Wrong is the one thing I cannot stand to be.
* * *
I knew in my bones that John was not the problem. But I took my discontent out on him because he was the closest person to me. Because he could see how messed up I was, I became even more aware of how messed up I was. He pulled me close, but when I looked into his eyes all I saw was my own warped reflection. I imagined how grotesque I must seem.
When I look back now at this time when I craved solitude and escape, I see that I wanted to be unwitnessed for a while, that’s all. I didn’t want anyone to see how wrong I felt. I wanted a chance to feel messed up without also feeling self-conscious. It was like the feeling I used to get before I fainted—an inkling of a crash, a hunch that I should get close to the ground. I needed a place where I could hit the floor without the added anxiety of knowing someone was watching me fall.
Nora Ephron and the Lives of Trees
There’s a line in Nora Ephron’s autobiographical novel Heartburn—“Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.” I read the book for the first time in seventh grade (not exactly age-appropriate) and again as an adult, which is when I thought, Wait a second—I cry sometimes when leaves fall. I’ve also been known to get a little teary when I see a craggy pebble that looks like a frowning face. I sniffle when I see a skunk in my yard who looks lonely, like it’s dawning on him that all his skunk friends went on an adventure and purposely didn’t tell him where they were going. I laugh, too—like when I see a twig that looks like it’s giving me the finger. I chuckle when I see an ant trying to carry half a Froot Loop.
I like to draw birds and jellyfish and flowers wearing hats, and very often these creatures feel as real to me—and as filled with inner narratives—as people. This is true of me now and it was true of me as a child, when I doodled puppies on every piece of paper I passed. I have always seen animals as characters. The way some people stop at every stroller to coo over a baby, I stopped to pet dogs. I imagined backstories for every canine I met. Seeing a dead dog on the side of the road undid me for days (and still does). I couldn’t turn it off, the imagining, so I’d envision everything that led up to the dog’s tragic quest. What compelled him to go into the street? What was he seeking? Maybe he wandered off in search of a snack. Maybe he was tired of his neglectful family and his concrete kennel. Maybe he just wanted some exercise. Maybe he saw a bird.
As a cartoonist, I use my imagination to bend the light of humanity through the prism of the natural world. A drawing of a penguin who’s mad because the self-tanner she bought doesn’t give her the even bronze glow it promised makes you think, That’s ridiculous. And it’s not ridiculous just because penguins don’t use self-tanner. It’s ridiculous because a tan is a goofy thing to get so angry about. It’s silly when a penguin does it, and it’s just as silly when a person does it. Projecting our foibles onto other creatures helps us get perspective and laugh at ourselves.
I shouldn’t care what the late Nora Ephron would have thought of me. It’s not like we were friends. She was old enough to be my mother, but she was not my mother—or my aunt or my cousin or anyone with any connection to me. But we people-pleasers want to be liked, even by people we’ve never met, especially by people we admire. How many times have I seen When Harry Met Sally? More than I could ever remember or count. Oh, how I marveled at the words Nora Ephron put into Meg Ryan’s and Billy Crystal’s mouths. What a genius she was. I wish she were still alive, so I could explain to her how much I loved her work and also how wrong she was about this one thing.
* * *
The other day I watched a video of a helicopter rescuing a cow in Italy. The cow had gotten stuck in a ravine and she—he? I can’t call animals “it”—couldn’t scale the walls to get out. Of course she couldn’t. She’s a cow. Cows can’t climb. But do they know they can’t climb? Did that cow panic? A veterinarian friend of mine says animals don’t dwell on the past and future. They live in the moment. This is why it’s so kind and responsible to put a dog to sleep when it’s in pain from a terminal illness. The dog doesn’t think, I want to stay alive long enough to see the snow fall one more time. The dog just feels that his legs hurt, that he cannot get up onto his favorite chair, that he is vomiting again. That cow wasn’t thinking ahead to her demise and worrying about whether her family would miss her, nor did memories from her calf-hood flash before her eyes. She just knew she was stuck.
After the rescuers hitched her into the harness and took off in the helicopter, what must have gone through her mind? A cow has no instinctive concept of what a helicopter is. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? she must have thought, as the propeller chopped through the air. I can only imagine what the cow made of flight, as her feet left the ground and her view of the familiar meadow tilted and widened.
We all know animals have emotions and personalities. There’s plenty of science to back that up, not to mention anecdotal evidence all around us. There’s a squirrel in my yard who shoves all the other squirrels out of the way at the bird feeder. He’s a bully. Dogs and cats and other animals can have anxiety, depression, even OCD. Just ask my yellow mutt, Woodstock, who can’t sit down until he turns around forty-five times and who, once he sits down, licks his own paws until one of us places a hand on his head and says, “Enough.”
* * *
In his book The Inner Lives of Animals: Love, Grief, and Compassion, the German forest ranger Peter Wohlleben proves himself to be a kindred spirit. He believes animals have souls. Not just the animals with cute, furry faces, like deer and goats, but the less cuddly ones, too: ravens, caterpillars, and ticks. I found it a compelling read, but anyone who finds it a bit twee would probably raise their eyebrows even higher at his prior book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. In that one, Wohlleben envisions trees in a forest as “friends” and “families” who share root systems and adjust their branches to make sure their neighbors are getting plenty of sunlight. He posits that trees can get scared and have memories and that they talk to one another through electric signals sent via the “Wood Wide Web.”
It’s an anthropomorphized view, certainly, but everything he describes has at least some basis in scientific fact. Acacia trees, for example, warn other nearby trees when grazing giraffes come around. The trees give off a gas that other trees can sense, prompting those trees to produce a substance in their leaves that makes them less desirable to snacking wildlife. Perhaps it’s a stretch to say that this is proof that trees feel fear. But Wohlleben writes that when he speaks of trees in this way, people’s eyes light up. He has translated the nonhuman parts of our environment into terms humans relate to, by making those things seem more like humans themselves.
Talking about animals and plants this way makes us feel less alone as living creatures, too. It’s soothing, isn’t it, to think of trees loving their parents, caring for their neighbors, and raising their babies? We all want the same things: to survive, to grow, not to be left behind.
I know I’m not the only one who thinks like this. If I were, animal videos wouldn’t go viral like they do. At the time of this writing, Batzilla the Bat, the Facebook page of a bat sanctuary in Australia—where I have never been but whose online presence I follow religiously—has nearly three hundred thousand followers. These people, including me, follow along to find out who’s new in the sanctuary and how they’re doing. The people who run the Facebook page give all the bats names and stories:
“Rescued a couple of weeks ago after being found flapping around in the middle of the road, Mr. Parfrey was in deep trouble, but following bed rest and time in care, he was joyfully released back to his home camp this afternoon.”
When I watch a video of a baby bat being swaddled in a washcloth or having his face wiped down with a Q-tip, it is not because I want to be wrapped in a washcloth and have my face swabbed down (whoa, claustrophobia), but because I feel for that bat. He is not alone, and I am not alone. There’s comfort in that
.
When I get lost in the imagined thoughts of a cow flying over a ravine, I am taking that comfort: Look, we all get scared. We all look around at the world these days and wonder what the fuck. Just as there are many things about humans that cows cannot understand, such as helicopters and artificial flight, I suspect there’s a lot about their lives that escapes our comprehension as well. We’re all a little confused about each other most of the time. That’s probably why instead of curbing my animal-drawing habit when I grew up, I drew more and more the older I got. Is it weird that a full-grown woman published a whole book of cartoon birds experiencing botched social interactions, existential dread, and petty grievances? Or does it make perfect sense? The latter, I say.
* * *
So yes, ghost of Nora Ephron, when fall comes and the world turns cold and inhospitable, I cry. Because everything in nature decays. And if there’s humanity in nature, well then, there’s nature in humanity as well. If everything dies, then everyone dies, and that means my family and my friends and me, and guess who else? Nora Ephron, that’s who. You’re not even here to call me an asshole, Nora. We never even met, and now you’re gone. Just like the leaves in November.
* * *
I think she would have understood, I really do.
This Is Not My Cat
“Come out slowly and show yourself,” I said into the darkness. I crouched on the floor, holding up the white cotton dust ruffle with one hand and squinting into the dark cavern under the bed. My nostrils and lungs registered the presence of fur, but my eyes detected nothing. The black cat, hiding motionless, did not want to be found, but it was my job to feed him. I needed him to give up his antisocial ways and accept a dish of Fancy Feast, but I also didn’t want him to come bolting out like a hell-monster and scratch off my face. My understanding of feline behavior was founded on very little. I’d been allergic to cats all my life, but I suspected—based on legends, internet memes, and that one pesky neighbor years ago—that all cats were pricks.
“Fine, then. I’m going to have some Savory Salmon Feast.” I could wait him out. There was no rush. In the three weeks that lay ahead of me in this house-sitting gig, he’d have to get hungry eventually. I went into the kitchen and surveyed my own stash of groceries, lined up on the butcher-block counter: a can of almonds, a bunch of bananas, two cases of lemon-flavored fizzy water, a bag of Mint Milano cookies, a box of Triscuits, and a tub of pimiento cheese. All the food groups, plus a bottle of anti-depressants and some Claritin for the cat allergies.
I don’t cook when I’m on my own. I graze. It’s one of the small measures of tenderness I grant myself, the removal of all pressure to feed and water fellow humans. The only creature other than myself I had to keep alive that summer was the cat. He came with the house.
* * *
To let the cat know I was still around, I took a stroll through this home that wasn’t mine. There was a portrait of a young woman I’d never met, her dark hair falling over the lace neckline of a white dress. There was that woman’s bedroom. The sunroom. A little wooden deck. A row of plants I was expected to hose down periodically so their leaves wouldn’t scorch in the July sun.
I stood on the deck and pulled up a map on my phone to get a better feel for where I was in relation to the rest of the city. I visually connected the dots between the house and the grocery store, the lake with a hiking trail, the few other places I knew to look for here in Nashville, the town in which I had been born but where I had not lived since I was a toddler, a place 250 miles from the city where my house, my spouse, my children, my obligations and responsibilities, were rooted.
* * *
It felt like fate that I’d ended up here. A few weeks after the conversation about how to live von Furstenberg style, I had come up with another idea—a version of “away” that made a bit more sense. I floated the idea past John over dinner one night: “What if I went somewhere by myself, just temporarily, while the kids are at camp this summer? Somewhere I could, I don’t know, rest my brain.” That, we could figure out.
It was only days later that I heard from one of my best friends, who lives in Nashville. She told me about her friend, who was in a tough spot. Her friend, like me, needed some time away. She’d been through a divorce, the deaths of both her parents, and a hell year at work. Her boss was insisting she take advantage of her backlogged vacation time, and she’d found a place to stay at the beach for a few weeks, but she couldn’t take the cat, and she didn’t have the funds to afford a house sitter or boarding fees.
That’s how I ended up with a free place to stay and a job feeding a cat named Winston.
In the journal I kept during those weeks, Winston makes frequent appearances.
DAY 3: Winston walked into kitchen when I started the can opener. Ate his food and ran back out.
DAY 4: Who came up with the concept of a litter box? Why did other people adopt it? Why didn’t everyone look at that person and say, “That’s a terrible idea, Mike”?
DAY 6: I am on the sofa and Winston is on the floor and he’s staring at me. I just thought, My cat is trying to tell me something, and at first I freaked out because I didn’t know how I’d figure out what he’s trying to say. But this is not my cat! I don’t need to learn his language. We can exist here for a little while without understanding each other. Everything in his house will go back to normal soon. This is just a pause. I just said “pause” out loud to the cat. What if he thinks I said “paws”?
Other prevalent themes in my journal included my daily physical activity (“Hiked around Radnor Lake for 30 minutes”) and errands (“Found my way to Walgreens and got paper towels”). I was very good at recording my comings and goings, which were few.
I wasn’t entirely alone during my alone time. My old friend lived nearby in the same part of Nashville, and she came over a couple of times a week for coffee. I was acquainted with a few of her book club buddies, who welcomed me as well. I enjoyed the occasional lunch or dinner with these people, but mostly I went on walks by myself or stayed in the little house, with the invisible cat, moving from chair to sofa to deck steps to chair. I did enough editing work to keep my clients satisfied, sending someone a document or two every few days; but as usual for the summer, the workload was light. I didn’t need to check email very often.
It was a vacation of sorts from my regular life. But one of the reasons I kept to myself so much was that I didn’t want it to feel too much like a vacation. I wasn’t there to have a good time and paint the town. I was there to experience aloneness, to see if getting what I needed would make me feel better. Sometimes a change of scenery had helped me see myself as a new character; sometimes it hadn’t. I didn’t know whether this time would work, whether fresh surroundings would help me reset my mental health.
I talked to John once a day by phone. “What are you thinking about?” he’d ask.
“Nothing,” I’d say. I wasn’t deflecting. It wasn’t like when you ask your child what they did at school and they say “Nothing,” even though they did a lot of somethings. I was truly focused on having as little as possible to think about. I was tired of thinking. I wanted to purge the running commentary inside my own head: You are broken. Something is wrong with you. You can’t succeed at the life you are living. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?
Later, I would realize that I had been doing a lot of meditating, although I didn’t fully understand what meditating was at the time and wouldn’t have called it that. I just knew that whenever a thought entered my head, I ushered it back out, protecting the emptiness. I craved nothingness—no agenda, no chatter. Just blessed silence.
I used to make fun of women who ran off to yoga retreats to find themselves. Not being a yoga person myself, I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why stretching was somehow a transformative experience. (I’m sorry, I know there is so much more to yoga than stretching, but that’s what it looks like to me.) I once joked to a friend that Lululemon should come out with a line of midlife-crisis pants and findi
ng-yourself bras. They’d sell like crazy.
But I get it now. It must be the meditative aspect of yoga that makes it such a draw for people whose minds are crowded with anxious voices. It must be the stillness. The permission to disengage.
I wanted to be quiet and small.
DAY 9: Found a recipe card in a kitchen drawer for “hot buttered crackers,” which calls for tossing saltines in butter and dry salad dressing mix and putting them under the broiler. Why does this require a recipe? Is it gross?
DAY 11: Winston sat in a chair next to my chair while I drank tea. Maybe in cat-world, we are friends now. Made hot buttered crackers.
DAY 12: Hot buttered crackers should be called hot buttered crack.
Mostly, when I felt the need to engage with something, I read. I’d packed a box of books I’d gotten behind on—novels I’d bought but never started, self-help books with inspirational titles like Daring Greatly, books about business and technology and science and nature and all sorts of things I wondered about and felt the need to have answers to. Because I was doing so little else, I ran through the books more quickly than I’d expected.
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