Will's Red Coat

by Tom Ryan

  A few weeks into eating a plant-based diet, I’d lost twenty-four pounds. I’d always been a heavyset guy. Then came the next step: I chose to go on a sixty-day juice fast, the same one Joe Cross undertook when he filmed Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. The extra weight melted away. I dropped from three chins to two and began sleeping through the night. My sleep apnea was gone, my skin was clearing up, my eyes looked brighter, and I was told I looked younger. My joints stopped aching; a bounce returned to my step, and I felt as if I were thirty again.

  As I continued on a diet without meat, eggs, or dairy, I became more educated about what was considered vegan and what wasn’t. There are phone apps for such things, one of them listing vegan junk food. When I mastered that list, I had a great time—I mean, who knew that Oreos and Twizzlers and Burger King fries were vegan?—but I gained some weight back. Then I gained a lot of the weight back. That’s when I realized that eating a plant-based diet wasn’t enough. Yes, I was showing compassion for animals, thinking that I wouldn’t eat Atticus or Will or Aragorn, so why would I eat a cow or a pig? But cheating with junk food—vegan or not—wasn’t being compassionate to me. When I understood that, I adjusted my diet again so that I was as kind to myself as I was to others.

  I looked into what a vegan diet would mean for Atticus and Will. Rachael Kleidon, who is a vegetarian, used to be vegan. She had tried feeding a vegan diet to the dogs she lived with but noticed an adverse change in their health. I had my own opinion on things, but I relied on Rachael with anything that had to do with Atticus and Will. Therefore, while I gave up eating meat, they didn’t.

  I’m not sure I’ll ever be thin, but I’m leaner and healthier. I still get tempted by the smell of hamburgers cooking when I pass a restaurant, but when that happens, I consider the animals I used to eat and how they died to make me happy. They had no joy in their lives, and most knew no freedom. They lived in fear.

  And even cheese and ice cream—favorites of mine—subjected mother cows to cruelty by separating them from their calves within days, if not hours, of their birth. Long after I moved north, a farm in Newbury, Massachusetts, was in the national news because of the haunting sounds their neighbors were reporting at night, wails of sadness and heartache. People from miles around thought a cow was being tortured. It was, but not in the way they thought. Local police reported she was mourning the loss of her calf, who had been taken from her soon after its birth so that milk meant for the calf could go to people.

  As part of my education, I started reading vegan cookbooks, which taught me what to eat, but also of critical importance, how to really cook. I collected so many of them that I had to buy another bookcase. Up to that point, my kitchen was home to a Crock-Pot and a George Foreman electric grill and that was about it. But as I learned to make soups and cook vegetables in other ways, I bought a pressure cooker, blender, juicer, and steamer. And I found that pancakes, muffins, bread, biscuits, French toast, and an incredible number of desserts can be veganized. Instead of using eggs, I learned to use silken tofu, bananas, flaxseed, and baking soda and vinegar.

  I discovered that cooking from scratch was a lot like writing. The joy of creation goes into both, and I found contentment in the process. I was inspired by authors like Dreena Burton, Lindsay Nixon, and Isa Chandra Moskowitz. I couldn’t believe how delicious the food was. And as I recently told my friend Annie Criscitiello, who is now eating in more of a plant-based way, “How can I not love the Thug Kitchen cookbook and the foul language used in their recipes? I’m a thug spiritualist, after all. Now excuse me while I go say my motherf’ing prayers!”

  I have adapted to Will’s way of living. I use my nose. I smelled celery—really and truly smelled it—and discovered its delightful aroma. I’d eaten celery thousands of times but always smothered in cream cheese, drowned in turkey soup, or used as a crunchy accent in a gooey chicken salad. But experienced on its own it was a revelation—as extraordinary as anything I’d ever eaten. Cucumbers were another, and grapes. Each trip to the produce section of a supermarket is a reawakening of my senses. The colors alone are jubilant. The taste of fresh fruit, the snap of vegetables, and the taste of nearly anything. I started taking whole tomatoes with me on a hike, and biting into them on a hot day is a sensual pleasure.

  Instead of pulling into the drive-through and ordering an Extra Value Meal from McDonald’s, I was stopping at farm stands and buying organic corn on the cob, lemons, peppers, apples, and bags of greens.

  I found my evolution into more mindful eating equivalent to the other changes in my life, and inspired simplicity while writing or even just listening to classical music or jazz. It all wove together within me. Art became life. To cook was to write was to not just listen to the music in our home, but like Helen Keller and Will, to feel it.

  The same chords were struck, the act of being present to the way my knife would slice through a ripe watermelon, the manner in which a cello rose above the other instruments in an arrangement, the way words string together to create a melody. At the heart of all of it was one seed. It was kindness. To live kindly was to live mindfully.

  I don’t play a musical instrument. As much as I admire those who dedicate themselves to learning the cello, piano, or violin, especially later in life, my fingers are too clumsy. They are mischievous and awkward. Some mornings I have a difficult time typing or writing letters.

  It helps me to start off almost every morning by listening to Laura Carlo on WCRB out of Boston. I am a sentimental fool, and knowing that my father sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a cigarette by his tinny clock radio listening to this music every day is meaningful to me. Like me, he didn’t play, but classical music helped to tame the savage inside of him. It centered him. When I write while listening, I imagine I’m Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, or Mendelssohn composing something ethereal. My fingers dance across the keyboard, I pretend they are more graceful than they are, and I float into the notes, and the notes take me to the words.

  When I began to eat healthier, I looked back at my relationship with fast-food restaurants and realized that no matter what I ate, I always left feeling empty inside. Making my own meals changed that, and I found a similar joy of creation out of writing. Each ingredient was a line in a poem or a note in a melody. I’m still awkward in the kitchen, but I’m getting better. The music helps as I reach for spices or a measuring cup as I will my recipes to life. There’s enormous satisfaction in taking a blank page and filling it with the right ingredients to reach for a perfection I’ll never grasp. The same is true of the time and attention it takes to make meals from scratch. It is another way I’m finding my religion; another way I pray without uttering a word.

  Just as Will’s world transformed, I was transforming my own. I started reading blogs about healthy eating, which led me to look for cruelty-free items in my choices for the bathroom. Whether it’s soaps, shampoos, deodorants, or shaving creams, I choose to use products that don’t put animals through testing.

  Mark Hawthorne’s Bleating Hearts: The Hidden World of Animal Suffering has found its way among the ten most important books I’ve ever read, and it can be found on my favored shelf not far from Emerson’s Collected Essays or Thoreau’s Walden. The harsh realities Hawthorne revealed forced me to see things differently. Zoos and circuses no longer seemed like fun or educational places. Instead, I saw them as the prisons they are. I’d like to think I had been kind to animals; I certainly had good standing with Atticus and Will, and different but fruitful and respectful relationships with our outside friends who spilled over from the enchanted forest on the other side of the river into our backyard fairy tale. But Mark and his peers forced me to see more, to feel more, to empathize with others I share this planet with.

  My compassion for animals flows more easily than it does with fellow humans, but I am reminded once again to strive to be a better human through my relationships with nonhuman animals. The writer Ram Dass said, “We are all just walking each other home.”

  This br
ings me back to the woebegone nursing home, takes me to the present with Will, and nudges me toward a more empathetic life. How nice it is to walk a friend home. How comforting to have the favor returned.

  Of course, there are always those who want to debate with me about animals and zoos and circuses and aquariums, but since my Undertoad days, I no longer get excited about arguing. When I’m cornered, though, by someone who insists that zoos, aquariums, and factory farms do more good than harm, I ask the simplest of questions.

  “If the roles were reversed, would you be happy living in an aquarium? Do you think you could live behind bars and be satisfied in a zoo? Would you like living in the horrific conditions of animals on factory farms?”

  Perhaps strangely, I have no issue with those who hunt for food. They are all around us in New Hampshire, and I have more respect for them than I had for the me I used to be who mindlessly picked through the plastic-wrapped meats at the local supermarket. But I do have a problem with trophy hunters. It’s one group of people I’ll never have compassion for.

  I now pay more attention to the plight of such endangered species as elephants and rhinos who have been hunted almost to extinction by poachers so people can have their decorative ivory and their “medicine” from powdered horn. I am aware that human development is taking away natural habitats at an alarming rate and wiping out animals both beloved by and unknown to us.

  From my life halfway to wild, I was understanding more about the world and drawn to the words of John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

  Atticus and I set out to find equality together while exploring life long ago. Will had grabbed hold of his chance at a new beginning. I was moving right along with them—sharing, teaching, and learning. Looking back on that time, I will always remember that the three of us were fully alive and aware of what we had during that summer of simplicity. Will and I were transforming. Atticus? I don’t think he had any need to. He got it right from the beginning.

  11

  Thorne Pond

  How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.

  —JOHN BURROUGHS

  The months came and went, rushing by the way they do when contentment fills a home. Where I used to count seasons with Will, celebrating when he reached his first summer, the beginning of his first autumn, and winter’s initial snowfall, I had ceased keeping track. Once Will decided to live, none of those milestones mattered any longer. What I cared about was how I filled his days.

  But when midsummer of Will’s third year arrived, I took note one morning as I watched him sprawled in the shade under the black ash tree. He resembled a lion in repose, proud and peaceful. The breeze stirred the grass around him, urged leaves into dancing above him, and tickled his bushy white hair. With eyes full of reborn innocence, he gazed out at his little kingdom. He looked up at me as I stepped closer. Although he couldn’t hear me, and never had, I continued to talk to him.

  “Do you mind if I sit down with you, Will?”

  Running my fingers over his ears, I closed my eyes and tilted my head to the sky and inhaled. The hour, the day, the entire season—all smelled of singsong bliss. My spirit rocked happily along with the swaying of the leaves. Keeping my eyes closed, I listed a handful of blessings. Will was still with us. Atticus had recovered completely from his cancer. I was in good health. We had many friends and few worries. There wasn’t much we wanted for. Life was as ripe as the bounty that filled the local farm stands.

  Even while wrapped in that lazy happiness, though, I knew that Will was changing. He had been losing weight, becoming more frail. His skin was irritated again, breaking down beneath his fur. I had to shave ever-larger sections of it away to better treat the lesions. No matter how much ointment I rubbed on him, no matter how many medicated baths he received, or how often I washed his bedding or adjusted his diet, his skin was degenerating.

  So was the rest of his body.

  Will could no longer bounce around, and when he tried to ride up on his hind legs and kick out with his front paws, they barely left the ground. It was more of a windup toy kind of half hop. The gleam of life reclaimed was evident, even in his cloudy eyes, but he didn’t have the energy to pull off the dance. He could still walk, but not as he used to, and I often had to carry him to his favorite places in the yard.

  When I mowed the lawn, he could only feign giving chase, and I petted his head whenever I walked past him. He’d look up after me, longing to run like a rascal, but instead he flopped down and waited until I returned in the next row of neatly cut of grass.

  On warmer days, I continued to take him down to the Ellis River. His trust in me was complete. I could feel it when I lifted his body, the way he sank into my arms and against my chest. He didn’t mind being jostled as we walked through the woods, over uneven ground and rocks and roots obscured by the ferns. He joyfully bounced along in my arms, looking up at me.

  It was always his eyes that made me smile. They’d once been narrow and suspicious, and I could tell he had stopped believing in much of anything. He didn’t trust. He was in pain and looking for a reason to strike out. He had the look of a fearful soul. But as the seasons and the years passed, hope returned, and with it joy. I often thought that if he could laugh, it would burst out of him.

  Down at the river, Atticus would climb onto his usual flat rock under the shade at the edge of the water and watch as I brought Will into the current. We’d sit together in the middle; no longer could he manage to sit on his own. I’d cradle him with my legs so he wouldn’t tumble over. The water was warm and shallow, perfect for my old friend’s weakened body. When he tired of sitting up, he’d rest his chin against one of my legs and lap the water, drinking in the lifeblood of the mountains as it flowed by us.

  Those were the happiest days, but I knew they were fleeting. So I did my best to capture each moment and make it a memory, and to put things in perspective I relished how far he’d come. There was a time, back in the beginning, when I wondered if he’d last three weeks, and here he was getting ready for his third autumn.

  August shuffled by. Goldenrod illuminated the deep grass that led to the forest. The leaves of the black ash began to yellow and curl. Will’s wildflower garden still held some bright colors, but it was beyond its peak, with some of the older plants turning brittle. Flowers started turning to seed. The heat of earlier weeks was gone, leaving in its wake delightful days made for lounging outdoors.

  In our little patch of backyard heaven, the crows watched over us, sitting up high, always chattering at Will, as if they were comparing notes about him. The chipmunks knew they had nothing to fear from Atticus, and Will had always been harmless, so they too chirped and squeaked, watching from the top of the stone wall where I gave them a handful of sunflower seeds each morning. They skittered away only when a hawk or other predator landed in one of the tall birch trees on the edge of the yard. Then they’d race with tails pointing up like furry exclamation points to whatever crevice or hole led to safety.

  Aragorn ambled through on his way home at the end of many a day. He’d pause and look at us, and I half expected him to wave. Once he stopped and sat in the wildflowers, in Will’s favored spot, while we viewed him from a dozen feet away. He bathed in them, smelling the dried plants around him, and then rolled over onto his back and side.

  The bear and Atticus had a connection from the first day he followed us home as a yearling, but his proprietorship over Will was altogether different. As he’d walk away toward the woods in the waning hours of light, he’d often turn before disappearing in the brush to take a final look at Will and me as we played.

  I don’t know if Will was ever aware of our free-to-come-and-go menagerie. He seemed oblivious to it all, other than the occasional high-pitched screech of one of the neighboring blue jays. He’d cock his head in their direction as if he was saying, Did somebody call my name? I imagined that without the grounding vibr
ation of the music I played him, the few other sounds that made it through to him must have seemed like a dusty memory.

  Aragorn was not the only bear to take note of the myopic little dog who took seriously his study of flowers, whether weeds or perennials. The four cubs of the Jackson Five stayed close to their mother whenever they approached from the bear path, but their curiosity got the best of them as Will circled and danced. On one occasion, they came up from behind us and startled me. Atticus and I were each sitting in an Adirondack chair while Will pranced in front of us. They walked so near that I could almost reach out and touch them, and two of the cubs lingered to watch Will’s stiff pirouetting before their mother came back and nudged them along. Yet as serious as she was, she too paused to watch his dance. We all did. Even Atticus, who had so little to do with Will. He’d study his shuffle, the way he tried to leap and make his drunken circle. Will may not have been able to hear music, and his body was breaking down, but it occurred to me his life had turned into a song of rapture.

  Knowing that our time together was ephemeral, I brought as many experiences to Will as possible. Atticus and I took him to Thorne Pond often in the coming weeks. Ten minutes down the road, it was an oasis for us on the days we didn’t hike. We saw bear and coyote, fox and deer, and birds of all kinds, and even though ticks had laid waste to much of the moose population, I spied an occasional hoof mark in the mud. The area had the charm of its flora and fauna, but what truly captured my imagination was the mystery of this place. There in the woods, beyond the water, I never knew what would be revealed to me. Possibility permeated the land and water.