The Random Cat Principle

Not long ago, a friend of mine sought advice on Facebook.  Should he adopt a promising-sounding young cat that was listed at the local animal shelter?

Go for it, his many kind-hearted friends advised him.  Adopt the cat!

Some of us – I’ll call us the advocates of the Random Cat Principle -- went one step further.  If that particular cat has already found a home, we advised, adopt whatever cat is there -- any cat at all. 

The Random Cat Principle got me thinking -- and ultimately set me to writing a blog post that is sneakily more about people than it is about pets. 

But first, cats.

Four years ago, a few months after our beloved Pippin died at the age of nineteen, the twins convinced us to head to the shelter as a family to get another cat.  They’d already picked out a name, Sinbad, based on a cat-character in a favorite novel.  As it turned out, there was only one cat at the Fairbanks North Star Borough Animal Shelter that morning.  Thus, she became our cat.  That was the entire equation for the application of the Random Cat Principle: here is a cat, she needs love, we want a cat to love – therefore, she is Sinbad, and we love her.  Four years later, that love has never fallen into any doubt.

What’s interesting about this anecdote is not that it’s unusual, but that it isn’t.

Love. Between one human and another, that word has a lot of blurred-yet-weighty meanings that include not only enjoying and appreciating someone’s particular qualities, but also genetics, guilt-trips, candlelit dinners, callipygian tendencies, dependence, hero-worship, obsession, country songs, and cringy rom-coms.  Sometimes we talk about love as if it were an emotion over which we have no control, as in “falling in love”. In other contexts, it’s an emotion we assign based on objective merit, as in, “My friend always brings pizza; I totally love him!” 

Loving a pet is easier to parse. I am not genetically related to Sinbad, except in the sense that I am also genetically related to chimpanzees, weevils, and bananas.  My obligations are entirely chosen, and she (being a cat) feels none.  I do not worship her, and she (being a cat) does not worship me.  I am happy to report that our connection does not involve romance or lust.  I appreciate many of Sinbad’s particular qualities (she’s curious, fuzzy, and affectionate) and she seems to enjoy some of mine (I’m playful, cuddly, and am willing to open and close doors a lot).  Yes, it now seems to me that she is a superlative cat.  But I’ve found likeable qualities in every cat I’ve ever lived with -- and every dog, and every orphaned squirrel.  My statistical heart knows that this is not Lake Woebegone, where all the critters are above average.  I see everything that is wonderful about Sinbad because I love her, rather than the other way around.

People are more complicated than cats.  There’s nothing wrong with that; I enjoy having a brain that’s weightier than a AA battery.  As such, we humans reserve the right to select our friends – people who are intelligent, kind, generous, quick-witted, empathetic, supportive, funny, creative, energetic, thoughtful, wise, or good at making vegetarian burritos. All that choice is empowering, but it can also be confusing and worrisome.  If we love others for their desirable qualities, are we merely being self-serving?  If others love us for our homologous paternal chromosomes, our excellent knock-knock jokes, or our sculpted thighs, is that love transactional and impermanent? Forced and coerced?

The Random Cat Principle reassures us that love is something we choose to do.  It’s something we undertake and create. Yes, we often (but not always) choose whom to love in a non-random way, but ultimately love is something we can build and rebuild, using magical fairy dust made from time, neural connections, and free will.  Love is a superpower

Superpowers don’t come cheap.  As a never-ending act of doing, creating, and rebuilding, love is the most expensive undertaking of our lives.  It comes with huge unavoidable risks. Sometimes love is not reciprocated.  Sometimes it needs to be ended, and sometimes it ends too soon.  To love someone –  even somecat -- is to set yourself up for work, frustration, disappointment, and devastation.  We suffer and ruminate over our failures and losses, but we rarely give ourselves enough credit for our successes, our ability to discover and nourish the good in others, our astonishing acts of creation.  We rarely give ourselves credit for the quirky beauty of the Random Cat Principle.

My friend went to the shelter.  The young cat he’d had in mind had already been adopted by someone else.  A different cat was there -- an older black cat of entirely unknown qualities.  A cat that needed a home.

My friend now has a cat, and the cat has him, and they love one another.

 

 

Words, words, words

 

How does one summarize a life? Places traveled, words spoken, tasks completed, people touched?  What is the sum of thirty thousand, two hundred and fifty-six days?

Many people knew Janet Fresco as the head clerk at a public library in a mid-size suburban town – the library lady with the practical skirts and cardigans, the bun, the friendly laugh, and the soft British accent.  They knew her as a woman in motion – a busy wife and mother of two, and later a grandmother of four.  They knew her as a walker, striding along the sidewalks or trails.  They might have known that she sewed all those practical skirts herself, knitted the sweaters, grew a garden, and turned her capable hands to carpentry to build more shelves for all those books. 

They might not have known that she spoke French and Turkish, and worked encrypting and decrypting encoded diplomatic mail for the British embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, during the tumultuous rise of the Khmer Rouge in the 1960s. 

My mother was a more complex and interesting person than I knew or understood when I was a kid.  But then, isn’t that always the case?

Mom (ahem, Mum) – Janet Malyon -- was born in southern England in April 1939, four months before Germany invaded Poland and Britain entered the Second World War.  Her earliest memories were a blend of warm family harmony -- her loving parents, big brother John, and friends Margaret and Angela – and the daily realities of wartime.  She remembered hearing the unmanned bombers and the air-raid sirens; hiding under the table and in bomb shelters; collecting interesting shrapnel from downed planes; carrying a gas mask and counting ration coupons.  Her father, an engineer, worked on the frenzied and crucial race to develop effective radar.  Her mother planted a garden large enough to be a farm, raised chickens in their suburban yard, and traded birds with the neighbors to avoid trauma when it came time to eat them.  The kids collected rosehips for the vitamin C.  The war ended when Mom was six, but food was rationed in Britain until she was 15.

My mother was someone who understood that Nazis have to be fought; knew the value of peace; and didn’t like waste.

Mom loved books from the time she was tiny, and ambitiously started writing her own when she was nine.  She easily passed the “eleven plus” exam and went on to the academic grammar school in Tunbridge.  She excelled there, passing a heap of A-level exams, but when the time came to choose her path forward, university held little appeal.  Her only educated female role models were unmarried teachers and nurses.  The world as she knew it had not yet grown to include women with education, careers, and families.  The world as she knew it boxed her in.

Plenty of people who knew Mom in later years assumed that she was a librarian, because she was so erudite, intellectual, and well-read, someone who not only worked with books, but loved them, too – not just Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, but a full range from pot-boilers and romances to new classics and old.  But she never went to college; she had no library degree.

Instead, Mom took a secretarial course, learned to type and take shorthand at a blistering pace, and worked in London for a short time.  But her feet itched for adventure, so at 19 or 20 she took a job with Nestle in Switzerland, perfecting her French and doing a bit of light Alpine hiking on the side.  Around this time, her father suffered a very early heart attack, and died.  She didn’t talk about him often, but she missed him for the rest of her life.

After this taste of adventure, Mom launched herself further, signing on as a secretary for the British Foreign Service.  That’s how she ended up in Cambodia when she was still in her early twenties.  She served there for three years.  The Vietnam War was raging.  The entire region was unstable. When the embassy was attacked, she and the head diplomat were briefly the only ones who stayed. 

Back in London at last, Mom briefly worked for the local embassy offices on a collaborative project with the French – an agreement that, years later, resulted in the construction of the Channel Tunnel.

Mom was next offered a posting to a tiny consulate somewhere in Africa – Angola, was it?  She turned it down on the grounds that she wanted a larger city and a busier social scene.  Mom wanted to go to parties with compatriots, to meet people, to dance. She had, after all, given up on the idea of university because she wanted to marry.  She wanted a family.  And, now in her mid-twenties, she was practically an old maid by the standards of the time.  She was sent to a slightly larger consulate in Turkey instead.  She worked there for three years.

Four days short of turning 28, Mom met an American diplomat named Bob Fresco.  It was his 25^th birthday.  A year later, they married.  Mom was required to give up her career immediately, due to some combination of sexism and fears of inter-embassy espionage (I prefer to contemplate the latter).  She did so.  A year after that, still in Turkey, my sister Sarah was born. 

I always thought Sarah’s birthplace was much cooler than mine.  By the time I came along three years later, my family was in Ohio, where my dad was working for the Cincinnati Enquirer.  A year later, he got a job with Long Island Newsday, and we all settled in Huntington, NY. 

Mom didn’t officially have a job during those early years of motherhood, but she was never not working.  She sewed most of her own clothes, and Sarah’s, and mine – using her own invented patterns and an old hand-crank machine that had followed her around the world.  She sold hand-made children’s clothes on consignment to a small boutique in town. She did everything on foot, piling groceries around me in the stroller.  She took her children to the public library so often that by the time I was four, she was recruited: “When Nancy starts kindergarten, would you like a job?”  Yes.  Yes, she would.

Mom’s accent shifted, gradually, as the years passed, but she was always branded as British.  She laughed about the assumptions that this burdened her with – positive stereotypes, but genteel ones.  She laughed about the fact that most Americans couldn’t differentiate a cultured BBC British accent from Cockney or Yorkshire.  She was condemned to being always very slightly foreign in a country that she ultimately made her own, although part of her heart was always in England.  She kept her green card for decades, and when she at last became a US citizen, it was not without regrets.  She had seen enough of the world to know how swaggering and ignorant America can seem.  At the same time, she loved America’s egalitarian ideals and generous landscapes.

No matter their nationality, Mom loved people – her family, her friends, her coworkers and all those library patrons, even when they were at their most maddening.  She could see through the differences, the trappings, the posturing, the biases, and the snobberies, and accept people for who they were. Most of all, Mom loved children.  Even as an old woman, she’d drop to the floor to play with Duplos or invent a magic carpet ride for any three-year-old who needed entertaining. 

While part of me is saddened by the thought that Mom gave up many potential opportunities to become a parent and grandparent, I know that she wouldn’t have altered those choices.  My own existence wasn’t the terminus of adventure; it was, for her, an adventure of its own.

It’s impossible to enumerate everything that Mom shared, gave, and passed on to everyone she touched in this world.  There are people she knew whose names I’ve never heard, or can’t recall.  Her legacy can’t be measured in stacks of old letters, hand-written stories, photos, or the quilts on her grandchildren’s beds. 

I wish Mom hadn’t started to decline mentally six or seven years ago, and that prior to that she wasn’t burdened with caring for Dad during his decline.  I wish they’d both had the chance to travel in retirement, as they always wanted to.  I wish my kids had had the chance to know Mom better, into their big-kid years and adulthood.  I wish she were still as she once was, and still with us.  But I find joy in all the ways in which Mom’s life is inextricably woven into who I am.  We all see ourselves, as we age, becoming our own parents.  Yes, this can be unnerving – but it’s also comforting.

Mom’s literary selections litter my over-burdened hand-built bookshelves.  Our family’s choices for reading aloud – still going strong even in the teen years – have included so many of her favorites (ahem, favourites).  The twins fell in love with the Swallows and Amazons stories early on, and have reread Mom’s battered copies of these 1930s British adventures perhaps even more times than I have.  Our current bedtime story is The Sand Reckoner by Gillian Bradshaw, a novel about young Archimedes of Syracuse, which I read myself years ago, at Mom’s recommendation.  Yesterday, the day Mom died, the kids begged me for extra chapters.  In the past month, I also read aloud A Town Like Alice -- a worn paperback by Nevil Shute, from Mom’s collection; they loved that, too.

Knowing how much Mom loved Shute’s books, I took one of her old copies along when I rushed east last week to pay one final visit.  Mom was no longer able to speak, although she smiled at me, and squeezed my hand, hour upon hour.  I read aloud to her from Pied Piper, a Shute novel about World War Two and an old man who risks himself to save seven small children.  On the book’s inside cover, in an achingly familiar handwriting, it says “Janet Malyon Phnom Penh”.  I showed the inscription to Mom.  She gazed at it for a long time.  She held my hand.

How does one summarize a life? Places traveled, words spoken, tasks completed, people touched?  What is the sum of thirty thousand two hundred and fifty-six days? 

There is no way.  And yet we try.

 

 

You Gave Me Words

You gave me words. You spoke them with the soft, refined vowels and inaudible r’s of Kent, near the English channel.  Up, no, more, eat, drink, sleep.  Baby.  You read aloud Beatrix Potter to the three-year-old at your side to prevent her from being jealous of her new sister.  She wanted to hear Mrs. Tiggywinkle.  Again.  Again. Again. The words flowed over me.  Pinafore, plaited, hedgehog, starch, stout, damask, goffered. 

You lose words, now.  Over the phone, your words wobble and falter.  This place where I am… your place, where you live… Four thousand miles away, I gently find the words you once gave me.  I pass them back to you.  Massachusetts.  Alaska.

You gave me whole sentences.  When I left your side to enter school, my sentences were so much yours that I spoke them in your voice, a little British child in New York.  I can already read.  I read my books in the rotunda while the other kindergartners are learning phonics.  I shed the accent, but I still sat in the rotunda with my books, my words, my sentences.

Now, your sentences sometimes turn on themselves and unravel.  Their endings become unwound from their beginnings.  The edges fray.   It’s like… that author, you know, but nobody reads him the way they used to, I suppose he did go on a bit, paid by the word, but such brilliant characters…  I rebuild sentences for you.  Oh, yes – you always loved Mr. McCawber, Mrs. Malaprop, Mr. Fezziwig.  I rewind the yarn of your thoughts until you catch up the needles again, and find your pattern.  And what about Miss Havisham, forever in her wedding dress?  Two plain, one purl. 

You gave me stories.  I loved the impossible ones: Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Black Riders.  I loved the might-have-been-real stories, too: The Picts and the Martyrs, The Hill War, The Railway Children.  You took me to the library.  Again.  Again.  You spent so much time at the library with your children that the library offered you a job.  You worked at that library for thirty years. You were never a librarian.  You’d never even gone to college.  Everyone thought you had.  You had so many words.

Over the phone, I offer you your stories back.  Remember the Amazon pirates in their red caps?  Faraway Moses?  Wild, Fiona, stalking the Scottish highlands in a beautiful, righteous snit with her brother Ninian?  Roger sliding downhill in his knickerbockers?  I’ve passed these stories on to your grandchildren, I tell you. The hard-bound editions, dark-green covers discolored by time, are stacked in Molly’s bunk.  Lizzy will use anything as a bookmark.  I hear the smile in your voice.    Nesbit’s time-traveling children have survived the test of time.  The harbour lights are shining on Wildcat Island.

You gave me your own true tales, the wispy-distant ones you could barely remember even before the sands began to shift.  You hid under the table, listening to the doodle-bombs overhead.  If the engine of the unmanned planes cut out, it meant they’d run out of fuel.  If the engines died, the bombs would fall.  They fell somewhere.  Not on you, though – not on you. There were ration cards and victory gardens.  The beaches were covered with barbed wire.   There were no oranges. 

I pass your childhood back to you, and you reweave it with me, joyfully.  You picked berries and rosehips in the hedgerows.  When you were naughty, you threw partially dried cow pies. You do not question the paradox, the intrinsic anachronism of my recalling a time a quarter century before myself.  Your big brother John and his friends collected fascinating bits of broken planes from the hills.  John is gone now.  John let you play too, even though you were little. Your daddy had a job that was secret, but special.  He was allowed a petrol ration.  Later, you learned that he helped develop radar.  His name was James.  He was quiet and gentle, brilliant and kind.  He died when you were still a teenager.  I never met him, but you gave him to me.  I give him back.  James.  Daddy.

You gave me the stories you wrote yourself, as an earnest nine-year-old sitting down with pen and ink and a blank notebook.  Margaret wrote stories, too.  She lived just down the road. The four volumes are perfect in their utterly precocious imperfections. You penned highly derivative British boarding school books -- fan-fiction for a genre that was already a parody of itself, from fifty years before Harry Potter.  Angela did the illustrations for both of you. 

When your granddaughters reached the age you were when you began your first ambitious opus, I read aloud all four of the volumes you produced before puberty.  Angela grew up to be a real artist.  I cannot draw nearly as well as your friend could when she was not yet ten.  You named your fictional boarding school Saint Margaret’s.  I tell you about Lizzy’s writing.  I tell you that she asks me, anxiously, if her highly derivative cat-warrior fan-fiction is as good as your books.  Your young heroines discovered a Nazi hideout in a cave.  Lizzy’s fearless cats find and raise an orphaned puppy, and win a war against a rival clan.

You gave me your adventures, from that mysterious grown-up-but-before-I-was-born time.  They were rich and improbable, historical, other-worldly.  All those A-level exams, but you saw no point in University.  You didn’t want to be a spinster teacher or a spinster nurse.  You learned to touch-type more than sixty words a minute.  On a manual typewriter.  You were fluent in French.  You worked in Switzerland.  You joined the Foreign Service as a secretary, but before long you were in Cambodia transporting secret mail bags and translating codes. Sihanouk was in power.  The Vietnam War was raging. The Khmer Rouge were rising.  Your embassy was sacked.  Almost everyone fled.  You stayed.  And after that, after three years of that, you were immediately posted to Turkey.

No, you tell me, they didn’t send me right away.  I had a bit of time in London.  A few months.  A summer.  I helped with… that tunnel.  You know.  The Channel Tunnel?  The tunnel to France?  But that wasn’t built until years later, I don’t think?  Wouldn’t this have been the mid-sixties?  Yes, yes the tunnel… there were just two chaps, and me.  They were working on getting that agreed, all worked out.  I carried all sorts of papers back and forth for them, to the French, at their, their… the French Embassy, in London?  Yes, the French. 

I Google it later.  The Chunnel didn’t open until 1994, but England and France officially agreed to build the tunnel in 1964, and carried out the initial extensive geological survey.  It was faster than the post, so I offered to carry the papers.  We got it all worked out about the tunnel.  The Channel Tunnel.  I never knew.  You still have stories to give me.  I will tuck that one away and give it back to you, too – next week, next year, whenever you need it.

You gave me my own details, the ones I was too little to remember.  You had an argument on the way to the hospital about what you were going to name the boy you were sure you were going to have.  You would have gotten your way.  I would have been James.  Like your father.  The engineer I never knew.  He was a lot like me.

The details snarl and snag, so I untangle them for you.  Remember the trip we took in the Rocky Mountains?  I was three months old. I had no words then.  But you granted them to me later, more vibrant than all the dusty carousels of slides.   A tour bus pulled in right next to your Volkswagen Beetle and its occupants stared down as you tried to nurse me discreetly. In 1972, breast-feeding was not in vogue.  I was eighteen months old when you took me in for testing on my blind eye, to see if anything could be done to repair it.  I had to be lightly anesthetized, and I developed acute separation anxiety for a while afterward.  You’re sorry, you say.  The eye was useless anyhow.  I got over it, I tell you. 

But, you say, your voice a four-thousand-mile, forty-seven-year echo, you still worry.  You still worry about my having only the one eye.  You always have.  I remember.  We remember. We remember that you always worried.

I’ve done just fine without that eye, I tell you.  Pretty well, in fact.  I laugh.

Yes, you say, laughing with me, winding forward, fast-forward across the blurring calendar of years, I guess you have done pretty well. 

Your voice still sounds like Kent.  Like the English Channel. 

You give me words: I love you.

I give them back: I love you, too, Mum.