by Cheryl Peck
The cat smiles. Normally he is not allowed on the table. It is time for step two.
Successive approximation is a slow process by which the doer is rewarded each time his behavior comes closer to being what the doee had in mind than the behavior before it. In this particular example, it will be the cat who will wiggle and twitch his way across the table toward the proposed doer, but the result is the same: the goal behavior is closer with each subtle ripple of fine gold hairs. Thus the treaty—which, in the beginning, was that the cat would sit (on the table, but) on the far side of the table, while the man ate their cereal—has successively approximated its way across the table until the man, the cat, the cereal (and the treaty) are all cozily tucked into one small corner. So closely, in fact, that the cat’s nose all but falls into the bowl.
The man is not stupid. He perceives a threat to the peace and tranquillity of his morning breakfast. Gently, firmly, he reprimands the cat. “Your place is on that side of the table,” he says, pointing with a milk-laden spoon.
This is the beauty of successive approximation (not to mention cats). The cat does not argue. The cat does not engage in negative social behavior. The cat does not attempt to punish or threaten the man. The cat withdraws. Halfway across the table. He is now not as close as he once was to the goal. He is also not as far away as he started out. He may sing a brief song to convince the man of his sincerity and affection. The cat feels neither, but there is nothing in Skinnerian behavioral psychology that requires absolute or even approximate honesty.
In a previous life I am fairly sure Skinner was a cat.
I studied Skinnerian psychology in the late sixties, just about the time my generation discovered peace, love and the Vietnam War. Good drugs were cheap and all around us. We all wanted to believe that good vibrations and gentle thoughts would change the world, cure greed and patch the hole in the ozone. So we all trooped into 101A psych course, ready to learn how to cure the planet and we immediately learned that (1) Skinner was primarily interested in electrocuting mice and (2) as far as Skinner was concerned, love had nothing to do with it. My, the high moral arguments that erupted from that class. It seems just basic human nature now, the notion that if you reward a child for a behavior the child will probably repeat the behavior, but at the time we had much higher principles. We did not conduct our behavior based on short-term temporal rewards (like fashion, social acceptance, peer pressure or the mores of the time). We were Right. We were Good. We were riding with the angels.
I fought with the amorality of Skinnerian psychology for a long time.
And every day I took that class, the cat I lived with at the time would jump up on my bed, kiss me, sing to me, rub her face against my cheek, then jump off the bed and go sit in the doorway. I would get up, walk down the hall and go into the bathroom, and the cat would come in, wind around my ankles, sit briefly in my lap, sing to me, rub her cheeks against mine, then go sit at the top of the stairs. I would throw on a robe, wander on downstairs, and the cat would run into the kitchen and then back to get me, and then into the kitchen and then back to get me. I would walk into the kitchen and the cat would run up to the cupboard where her food was kept and then to her dish and then up to the cupboard where her food was kept and then to her dish.
Somewhere about mid-term it dawned on me that my cat rewarded me for every behavior that more successively approximated her goal. It was nice that I felt my cat loved me. It was nice that I responded so well to small, furry bodies rubbing against my shins. It was also very nice that I fed her for this. It worked out well for everyone involved.
The problem with Bob’s treaty with Babycakes, of course, is that Bob believes what Bob has been led to believe. Bob believes that they understand that when he is finished with his cereal in the morning, Babycakes can have the milk that is left in the bottom of the bowl. There is no guarantee this is the ultimate goal that Babycakes had in mind. It is possible that his twitching across the table oddly like the lion on the Serengeti inching toward a zebra herd merely means that he is anticipating Bob’s compliance with their aforementioned agreement. It might also mean he is stalking Bob’s breakfast, but far be it from me to interfere with my roommates and their sacred male bonds.
Myself, I have a backache and I am going to go sit on the couch in the sunroom and think calm thoughts about the ozone.
the sad and tragic death of joey beagle
FIRST OF ALL, what is most important and must be remembered at all times is—I was not there. I may have been in school, polishing my mind, or I may have been pursuing some other wholesome adventure, but you need to know—and remember— that the story I am about to tell you happened when I was somewhere else.
In fact, random people who have known me—members of my family, just as an example—have been quick to point out that various life facts I have presented in the past do not necessarily agree with the fact they themselves remember. My facts are bigger, sometimes. Brighter. Less likely to reflect unfavorably on me. Be that as it may, I leave you, the audience, to evaluate the absolute truth of a story about an incident that happened when—and I may have mentioned this—I was not there.
But first, a brief history of my family.
When we were very young, the UnWee, the Wee One, and I, the Least Wee, were unusually blessed with remnants of preceding generations. I am the oldest, so I can remember not only two grandmothers and two grandfathers, but a great-grandmother (on my father’s side), her husband (apparently on no one’s side) and a great aunt (on my mother’s side). When I was very, very young many of these people were old, certainly, but by my standards today they were not all that old. My father’s mother still threw herself belly down on her sled and raced us down hills when I was in my teens. Both of my grandmothers lived into their mid-nineties and my great grandmother lived into her mid-eighties. These people—these women—were around for a long time by anyone’s standards.
Apparently because we had all of these living older relatives, the UnWee, the Wee One and I would be seized from our mud pie assembling, face-washed, shod, spit-combed and driven repeatedly to visit aunt- or grand-so-and-so. The world was a much larger place when we were young and our mother did not just recklessly jump into the car and drive eleven miles to the next town for nothing, so I assume there was a good reason for our visits. The evidence would suggest our entertainment was not to be one of them.
In particular, my mother never struck me as being unusually fond of my great grandmother—Gram—nor did Gram seem any fonder of her.
I was partly responsible for this lack of overall goodwill. I laid in the rain.
Obviously this was no great plot on my part; I was only about six months old at the time. I was lying in my buggy and ogling the sun when the sun went away and clouds arose and water started falling out of the sky. Never having been one to cherish discomfort, I’m sure I reported this change to the nearest responsible authority as soon as I became aware of it. The nearest responsible authority came barreling off the porch, intent on saving her first-born from drowning, slipped, fell, and snapped her wrist like a toothpick. She did have the presence of mind to drag me, buggy and all, out of the rain, but immediately after that she had to go to the hospital and have a cast put on her right wrist. My mother was right-handed. Potent family forces determined that she was no longer able to care for a six-month-old as precious as I was with only one wrist—and the weak one at that—and so Gram was dispatched to oversee us.
By all accounts, this arrangement lasted just about a week.
My mother told me Gram was too easily offended.
My grandmother—Gram’s daughter and my father’s mother— told me my mother was terrible to my great-grandmother and sent her home in tears.
Having listened to evidence presented by both parties, I have determined that you had to be there—which I was, but, as I mentioned, I was six months old at the time and not a particularly good witness.
However, as a result of my unfortunate drenching and my mothe
r’s broken wrist and the hurt feelings all around resulting from it, we visited fairly often with Gram, but it was never presumed that any of us would enjoy it.
I should also note that I was an imaginative child. Whenever life became too dull or boring or routine to amuse me, I made up my own reality. I estimate I spent roughly half my childhood writing my own personal novels in the back of my head while ignoring much of what was going on around me. I am a whimsical candidate for the role of family historian.
For a while when I was a child, Gram was married to her third husband, Charles. I was charmed by him because he had had several fingers lopped off in some kind of horrible accident and when he tamped down the tobacco in his pipe, he did it with the stump of his left index finger. I was so intrigued by the sheer efficiency of this action that I suspected if I ever took up the pipe, I too would have my left index finger stumped. Charles Beagle died of a heart attack while walking home from town one day when I was still quite young. For a while he was there and then he was not. I never did know exactly where he went.
I used to like to go to Gram’s house because she occasionally made a cocoa/butter/oatmeal cookie called a “no-bake,” which I considered to be nature’s most perfect food. Actually getting one, however, was tricky. For one, I was raised by my father to lie. I often rode with him on daylong jaunts in his fuel oil delivery truck where I presume I chatted nonstop, a particular skill of mine, while he delivered gas and oil to the farms on his route. I was given strict orders, each time I crawled up into his cab, to tell each and every one of those loving, giving, baking farm women, “No, thank you,” when they asked, “Would you like a cookie?” This is the moral equivalent to asking Elizabeth Taylor to say, “No, thank you,” when someone offered to give her a diamond—not only was it soundly untrue, it just went against basic nature. Often these farm women would chase me around the back of the truck where they hoped my father wasn’t looking and stuff cookies into my innocent pockets for later. Sometimes I felt so sorry for them, driven as they were by their obvious need to feed someone, that I took one. Gram was all the more treacherous, therefore, because not only did she ask you once or twice or three times if you wanted a treat, she seemed to enjoy a perverse form of forced begging.
“Would you like a treat?”
“Oh, no, thank you.”
“Are you sure? I know you liked my no-bakes before.”
(Quick look at Dad), “Oh, no, that’s okay.”
“You don’t like my treats?”
My dad would bump me. This was one of those father-child signals that had not been fully worked out at that point in our relationship. (Heavy sigh.) “Oh, no, thank you.” Had I been Pinocchio, my nose would have been a foot long by now. My mouth was literally watering at the thought of a no-bake.
“Oh, Bob, let the child have something. How about”—she would wink at me and scuttle out to the dining room, and come back triumphantly brandishing the infamous candy dish—“a hard peppermint candy?”
I loathe hard peppermint candies.
I would rather eat peas.
My father would give me his Significant Look now. I could only assume this meant I should continue to lie, so I would sigh and say, “Oh, I’d love one. Thank you very much.” And I would take one of the disgusting things and (another particular skill of mine, honed to perfection during pea season) I would do everything a small child can imagine to do with a candy except eat it. When I left Gram’s, the insides of my pocket were glued together with little wads of wet, sticky peppermint.
That candy dish has been handed down through generations and a few years ago I nearly had the opportunity to inherit it. I amused myself with fantasies of carrying the dish ceremoniously out to the back porch and smashing it to dust with a rock.
Gram was immensely old, probably in her mid-seventies, and immensely large—as many of the women in my family either are, or struggle righteously not to become—but what my sisters and I remember most about her was her nose. The poor soul was blessed with a huge old Roman nose. We probably would not have noticed quite so much had she not also been a devout and unavoidable snuggler of small children. The moment we arrived she would demand we vault immediately into her lap and begin snuggling and she would burrow that big old Roman nose right into our faces, or our chests, or in the UnWee’s case (for the Un-Wee passionately hated snuggling) the small of her back. The thereness of that oversized and witchlike nose was inescapable.
Even worse, her most prized possession was a small parakeet named Joey whom she fussed over as if he were her firstborn. On command the bird would fly to her shoulder, land, walk up and down her arm, and then kiss her on the nose. I may not outlive the observation that his beak and hers were exactly the same shape.
None of us were exceptionally fond of Joey. We had to be careful not to let him out when we came in or when we left. Sudden or loud noises upset him. He begged for food mercilessly (and probably ate most of his meals by her hand) but we were not to feed him. So we would be sitting politely in a chair (we were not allowed to move, at her house), silent as church-mice (we were not allowed to talk, at her house) when the Bratty Blue Baron would fly through and nip a hunk out of our cookie on the way by. He seemed quite aware of the fact that we were to be seen and not heard and he delighted in inciting us into rebellion. One of his favorite forms of amusement was to fly around the house about a foot below the ceiling and strafe small children, dragging his feet through our hair, flying back to Germany or wherever he lived with toesful of our hair as souvenirs. He particularly liked to pester the UnWee, either because she was a strawberry blond, or because she spent most of the time we were at Gram’s with her head buried in a paper bag, or under a couch cushion, thus making it more of a challenge for him.
I think it would be fair to say we all hated that bird. I would think that it would be just human instinct, when something flies by at fifty miles an hour and steals your hair, to reach up and smash it.
Apparently, on a day that I wasn’t there, the following event occurred. I am quoting my baby sister, the Wee One, and although I will note that she and the UnWee were nearly inseparable as small children and presented a nearly impenetrable front to the outside world, I am in no way suggesting that her story would be anything but utterly true. Our daddy did not raise his little girls to be liars.
The Wee One and the UnWee were innocently standing in a room where the adults were not when Joey flew through, contracted a heart attack in midair, and fell flat on the floor dead.
One minute he was the Bratty Blue Baron: the next he was a cheap pile of used parakeet feathers.
They were themselves astounded at such a sudden change in their fortune. One minute they were being tortured unmercifully by three ounces of flying fuzz and the next, the cursed bird was dead.
I would imagine they just stood there, staring at each other, stunned.
When Gram discovered her beloved Joey dead, however, she was not stunned. According to the Wee One, she carried on like a child of God. She accused the UnWee of budgiecide, she wailed, she cried, she screamed. The woman came completely unraveled.
“She never forgave the UnWee for that,” the Wee One has told me, and not a lot of forgiveness has gone on in the Wee One’s house, either. “Like we would kill her precious parakeet.” And then she informed me the bird fell over dead on the kitchen counter when they were not even in the room.
Myself, I have no idea where or how many times the parakeet died, or how many persons were in the room when it happened because—as I may have mentioned by now—I was not.
the young person’s guide for dealing with the impossibly old
I WAS YOUNG ONCE. In fact, everyone I’ve ever known has made that claim.
I didn’t believe them right away. When I was a kid my grandmother used to tell me stories about her life when she was a little girl and I would sit there, gazing solemnly at her silver hair and her wrinkled face and think to myself, “Yeah, right—like you were ever my age.” I was a sensit
ive and compassionate child.
I am now just about the same age my grandmother was when we had those conversations. My hair is mostly silver. I don’t have as many wrinkles, but that may be because they’re less than three feet away and I can’t see them anymore. The backs of my arms are flabby, I am fat, I have rude hairs growing out of my chin and my skin has lost its memory. All of those crude jokes we made about our sixth-grade English teacher have come home. Teenaged boys—once the bane of my existence—now hold doors open for me. The woman who looks back at me from my bathroom mirror is sliding toward her mid-fifties. She’d better be careful—she’s getting old.
I myself am about thirty. I’ve been thirty for about twenty-three years now.
Not much else has changed.
I remember being twenty, but—oddly enough—I’m nowhere near as jealous of twenty-year-olds as I knew old people were when I was twenty. In fact, I am nowhere near as old as fifty-year-old people were when I was twenty. The Important Subjects we all endlessly discussed when we were twenty—birth, death, The Meaning of Life, Why They Don’t Just Fix That—all seem sort of … done … to me now. It’s not that I never suffered over them, it’s just that some questions answer themselves and others change from one decade to the next. After you’ve debated the existence of God for thirty years, you understand that no one is likely to change their mind because of any brilliant insight you might give them. Change itself—which seemed so inevitable and necessary when I was twenty—has taken some strange twists and brought on enough unexpected side effects to make me wary these days.
When I was twenty it was painfully important that everyone around me like me and—if not like me—at least understand me. I was a one-woman Peace Corps. Even the opinions of total strangers sitting at adjoining tables mattered. I don’t know when that changed. I wasn’t paying attention. I am fifty now. I expect the strangers at adjoining tables to mind their own business and I presume I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I no longer assume I am the most interesting person in the room and as I have slowly turned gray I have discovered people don’t pay much attention to me anymore. I find that I like this.