It’s an age thing. There’s a hormone in the brain that kicks in when you see a younger person in a state of shell shock over meringue sugar, or how to get the lids off jars or the beet stains out of tablecloths, or the right way of dumping the bad boyfriend who should be disposed of immediately because as anyone with half a wit can see the man is a psychopath, or which candidate is the best bet in the local election, or any number of other things on which you appear to yourself to have an overflowing fund of useful knowledge that may vanish from the planet unless you dish it out right and left, on the spot, to those in need. This hormone automatically takes over—like the hormone in a mother robin that forces her to cram worms and grubs down the gaping maws of plaintively cheeping nestlings—and reams of helpful hints unscroll out of your mouth like a runaway roll of toilet paper falling down the stairs. You have no way of stopping this process. It just happens.
It’s been happening for centuries; no, for millennia. Ever since we developed what is loosely called human culture, the young have been on the receiving end of instruction from their elders whether they liked it or not. Where are the best roots and berries? How do you make an arrowhead? What fish are plentiful, where and when? Which mushrooms are poisonous? The instruction must have taken pleasant forms (“Great arrowhead! Now try it this way!”) or unpleasant ones (“You idiot! That’s no way to skin a mastodon! Do it like this!”) Since we’ve still got the same hardware as Cro-Magnon man, or so we’re told, it’s merely the details that have changed, not the process. (Hands up, everyone who’s ever taped laundry instructions to the washer-dryer for the benefit of their teenaged kids.)
There are mountains of self-help books testifying to the fact that the young—and not only the young—are fond of securing advice on every possible subject, from how to get rid of pimples, to the suave way of manoeuvring some youth with commitment issues into marriage, to the management of colic in infants, to the making of the perfect waffle, to the negotiation of an improved salary, to the purchase of a rewarding retirement property, to the planning of a really knock-out funeral. The cookbook is one of the earliest forms of self-help book. Mrs. Beeton’s enormous nineteenth-century tome, The Book of Household Management, expands the tradition, and includes not only recipes but advice on everything, from how to tell a real fainting fit from a sham one, to the proper colour choices for blondes and brunettes, to which topics of conversation are safe for afternoon visits. (Stay away from religious controversy. The weather is always acceptable.) Martha Stewart, Ann Landers and Miss Manners are Mrs. Beeton’s great-granddaughters, as is Mrs. Rombauer-Becker of Joy of Cooking fame and every home handywoman, interior decorator and sex expert you’ve ever watched on television. Look at the shows and read the books and authors quickly, in sequence, and you’ll feel the need of some cotton wool to stuff in your ears as a defence against the endless stream of what would sound like relentless finger-waving, hectoring and nagging if you hadn’t chosen to let these folks in the door yourself.
With how-to books and self-help shows you can absorb the advice if and when you want it, but relatives or friends or acquaintances or mothers cannot be so easily opened and then closed and put back on the shelf. Over the centuries, novels and plays have given us a stock character: the older female—or male, both versions exist—who’s a voluble interfering busybody, deluging the young folk with unasked-for tips on how to conduct their lives, coupled with sharp-tongued criticisms when the advice is not heeded. Mrs. Rachel Lynde in Anne of Green Gables is a case in point. Sometimes this type of person will have a good heart—Mrs. Lynde does—although, just as often, he or she will be a sinister control freak like the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute. But good or bad, the meddlesome busybody is seldom entirely sympathetic. Why? Because we like other people—well-meaning or not—to mind their own business, not ours. Even helpful advice can be indistinguishable from bossiness when you’re on the receiving end.
My own mother was of the non-interference school unless it was a matter of life and death. If we children were doing something truly dangerous and she knew about it, she would stop us. Otherwise she let us learn by experience. Less work for her, come to think about it, though there was of course the work of self-restraint. She later said that she had to leave the kitchen when I was making my first pie crust, the sight was so painful to her. I’ve come to appreciate these silences of my mother’s, though she could always produce a condensed pill of sensible advice when asked for it. All the more puzzling, then, that I have taken to blurting out instructions to strangers in cheese stores. Perhaps I take after my father, who was relentlessly informative, though he always tempered the force of his utterances by beginning, “As I’m sure you know …”
• • •
I went to high school at a time when students were required to learn things off by heart. This work formed part of the exam: you were expected not only to recite the set pieces out loud but to regurgitate them onto the page, with marks off for faults in spelling. One standard item was the speech made in Hamlet by the old court counsellor, Polonius, to his son, Laertes, who is departing for a trip to France. Here’s the speech, in case you may have forgotten it, as I found I had when I tried for total recall.
Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There,—my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice:
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy:
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!
The method is aggressive—Polonius scolds Laertes because he isn’t on the ship yet, then holds him back with a long list of do’s and don’ts—but it’s all very good advice. A rational person can’t disagree with any of it. Yet in every performance of Hamlet I’ve ever seen, Polonius is played as a comical but tedious old pedant and Laertes listens to him with barely concealed impatience, although he himself has just dished out a heaping plateful of his own advice to his younger sister, Ophelia. Looked at objectively, Polonius can’t really have been the boring idiot we’re usually shown: he’s chief adviser to Claudius, who’s a villain but no fool. Claudius wouldn’t have kept Polonius around if the latter had really been several bricks short of a load. Why then is the scene always played this way?
One reason is that it would be boring if done straight, because advice you haven’t asked for is always boring, and it’s especially boring if the person giving the advice is old and you yourself are young. It’s like the cartoon with the caption “What people say, what cats hear”: over the head of the cat is a voice balloon with nothing in it. The advice to the cat may be perfectly good—“Don’t mess with that big tomcat down the street”—but the cat isn’t receptive. It will follow its own counsel, because that’s what cats
do. And that’s what young people do as well, unless there’s something specific they want you to tell them.
Which is my way of ducking the question. What advice would I give the young? None, unless they asked for it. Or that’s what would happen in an ideal world. In the world I actually inhabit, I break this virtuous rule daily, since at the slightest excuse I find myself blathering on about all kinds of things, due to the mother-robin hormone I’ve already mentioned. Thus:
As I’m sure you know, the most eco-friendly toilet is the Caroma. You can state your position and stick to your guns without being rude. Awnings cut down on summer heat through your windows by 70 percent or more. If you want to be a novelist, do back exercises daily—you’ll need them later. Don’t phone him, let him phone you. Think globally, act locally. After having a baby you lose your brain and some of your hair, but they both grow back. A stitch in time saves nine. There’s a new kind of crampon you can strap onto your boots, handy on icy sidewalks. Don’t stick a fork into a wall socket. If you don’t clean the lint trap on the dryer it may burst into flames. If the hair on your arms stands up in a thunderstorm, jump. Don’t step into a canoe when it’s pulled up on the beach. Never let anyone pour you a drink in a bar. Sometimes the only way out is through. In the northern forest, hang your food from a tree some distance from your sleeping area and don’t wear perfume. This above all, to thine own self be true. Eyebrow tweezers are handy for getting big wads of glop out of bathroom sink drains. Every household should contain a wind-up flashlight. And don’t forget about the little touch of vinegar, for the meringues. That’s the white vinegar, not the brown.
However, here’s the best piece of advice of all: Sometimes young people don’t want advice from their elders. They don’t wish you to turn into Polonia, not as such. They can do without the main body of the speech—the long checklist of instructions. But they welcome the part at the end, which is a kind of benediction:
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!
They want you to see them off on their voyage, which is—after all—a voyage they have to make on their own. Maybe it will be a dangerous voyage, maybe you’d be able to handle the danger better than they will, but you can’t do it for them. You’ve got to stay behind, waving encouragingly, anxiously, a little plaintively: Farewell! Fare well!
But they do want the goodwill from you. They want the blessing.
Picture this: a four-year-old girl sees a horse in the flesh for the first time. The creature looms above her, enormous, like something from a fairy tale or dream. The copper-coloured beast is tied up to a corral railing, somewhere on the Alberta prairie, circa 1952. The sky is a blue inverted bowl, the August sun almost at its zenith. The heat is unreal. Everyone’s sweating.
The child’s mother stands several yards away on the veranda of the ranch house, not just because of the shade, but because she’s scared silly of horses. The child’s father is not, although horses don’t interest him much. He rode a few times as a child, then fell hard for airplanes and the sky. But he can see his daughter is mesmerized. A man in chaps and a dented cowboy hat asks the child if she’d like to sit on the horse. The child nods, so he scoops her up into the western saddle that feels as broad as a couch. The horse, its head low in the heat, doesn’t move. A few feet away, the father and the cowboy chat desultorily, but the child barely hears them. She leans down to touch the bright shining neck of the horse, she inhales its scent of sweet grass and warm earth and dust. No one offers to lead the horse around—perhaps they think she’s too small to stay on, even at a walk—but she doesn’t care. She’s in some kind of swooning ecstasy.
A few minutes later, her father reaches up to take her off the horse. The child makes a face. “Noooo,” she whines. “It’s time to go now,” says the father sternly, and begins to pull her out of the saddle. A much decorated World War II pilot, he won’t have a four-year-old defying him, no sir, especially in front of another man. The child stubbornly grabs the high pommel and hangs on with all her tiny might. The father pulls, she begins to wail: “No! No! No!” Her mother comes rushing over, but slows down uncertainly several feet from the horse as her maternal instinct collides with her terror of the beast.
The child is screaming now, but it’s no use—the father yanks his flailing daughter off the horse and unceremoniously carries her to the car. The child’s screams pierce the summer afternoon as the family drives off, the parents embarrassed as hell over the mystifying behaviour of their child.
• • •
That child was me, and I can still hear my own screams from that day. Of course, at the time I couldn’t explain what had happened. All this over a horse? Well, yes. I had just found my primary totem animal, my spirit guide, my religion. And they had torn us apart.
Horse crazy, they call girls and women like me. It’s a sex thing, snicker the boys and men. They are so wrong.
What makes a small child know so strongly, so deeply, that she has connected with something vital to her soul and heart and body, something that seems to come out of nowhere, with no immediate precedent? Do we humans have genes for our passions? Researchers are beginning to think there’s a gene for religious faith or belief. That might explain why some people find God so fervently and definitively, and others, like me—despite fifteen years of rigorous Catholic brainwashing—thoroughly lose God as soon as they’re old enough to think for themselves.
But animals … go figure. My father’s mother loved animals, horses and dogs in particular. Did I somehow inherit my passion from her? Or are past lives operating here? I don’t know, but I do know this: I’m not alone.
Whether it’s horses or dogs or cats (if the horse is my main totem, then the cat ranks just below it), there are legions of women (and some men) who love animals. I’m not talking about celebrities who dye their poodles pink to match their wardrobes, or stuff their chihuahuas in Vuitton handbags as though a dog were just one more accessory. And while I know some of us are guilty of infantilizing our kitties or turning our pooches into human-companion surrogates, I also know that many more of us have made deep soul connections with animals that are mystical, mysterious and profoundly healing.
But this is a passion that until recently we’ve been somewhat embarrassed to acknowledge. It’s a passion that gets ridiculed. With homosexuality now out in the open in Western culture, this is the new love that dare not speak its name, especially in our patriarchal world, where it’s seen as somehow soft to love animals. Animals are for hunting down and eating, for God’s sake. And if you’re a woman, you’re soft already, so better shut up about critters.
Picture this: I’m visiting a ramshackle house in the Southern Ontario countryside. I walk in through the screened-in deck, where thirty-odd cats laze in the sun. At least ten eagerly rush over to me, like a horde of feline Wal-Mart greeters. I enter the kitchen, where another twenty or so drape themselves over every flat surface. The living room is wall-to-wall felines, the bedrooms too. About two hundred rescued or abandoned cats live in the house, and the big workshop building outside holds another two hundred. One human lives on the property. Do I hear you thinking “crazy cat lady”? You’d be wrong. The person who runs this rescue shelter is a man named Larry, but who ever heard of a crazy cat gentleman? We have no such phrase in our culture.
Same with “horse crazy.” It’s only girls and women who get labelled that. Was Roy Rogers, despite his singular devotion to Trigger (he even had him stuffed after the animal died), ever called “horse crazy”? Is Ian Millar, Canadian Olympian, World Cup show jumping champion and partner to the illustrious Big Ben? I think not. And that’s telling.
But never mind, ladies. Whatever they call us, science is on our side, proving through countless studies what we already know: that the human-animal bond is good medicine. Nobody is sure why contact with animals reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, banishes depression, increases longevity and just makes us goofily happy. But it does. I own a horse now (are you surprised?) and where I board him,
there are twenty-nine other horses—all owned by other contented women. Why, you can practically smell the endorphins when you walk past as we groom our steeds. And I know that for many of those women, their horses function as Beau does for me: part buddy, part fitness coach, part entertainer, part therapist, part teacher, part priest.
Yes, priest. The researchers don’t seem to talk about animals and spiritual health, but for me, that’s part of the bond too. Lacking that religion gene, I have tried but failed over the years to find a faith or philosophy that spoke to me. Of all the paths I explored, Buddhism was the most compelling, but though my head was intrigued, my heart and soul remained unmoved. Besides, every time I tried to meditate, I fell asleep.
Still, I longed for inner peace. Throughout my twenties and most of my thirties I spent hours in therapy dissecting my drearily unoriginal dysfunctional family. I constantly struggled with depression and rage. The world seemed a dark, chaotic and terrible place, and contentment largely evaded me—except when I was either writing (songs, plays, anything), happily in love (a stage that rarely lasted more than ten weeks) or when I was around animals. Then I felt calm and whole and—right.
And it’s always been like that. Not surprising then that, regardless of circumstances, I gravitate toward non-human species. I’m the six-year-old kid who bawls for days when her turtle dies. I’m the teenager at a convent school on Lake Nipissing who spends lunch hour alone by the water luring seagulls with sandwich crusts, because she loves to watch them wheel and dip around her. I’m the woman at the sparkling soirée in a Rosedale mansion who’s ignoring the famous guests in order to crouch down in a corner and commune with the family hound.
And shadowing me through all my years are horses, horses, horses—those creatures so magnificent in the flesh and blood, so rich in mythic dimensions. I had a pony for two years as a kid, and a horse for three years as a teenager. I rode on and off until I moved to Toronto at age twenty-three to follow my creative muse. When I discovered how broke the muse was, I was forced to repress my equine passions for over twenty years. But every time I saw a police officer ride by on one of those splendid mounts, my breath stopped and I felt a yearning so powerful it was like mourning a lost soul mate.
Dropped Threads 3 Page 2