I rather fancy that this has been done, but alas, the midnight brings out no better words or thoughts than these.
Cooking, in the years that I have actively practiced it, has become nothing less than an art: delicate balancing of chemical leavening such that the desired rise is achieved sans metallic taste, improvised spice-to-dish ratios to create the desired full body of flavour (my mother once made a soup out of apples, of all things, which tasted almost remarkably like chicken [ignore, kindly, the fact that I haven't eaten chicken for six years and wouldn't know it if it smacked me upside the head], but for a jarring, lilting tinniness that sang above a rootless tenor that pulled it off course. A dish, like a choir, demands all voices), and that questioning painting of taste, texture, and yes, even colour, that combines to some sort of perfection unachievable by something less necessary and inherently desired than food. There are failures aplenty, as in any art form, which manifest in anything from excesses of aniseed extract in an otherwise delicate and snowily-crumbed cake to a simple misjudgement of time allotment, resulting in fallen souffle or limply soggy vegetables. I stamp my foot at those and move on, but every now and then there is that singular beauty, a masterpiece that soothes the irritation of the sorry waste with the reassurance of radiance in something so primal. Recipes can only guide you so far, as they are written by different people with different tastes, different families and life experiences, even simply different equipment or location—which is to say that really, cooking is nothing if not cleverly reducible to a complex, unimaginable series of biochemical reactions (but oh, goodness, what isn't?), and simple things such as changes in air pressure or slightly higher British Thermal Unit per hour output are inherently applicable. But like so many things, no Ph.D in biochemistry will be worthwhile in the kitchen if you use it to disregard the necessary subjectiveness of that elusive flawlessness.
Every so often, though, I feel this entitlement keenly. It is more often now, now that I have been just exposed enough to realise what I am myself, and suddenly, everything that I work for, everything that I strive for, long for, becomes abhorrent, even vile. Music and art, at their cores nothing more than longings for something lovely, and well, even food, that symbol upon which we base everything, by the virtue of their being aspired to, are repellent. It's not even so rarely anymore that I quite despise eating, and for someone as enamoured with cooking as myself, perhaps this is a strange thing, even an unnatural thing to say. I feel this unnaturalness even now, still shivering off the effects of yesterday's (er—well, poorly handled and unfortunate, to say the least) long-broken fast, but there is something beautiful and engaging in the preparation of food that inevitably fades come time for consumption. This, too, reviles me when I ask myself if I even have a reason anymore and can't come up with anything better than a paltry, “Why not?”. It used to be that “even the privileged need respite from gluttony”. No longer, not really. Nor can it be out of any pretentiously altruistic desire to “understand” something that I can't understand because for me, it has always been a choice to abstain. But no matter how far you draw it out, it all too often seems that there can never be a way to do anything. So I pull myself back to normalcy, retaining my rampant adoration for such things as opera and art museums, clothbound second-hand novels, and, yes, saffron and cave-aged gruyere. But I say “second-hand” because there is a well-loved, well-read attractiveness to a slightly weathered, yellow-paged Middlemarch or Crime and Punishment. If you are not too shy to look around the darkened hall at Carmen or Madama Butterfly, turn, ever so slightly, because there are few things in public so peaceful and comforting as another, blissfully engaged in music that they adore. So it is with food—beauty in a dish seems wasted on even a single person, let alone the cook. Tired and satiated from a day of the sweating kitchen, I cannot feel a hunger beyond that to observe the momentary bliss of one engaging fully with something so mundane and necessary as food. And beyond that, fasting has become a sort of necessary, integral ritual—not to be undertaken too often, it must be said, to maintain personal physical health as well as parental mental health, but the few quiet days that it's allowed are a thought-provoking transition from the weak, shaky beginning to a tranquility unparalleled.
Absent the mind-numbing stupor of satiation, the world is at once frighteningly clear and impressionistically blurred. Birdsong is never so cleanly bright as during a fast, and the shades of life around never so vivid. I wonder now, curled in a blanket and warm against the winding evening, if sublimity exists above a meandering, pre-dawn walk into perhaps a world as unblemished by civilisation as the body itself is lightened by fasting. In the summer midnights, I ran wild into forests lining cornfields, wading through pebbled streams and benevolent, star-studded velvet skies. The world beyond the body is too much to take in, perhaps, that to keep from going mad from it all, one detaches from that physical world of necessities and the soft, sweet complaining of deprivation. It is an incomprehensible joy, a satisfaction that cuts deeply into a reality separate from that which demands material satiation and only then, as you sit sated and calm, softly unaware, your experiences ferment into memories and linger there, reminding you, when you attach yourself just a little too much to a certain frame of mind, of that which glitters beyond the visual world. It is strange. Perhaps it is no different than a slowed-down repeat of those skittering moments of breathlessness before blackness, string pulled taut, though I have never been capable of thinking of breathlessness as anything other than frightening and terrible.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
An Inordinate Fondness, or Vegetarianism
The Centro Cultural de Belém rose above me, impersonal and thick with square white windows, a bright banner strung across the entryway reading “Interspeech 2005, Lisboa”. Interspeech is a yearly conference on speech technology, one of many that have dragged me around the world since birth to revel in the air of a world unknown to me. Why there, then? I wonder belatedly, trying to recall the calm, sunny terrace, the bustlingly shady arch of the entryway, the adjacent park where I spent the mornings, stretched across the grass and side-by-side with the Count of Monte Cristo. There was something about the white-grey of the paving stones, the Atlantic sun, that pulled me out of my mundane, cornfield-encased world at home and forced me to reflect between paragraphs and pigeon-watching breaks. I had done it before, for a year when I was between eight and nine years, before I failed, failed miserably and reverted to the altogether simpler usual household diet. What was so different about the newly-turned eleven that gave me the courage and the audacity to try it again, in the middle of Portugal, where fish as cuisine frankly outrank all other things? But I was impulsive, and very suddenly convinced. I informed, eagerly, my parents of my new conviction. My father's response was a restrainedly diplomatic, “Can't you wait until we get home?” I shook my head. No. Personal change was a beautiful thing, and I dared not make it wait. That was the first day. I have not knowingly eaten meat, or any slaughter by-product, since.
Beyond anything, I loved animals as a child. I never grew out of that, although now I call it a fascination for biology, to match a more scholarly application. When I was very young, I had no pets, but my parents were casual hikers, and we travelled out on weekends to the wilds of New Jersey, where I jumped and ran and fulfilled that childhood dream of getting completely, utterly coated in mud as I searched for salamanders and wood frogs under logs, songbirds in the trees, and elegant, white-tailed deer in the brush. In Hong Kong one year, I spied a group of workers draining a pond, and fearlessly, as I must have been back then, I waded in to the dwindling water, bucket in hand, to save the fish. Somehow, I attracted a small crowd of local children and their respective pails, and eventually even the workers conceded to assist, scooping up little fish by the netful and dumping them into the nearest child's rapidly filling bucket. Such adventures roughly paralleled the more mundane scene of the earthworm-scattered pavement after a rain, which I scurried across on the tips of my toes, bending to grasp each squirming worm between my index finger and thumb and hurry it to the relative safety of the dewy grass before it could be stepped on. That was my childhood, wild turkeys in the summer and foxes in the snow. With the naivete of a very small child, though, I did not connect the living things I adored with the foodstuffs we ate until later. I almost wish I could remember how the realisation came about: if it was in one sudden moment of terrible epiphany, or if it came by in months, slowly sinking in. Regardless, it was that, the love, the incapability of distancing myself, especially then but even now, that was my reasoning, more than any real conception, at the time, of, say, the factory farming industry or varying health implications.
The night we drove home from the airport, none of us had eaten for a full day of travel. The tiny restaurant we stopped at was half-empty and brightly lit in my memory, and perhaps vaguely reminiscent of some of the shiftier New Jersey diners that occasionally popped up through my childhood, with its cracked chair cushions and mustily foot-printed floor. The waitress was impersonal, her apron slightly stained, and my father glared into his dishwater coffee, too tired to refuse it. I read and reread the menu furiously, wondering if I was missing something obvious. My mother's brow was furrowed, and she asked the question before I did. “Do you have any vegetarian food?” she asked, her glance up imploring. On occasion, she still does this. The waitress frowned. “What?” “Vegetarian—food without meat in it,” she answered. “My daughter doesn't eat meat.” The waitress' eyes landed on me, and her frown deepened, etched into her face as if in stone. Somehow, the answer was no. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head, still grippingly zealous in my determination. “No, thank you, then,” I managed, rolling my icy water cup between my palms. I downed three glasses of water that evening and tried to ignore the irritable sloshing of my stomach until the next few hours brought us home and to sleep.
It's strange how we become used to things. The first weeks were battles of craving and denial, and I was young enough that I was unused to trials on that scale. My parents half-heartedly followed my lead on most days, but on the odd nights that they seared salmon and offered me lemon slices, or roasted chicken and the scent permeated the house, I took my steamed broccoli and retreated to another room, willing away an unwelcome invasion of my ethic. It was not for me to expect anybody else to change. I had to change. And somehow, slowly, slowly, I did. I taught myself to cook that year, and from the days of shaking and poring over recipes, from wincing at the snarling of hot oil, from checking the water by the minute, afraid it had somehow boiled dry, I became easy and confident, even fascinated and attracted by a new world and art that had opened itself to me. There was no loss, I realised at some point, in vegetarianism. In these days of microbial rennet and rising soybean popularity, it is no longer even an inconvenience. And now I wonder if I even notice meat any more, the vast majority of the time, because I rather imagine a switch in my mind has gone off, and I can no longer regard it even as food, no matter how I distance it from its animal source. I read cookbooks cover-to-cover, I casually follow cooking blogs—my distinct fascination with food preparation has lingered behind my interests in everything from history to biochemistry to art, and somehow a world that was painful for me, if only briefly, years ago, is alive with beauty and possibility. On vegetarianism, though—the morality of the predator is still something I dare not attempt, especially in text. To say, as Benjamin Franklin did, that (paraphrased) because a fish eats a fish, it is reasonable to, oneself, eat the former, is the justification of another. I do not challenge it, because I can no more wish a lion to starve than I can want a gazelle to die—which is really to say simply, the preciousness of life is not quantifiable. Or I am blinded by a love for the living, so I make a choice to try (and to speak as honestly as possible, it must be said, incompletely), whether or not true success is attainable, to match this sector of my own personal morality with action. A universal morality, or rather, societal morality seems unattainable until we are able to see through the eyes, truly, of the cows, or the chickens, the pigs that live, even now, in their pens and cages, whom we do not, cannot understand because we are humans, with our human points of view, and naturally equate our selves with the height of animal brilliance and sensitivity. We must be fooling ourselves, for who is to say? What paragon of universal truth is there to unmistakably assure us that we are truly superior, and most certainly have the right to cage and dispatch at will? So this matter lies inherently incomplete, for a pure incapability of knowing anything. I hope always to the height of my efforts, then, I strive, I try. I abstain.
Beyond anything, I loved animals as a child. I never grew out of that, although now I call it a fascination for biology, to match a more scholarly application. When I was very young, I had no pets, but my parents were casual hikers, and we travelled out on weekends to the wilds of New Jersey, where I jumped and ran and fulfilled that childhood dream of getting completely, utterly coated in mud as I searched for salamanders and wood frogs under logs, songbirds in the trees, and elegant, white-tailed deer in the brush. In Hong Kong one year, I spied a group of workers draining a pond, and fearlessly, as I must have been back then, I waded in to the dwindling water, bucket in hand, to save the fish. Somehow, I attracted a small crowd of local children and their respective pails, and eventually even the workers conceded to assist, scooping up little fish by the netful and dumping them into the nearest child's rapidly filling bucket. Such adventures roughly paralleled the more mundane scene of the earthworm-scattered pavement after a rain, which I scurried across on the tips of my toes, bending to grasp each squirming worm between my index finger and thumb and hurry it to the relative safety of the dewy grass before it could be stepped on. That was my childhood, wild turkeys in the summer and foxes in the snow. With the naivete of a very small child, though, I did not connect the living things I adored with the foodstuffs we ate until later. I almost wish I could remember how the realisation came about: if it was in one sudden moment of terrible epiphany, or if it came by in months, slowly sinking in. Regardless, it was that, the love, the incapability of distancing myself, especially then but even now, that was my reasoning, more than any real conception, at the time, of, say, the factory farming industry or varying health implications.
The night we drove home from the airport, none of us had eaten for a full day of travel. The tiny restaurant we stopped at was half-empty and brightly lit in my memory, and perhaps vaguely reminiscent of some of the shiftier New Jersey diners that occasionally popped up through my childhood, with its cracked chair cushions and mustily foot-printed floor. The waitress was impersonal, her apron slightly stained, and my father glared into his dishwater coffee, too tired to refuse it. I read and reread the menu furiously, wondering if I was missing something obvious. My mother's brow was furrowed, and she asked the question before I did. “Do you have any vegetarian food?” she asked, her glance up imploring. On occasion, she still does this. The waitress frowned. “What?” “Vegetarian—food without meat in it,” she answered. “My daughter doesn't eat meat.” The waitress' eyes landed on me, and her frown deepened, etched into her face as if in stone. Somehow, the answer was no. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head, still grippingly zealous in my determination. “No, thank you, then,” I managed, rolling my icy water cup between my palms. I downed three glasses of water that evening and tried to ignore the irritable sloshing of my stomach until the next few hours brought us home and to sleep.
It's strange how we become used to things. The first weeks were battles of craving and denial, and I was young enough that I was unused to trials on that scale. My parents half-heartedly followed my lead on most days, but on the odd nights that they seared salmon and offered me lemon slices, or roasted chicken and the scent permeated the house, I took my steamed broccoli and retreated to another room, willing away an unwelcome invasion of my ethic. It was not for me to expect anybody else to change. I had to change. And somehow, slowly, slowly, I did. I taught myself to cook that year, and from the days of shaking and poring over recipes, from wincing at the snarling of hot oil, from checking the water by the minute, afraid it had somehow boiled dry, I became easy and confident, even fascinated and attracted by a new world and art that had opened itself to me. There was no loss, I realised at some point, in vegetarianism. In these days of microbial rennet and rising soybean popularity, it is no longer even an inconvenience. And now I wonder if I even notice meat any more, the vast majority of the time, because I rather imagine a switch in my mind has gone off, and I can no longer regard it even as food, no matter how I distance it from its animal source. I read cookbooks cover-to-cover, I casually follow cooking blogs—my distinct fascination with food preparation has lingered behind my interests in everything from history to biochemistry to art, and somehow a world that was painful for me, if only briefly, years ago, is alive with beauty and possibility. On vegetarianism, though—the morality of the predator is still something I dare not attempt, especially in text. To say, as Benjamin Franklin did, that (paraphrased) because a fish eats a fish, it is reasonable to, oneself, eat the former, is the justification of another. I do not challenge it, because I can no more wish a lion to starve than I can want a gazelle to die—which is really to say simply, the preciousness of life is not quantifiable. Or I am blinded by a love for the living, so I make a choice to try (and to speak as honestly as possible, it must be said, incompletely), whether or not true success is attainable, to match this sector of my own personal morality with action. A universal morality, or rather, societal morality seems unattainable until we are able to see through the eyes, truly, of the cows, or the chickens, the pigs that live, even now, in their pens and cages, whom we do not, cannot understand because we are humans, with our human points of view, and naturally equate our selves with the height of animal brilliance and sensitivity. We must be fooling ourselves, for who is to say? What paragon of universal truth is there to unmistakably assure us that we are truly superior, and most certainly have the right to cage and dispatch at will? So this matter lies inherently incomplete, for a pure incapability of knowing anything. I hope always to the height of my efforts, then, I strive, I try. I abstain.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Retrieval
There comes a time, every now and then, when you have to wonder how to be happy. From day to day, from year to year, the answer changes, floats, twists, turns. It's strange to think how very different my answer would have been only this time last year, and whether the change is a result of collected wisdom (if only), or perhaps from some variety of jadedness (though I am yet so young that it seems strange to offer myself that), I cannot say, I daren't fathom. But indubitably, beauty was the first thing, my first obsession (although to say that is perhaps to really say nothing at all). It had its natural attraction to a child often alone, the wonder, the abstraction. There was too little in the moving, bustling "real" world to attract me; for a time, I did not speak the right language, and when I did, I was too shy and impatient with social niceties. I kept to the world of my young mind, contemplating words and colours, bright skies, languid streams, tulip trees in bloom. I was quiet, I tried to succeed, whether it was in finding the first bright-orange eft on the weekend hikes with my father, or rescuing the squirming, helpless earthworms that littered the school's blacktop after rainy nights. It could have been finishing a chapter reading first in the class. I would snap my textbook closed crisply, fold my hands and look down, down to my feet, not smiling but secretly thrilled by the springtime sound of the clicking fans above and the flipping pages all around.
I admit, I lost sight of that early, childhood sensibility. Hard times came, and the life that I knew began to crack, fracture, shatter. When the world turned too dark, I turned my back on it and stepped away. I could not find the light in something that had been reduced to darkness and shadow, and it was light that I needed, light that spread the world thick in bloom, light that rendered the colours that danced behind my eyes full and jubilant. Like a seedling in a closet, I searched, I faltered and failed. It was far too long that all I knew was bitterness, that I could not have recognised joy if it had bitten me on the shoulder. My happiness then was in letters and marks, in comments from teachers, in books read. In success. I could not waste time, in the early days of the darkness, for there was no cheer in contemplation, in solitude and thought. (I sound melodramatic here. It is the disintegration of a family that I speak of, a family that my faraway daydreamer of a childhood self did not realise was dissolving until too late. It was a disillusionment, it was a loss of something too great to describe.) I read textbooks, I read novels and papers, I turned to music and sound, anything but give myself time to reflect. At the falling apart, I drove myself as deeply into work as I could and huddled there, afraid to peek out to see what the world had become. But when the dust settled, it settled atop my nest as well, and the new world forced me to learn, to forgive, to understand. (Forgiving those that you have tricked yourself into hating is no small task, but the forgiveness taught me that nothing is worth the hatred. It is not a paltry breed of dislike, it is the formation of a falsehood.) It's strange to think of those times now, as I stare out of confining, yet frosty windows and wish to be in some other world, high in a sun-dappled tree with a novel or field guide, or else simply wandering. I scarcely knew how dearly I missed this joy.
I spent last week almost entirely in the garden. I can hardly say how it calmed me, the sunlight and the swift, Midwest winds, the tending to rosebushes, the friendly coolness of freshly turned soil. I laughed in surprise at the scurrying isopod colonies, the garter snakes coiled beneath the stepping stones, indignant and wide-mawed as I pulled away at their shelters (I replaced them later, although I think they were mightily displeased with the whole affair). The squirrel social dynamic was something quite fascinating to observe, although the losers in the fight over the birdseed comforted themselves with the young buds from the long-suffering magnolia. Was I happy? I could not have been simply distracted, for I have scarcely felt closer to that connection I missed so than when I stood barefoot in the newly turned vegetable patch, wistfully watching robins tug away at the unfortunates of the earthworm population. It makes me wonder how much I missed when the world went black, but it is too much of myself now to regret it entirely.
I admit, I lost sight of that early, childhood sensibility. Hard times came, and the life that I knew began to crack, fracture, shatter. When the world turned too dark, I turned my back on it and stepped away. I could not find the light in something that had been reduced to darkness and shadow, and it was light that I needed, light that spread the world thick in bloom, light that rendered the colours that danced behind my eyes full and jubilant. Like a seedling in a closet, I searched, I faltered and failed. It was far too long that all I knew was bitterness, that I could not have recognised joy if it had bitten me on the shoulder. My happiness then was in letters and marks, in comments from teachers, in books read. In success. I could not waste time, in the early days of the darkness, for there was no cheer in contemplation, in solitude and thought. (I sound melodramatic here. It is the disintegration of a family that I speak of, a family that my faraway daydreamer of a childhood self did not realise was dissolving until too late. It was a disillusionment, it was a loss of something too great to describe.) I read textbooks, I read novels and papers, I turned to music and sound, anything but give myself time to reflect. At the falling apart, I drove myself as deeply into work as I could and huddled there, afraid to peek out to see what the world had become. But when the dust settled, it settled atop my nest as well, and the new world forced me to learn, to forgive, to understand. (Forgiving those that you have tricked yourself into hating is no small task, but the forgiveness taught me that nothing is worth the hatred. It is not a paltry breed of dislike, it is the formation of a falsehood.) It's strange to think of those times now, as I stare out of confining, yet frosty windows and wish to be in some other world, high in a sun-dappled tree with a novel or field guide, or else simply wandering. I scarcely knew how dearly I missed this joy.
I spent last week almost entirely in the garden. I can hardly say how it calmed me, the sunlight and the swift, Midwest winds, the tending to rosebushes, the friendly coolness of freshly turned soil. I laughed in surprise at the scurrying isopod colonies, the garter snakes coiled beneath the stepping stones, indignant and wide-mawed as I pulled away at their shelters (I replaced them later, although I think they were mightily displeased with the whole affair). The squirrel social dynamic was something quite fascinating to observe, although the losers in the fight over the birdseed comforted themselves with the young buds from the long-suffering magnolia. Was I happy? I could not have been simply distracted, for I have scarcely felt closer to that connection I missed so than when I stood barefoot in the newly turned vegetable patch, wistfully watching robins tug away at the unfortunates of the earthworm population. It makes me wonder how much I missed when the world went black, but it is too much of myself now to regret it entirely.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Music and Synæsthesia
It is interesting, how one thinks, or perhaps wishes, so much that one has understood, only to discover the delusion. It is very nearly devastating. It happened this past year, it happens every week now, every day of every week. It is almost all I want, to understand. To feel it, to touch it, if only ever so briefly; I am grasping. With each breath, I hope I am the slightest bit closer, I long to be one second closer to the day I can wrap my arms about it, feel it close and tangible, the day I might hope to hold it for my own, that flighty songbird. He will land once more, touch me just so gently, but in that moment I can fly for pure joy. I will not show it on my face, but I glow within.
I have always seen things in colour, every syllable on every page, every sound, every thought, every person I dare to know. Words spoken are shaded by inflections and tones, by the person who speaks them, by the language they are spoken in. I have always seen music in colour. Music is shaded by the timbre of the instrument, of course by perceived affection. Music, if nothing else, speaks that tender, careful language of subtle changes, of overpowering emotion that is so basic and primal, that comes so naturally to the human mind that there is scarcely anything to break it down into more abstract than serotonin or dopamine. But there is colour. There is the gentle interplay of light and shade, there is the chiaroscuro, there is the jagged edge or soft blend. I cannot imagine a piece that does not have its corresponding colour sequence, it has always been this way. Then the playing of music was necessarily stronger, barer, raw and open to whatever searing light dared shine. The first screech of my childhood violin was as grass-green as the spring around. I remember it still, although I have long forgotten the sound, that colour branded as if into my eyelids. I can see it now. I grew a small amount in skill and the brightness, the ear-splitting quality of my first, unrefined sawing of bow against string faded to something warmer, softer, something more alive with the true, mahogany (the colour, not the wood) ring of the violin. But it was flat, two-dimensional. It was my fault—I did not cultivate my relationship with my violin. I practiced half-reluctantly, and the colours never bloomed, never quite, only budding. It was worse with the piano, an instrument with which I still have only a fair-weather relationship (although I should always hope that my respect for it, and its players, is profound). The sounds I caused to rise from the bowels of the grand were coolly impersonal, flatly unfeeling, not notes or colours that made me ring. Again, it was my own fault—I could not learn to connect with an instrument so external. I loved it, but I did not feel it. Eventually, that fell away too, with the shed skins of other attempts. It is strange that the love that came most naturally to me should be one so nearby, so close and even within that I took it for granted for far too long. Voice, my great fear, my dear love, that twists and rises, that rings so freely from a freedom born of control and concentration, that sweet, faraway thing that I shall not, cannot master but can dream of in a light so pure, in shades so warm and languid that I must wish it something solid that I could lean into it and fall, that far-off beauty.
I do not call myself a musician in any right. As I write, I have no aspirations, I long not for the stage lights and the crowds. I was never very good with those to start with. For now, as it has been for long enough, the music alone is consolation enough, the learning and fiddling and bending to understand is beauty enough. It is pure light, something ethereal when you find you are but a step closer, a step wiser, and the colours grow brighter each day.
I have always seen things in colour, every syllable on every page, every sound, every thought, every person I dare to know. Words spoken are shaded by inflections and tones, by the person who speaks them, by the language they are spoken in. I have always seen music in colour. Music is shaded by the timbre of the instrument, of course by perceived affection. Music, if nothing else, speaks that tender, careful language of subtle changes, of overpowering emotion that is so basic and primal, that comes so naturally to the human mind that there is scarcely anything to break it down into more abstract than serotonin or dopamine. But there is colour. There is the gentle interplay of light and shade, there is the chiaroscuro, there is the jagged edge or soft blend. I cannot imagine a piece that does not have its corresponding colour sequence, it has always been this way. Then the playing of music was necessarily stronger, barer, raw and open to whatever searing light dared shine. The first screech of my childhood violin was as grass-green as the spring around. I remember it still, although I have long forgotten the sound, that colour branded as if into my eyelids. I can see it now. I grew a small amount in skill and the brightness, the ear-splitting quality of my first, unrefined sawing of bow against string faded to something warmer, softer, something more alive with the true, mahogany (the colour, not the wood) ring of the violin. But it was flat, two-dimensional. It was my fault—I did not cultivate my relationship with my violin. I practiced half-reluctantly, and the colours never bloomed, never quite, only budding. It was worse with the piano, an instrument with which I still have only a fair-weather relationship (although I should always hope that my respect for it, and its players, is profound). The sounds I caused to rise from the bowels of the grand were coolly impersonal, flatly unfeeling, not notes or colours that made me ring. Again, it was my own fault—I could not learn to connect with an instrument so external. I loved it, but I did not feel it. Eventually, that fell away too, with the shed skins of other attempts. It is strange that the love that came most naturally to me should be one so nearby, so close and even within that I took it for granted for far too long. Voice, my great fear, my dear love, that twists and rises, that rings so freely from a freedom born of control and concentration, that sweet, faraway thing that I shall not, cannot master but can dream of in a light so pure, in shades so warm and languid that I must wish it something solid that I could lean into it and fall, that far-off beauty.
I do not call myself a musician in any right. As I write, I have no aspirations, I long not for the stage lights and the crowds. I was never very good with those to start with. For now, as it has been for long enough, the music alone is consolation enough, the learning and fiddling and bending to understand is beauty enough. It is pure light, something ethereal when you find you are but a step closer, a step wiser, and the colours grow brighter each day.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The Way of the Wasp (or: Cavorting with Caterpillars)
She is now as lovely as I have ever seen her: long-legged and elegant, deep red and black—a beauty, by any acceptable definition. She crouches on the rim of a borrowed glass jar and gazes with the depthless black eyes that fill half of her sharply pointed, nearly feline face. Her wings are sooty, coal-black, and pressed tight against her abdomen. Her segments are clean, her reflexes quick, and she stares at me through the glass as if obstinately, wasp-waisted and dignified and so tiny that she could rest comfortably on my fingertip (if only I were convinced that she wouldn't turn her stinger on me). She spreads her wings ever so slightly to groom, then returns, legs splayed and antennae still, to her previous, stoic attitude, lapping casually at sugar water as if it is her birthright.
Of course, I haven't the slightest idea what she eats, beyond plain sugar water. I have offered her everything from tofu to dog food to mango, plain and sugar water, jams, even the odd crumb of cheese (I suspected it would not tempt her, but my dear, long-lived Dermestes lardarius, Morton, has been enthusiastic enough). The literature is, maddeningly and unusually, useless. She is a member of the species Trogus pennator—an Ichneumon wasp—and every last written word on that species seems to refer only to the larval stage, or at least the host-finding mechanisms of the adult female: the “interesting part”.
I suppose this story really began months ago, in the deep and barbarian wilderness of Kickapoo State Park, where I was gratified to come upon the host plants of several young swallowtail caterpillars, many in their first or second instars (this is wildly exciting for me, because I have a long tradition of hand-raising arthropods, or at least attempting to befriend those that occur domestically, from the earliest, pleasantly fuzzy Arctiid caterpillars and isopods of my youth to regal, if mangled, Eleanor, an injured Chinese mantis, and her successor, the cat-like Seymour, from the waning Monarch, Jane, to the caterpillar Buckeye, William, who spread his wings just as the first autumn breezes blew). I already had several lepidopterans of different families at home—William had just pupated, and I had five larval Arctiids eagerly stripping my lawn of clover and plantain, but the swallowtails were irresistible. There were many, and, perhaps proudly, I collected four of the youngest (Rosalind waved her osmeterium threateningly; perhaps it was a true warning that I did not then have the wisdom to heed). The first swallowtail instars have a terrible habit of looking much the same (they are bird dropping mimics), and correct identification is essential, since even the most closely related of butterflies favour different food plants. Still, I returned home that day with the christened Isabella, Eirian, Marisol, and Rosalind (well, and Hildegarde the Membracid, although she is less relevant to this tale) in tow, and after some time comparing pictures, it was decided that Marisol and Rosalind were Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio glaucus), who would eat tulip tree leaves, and that Isabella and Eirian were Black Swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes), who might eat either fennel or dill. With that settled, I cheerfully wandered out to procure their preferred food items and fixings for a comfortable habitat, hardly considering, never imagining the horrors to come.
The first was poor Rosalind, who expired prematurely, so unlike her Shakespearean namesake. She was never quite as hefty as her age-mates, and I suspect now that she died of some variety of virus; it was pure luck that I recognised her illness prior to its spread to the others and isolated her. The next was Fairfax, an Arctiid whom I had collected several weeks prior, who died unexpectedly, and, upon preservation in alcohol, revealed the two larval parasites that had killed an otherwise energetic and hungry caterpillar. It was the first time I had seen such a thing in person, and I admit to fascination and a fair amount of morbid excitement, even as I mourned poor Fairfax. But time passed, and the others pupated. Some, like William, emerged before the winter, but the majority overwintered, and most of them remain with me still, awaiting the spring. I was rapt with fascination, I admit, especially at the transformation of the swallowtails. From bird dropping mimics they diverged, and Isabella and Eirian grew lovely and striped down, in black and green and yellow, while Marisol went the way that Rosalind had missed, forming bright eyespots and a rosebud-pink head, before going completely brown prior to pupation. They pupated by cradling themselves with strands of silk, nearly upright against the branch of choice, and shaking, squirming out of their last caterpillar skin. When the three had finished, I took their twigs from their jars and laid them safely away to overwinter in peace. Alas, 'twas not to be.
When I discovered Marisol's chrysalis empty in late January, I admit to confusion; the tiny hole through the woody skin was not typical of the butterfly's emergence, and there was no evidence of a large-winged swallowtail anywhere in the house, not accounting for the strangeness of her having emerged prematurely anyway. I was disappointed, I admit; I had been looking forward to her emergence in the spring, and now I had only Isabella and Eirian of the original swallowtails. Perhaps.
I found Kitty about a week ago, buzzing loudly in my lamp, fruitlessly trying to find a way out. I offered her an index card to climb on, and when I pulled her out, I was truthfully confused. I knew her species, I'd seen her brethren before, but only ever during the warmer months, never in bitterly cold early February. I knew her to be a member of the family Ichneumonidae, but beyond that, I had no surety of her identity. I gave her a paper towel soaked with sugar water, and set her away in a Petri dish overnight, musing on her strange and sudden appearance as I turned out the light to quiet her incessant buzzing. The next day, however, shed some light on her character, by way of the nicknamed Giant Book in the biology lab; after lingering over the lovely photographs of jewel-bright beetles, I turned to the Hymenopterans and in minutes had a match for my renegade friend—of course, Trogus pennator, a beautiful wasp, sure, but more importantly, a swallowtail parasite. I left Kitty (or “Shirley”, to some) safe and warm in the lab, housed in said borrowed jar, with a promise that I would return the next day with some manner of potential foodstuff for her sampling pleasure. I hurried home as quickly as I could jump over piles of snow, eager for closure to this mystery.
It was with a certain heaviness that I pushed open the door to my bedroom, walked to the bookcase, and picked up the chrysalis of the late Isabella. The irregular hole chewed through its surface momentarily chilled me, and I put it back down, turning away, mourning my Isabella and the chance to see her fly. I knew now, also, what had happened to Marisol, though I never did find her parasite. And yet, it was with excitement that I collected a number of varied food items to offer to Kitty the next day (I have no evidence that she ate any of it, but one tries, and the weather is too harsh to simply let her go). Either way, I mix sugar water for Kitty with the same enthusiasm that I searched for Isabella's fennel and dill. Perhaps my affections are fair-weather only, but I cannot resent Kitty for the death of Isabella. I suppose Isabella never really was, not the singular Isabella that I knew, and in some twisted way, the chrysalis that Kitty chewed her way out of really was her own. It is chilling and strange to we who like to find morals in everything, this thankless use of a true child's living body for food and shelter. Charles Darwin (a far, far wiser and more eloquent man than I) said once in a letter, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars...”—well, let words such as these be the end of a wildly prolonged and blatantly entomophilic post.
Of course, I haven't the slightest idea what she eats, beyond plain sugar water. I have offered her everything from tofu to dog food to mango, plain and sugar water, jams, even the odd crumb of cheese (I suspected it would not tempt her, but my dear, long-lived Dermestes lardarius, Morton, has been enthusiastic enough). The literature is, maddeningly and unusually, useless. She is a member of the species Trogus pennator—an Ichneumon wasp—and every last written word on that species seems to refer only to the larval stage, or at least the host-finding mechanisms of the adult female: the “interesting part”.
I suppose this story really began months ago, in the deep and barbarian wilderness of Kickapoo State Park, where I was gratified to come upon the host plants of several young swallowtail caterpillars, many in their first or second instars (this is wildly exciting for me, because I have a long tradition of hand-raising arthropods, or at least attempting to befriend those that occur domestically, from the earliest, pleasantly fuzzy Arctiid caterpillars and isopods of my youth to regal, if mangled, Eleanor, an injured Chinese mantis, and her successor, the cat-like Seymour, from the waning Monarch, Jane, to the caterpillar Buckeye, William, who spread his wings just as the first autumn breezes blew). I already had several lepidopterans of different families at home—William had just pupated, and I had five larval Arctiids eagerly stripping my lawn of clover and plantain, but the swallowtails were irresistible. There were many, and, perhaps proudly, I collected four of the youngest (Rosalind waved her osmeterium threateningly; perhaps it was a true warning that I did not then have the wisdom to heed). The first swallowtail instars have a terrible habit of looking much the same (they are bird dropping mimics), and correct identification is essential, since even the most closely related of butterflies favour different food plants. Still, I returned home that day with the christened Isabella, Eirian, Marisol, and Rosalind (well, and Hildegarde the Membracid, although she is less relevant to this tale) in tow, and after some time comparing pictures, it was decided that Marisol and Rosalind were Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio glaucus), who would eat tulip tree leaves, and that Isabella and Eirian were Black Swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes), who might eat either fennel or dill. With that settled, I cheerfully wandered out to procure their preferred food items and fixings for a comfortable habitat, hardly considering, never imagining the horrors to come.
The first was poor Rosalind, who expired prematurely, so unlike her Shakespearean namesake. She was never quite as hefty as her age-mates, and I suspect now that she died of some variety of virus; it was pure luck that I recognised her illness prior to its spread to the others and isolated her. The next was Fairfax, an Arctiid whom I had collected several weeks prior, who died unexpectedly, and, upon preservation in alcohol, revealed the two larval parasites that had killed an otherwise energetic and hungry caterpillar. It was the first time I had seen such a thing in person, and I admit to fascination and a fair amount of morbid excitement, even as I mourned poor Fairfax. But time passed, and the others pupated. Some, like William, emerged before the winter, but the majority overwintered, and most of them remain with me still, awaiting the spring. I was rapt with fascination, I admit, especially at the transformation of the swallowtails. From bird dropping mimics they diverged, and Isabella and Eirian grew lovely and striped down, in black and green and yellow, while Marisol went the way that Rosalind had missed, forming bright eyespots and a rosebud-pink head, before going completely brown prior to pupation. They pupated by cradling themselves with strands of silk, nearly upright against the branch of choice, and shaking, squirming out of their last caterpillar skin. When the three had finished, I took their twigs from their jars and laid them safely away to overwinter in peace. Alas, 'twas not to be.
When I discovered Marisol's chrysalis empty in late January, I admit to confusion; the tiny hole through the woody skin was not typical of the butterfly's emergence, and there was no evidence of a large-winged swallowtail anywhere in the house, not accounting for the strangeness of her having emerged prematurely anyway. I was disappointed, I admit; I had been looking forward to her emergence in the spring, and now I had only Isabella and Eirian of the original swallowtails. Perhaps.
I found Kitty about a week ago, buzzing loudly in my lamp, fruitlessly trying to find a way out. I offered her an index card to climb on, and when I pulled her out, I was truthfully confused. I knew her species, I'd seen her brethren before, but only ever during the warmer months, never in bitterly cold early February. I knew her to be a member of the family Ichneumonidae, but beyond that, I had no surety of her identity. I gave her a paper towel soaked with sugar water, and set her away in a Petri dish overnight, musing on her strange and sudden appearance as I turned out the light to quiet her incessant buzzing. The next day, however, shed some light on her character, by way of the nicknamed Giant Book in the biology lab; after lingering over the lovely photographs of jewel-bright beetles, I turned to the Hymenopterans and in minutes had a match for my renegade friend—of course, Trogus pennator, a beautiful wasp, sure, but more importantly, a swallowtail parasite. I left Kitty (or “Shirley”, to some) safe and warm in the lab, housed in said borrowed jar, with a promise that I would return the next day with some manner of potential foodstuff for her sampling pleasure. I hurried home as quickly as I could jump over piles of snow, eager for closure to this mystery.
It was with a certain heaviness that I pushed open the door to my bedroom, walked to the bookcase, and picked up the chrysalis of the late Isabella. The irregular hole chewed through its surface momentarily chilled me, and I put it back down, turning away, mourning my Isabella and the chance to see her fly. I knew now, also, what had happened to Marisol, though I never did find her parasite. And yet, it was with excitement that I collected a number of varied food items to offer to Kitty the next day (I have no evidence that she ate any of it, but one tries, and the weather is too harsh to simply let her go). Either way, I mix sugar water for Kitty with the same enthusiasm that I searched for Isabella's fennel and dill. Perhaps my affections are fair-weather only, but I cannot resent Kitty for the death of Isabella. I suppose Isabella never really was, not the singular Isabella that I knew, and in some twisted way, the chrysalis that Kitty chewed her way out of really was her own. It is chilling and strange to we who like to find morals in everything, this thankless use of a true child's living body for food and shelter. Charles Darwin (a far, far wiser and more eloquent man than I) said once in a letter, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars...”—well, let words such as these be the end of a wildly prolonged and blatantly entomophilic post.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
On Asthma
I suppose I feel safe now, sitting cross-legged on a scratchy, brown, hotel blanket. I feel safe and for the most part, I am safe, and so I block my fear from my mind and laugh about it. Sometimes I forget about you completely—or I think I do, but can't in reality, as you gnaw tenaciously at the back of my mind. Somehow, with nothing to recommend you, you hath me in thrall; I feel trapped by recognition, so I push myself into a non-reality, a dream in which you do not exist. You know, dear Executioner, it's often much nicer without you.
Those days always start off normally. Sometimes it's terribly cold out, and that makes sense, but that day was warm and moist and lovely, and even later I couldn't understand what drew you out. Were you disturbed from your slumber by a change in weather? Was it just spite? I suppose I can't know; but that I didn't expect you made it somehow worse. So I ran. I ran, and when you stirred and quietly stroked at my airways, I ignored you. Maybe I felt you laugh; I don't know. You clenched at my heart, at my lungs, you pulled at my airways in some sort of infantile joy. I choked, as much with tears as directly from your efforts. I told myself to stay calm, to stay quiet, to breathe, but as my fear heightened, so did you, clinging to it like a lifeline. At times like this, warm and calm, I can't help but feel ridiculous in the vulnerability that you pull out of me, but Seneca said it better than I ever could: “...while with this you're constantly at your last gasp? This is why doctors have nicknamed it 'rehearsing death,' since sooner or later the breath does just what it has been trying to do all those times.” Is that what you're trying to do, teach me how to die? But all you've taught me is how to dread it.
The lights were over-bright and cold, glinting off of stainless steel, rendering the white sheets of the examination table sharp as ice and snow. The computer beside me hummed meaninglessly. It was old, likely older than the painfully typical prescription that they've repeatedly hurried me out with, month after month, year after year. Every visit feels like nothing more than a rerun of the last; it's only the wait times that vary, by seconds or minutes or, every now and unfortunate then, half-hours, and there I was again, bathed in fluorescent light, awkwardly twiddling my still-blue thumbs on this oddly patterned, apparently plastic couch. I suppressed a series of coughs, relics from that morning's episode. After a few moments or months, the doctor bustled in. This time she'd brought a medical student. She handed me the peak flow metre, which is like mine except that the mouthpiece is cardboard. Three times, I blew into it, producing exemplary numbers like 250, 310, 275. I ought to be hitting 450, but, of course, you wouldn't like that, would you, old friend? But I could feel you frown as she says something about the salmeterol xinafoate and fluticasone propionate dry powder inhaler I've been using, and for the first time in five years, she'd suggested something else. Plain fluticasone proprionate and a higher dosage. I was very nearly pleased, and you curled irritably around my chest and shuddered.
I refer to you by name, I talk to you as if you're somebody else. In some ways, I suppose we're like that, two separate wills fighting to control something beyond either of us; to breathe or not to breathe, to live or die. But in a far more real way, you're nothing more than a part of whatever it is that I am, as pained as I am to admit that you are mine, that this clinging, festering weakness is mine. You've taught me a fair amount, I concede. You've taught me how to fear, dread, and hate; presumably I'd have far less occasion to nowadays without your constant guidance. You've taught me to suffocate; perhaps you've showed me how it is to die halfway. Of course, I've never died, so I can't know how far the path goes (although please, don't take this as an invitation to show me). But look, I've grown flippant in your momentary absence! Perhaps this is all to say that as ardently as I despise you beyond anything, I'm very close to actually appreciating you—such is the nature of hatred, I suppose. But, please, rest assured that I will take these words back more quickly than they were written the moment you again rear your ugly head.
Those days always start off normally. Sometimes it's terribly cold out, and that makes sense, but that day was warm and moist and lovely, and even later I couldn't understand what drew you out. Were you disturbed from your slumber by a change in weather? Was it just spite? I suppose I can't know; but that I didn't expect you made it somehow worse. So I ran. I ran, and when you stirred and quietly stroked at my airways, I ignored you. Maybe I felt you laugh; I don't know. You clenched at my heart, at my lungs, you pulled at my airways in some sort of infantile joy. I choked, as much with tears as directly from your efforts. I told myself to stay calm, to stay quiet, to breathe, but as my fear heightened, so did you, clinging to it like a lifeline. At times like this, warm and calm, I can't help but feel ridiculous in the vulnerability that you pull out of me, but Seneca said it better than I ever could: “...while with this you're constantly at your last gasp? This is why doctors have nicknamed it 'rehearsing death,' since sooner or later the breath does just what it has been trying to do all those times.” Is that what you're trying to do, teach me how to die? But all you've taught me is how to dread it.
The lights were over-bright and cold, glinting off of stainless steel, rendering the white sheets of the examination table sharp as ice and snow. The computer beside me hummed meaninglessly. It was old, likely older than the painfully typical prescription that they've repeatedly hurried me out with, month after month, year after year. Every visit feels like nothing more than a rerun of the last; it's only the wait times that vary, by seconds or minutes or, every now and unfortunate then, half-hours, and there I was again, bathed in fluorescent light, awkwardly twiddling my still-blue thumbs on this oddly patterned, apparently plastic couch. I suppressed a series of coughs, relics from that morning's episode. After a few moments or months, the doctor bustled in. This time she'd brought a medical student. She handed me the peak flow metre, which is like mine except that the mouthpiece is cardboard. Three times, I blew into it, producing exemplary numbers like 250, 310, 275. I ought to be hitting 450, but, of course, you wouldn't like that, would you, old friend? But I could feel you frown as she says something about the salmeterol xinafoate and fluticasone propionate dry powder inhaler I've been using, and for the first time in five years, she'd suggested something else. Plain fluticasone proprionate and a higher dosage. I was very nearly pleased, and you curled irritably around my chest and shuddered.
I refer to you by name, I talk to you as if you're somebody else. In some ways, I suppose we're like that, two separate wills fighting to control something beyond either of us; to breathe or not to breathe, to live or die. But in a far more real way, you're nothing more than a part of whatever it is that I am, as pained as I am to admit that you are mine, that this clinging, festering weakness is mine. You've taught me a fair amount, I concede. You've taught me how to fear, dread, and hate; presumably I'd have far less occasion to nowadays without your constant guidance. You've taught me to suffocate; perhaps you've showed me how it is to die halfway. Of course, I've never died, so I can't know how far the path goes (although please, don't take this as an invitation to show me). But look, I've grown flippant in your momentary absence! Perhaps this is all to say that as ardently as I despise you beyond anything, I'm very close to actually appreciating you—such is the nature of hatred, I suppose. But, please, rest assured that I will take these words back more quickly than they were written the moment you again rear your ugly head.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Cave Canem
I last saw you at roughly 7:45 this morning. You were looking out the window as I dragged my feet across the ice in order not to slip. I waved. You could be construed as having waved. I tapped the glass. You looked right through me into the thorny bushes across the driveway, where a squirrel sat chewing a miscellaneous food object. I watched you stiffen, straighten your tail, raise your paw. I'd seen you point before, of course, but it always amazes me how well you do it, even though you've never hunted a day in your life. Do you remember that last time we went to the park together, and you ran through the grasses, got covered in mud, little, dark, thorny seed pods, and flickers of saliva? There were little rabbits everywhere, twitching their ears, chewing through their meals of nigh-indigestible cellulose, gazing at you with beady black eyes as you fell into a perfect point, a beautiful, low crouch, and you edged nearer and nearer, closer, closer, until suddenly each rabbit zipped away into the prairie grass, and the path was as if they had never been there. You were indefatigable, though, and you seemed to glow with your failures. I hung back and laughed as you stalked each one, mildly sorry for the trouble the rabbits took, but altogether too happy that you were happy. That was weeks, even months before the veterinarian pulled out the word “senior”. I wonder that it took me so much by surprise, but it was far easier to be light-hearted before that.
How long has it been, love? Six years? Seven? They blend together now, and I can't really remember. I remember some things, though. I remember that wonderful, strange first day, the day I first saw you up against the bars of your cage, your tail whipping through the air, your claws clattering against the metal. You pressed your nose to my hand when I reached through the bars. I don't think I even saw another dog that day, although they were all around. I did see a pot-bellied pig, in the pen by the door. You did too; you ignored the barking, yipping, tail-smashing excitement of the other dogs and made a beeline for the pig's cage, where you pressed your nose against the fence. The pig ignored you. So did the cats. So did the hamsters. I couldn't. We were too like each other; young, eager, perpetually hungry for something that, I, nine and you, one, had no name for. It was high summer and I remember the days like a picture book, the snapshots warm and eternally hazy, the creeks and cornfields, the paths and ponds, the forest that stretched all around that only we dared explore, we the wild, we the brave. You chased squirrels, ramming so hard against the lead that I, slighter then, fell forwards to my quite battered knees. I waded through ponds and rivers with my shoes off and my toes thick with mud, laughing at you as you picked delicately along the banks. Later, in the evening, I lay across the endless, beige carpet, you curled at my side, and I read aloud, or laughed, joked, sang aloud, from novels and poetry books and newspapers.
You were so polite, so demure those first days at home. You trailed after me to supper, lifting your paws almost daintily, as if you hadn't been rolling and running through tick-thick grasses only hours before. You lay on the old carpet beneath the table, and when the table was set and the three of us had sat down, you very quietly dozed off. You never barked, either; we wondered if you were mute for months. Looking back, I rather think we ruined you, my dear. Ah, well; good manners, as all things, were never meant to last. And at least I now, like so many others, know exactly when the mail's come.
I don't want to end on that word, “senior”. I don't want to think on its implications, I don't want to face your... what is it? Death? Failure of being? Loss, perhaps? To pull out such words on someone so alive as you seems so untrue, and yet, what else might I say? Can I say something that means more than not being able to speak at all? Perhaps my words are lost on you anyway, or perhaps it doesn't matter at all, the faceless men in lab-coats measuring your time to the last, fatal second, the shots and syringes, the cool, impersonal light of the rooms where they all ended before you and I. Oh, love; I'm tense, trying to put these things into words that sound right, words that sound right and mean something. One day, I can only hope that it is I who will shade your eyes from the bright fluorescent lights. Today, let's not think on that far-away, unfocussed hour. Here we are.
How long has it been, love? Six years? Seven? They blend together now, and I can't really remember. I remember some things, though. I remember that wonderful, strange first day, the day I first saw you up against the bars of your cage, your tail whipping through the air, your claws clattering against the metal. You pressed your nose to my hand when I reached through the bars. I don't think I even saw another dog that day, although they were all around. I did see a pot-bellied pig, in the pen by the door. You did too; you ignored the barking, yipping, tail-smashing excitement of the other dogs and made a beeline for the pig's cage, where you pressed your nose against the fence. The pig ignored you. So did the cats. So did the hamsters. I couldn't. We were too like each other; young, eager, perpetually hungry for something that, I, nine and you, one, had no name for. It was high summer and I remember the days like a picture book, the snapshots warm and eternally hazy, the creeks and cornfields, the paths and ponds, the forest that stretched all around that only we dared explore, we the wild, we the brave. You chased squirrels, ramming so hard against the lead that I, slighter then, fell forwards to my quite battered knees. I waded through ponds and rivers with my shoes off and my toes thick with mud, laughing at you as you picked delicately along the banks. Later, in the evening, I lay across the endless, beige carpet, you curled at my side, and I read aloud, or laughed, joked, sang aloud, from novels and poetry books and newspapers.
You were so polite, so demure those first days at home. You trailed after me to supper, lifting your paws almost daintily, as if you hadn't been rolling and running through tick-thick grasses only hours before. You lay on the old carpet beneath the table, and when the table was set and the three of us had sat down, you very quietly dozed off. You never barked, either; we wondered if you were mute for months. Looking back, I rather think we ruined you, my dear. Ah, well; good manners, as all things, were never meant to last. And at least I now, like so many others, know exactly when the mail's come.
I don't want to end on that word, “senior”. I don't want to think on its implications, I don't want to face your... what is it? Death? Failure of being? Loss, perhaps? To pull out such words on someone so alive as you seems so untrue, and yet, what else might I say? Can I say something that means more than not being able to speak at all? Perhaps my words are lost on you anyway, or perhaps it doesn't matter at all, the faceless men in lab-coats measuring your time to the last, fatal second, the shots and syringes, the cool, impersonal light of the rooms where they all ended before you and I. Oh, love; I'm tense, trying to put these things into words that sound right, words that sound right and mean something. One day, I can only hope that it is I who will shade your eyes from the bright fluorescent lights. Today, let's not think on that far-away, unfocussed hour. Here we are.
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