by Meghan Daum
I asked her about the Joni Mitchell problem. Not the part about people in country houses making fun of her yodeling but the part about people assuming she’s sentimental and confessional when in fact she’s the opposite. I said I always thought she wasn’t a poet as much as a kind of musical essayist. Moreover, the lyrics people always interpret as confessions are really just invitations for the listener to come in closer. They’re saying, This isn’t about me. It’s not even about you. It’s about the whole world.
“You know what I’m saying?” I asked.
“Yes, exactly!” Joni said.
She seemed unconcerned that the ash on the tip of her cigarette was now half as long as the cigarette itself. With anyone else, it would have crumbled onto her lap. But Joni smoked with such authority, with such an absence of apology, that the ash sat motionless and obedient, like a dog waiting for a command.
“I’m more like Saint Augustine,” she said. “He supposedly wrote confessions but really they were prayers for a fallen world.”
I asked her how she felt when people told her they liked her early records but weren’t familiar with anything after Blue. She told me that Clouds and Song to a Seagull were the work of a totally different person. She said she couldn’t stand to listen to them.
“People get so hung up on the folksinger thing,” she said. “They don’t understand I’m a composer. This is composed music! It was the same for Mozart. Nobody understood what he was doing. They said there were too many notes.”
Joni said no one had ever asked about the time signature changes in the middle section of “Paprika Plains.” This pleased me immensely. Then she said that the political and social climate of the United States currently was a lot like Germany in the lead-up to World War Two, that Americans were not aware of the atrocities being committed by their own government and that the rest of the world was powerless to do anything but watch. She said people didn’t like hearing this kind of thing but that as a Scorpio she could never help but speak her mind.
“Interesting,” I said.
The gallery owner looked on the verge of falling asleep. Despite some early efforts on my part to loop him into the conversation, he’d followed next to nothing and had evidently smiled and nodded his way to exhaustion. I asked Joni if I might send her a copy of my novel. Not that I expected her to read it, of course, but given how much inspiration I’d drawn from her, I’d like her to have it. She gave me the address of her house in Bel Air and told me to mail it to her there.
“You have honored me tonight,” she said. “People don’t know what it means to honor someone. They think they do but they don’t. You have truly honored me.”
We hugged. This was an incredible evening. And the best part was that it was over now. The entire time, all I had thought was that I couldn’t wait for it to end so I could go home and talk about it for the rest of my life.
* * *
The next week, the gallery owner called and said that Joni had read and enjoyed my novel and wanted to talk to me again. He gave me her telephone number, explaining that she didn’t have a computer or even an answering machine so I couldn’t e-mail her and might have to try calling several times before I reached her. He reminded me that she was nocturnal and said I should probably call her at night.
I dialed her number at eight o’clock one evening. Then the next night at nine and the next night at ten. There was no answer. Meanwhile, I had to write a column about the exhibit, or at least about something. I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t make sense of any of my notes and I had nothing substantive to say about the broken-TV photographs. I came up with a column that was really more of an art review and my editor said it was unpublishable, not only because I wrote for the opinion page and not the arts section but also because I clearly had no idea what I was talking about.
I started over and wrote about my excitement at meeting Joni Mitchell and how I didn’t know what to say but that if there was anything I’d learned from her over the years it was that if you didn’t “write from a place of excruciating candor you’ve written nothing.” I then went on to talk about how much I loved her music and what a great conversation we’d had. Except that I wasn’t excruciatingly candid because I still half expected to see or at least talk to her again and I didn’t want to say anything that would piss her off or make me seem so sycophantic that I’d be afraid to face her.
I called Joni’s number a few more times, then decided maybe she’d gone out of town and that I’d try again in a few weeks. Then the column came out and I was so convinced she’d read it and been disappointed by its blandness that I stopped trying to call her. Several weeks later, I looked for the notebook where I’d written down her telephone number—the same notebook that contained her address and those useless notes—and I couldn’t find it. I searched for it intermittently over the next few months and, in a burst of energy one afternoon, tore apart my office in disbelief that I could lose track of something as precious as the phone number of the person who wrote the score to my entire life.
But it was true. I lost Joni Mitchell’s phone number. After everything—after the dinner, after the art exhibit, after the decades spent with my own private Joni as she piloted me through the indignities of adolescence and the indecision of early adulthood and the parting clouds of middle adulthood—I let the woman herself slip away like a dream burned into abstraction by the glare of wakefulness. Let me repeat that. I lost Joni Mitchell’s phone number. I, of all people, lost Joni Mitchell’s phone number. And also her address.
The column I wrote about her, which had the headline “My Dinner with Joni” even though we hadn’t really eaten dinner, is one of the dullest I’ve ever published. It’s also, to this day, one of the most popular. I heard from hundreds of readers, only a few of whom called me out for being so vague and noncommittal. Everyone else wanted to tell me how much they also loved Joni and how jealous they were that I got to meet her. Many told me how much they liked “Both Sides Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi.”
I never talked to Joni after that evening. But in the years since, I’ve occasionally looked at the ocean and thought about the whales being blown off their courses, their compasses rendered useless by all the buzz and static crackling overhead. I’ve thought that this notion is most likely ridiculous but also strangely poetic. It’s actually the kind of thing Joni would compose a lyric about. She’d be singing about some love affair gone wrong but then she’d go to the whales and suddenly the song would be about something else entirely. It would be about the difficulty of listening to your thoughts in a cacophonous world. It would be about craving silence while also wanting to hear everything. It would be about wanting to be alone and yet wanting to be in love. It would be about one of life’s most reliable disappointments, which is that your audience, no matter how small, is always bigger than those who actually understand what you’re saying.
THE DOG EXCEPTION
A week before my dog Rex died I submitted his photo and biographical details to a website called the Daily Puppy. As examples of oppressive Internet cuteness go, the D.P. is in the upper stratospheric reaches. People send in photos of their puppies, accompanied by descriptions that are often in the first person, as though the dogs have composed their own dating profiles. The goal is to win a coveted “Puppy of the Day” slot on the home page, a designation that invites a trail of gushing comments on the order of “Ooh, you precious baaaby!” and “You are so furrylicious I could hug you for hours.”
The site also has a category called “Grown-up Puppy of the Day.” One morning, as I looked at Rex and got the distinct feeling he didn’t have that many mornings left, I gathered up a handful of his best photos—Rex on the beach at Big Sur, Rex in the flower garden, Rex in front of the Christmas tree—and uploaded them to the Daily Puppy’s submission page, along with his (somewhat grammatically challenged) personal ad. “My name is Rex and I am a grown-up puppy … my humans say that there’s never been a dog loved as much as me.”
Despite an auto-reply saying that the high volume of submissions meant it would be weeks or months before my entry was even considered, Rex turned out to be the Grown-up Puppy of the Day the very next day. I was elated. This was essentially my version of my kid winning an Olympic gold medal. I immediately shared the link on Facebook, using many exclamation points.
As has been well established in these pages, such blatant displays of sentimentality are almost unheard of for me. My aversion to in-your-face adorableness, especially the kittens/babies/kids-saying-the-darnedest-things kinds that are endemic to the Internet, is so pronounced that I have been known to block people from my Facebook feed altogether if they so much as click the “like” button on a video of a kitten riding a turtle or a photo of some unwitting toddler sitting on his potty seat reading People magazine. But for every rule there is a hulking exception and the exception I make to my rigid antischmaltz policy is for dogs. At the heart of that exception was Rex. In his presence, my normally dry, undemonstrative personality flipped upside down. I talked baby talk to him. I hugged him constantly. I told him I loved him approximately eighteen times a day. I used words like furrylicious. I once entered him in a charity “mutt show” contest in the category of “best coat” and was incensed for weeks afterward (in truth: months, possibly years) when he didn’t win. His face was—and for more than a year after his death remained—the wallpaper of my digital self-presentation: my screen saver, my social media avatar, the photo glowing on my cell phone. As I write this, the bulletin board above my desk holds five snapshots of Rex, one snapshot of my husband, and a couple of taxi receipts.
Though babies and children tend to elicit little enthusiasm in me, the sight of a puppy, particularly if it’s some permutation of the large, long-haired breeds I favor, turns me into a swooning, drooling fool. I have been known to cross several lanes of traffic in order to fawn over some fluffy young Saint Bernard or Bernese mountain dog lolling on the sidewalk while his owner gazes into a store window or lunches with a friend at an outdoor café. These interactions, as owners of such dogs know, tend to embody the rather wincing combination of sweetness and awkwardness you see in interactions between children and people inside giant Easter bunny costumes. There’s a soft, huggy vibe about the whole exchange that doesn’t necessarily extend to conversation or even eye contact. There’s a sense that the dog is both humoring the admirer and also very consciously performing a job. Having been on both sides of the transaction, having been the gusher as well as the human at the other end of the gushed-upon animal’s leash, I see why pets can lower blood pressure and increase serotonin. I can see why dogs can do more for trauma victims than an army of clinical psychologists. They are security blankets for grown-ups, “comfort objects” no one expects you to outgrow. A fifty-year-old man who takes his golden retriever with him everywhere he goes is essentially no different from a five-year-old boy with a teddy bear. But a dog confers status on a man. It shows he is responsible and capable of love. It will probably even help him get laid.
* * *
I was an animal person from a very early age. And I’m sorry to say I was a proclaimer. My first foray into philotherian pride came when I turned seven and was allowed a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake for my birthday. This was a very big deal, as it was the first birthday cake ever that had not been baked by my mother and therefore subject to her apparently irremediable inability to write on a cake. When we visited the Baskin-Robbins store to place the order, I made my selection among the thirty-one flavors (mint chocolate chip) and was then asked what written message I preferred. My mother had made it clear that “Happy Birthday, Meghan” was too conventional for her (and therefore also my) taste. She suggested I think about what other ways I might describe myself besides simply invoking my name. When I could not come up with anything off the top of my head she suggested we go home and think about it for a few days.
I stewed over this for nearly a week, cataloging my various attributes as though they were going on my permanent record. What was I? A second grader? A devoted fan of Little House on the Prairie, ABBA, and Nadia Comaneci? A reluctant piano student of Mrs. Dorothy Terhune of Pine Mill Road? The cake deadline imminent, I finally arrived at what should have been obvious all along. I loved animals. I had towering piles of stuffed creatures in my room (no dolls), boundless adoration for our cat, and a sensitivity toward animal suffering so acute that any picture book depicting even a moment’s unhappiness on the part of an animal character upset me so profoundly that my mother had to draw smiles over their frowns or tears. And so it was decided.
“Happy Birthday, Animal Lover.”
It wasn’t until more than thirty years later, while sorting through family photographs and stumbling on that year’s birthday portrait, that I realized the absurdity and borderline obscenity of the inscription. There was my seven-year-old self, wearing a pinafore dress from Sears and beaming over a green ice cream cake celebrating not only my special day but also, by all appearances, my wildness in the bedroom. It also wasn’t until then that I appreciated the extent of my mother’s generosity and her willingness to place her daughter’s wishes above her (quite substantial) fears of public mockery.
Mostly, though, I winced, remembering suddenly the rawness of my feelings for animals. I loved them too much back then. This love got in the way of things. Every day on earth is a minefield of animal tragedies, of baby birds fallen from nests and insects smacking onto car windshields and roadkill of all varieties leaving lumpen streaks across the pavement. When you suffer from hyperempathy toward animals, the entire day can be an exercise in averting your eyes, trying to shift your thoughts, holding back tears. But when you’re a child with this condition, when days feel like weeks and roadside carnage is closer to eye level, when your natural, childlike inclination toward anthropomorphization means every squirrel and firefly in your midst has been assigned its own little personality, the whole world can seem like the saddest picture book you ever opened.
So, as I got older, out of some kind of unconscious, self-protective instinct, I began to wring the sensitivity out of myself. Not all of it, mind you. Not even half of it. Not even half of half. But enough so that I did not run crying from the room when crocodiles sucked down zebras on Wild Kingdom or when I heard aphorisms like “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” I did not shed tears when, at twenty-four, I got the call from my mother saying that the last of our family cats, Niffy Two (Niffy One had met a grisly demise under the tires of a car shortly after that seventh birthday; wisely, my parents shielded me from the optics), had finally died at the age of at least thirteen. I traveled to Africa and watched in real life as lions ripped the limbs off gazelles and chewed until their manes crackled with dried blood and shards of bone. I even managed, in my early thirties, to live on a farm and cope with the brutality known only to those “lucky” animals that live in the country. The horses stood in the pasture through blizzards and hailstorms. Barn cats lived off mice and the occasional bluebird. A trio of Canada goose eggs by the pond, tended by both parents, who never wandered more than steps from the nest, was suddenly gone one morning, snatched by coyotes that had likely swallowed them whole.
Amid this carnage, I learned to buck up. I learned to care less, or at least to turn the pages quickly when I spotted a newspaper article about abused racehorses or circus animals beaten into amusement-worthy submission. But in the case of one species, my senses simply could not be dulled and that was dogs. Depending on their size and temperament, they were—and are—capable of delivering a joy I rarely accessed elsewhere. The mere sight of a doe-eyed golden retriever puppy or a massive, Sphinx-like Leonberger can temporarily alter my brain chemistry. To encounter a Great Pyrenees or a malamute feels to me like meeting a unicorn. That such creatures roam in our midst seems nothing short of magical. That such creatures might share our beds or lie on the sofa with us while we watch TV seems like proof that heaven is capable of dipping down and grazing the earth with the tip of its toe.
&nbs
p; And there we have the sole exception to my antisentimentalism, my one area of unapologetic schmaltz. I love dogs so much it hurts. When I’m driving, any foreign object in the road, be it a plastic bag or a cardboard box or a disintegrating sofa that’s fallen off a truck, produces a wave of panic brought on by my fear that it’s a dead or injured dog. I have covered my eyes while riding in the passenger’s seat, only to have the driver ask why I’m shielding my eyes from a garden hose.
I loved Rex so much that even leaving him at a friend’s house for a week while I went out of town felt like a vital organ was hanging loose from my body. Once I read something in which a mother described her love for her child as feeling like her heart was walking around outside of her body. As a nonparent I’m wary of dog/child comparisons, because they essentially open the door for a flood of indignant reminders that the love for a dog is nothing compared with a parent’s love for a child and that putting kibble in a dish twice a day is a joke compared with feeding/clothing/educating/shaping the moral compass of another human being for eighteen-plus years. So please understand I’m not making any comparisons. I’m just saying that Rex, the collie-shepherd mix who was my companion for more than thirteen years, lived with my heart permanently lodged in his gut. When he snoozed all night at the foot of my bed (and sometimes next to me, head on pillow, so we could spoon) I slept soundly in unclouded peace. When he rolled in the beach sand, scratching his back and flopping his tongue around as though having some kind of euphoric seizure, I, too, felt my every itch had been satisfied.
But you know what’s coming next. It’s what always comes next with dogs. Graying muzzles, creaking hips, tumors. To have an old dog is to look into the eyes of the sweetest soul you know and see traces of the early light of the worst day of your life. When that day comes there is no universally recognized ritual of mourning. No one expects you to take time off from work. No one understands that you cannot answer the phone for a week. No one likes it when you say the barbaric truth, which is that because pets occupy a sphere of uncomplicated, unfluctuating love, because their love actually becomes absorbed into the architecture of your home, their deaths can be more devastating than even the death of a close friend or family member.