifications merge, the places where things that we differentiate and name have something in common, those places that conjure up brilliant metaphors and fascinating similes and profoundly unique connections.

I have a several microscopes in my office at the church and a globe of the earth and a rock collection and a chambered nautilus and picture that I took in South Africa of a white rhino herding her baby across the road. I am and always will be a man of the earth, of rocks, of the sea and of sea creatures, of photography and art and the image and the particular that represents the universal, in other words a Christian after the heart of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
 
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise Him.

This is the way I see it;  praise to the one who made things to name, to classify and to order, and all the things also that run counter to those names and are different and in between and fickle and in some odd and intriguing manner spotted or dappled or stippled.

I believe that this is all very deep in me, and in many of us. In grade school my friends and I copied the names of birds and flower from the Encyclopedia for fun. Now when I go to the desert or mountains or the beach or travel anywhere I drag along bird and flower books and sometimes my sky charts.

I love Aristotle. I love the modern nested hierarchies of internationally-accepted classifications and categories. I love information systems, intellectual disciplines and thinking about how to sort and store knowledge.

I love and honor the power of naming. Rumpelstiltskin, the gold-spinning dwarf, was not vanquished until the queen could say his name. He sang:

“To-day do I bake, to-morrow I brew,

The day after that the queen’s child comes in;

And oh! I am glad that nobody knew

That the name I am called is Rumpelstiltskin!”

But the queen overheard the song and said his name and then Rumpel was done and his power was broken, and that happened when she said his name, Rumpelstiltskin, and then he left without her child, and he never came back.

With the queen, I want to say the name of the dwarf and the names of God too. I want to say the names and call to our attention what is good and pure and right and noble, and I want to say the names and banish what needs to be sent away forever, things like the addictions and the humiliations.

I want to live after the manner of Hipparchus and Tycho Brahe and Linnaeus and Adam all the other namers of names. 

I want to and I will learn the names and celebrate the names of the stippled and dappled things of creation. I want to say and to see.

Amerian Avocet, a long-legged shorebird with long, thin, upcurved bill, distinctive black-and-white back and sides, and a bright rust-brown head and neck during the summer.

Alberio, a gold and blue binary star in Cygnus.

Heliotrope, a sun loving pink and purple flower that climbs up through other plants and smells like cherry pie.

Bushy Bottom, a jelly, from the sea, with a bushy derriere.

Halophile, an extremophile that loves a highly salty environment.

pastor, a human being who is searching for God just like the rest of us, but who takes the time to get to know the rest of us and help us.

God, himself.

Nomenclature, good!

beautiful

Posted: August 10, 2010 in beautiful
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I want it. I want to snorkel it, I want to telescope it, I want to drive in it, I want to plant it in my backyard, I want to eat it, I want to look at paintings of it, I want to see buildings that revel in it;  I want to put it on the top shelf of my brain every night and sleep on it.  I want to happen upon it unawares on the ground or on a wall or on a face and be startled again by the drop-dead gorgeousness of the gorgeousness of the gorgeous.

Last week, I saw a man hand a woman a bag of free food – beautiful.

I saw a cat peak with yellow eyes, black face and white whiskers through a hole in a box—beautiful.

I saw the shadow of a tree on a wall, shadow art, lacey and intricate grey drawings,  caved paintings, duplications of the ideal forms of things. I was Platonic again in that moment.

I saw a baby crawling, sitting, clapping, bright eyed, expectant, insatiably curious – absolutely beautiful.

We live in a God-kissed world; his lipstick is all over the place.  This is why sunsets and Indian Paint Bush are red.

I couldn’t resist the charms of a pack of rosy colored Impatiens at Lowes last week. I brought six plants home, all blooming with best shade of red ever and planted them in my back yard along with some new bright green sod. I planted the flowers in front of my repainted, white, stucco terrace wall. I really like the rough surface of stucco; flowers and trees and grass look knock-you-out beautiful posing up against stucco. It never stops —  the divine smouching,  the physical evidence, the outrageous beauty.

On August 1, 2010 the sun flared, an arcing pillar of hot, white light rising up and flaring out from roiling surface. Recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory at extreme-ultraviolet wavelengths, the photographs show a massive white, orange and yellow pillar of fire rising up off the sun.

Nice! Beautiful! We needed that, the flare, the flicker from the sun, the color in our eyes. Yellow fire, we’ve seen it before — the candles on Christmas Eve, flickering over the communion, highlighting the wine in the cup. The pure golden fire, lying on the beach as the sun sets, a glitter path of golden light running from the falling sun, across the waves and onto the sand.  

It’s good for us. On August 1 we  soaked in the flare, literally, the rays, as they flew on the solar wind to earth. One day a larger solar storm may stike us and destroy the electrical grid and wean us from TV and the Internet and managing our money online.  If that happens, it will be okay, really; it will give us more time to look around,  at the beauty.

I see that Lunt Solar Systems is now offering an affordable, compact hydrogen-alpha solar telescope that features a 35-mm etalon, with a bandpass narrower than 0.75 angstrom. It can show the Sun’s prominences and delicate surface detail. I want one. We all should have one. Iccarus should have left off with the wings and just sprung for one.  A solar flare, seen from afar, can make a day.

But the deal it that there are a lot of things to distract us from seeing the good stuff, to interfer. Too much, we miss it.

Today, more than a solar telescope, I felt like I needed some protein, and so in the morning, I engulfed my soymilk, wheat checks and coffee. The brown, latticed squares crunched hard and fast, as well as the second bowl and the second slurped cup of coffee went down smooth. As the protein, carbs and caffeine weighed in, I began to near humanhood again.  The first grumble at our house is sometimes, “Just give me the coffee, and no one will get hurt.” Eating and drinking is good habit, a good habit, but good habits  can keep us from seeing better stuff — flares.

Last night, I  wanted sleep more than star light or meteors or other bright visual stuff. I know that because I closed my eyes at 8:30 pm. with the light still on for my wife’s reading, and went to sleep.  Running my reciprocating saw all morning cutting metal bolts and flanges in the backyard had dramatically depleted my stored energy. These bits and pieces of rusted metal were remnants of someone plan for a patio cover — never realized. We dream, of the sun and of shade, but sometimes, like Jonah by his withered plant,  we fail at it.

This afternoon, I wanted safety, not beauty. I know that because I slowed on the turn around the lake in my SUV, coming back from Lowe’s, negotiating the SUV lean, wishing I was driving the MGB that I owned in college, but being careful in what I was in – a living room on wheels, not much more negotiable in a turn than a book mobile. But speed will have to wait,  perhaps until the Infiniti G-35 sport coupe that I occasionally lust after and may some day fall for. I checked the intersection at H Street and Eastlake Drive before entering to avoid any Mr. Toad’s driving furiously by.  And last night, for more safety, I avoided watching the evening news. What I don’t know isn’t in my mind, to scare me. Safety is overrated. It too often wastes the use of our eyes.

And this evening, I felt like I needed a real kiss, not a solar kiss. I know that because when my wife came home from work, I was really happy to see her and gave her a big hug, and we ate Mexican food together on the patio and talked over the day’s trivial events, as good wives and husbands do all over the world, making sense of the day, calming the little things we did and said that day down, telling them in a story, settling them in for the night. We were Mrs. Darling in Peter Pan, folding and stacking the mental mess, putting the good on top, packing the undesirable at the bottom of our minds.  The Mexican food helped because Mexican food makes for good talk because it is multi-colored and beautiful  — green, red, yellow – and it can inspire multi-level thinking, and with a Corona to wash it down, it can inspire colorful conversations – sometimes.

But protein, sleep, safety and kisses are not enough. Something is still missing. We also need beauty. This is one thing I have sometimes forgotten but keep coming back to strong now. I need beauty, a cup full, a bowl ful, a world full, a sky full, everyday. So does everyone else,  but we all tend to forget it in all the pursuit of the other pursuits that pursue us.

During my recent garden project that resulted in a nice layer of sod in my backyard, I glued a lot of schedule 40 PVC irrigation pipe. To stick it together, I used Christy’s “Red Hot Blue Glue.” I love Christy’s glue. It’s beautiful with the lid off, ropy, as deep blue in color as my grade school girlfriend’s Teresa’s eyes and it makes me dizzy in the same way she did. To avoid Christy’s seduction on my recent project, I wore my snorkel and mask when gluing the pipe together in the trench. It’s the same breathing tackle I used in Maui on our last trip to the islands. But when you wear your mask and snorkel in the backyard while carrying a can of blue glue and some white pipe around, you risk the neighbors avoiding you forever hence forth. But it can’t be gotten around. The pipe must be laid. A beautiful lawn is really all about what’s underneath, schedule 40, some male and female connectors, some risers and Christy’s hot blue glue. One night I wore my mask and snorkel to bed, putting it on while my wife was in the bathroom. When she came out,  I was ready, looking out over the sheets through my silicon mask, breathing noisily. Her, not so much. 

It’s universal, the lunge toward beauty, the beauty projects, the willingness to lay pipe to create lawn.  Some of our greatest minds have been chronically in need of a daily dose of the gorgeous – obviously. Consider Xie He,  the Chinese art critic known of his six elements that define a painting,  Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch master of painted light, Carl Linnaeus, the Swiss father of taxonomy,  Antoni Gaudi,  the Spanish architect of biomorphic buildings, Coco Chanel, the French fashion designer, Satyajit Ray, the great Indian filmmaker, Auguste Escoffier, the French emperor of chefs, Leonardo da Vinci the Italian genius, Shakespeare, the English bard – all clearly ached for beauty.  All their art and art criticism and science and architecture, clothing, movies, culinary delight, intricate machinery, fine literature and a lot more stuff in our world bears witness to our wildly aesthetic bent, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, da Vinci’s flying machines, Coco’s little black dress – “Wow!” 

And we don’t merely need one beauty; we long for and crave many  beauties, one of them being that shapely thing we call size. We humans are wildly attracted to things cubic, things with circumference, with volume. When I was in college a friend and I shared rides to school. She was taking beginning Astronomy and loaned me one of her text books, The Stars by H. A. Rey. It is a children’s book and so it is very helpful to everyone.

There I first learned about the stars. Stars have circumference, a lot of it. They have pull, gravity, and an appetite; they eat and are eaten by each other. I was smitten by the huge, round, hot, white, blue and red orbs and their groupings in space.

Using her big blue book, I identified the constellations for the first time in my life. I thrilled over discovering Orion, as if I were the first discoverer, the belt, the sword, the nebulae therein.  I bought my own copy of Rey’s book. I went on a trip with her class and wandering innocently up to a telescope I bent down and saw the faded butterscotch orb and brilliant arching rings of Saturn.

“Incredible! It doesn’t look real. I didn’t know you could see the rings of Saturn in a little telescope. That’s the Cassini Division in the rings?  Wow! Superwow!”

I gushed. I grinned. This was it. This struck a chord in me; the ring was for me a beautiful F# minor 7th, a combination of harmonious notes to play again, to come back to whenever playing an E, an A2, a B2 and a C# minor 7th.  It fit, it belonged, it seemed to me that it wanted to belong in this measure of song, in this movement, of this piece, in this given universe. And perhaps it was more even than that, and indicated something fishy going on here, something behind the scenes, something weirdly wonderful in the physics of the stuff we live close to.   

The split between the A and B rings is one of the most beautiful splits in the universe to look into, much like the Grand Canyon or the split between the left and right brain. The rings on each side of the Cassini are flying flocks of rocks, shepherded by moons. How cool is that?  

“Gorgeous!  Amazing! Wow. Wow. Wow!”

I read in H. A. Rey that if you placed Saturn between the moon and the earth the rings would almost touch reach the moon on one side, the earth on the other. I celebrated that and still do, inside and out. That night I also saw the moons of Jupiter and its cloud belt. I was astonished, ripped, wrought. I went back home and bought a four inch reflector. I pointed it up and was astonished.  But it wasn’t big enough for my appetite. More light was needed.

I bought an eight inch Celestron — beautiful, in itself, in fact, so much so that  by it I was distracted from the stars for a moment  much in the way that cars distracted me from math in high school. What a gorgeous work of art is the Schmidt Cassegrain telescope —  the central opening in its primary mirror, the folded light path, the sleek and shiny corrector plate.  And the views it gave up, they were something to “ooh” and “ah” over — Saturn’s belts, Jupiter’s red spot, Venus’s crescent, Mar’s white polar cap against its dusky orange sphere, the perceptible disks of Uranus and Neptune.  

I went crazy for aperture. I found a used 13.1 inch Coulter Optical Dobsonian in the paper, bought it and refurbished it. It was a light bucket. I fell in love with the mirror. I cleaned it, stroked its silver skin, polished its gentle curve. I now owned an observatory. I could find and gawk at hundreds of fuzzy galaxies with 100 million stars in them, more, more, more, the hunt for the mystery, the look, through the eye piece at the wonders.  I couldn’t get enough celestial beauty; I still can’t. I adore the Orion Nebulae, the Ring Nebulae, the Veil Nebulae, the great globular cluster M-13, the Whirlpool galaxy. They never stop thrilling me. Anyone who has missed them should do nothing else at all until they have seen them. One should not exit earth wthout seeing what is beyond earth.

The other night I looked up. The moon was huge and far and white. I put it in my eye, and I washed a little bit of the difficult day out with it. This is it, the beauty washes us, it cleans us, it restores the orderly in us again; the beauty is Mrs. Darling, bent over our disturbing dreams, straightening the covers, kissing us on the foreheads and saying “Goodnight, my little sweethearts.”

We must go places where we can see further. It should be mandated that we frequent viewpoints and lookouts. This last spring, I went out to the Anza Borrego desert east of San Diego. From highway 79 just south of the town of Julian I stopped at the desert outlook. I squeezed through the sun roof of my SUV and sat on top. Thousands of feet below and miles away, were the beautiful, sandy desert and beyond the blue Salton Sea. I soaked my psyche in the far off.

But what is the beauty of distance, of size of volume, without the beauty of color. Color is fuel, drugs, the palate of the mind. I love color. This spring my wife and I hiked the trail from the top of Torrey Pines, south of Del Mar, down to the beach. Stopping half way down, the color palate was stunning, yellow Sea Dahlias, red Paint Bush, blue heliotrope, purple and white Black Sage and the red sand cliffs and the aqua marine ocean with the black dolphins riding on it, swimming south in the sea in lyrical, synchronized movements.

I needed this because I had worked too much in confined spaces, too close to sheet rock and neutral wall paint for too long. I went home cured, temporarily.

I love the watery beach with the same love that I have for the desert. They wear similar makeup. One year when we went out to hike the Palm Canyon in the Anza Borrego desert, just east of San Diego, it rained. There we were, hiking up the canyon, ogling the flaming red tips of the Ocotillo, the yellow clumps of brittle bush, the magenta explosions shooting out the tops of the beaver tails. Then it rained, and the canyon was transformed into a cathedral, the wet walls became stained glass windows, rich in reds and blacks and gleaming browns and yellows.

A few years back my wife and I toured Italy,  an art circle tour. In Assisi we visited the basilica of Saint Francis. We were struck by the frescoes in the lower church, said to be painted by Giotto in his revolutionary naturalistic style. The life of Christ was depicted in blue and red and green and brown, simple shapes, elemental colors, archetypal stories.  Linda cried. I asked her why.

“They are so beautiful,” she said.

She is on to it. Everywhere we go we should be weeping, over the beauty, everywhere, in nature, in art, in each other, in faces. Just consider the glorious beauty of faces. I recently looked into the face of a woman with cancer and then into the face of her mother who had just prayed for her, thanking God for giving her, her little girl so long ago, a very old woman praying for her aging daughter and all the beauty she was at the beginning and is now, perhaps near the end.  I looked in their faces as they looked in each other’s familiar faces and there was pure, love-drenched beauty..

A few Sundays back, I saw a little girl walk to the front of the church by herself, standing in line, only eight and yet making her own decisions to take the sacrament, making her own choices to put herself in the moment of holiness. 

She stood expectant before the woman serving her, like Vermeer’s girl at the window, caught in the light, reaching to open the glass to something beautiful.  The little communicant held the bread, her short black hair cropped straight along the bottom of her chin, her head tilted as in the painting, angled slightly down and yet opening to something outside of herself.

Then she took the cup, and held this too, perhaps too long, certainly longer than the adults before and after her, either not sure what to do or simply savoring the moment, maybe a little embarrassed, always looking down at the hem of her dress, sipping the blood of Jesus so carefully, half emptying the cup and handing it over, as if it were too special to drink it all. Vermeer would have been frozen, stunned silent and motionless by the beauty.

We need such beauty, often, close, experienced, savored. We would do well to know that more and to make the conscious aesthetic choice to really see it when it is in front of us and to go find it when it is not,  to know it, to treasure it, to soak in it, and to let it inside of us to fill us up again.

I paused under a tree recently and to notice the little bright circles on the ground. It was the sun, shining through the leaves, reproduced, the solar pinhole effect, 386 billion billion megawatts of energy, in a tiny, me-sized, accessible image! I was reminded; we are here to pause, to Sabbath, to enjoy! This is it — the pause; we need to pause; we must pause.

I striped my church’s parking lot recently, laying down new white parking lines on the black asphalt. When I was finished, I paused, it was the divine pause; I enjoyed my work. This is how God must have felt after making the zebra. Stripes! It’s good. My striped parking lot is of the divine order of things.

I like the Hebrew Psalm, number 148. It’s a hymn of creation, the writer exulting in the galaxies, angels, sun, moon, rain – everything up there praising, the writer exulting in everything down here, including little creatures, praising. ”Praise the LORD …  “small creatures,” the Psalmist writes. I guess that includes ants and fleas. The Psalm presents a world-view that reveals a vast, universal hymn going up from the earth, from flea to galaxy, creation — all praising the maker of the beauty. It makes me think, hard.

It is a privileged to see the living Vermeers, and yet,  while we do our best to pile up beauty around us, art on the walls, food plated and presented perfectly, the faces we love captured and framed, the pet fur that we love kept near us in a box or a cage or a yard, our chromey and zoomy cars in the garage, our flowers on the table, much of the beauty of life isn’t in our hands to give and take. We go looking with our telescopes, but the event isn’t within our grasp. It’s cloudy or not; it’s given, or not.

On a recent warm, San Diego afternoon my wife and I paddled out into San Diego Bay from J Street Marina over arched by a steeply angling sun. We had come out to gape at the wonders. Sitting off-shore from the Chula Vista power plant, we turned in the kayak and looked west toward the Pacific Ocean. The roar of cars on Freeway 5 at our backs, we could see the Silver Strand running north from Imperial Beach to the almost-island town of Coronado,  a beautiful narrow strip of sand crowned with red tiled roofs and glowing palms. Condos, big houses, boat slips, the famous Hotel Del Coronado, upscale retail – more contrast to the industrial shore line behind us. 

We luxuriated in this watery commons, we soaked in the distances, we beheld the reflective plane, the flat lines as beautiful as those in a John Marin seascape, and then we turned back toward the power plant. My eyes traced the long line of one of the earthen dikes built to create its intake and discharge channels. What a contrast to Coronado’s strand. Chula Vista’s thin strips of fill material are as ugly as a ransacked room, narrow lines of eroding fill dirt and pieces of broken concrete. As we sat in our quiet watery moment, the beauty of the bay broke through like a shy smile.  The departing sun glittered across the ocean, over the strand, down the bay and onto our faces. The breeze became gentle, the water smoothed and then suddenly, very near, we saw what we had come to see.

A large curious head and curving protective shell broke the surface of the water. We aren’t alone. Swimming very near was a giant, green sea turtle, one from the group turtles that have made their residence in the warm waters of the power plant. One doesn’t have to go far in Chula Vista to see the marine treasures.  In 2009, Forbes magazine rated Chula Vista as one of the most boring cities in America. That’s interesting. Are there boring places? Or are there only bored people in uninvestigated, beautiful places?

We watched transfixed as the turtle broke the surface, opened its mouth, and then slipped back into the depths. It was a sighting of a wonder. It fell into the neural folder in my mind that held all the other sea turtles I have ever encountered. It found space beside the turtle I swam with two years ago on a gorgeous California summer day in La Jolla. That day, my marine buddy and I paddled together from Jolla Shores to the La Jolla Cove through glitteringly clear water, moving in tandem through the sparkling blue Pacific.

It landed in the same neurological row as the baby turtle I discovered while snorkeling off the west coast of Maui last summer. I found this little one on the bottom, sleeping under a rock shelf, then coming up to breathe with me and descending again in a slow arc to safer quarters.

Sea turtles, something given, offered  —  they are part of the beauty that we paddle through life with.

Last week on a bike ride with my wife, I saw a Snowy Egret fishing in a mud flat along the strand in Coronado — beautiful.

Today I say a large white bloom crowning the top of a dark green, glossy-leafed Magnolia tree on the main street running to my house — gorgeous.

And today I watched water cascade over the rock waterfall that I built in my backyard pond, glistening silver in  the sunlight and splashing happily onto the green lily pads that I have planted and carefully nurtured there — spectacular. Monet would approve.

It’s given, non-stop, everyday, offered, to us, out of love, for us — the beautiful!

Fur

Posted: August 3, 2010 in animals
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MeganI was half asleep, napping on my day off after a challenging work week. The sleep research shows that we need to catch up on sleep, after putting out, by putting in 10 hours or so. I was catching up and so was Megan, nesting down at my feet.

Then I felt her weight on the covers, fur moving my way. It was a bit odd. Megan is afraid a lot, she is tactily defensive. It figures, with her past. My daughter Laurel, one day walking from jury duty to my office, found Megan on a block wall by a bank, eyes swollen shut –  a hungry, lost, crying kitten. Laurel called me; I came and got her and Megan in the car. We took her home with us.

Megan is now family; she lives within the walls, not on the wall, and she lives with all her needs met and more, yet she has never fully recovered from her time outside on the wall. She has her terrors, her abandonment issues, her eating disorder. She is now overweight. It’s interesting, the issues of our animals and our responses to them.

Megan is in therapy now; I’m her counselor. It’s working. That day on the bed, she crept up to my side, did that half turn that animals do before settling, and nested up against my side. I didn’t touch her; she would have retreated. We slept snuggled, her weight against my stomach, a familial closeness, hanging out together, both doing deep breathing. This is why we have pets; to have something to breathe in sync with that doesn’t make a fuss when we don’t do breathe right, or do anything small and insignificant right, the kind of ridiculous fuss our human companions tend to make over little things that don’t matter now and never will. Mark Twain quipped, “If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.”

I’ve always enjoyed animals, from the day I dragged the tom cat I named Red home and made him mine, to the time I crawled under the chapel to drag nineteen puppies out in a cardboard box, picking up each soft warm body, much to their mom’s dismay, and bringing them out into the light, into society, to the present as I live with two black cats who I generically refer to as “fur,” as in, “How was fur today?”

Something in us wants to find a creature, adopt it, and love it. It is the pleasure of domestication. My friend Tim has turtles, Vance and Adriana have birds, Natalie has a gecko.  Some like scales, feathers or a carapace,  but I prefer fur. My wife likes turtles and so we have several in our backyard. She and Tim talk turtles: worms, eggs, great escapes, stuff like that. I don’t really get it. What can you do with a turtle? They won’t fetch no matter how many times you throw a ball past them, and there is no snuggling; just gawking at the prehistoric, head-snapping  food lunge and a bit of hand washing if you pick them up — Salmonella.  From what I hear this rod-shaped, non-spore forming,  motile enterobacteria, isn’t that much fun either. It doesn’t make a good pet.

Tim is really into turtles. He has five of them, all of them  gifts from my wife. There was some hanky panky among the turtles in our backyard and we needed to off load the results. I saw some of the action; it looked like two Volkswagens had gotten into a wreck with each other. Tim adores his adoptees so much that he built a turtle habitat,  sparing no expense, making a kind of turtle condominium out of wood and screen. His turtles live in perfect conditions.  Dynamite, his favorite, is growing at an alarmingly rate, as if trying to live up to his name. To accelerate things, Tim sent off for worms and began farming them where he throws his garbage. I’ve seen this plot of ground; its terrifying. One shovel into the dirt will conjure up a massive, squirming ball of twisting turtle entrees. It takes a life, sometimes a lot of lives, to make a life. People with pets in need of particular foods end up trafficking in all kinds of less than appetizing carcasses — dead mice, live crickets and buzzing flies. I saw an ad recently on the internet for a reptile lunch box.

Early in Tim’s turtle adventure,  one of his cata roughed one of his shellish friends, who at that time was not much bigger than a quarter. The cat got the tiny carapace in its mouse and carried it  from the backyard and into the house where the tiny tortise was found on the floor looking a bit like a leaf dropped from a tree. Tim rushed home from work and off to the vet with his traumatized friend. The doctor examined it carefully with his stethoscope — respiratory concerns. When we heard about all this from Tim,  we hooted and hollered and made a lot of hilarious and derogatory remarks, but Tim took it all in with a knowing smile and lost nothing of his deep love and care for his terrapin friends. There is something in a modern man that wants a backyard farm, a suburban ranch and a creature or two to care for. There is something us all that values the things we raise. One of our neighbor’s dogs ate rocks, the rocks below the barbecue that the grease had dripped down on. The surgery bill? It was $900. They paid it —  true love.

One day when she was little, my daughter Laurel found a Gulf Fritillary, a Passion Butterfly who had just emerged from his chrysalis home with one of his wings badly wrinkled. The wing was deformed and so the butter couldn’t fly. She named him Jack. She told me she loved him. She held him on her finger; she prayed for him; we put him back on the passion vine from whence he came, but her passion was for him through that day and night.

That night as she went to bed, she worried over Jack. Jack was gone the next day, as butterflies tend to be. Recently, Laurel and I talked about Jack. Laurel is now 20. When we found Jack she was about eight or ten. The story is archetypal for us. We go back to it now and again, as if it were our Beowulf or our Iliad, the mythic past when Laurel loved Jack. There is a tenderness to the plot, a little girl, a disabled butterfly, a rescue and the poignant awareness that sometimes there is nothing that we can do. Such stories are social catalysts, linking family members together, amping the value of something important to them.  If only we were all loved like Laurel loved Jack.

But we aren’t, and we don’t. We discriminate, badly, against some of the creatures. I know that I do. I demolished a wood deck in my back yard recently. We think of a deck as a nice clean place to set up a table and chairs and eat a la fresco with pretty plates, lemonade and barbecue. That isn’t the whole of it. A deck is a habitat, and if you don’t know that, try looking underneath. The underworld of a wood deck houses biota — molds and mildews, wood rotting bacterium, various species of bulbous-bodied black and brown spiders, termites and the larger creatures of ill repute, mice, rats, opossums, and skunks. It’s a motley lot of undesirables. But they live close to us for several reasons, one of them being that they keep us honest. They save us from an overly romantic view of the creation. I love a house cat and a backyard dog. But there is another, darker side to me. I’m death to spiders. Opossums don’t move me. When I took out my deck; I decimated the spider population on my square of suburban wilderness. I found some opossum bones in the dirt, but I didn’t grieve. When I was a teenager I shot a ground hog. That I grieved. I did it to impress my friends. Impressing people is overrated. I wish I could take it back.

But even our scientists rank the species and in this way perhaps they devalue some of them. They measure encephalization quotients, EQ’s, and some fur friends don’t do so well —  opossums. EQ is a amount of brain tissue plotted against total animal  size. Humans weigh in at 7.6; opossums fall far down the list at 0.2. It’s difficult to find a opossum who has gotten past preschool; they aren’t the brightest crayons in the box. You can catch one in the same trap seven nights running. It’s hard to get worked up over them, although the prehensile tail is pretty cool. I saw an opossum walk across the top of my backyard fence the other night. It’s about three-quarters of an inch wide. That’s good balance. But I didn’t want to snuggle him. Many people think of the critter as a large rat, but it isn’t so; it’s a small kangaroo, well at least in the same family, a marsupial. It is the only marsupial native to  North America. So there.

To an opossum’s credit he can fake his own death. I wish I could fake mine sometimes. This could be a useful way to extract myself from difficult situations, chores, arguments, social engagements I don’t want to attend, things like that. The opossum does it by falling over on his side, opening his  mouth  in a death-like grin, and letting saliva run out of the corner. Cool!

But we don’t want a fake. We want the real thing, a honest to goodness pet. We want to win something’s trust, woo something, befriend something, love something. We call our cat, Shanaynay, “friend.”  We call her feline housemate Megan, “girlfriend.” Something in us loves a fur friend, their softness on our finger tips, their peacefulness on our laps, their lack of judgment, their cuteness when they chase a string or a ball, their happiness when we arrive back home after a time away. Last night we found the cat’s toy mouse by the door from the house to the garage when we came home. Megan was anticipating a playful reunion. If only our human friends had such hopeful thoughts of when they might see us again.

When we adopted our cat Shanaynay from the animal shelter, she rode on the broom when we swept the kitchen; she rode on the vacuum when we hit the rugs. No fear. She has never had fear. She is so unafraid of us we can’t keep her off the counters. She looks for her black fur with big yellow eyes that are never afraid of us.  It’s good, no fear; if only we could all be raised in such a loving way that we had no fear. I hate it when we are afraid of what shouldn’t ever hurt us.

Megan has fears, but she is gradually overcoming them. I carry her up to the shower when I bathe. Sometimes she realizes what is happening and lumbers up the stairs after me, making her own way into the bathroom. As we begin, I put her towel down beside the tub, and she comes and sits on it. When I get out of the shower, she is there, waiting, and I get her back and sides and head a little wet with my hand. Her black fur forms immediately into little bundles, into fur tufts and fur locks. She lets me make this change to her, but then she quickly gets a little nervous over her new state of being and moves out of reach again, as we all do from the kind of touches that both thrill us and disturb us at the same time, the touches that tap into the wildness left inside of our tamed borders, what in still in us not yet domesticated. Megan moves apart an arms length to lick herself consolingly and calm her ruffled psyche. I dry myself and dress and then it’s her turn.

It’s a pattern, a drill, and she has it down. I pick up her towel, sit down on the toilet seat, and call to her, making the soft feline, chuffing sounds she makes when she sees a bird outside. This sound is primal, and I speak it like one speaking a language that they don’t pronounce correctly or understand fully. She dissembles, dallies, and then when she can wait no more she comes to me. I throw the towel over her and begin with her head. She can hardly bear it. She falls on her right side, always her right side, and she clenches the mat that surrounds the base of the toilet with her claws. Kneading the now bunched up stringy mat passionately, as if it were her lost mother found again, she begins to articulate the experience, to narrate the process. I go against her grain, pulling her damp fur back from how it naturally lies downs. This works, her fur begins to separate again. She wheezes. It feels the opposite of what she felt when she was lost on the wall. She begins to believe again, for a moment. She is so happy, that is until we are out the door of her safe place and off to the day again. Then some of her anxiety falls on her slowly drying fur again, and she runs from me and goes under the bed. Weird little beast.

But if she is weird, she is weird in the way that all of us creatures are weird. She is weirdly wired to need a social network. If she could, she would be on Facebook, Twitter and Flikr. And she would do this because it is safer than physical contact., but sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

Actually the animals, of course, aren’t all safe. I knew a girl who told me one time that her worst fear was being eaten alive by a large animal. I had never thought of that before; it is frightening. She had some really good curves and should, as things turned out, have been more afraid of herself and her own kind.

I have run from animals, dogs, snakes, goats. We had a billy goat when I was growing up. He had a mean streak in him. The word on the street was that he had been abused or teased. It was my job to feed him. While doing my duty, I kept myself at the edge of the length of the chain that tethered him. I’d set his pail just within his reach, then scram. One day he came to the end of his chain and kept coming. Not sure how that happened, but I didn’t stick around to find out. I’d said some fairly mean things about his mother, and he hadn’t forgotten.

At the place of safety, where he usually had his neck jerked, where he was usually reminded quite nicely of his rank, he experienced the joy of Montresor in Poe’s story “The Cask of Amontillado,” a savored revenge realized. And yet before he reached me, I wasn’t there and the chase was on. He asked me as we went along what I had said about his mother, but I couldn’t remember in that moment when I was trying to think of something to compliment him on. The brain is like that; our judgments and our mercies are compartmentalized, and when we are harsh we are harsh and  our compassions can’t seem to lay a gentle hand upon the raised arm and calm it down again.

I headed for the cabin where my dad was meeting with some other men. The thing was that when I arrived at the front door, Billy was drooling on my back, so I took an alternate route around the building, yelling as I went past the windows. The second time around, I think, my dad came out and the course of the war changed directions again. Billy was had, by the horns, which made perfect handles, and the mood between us changed again. It came to me, what I had said about his mother, and so I answered his question.

“Your mother smells like a goat,” I replied late.

The fun with pets lies in part in the surprises, with those unexpected moments when a kind of crazy happens. Once when we were little, one of the family’s Boston Terriers ran into the room startling the cat who proceeded to launch straight into the air while the dog ran right under it, the dog running under the cat in the air, the cat coming down on the other side of the dog. We hooted, hollered, yelled, “Did you see that,” and didn’t forget it.

One Christmas we bought two angels for the front yard, about three feet high, covered with lights. At the heart of each angel was an electric motor that slowly flapped their wings. It rained; I brought the angels in, plugged them in and enjoyed the show. So did the cat, and on one particular series of wing flaps, she attacked.The angel went dark, the cat lit up, and with tail smoking she exited the room, fast. Every Christmas when I take the angel from its box, I note the orange wire nut and remember the fun and tell the story when I get the chance.

Perhaps, however, the essence of a particular pet lies not so much in the events of their lives, but in their personalities. We  have had our share of weird cats. Ruby was peevish, bit people, walked sideways into the furniture, saw things that weren’t there, and we gave her back to her foster mom. Indiana Jones was a black and white fluffy ball of madness, white whiskers exploding from above his wild eyes — Dean in On The Road — launching off the couch and into thin air with no apparent destination in mind, a beat zaniac, crazy for the night, a gone little guy. We locked him in the garage one evening to protect our sleep, and he broke out and we never saw him again. I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, “Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.” Indiana did, although the corpse was probably not that beautiful once it finally rested in peace in the coyote or fox that ate him.

And Shanaynay, what a personality she has. I have never lived with a cat as social, as tactile, as friendly as  her. When I go up to wake up my daughter Rosalind in the morning, Shanay is sleeping under her arm. When I go back down to work on my laptop, Shanay comes down to find a place on my lap. If I won’t let her, she sleeps on my lower legs. When we lay on the couch in the evenings and watch TV, she comes to lay on someone chest. When we leave the house, she weeps. When we come home she is at the backdoor to greet us.

When my wife goes to bed, Shanay likes to sleep by her head, put her front feet on her neck and knead. When we drag a string on the end of a pole, she tears after it; when it goes airborne, she does too. When we drop it, she picks up the string in her teeth and drags it to our feet for more. When I run after her, she runs from me, her tail up, crazy with the chase. She runs to her scratching pole and rips it up, then takes off behind the couch with a wild look in her eyes.

With her expanding repertoire of fun behaviors, our names for her have also expanded. Sometimes I call her dogs because she acts like a dog, and sometimes I call her Shindog Millionaire,which is a variation of dogs that came to me after I saw the movie Slumdog Millioinaire. Sometimes we call her Lafonda from Napoleon Dynamite. Sometimes Roz calls her Shanaynay, Lafonda, babies, cresent roll Hasper. We can tell what we value by the number of names we have for it.

When I come home at night I am genuinely glad to see her. She is my domestic livestock, my black leopard, my little bit of jungle, my friend. Something in me wants the warmth, the fun, the companionship, the touch. It is back to touch. My cats are soft. That pretty much gets it for me. And when they don’t sit on me, they sit by me, lying on the floor below my soft chair, always facing toward me, giving the catish slow blink, being there, with me. That counts.