“I’m worried about Delilah,” said my friend Megan.
When a pet owner says this to you, it’s usually bad news. People who’ve had pets for a long time are used to a creature that can’t tell you what’s wrong with them, so these folks always seem to have an added sense about their pet’s health. Megan was no different. So many times, it happens so suddenly. The animal seems fine one day, and then the next, they’re not lively, not loud, and, most ominously, not eating. Sometimes this is just something that would knock any of us down for a few days, the way that, say, the flu does; but more often than not, it’s a sign that the pet’s days are numbered. That was the case this time. The specifics vary from pet to pet--in this case, it had to do with a growth on a vital organ that was, and would continue, to cause more and more debilitating pain--but sooner or later, there is that miserable moment when the person realizes that the animal faces nothing but agony for the rest of its life, no matter what treatments are available. This, of course, is that moment that the person faces the horrible decision of putting the animal down. It happened to me a little while ago, and it was no less sudden. My cat Clementine was suddenly the same way as Delilah. I took her to a clinic so that she could get a body scan, and to quote one of the characters in The Fault in Our Stars, when they scanned for cancer, she lit up like a Christmas tree. My vet talked about various treatments, and I cut him off by saying that I wouldn’t go through with it if it meant a life of pain. As if I’d freed him to speak the truth, he said “look, I can treat it, but I can’t cure it. I can give you another year, tops, and as much as I can manage the pain, she’s going to suffer.” People who have never had a pet just can’t relate to what it’s like to lose one, and it’s one of the reasons I like working at a school. It’s an environment where people understand when someone suddenly cries over their loss, unlike the business world, where people look at you and roll their eyes. At school, there’s a wonderful person with an adorable tiny tattoo of paw prints on her ankle, and she was beside herself when her dog died; many people gave her hugs. You learn a lot about how fleeting life is when you own pets. In The Tommyknockers, there’s a wonderful passage in which Stephen King writes about how dogs and cats age so much faster, and how you can’t help but see your life in theirs. For many of us, a pet is really the first time we come to know about death, and how important it is to remind everyone who means something to you that you love them. It’s particularly painful when you get even less than the 12 to 15 years you usually get with your pet. You’ve gotten to know it, and you’ve gotten to love the way they’re always there to cheer you up during tough times. They are unusually good at this, cat and dog alike. Fortunately, sooner or later, the sense of loss gives way to great memories of all the times you shared. If you got your pet as a puppy or kitten, you remember things like the first time the dog no longer fit on your lap, or the first time your kitten successfully vaulted onto the table. If you don’t have a child (I never spawned), it’s the closest you get to understanding what parents feel watching their child grow up. I know...many of you in the business world are rolling your eyes. At the same time though, I am sure that, even in the business world, there are a few people who put a hand on the shoulder of the person who is in mourning, and offer some words of empathy. I know what it is to feel loss, they say, and somehow, we’re reminded that people are capable of the same contact and kindness that we get from our pets, and we remember that the pain will diminish over time. And usually we get another pet who will, once again, leave us before we get that much older...and don’t they say that few things are more painful than a parent outliving their child? We pet owners are not stupid; we know that it’s not the same as a human child. At the same time, though, it is a companion and a friend whose fleeting time with us serves as a reminder that all good times come to an end, so we must enjoy them, and always look forward to the good times that lay ahead. Perhaps, as you read this, you have just lost a pet, or are now thinking of one that you’ve lost. If this is the case, there is a good chance that, when a friend or coworker loses one, you’ve offered empathy, sharing that person’s loss, understanding why people bury their pets in cemeteries so that they can visit them, and why they will show you pictures of their deceased companion. Pets start as strangers and become family; they leave a hole. and we imagine them living out eternity in some massive, beautiful dog run or massive complex of scratching and climbing posts. I like to think that this is where Delilah and Clementine are at this moment. And when my current beloved friend Hugo slips this mortal coil, he will be there as well. I know there will be people who will understand and put a hand on my shoulder; there always are.
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I ate a crab cake burger today. It tasted pretty good. I don’t see myself ordering it again but the point is, I ordered it.
I’m so dull when it comes to eating. I have, in my life, eaten Costco burritos for dinner several days in a row (a fact that horrified a friend of mine who’s a devoted foodie). When I go to Chinese restaurants, no matter how fancy, I eat a lot of fried rice and pork. Most of the time, when I order a burger, I order...a burger. I do not order much of anything on it. Okay, if I’m feeling particularly adventurous, I’ll put mustard in it. I am, however, changing. Now, I really do try, if I’m eating out, to order other things. I realize that it doesn’t sound like much to order a crab cake burger, with plans to order a portabello mushroom burger or a black bean burger in the future, but this is huge for me. As a kid, I was beyond finicky. There was a long period where I would eat nothing but Rice Krispies for dinner. I just didn’t like things to be that complicated. I liked really bland things. I used to pick off all the cheese on pizza, and just eat the dough and sauce. My older brother, for some reason, was incensed about this. As long as I’m on the subject of my older brother--a subject, I’m afraid, I may come back to from time to time--I suggest that he did not help matters. One time, when I was five and he was eleven, he took it upon himself introduce me to sunny side up eggs (I only ate scrambled). He cooked one and insisted that I eat it. When I didn’t, he forced my jaws open, and then repeatedly hit me until I was properly frightened of him, saying he would keep doing so until I ate it. I did. I did not like it. Fortunately, other folks passed through my life who eased me into such things as mushrooms. A girlfriend who eats mushrooms, specifically. It was really nice telling her that I love mushroom risotto now, and she was thrilled. In fact, I can eat sunny side up eggs from time to time, although they are not my first choice. I’m trying to remember what pleasant experience led to my trying them. I do remember that it was more pleasant than someone repeatedly hitting me and saying that they would do more of the same if I didn’t try sunny side up eggs. I am still a long way off from, say, trying balut (to know more about balut, follow this link to a Cracked article about disgusting foods; trust me, though, it’s rough). I probably could, however, after a few drinks, try escamol. This is progress. It also shows that you can, at least with me, get far better results with kindness than the threat of violence. I have many friends who are a great deal better read than I am, which is kind of embarrassing, considering that I’m a librarian. I admit that growing up, I didn’t read that much fiction; I loved libraries because I could go there and find out about cool things.
In other words, I was what, in the library biz, they call a reluctant reader, and I still am. I cannot begin to count the number of books in which I have read the first ten pages, and then put it aside for another session with something like Ripley's Believe It or Not or The Book of Lists. Again and again, I simply have difficulty achieving lift off. I don’t want to think about the number of times I started The Lord of the Rings, and then abandoned my quest. So my writing is the kind of writing that I liked. Whatever grade level that tests indicated I could handle (a respectably high level, apparently), it was clear that this wasn’t the level of the reading that I enjoyed. Most of the reading I enjoyed was at an embarrassingly low level. I think some of this has to do with the fact that the actual literary style meant little or nothing to me. To this day, I still remain remarkably free of any sort of discriminating literary palette, and when it’s a book in which it’s necessary to really bear down and figure out what’s going on, I flee. My friends can breeze through Finnegan’s Wake without breaking a sweat; I have no such intelligence. A first grader would probably dismiss my writing as being too easy. Fine...for me, the easier, the better. I liked being able to follow what I was reading. Yet so often, when I read, though I could read all the words (and knew the definitions to them) I could not figure out what in the name of heaven was going on. My high school years were all about this. Classmates would raise their hands and clearly show that they were all over the stuff we’d read. I, meanwhile, hadn’t read it, because I’d completely given up after about 40 pages of being unable to follow anything. Perhaps I’ve gotten a bit better at this; it has, after all, been over 30 years since high school. Still, the memories linger. And I really, really don’t want anyone who had the same borderline retarded novel reading skills that I did (and perhaps still have) to feel borderline retarded. So I write in this style, plain and, let’s face it, really, really easy to read. It is for the person I was, a way to invite that poor kid to just enjoy the pleasures of reading something. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I own derekleif.com as well as this (if you type "derekleif.com" in your address window, it’ll redirect you here), but I really like derekleif.org.
Contrary to popular belief about website evaluation, you can’t trust .org anymore than .com. If you type martinlutherking.org in your address box, you’ll get to a horrible site that tells “the truth” about Martin Luther King. It's actually a fake history site that belongs to the notorious white supremacist organization Stormfront; there are many more examples of this. So basically, any clown (myself included) can buy a website address with a .org suffix. Well, I still like it. Think about the name choice that goes into setting up a website. It can be a company site (I'm wary of companies), a government site (I'm also wary of government) or a military site (I'm wary of them, too). I’ll take an organization every day. Out of “military,” “government,” and “company,” the only one that can become a verb is government, which can become “govern.” I don’t want to govern. I would like decent people to govern, but it’s just not for me. On the other hand, I just find the word “organize” uplifting and empowering. Whenever there’s some sort of something that is positive and grassroots-ish, organizing is the key, to getting it off the ground, particularly if the folks behind this something that they are trying to get off the ground don’t have a lot of money. This doesn’t, but the way, have to be anything partisan. It may be something as simple as deciding that the local neighborhood needs a park. And when it comes to getting stuff like that done, I don’t think of corporations or military. Granted, it’s often local government that ends up ultimately making stuff such a park happen, but it all happens because people organize. They make phone calls. They start Facebook groups. They go to town hall meetings. And it’s great when this happens. A long while back, where I grew up, I attended a town meeting where some parents wanted some extra safety signs around the local school. I saw the signs there a little while later, and I felt just a little bit more faith in humanity than I had before. In addition this this…boy, do I wish I were better organized. I don’t wish I were more corporate, and I don’t wish I were more militaristic, and I don’t wish I were more governmental. I do, however, wish I were more organized; then maybe I would have gotten this whole .org thing off the ground a lot earlier. Anyway, it’s derekleif.org. Perhaps, in the future, I will work to organize my half dozen readers so that we can…well, I don’t know what we could do at the moment. I do, however, know that we have a far better chance of getting it done if we put aside our differences, organize, and work together. We were talking about my getting used to being alone (I am in the process of being unmarried) and I mentioned getting a cat to keep me company.
"You must get a tuxedo cat," my friend Megan told me solemnly. Yes, she only said six words on the matter, but she said them in such a way that she would later apologize for being bossy. I explained that she made the classic mistake, among strong, intelligent women, of calling herself "bossy" for behavior that, among men, is simply called "stating a belief." Being a librarian--which means I've had a lot of female bosses--I've learned that when a woman gets serious about something, it's best to listen, as she is probably right. Hugo was terrified when I brought him home from North Shore Animal League (the largest no-kill shelter in The United States, I have you know). For two days, he hid in closets and underneath my futon sofa. He couldn't even figure out that the doghouse-looking thing in the bathroom with the swinging door was his litter box, so I had to scrub my bathmat for reasons that require no elaboration. Then however, came Friday. Perhaps Hugo's breakthrough was due to the energy my dad send out. He is, as my friends who've met him will tell you, one of the kindest, most easygoing people on the planet. As if someone had switched on a current, Hugo came out from underneath my futon sofa (another safe haven) and started winding around my father's legs. What had happened, obviously, came after a great deal of deliberation on Hugo's part. I had, after all, placed a great deal of responsibility on Hugo, as does anyone who takes a cat into a dwelling, particularly when that cat is to be the sole resident. The reason for this is quite simple: the cat must accept their appointment as Emperor of the Dwelling. I've had cats for over 40 years. I feel very old writing this, but there it is: over 40 years. Having this sort of experience I can tell you that the whole thing about them having no concern for humans is just...not true. Cats never quite let themselves be domesticated the way dogs did. Dogs became social in exchange for human protection and contact, and in return became a creature in which they have several jobs: herding, hunting, home security, tracking. Cats, meanwhile, looked at desperate Ancient Egyptians whose grain supplies were under attack from rats, and said "take care of us and we'll kill for you and hang out with you...but that's it, and we work alone." Thus if you own a cat, you don't own a military recruit who's going to play saxophone in the USO...that's a dog; no, you have a sniper on your hands. They will be solitary. They will stare out the window a great deal of time, sighting prey with a quiet, almost autistic focus. Yet they are, most of the time, fair and just rulers they take their job seriously. They feel a debt to the person or people over whom they govern, who do such trivial things as provide food and shelter. Consequently, they develop that sixth sense of coming to you when you need them. Granted, they often come to you when you don't need them. According to The Book of Lists or The Book of Lists 2 (I forget which one), a writer--I think it was Georges Simenon--called his cat "Madame Secretary," because she would be on whatever particular piece of paper he needed at any given moment. Still, though, Hugo just knows when I'm really feeling down. And I feel down sometimes; it's not easy having a marriage fall apart. It doesn't matter how it happened, it doesn't matter who did what; the fact remains that you're now both alone, and more than a bit scared as to what's going to happen next. And somehow, Hugo, always aware of his duty to his loyal subject, and always well-dressed, knows exactly when to glide up to me, sit on my lap, or lie down right next to my head when I'm in bed, and ask what the problem is. Then, in exchange for little more than scratching behind his ears, he tells me, in a language of purrs and body language that includes a great deal of stretching, that everything's going to be all right. Of course, he eventually leaps away, off to the easy chair or ottoman (Emperors of Apartments and Houses require many, many thrones). He is, however, simply digesting his session with me. He needs time to formulate followup sessions to remind me that there is only the present, and that life, indeed, goes on. I have often thought that if the Hindus are right and that life is a quest through many lifetimes in order to find Nirvana, then a cat was a really good person in the last life who, in this life, is getting a ten or twenty year rest. Ascension to Nirvana is hard work, after all, and Hugo deserves a break from his travels. Hugo clearly was a gentleman in his past life--he even took his best clothes with him into this one--and rules my apartment with a just and loving paw. For this, I am eternally grateful. So for a number of reasons that I've written about but do not wish to elaborate on at the moment, I figured it would be nice to just start all over someplace else. This is my new site. This is my new life. Thank you. Thank you very much.
More to come. |
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