The Dark Side

“Look Mama, it’s a waxing gibbous!”  One small mitten was pointing skyward.

“Oooh, yeah!”  My two daughters had both stopped in their tracks directly in front of me – presumably because the neurons needed for walking, talking, and looking at celestial objects are wired in series rather than in parallel in their brains. “I can see the shadows -- where the long-ago meteors hit it!” 

The kindergarten astronomers were entranced.  It’s the moon!  It’s in the sky!  It’s shining!  Clearly this merited some kind of public service announcement, at the very least.

I tried to share their enthusiasm.  But we’d seen the moon the previous morning on the way to school.  We would see it again tomorrow.  I was concentrating on keeping my footing on our narrow, winding, snow-covered boardwalk while hauling a sled full of groceries.  My headlamp kept slipping down and illuminating random clumps of snow-covered shrubbery.  If we didn’t get moving, the lettuce would freeze into a state of irredeemable black nastiness.  Besides, I was feeling distinctly ambivalent about the giant ball of rock that orbits the earth.  When the moon takes center stage in the afternoon sky in Fairbanks, it means that the sun has headed off towards the Tropic of Capricorn for a vacation.  A long vacation.  That pale celestial orb is the Harbinger of Gloom.  She’s the Queen of Darkness.  She’s the Seasonal Affective Satellite.

I never used to have anything against the moon.  In fact, during the nerdy-science-fiction and wannabe-astrophysicist phase of my life (roughly encompassing everything from age five onwards) I learned an egregious amount of trivia about not only our own moon, but also more esoteric satellites such as Ganymede, Titan, Phobos, and Charon.  Other planets have hordes of little followers.  We have just one, but she’s special.  For a planet Earth’s size, Luna is enormous, practically a sister-planet, which is why she wreaks all kinds of interesting tidal havoc on our world.  Contrary to popular belief, the moon doesn’t have a dark side – at least not a permanent one.  She always shows us the same face, but the phases we see, from new to full and back again, are the month-long lunar day.  Even though our moon’s surface is actually as dark as coal, she reflects an appreciable amount of sunlight – a.k.a. moonlight -- to Earth’s surface.

Enough light, perhaps, to allow a bumbling human to haul groceries along a boardwalk. I gave up on my headlamp, and turned it off.  Minus its distracting flicker, the waxing gibbous seemed even larger, brighter, and more in command of the firmament.  She cast cool shadows across the snow.  The spruce trees were gray against the sky.

“Will it be a full moon tomorrow, Mommy?”

“Um… probably the day after tomorrow,” I hazarded, switching hands on the sled’s narrow tow-rope. 

When I was a kid, I noticed the moon too, but I could never keep track of its phases, and I never thought of it as a source of light.  It also never struck me as being a depressing sun-substitute. The moon decorated the sky, but didn’t illuminate the ground.  That job was already more than covered by the omnipresent street lamps, headlights, and chain-store-neon, as well as the amorphous yet ubiquitous combined glow of Bos-NY-Wash.  I looked at books that showed me which constellations ought to be in the sky.  I remember finding the faint outline of the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia, and then giving up in disappointment.  In the suburbs of New York City, it doesn’t get dark. Not really dark.  Not ever.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager camping in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton Wilderness that I found a sky that looked like a planetarium,  If the moon was full, it felt bright enough to read by (teenagers have good eyes).  At the new moon, it was dark enough to walk straight into the privy pit or the side of a moose.  This was the moon that humanity has obsessed about for the past couple of hundred thousand years. 

Throughout history, the moon has sparked imaginative beliefs, quaint rituals, and a plethora of paranoid and illogical behavior.  Worldwide, we’ve created enough legends about the moon to stuff a library, and enough lunar gods to satisfy the most ardent pantheist.  Artemis, Thoth, Hecate, Chandra, Tarqiup Inua, Luna…  Not everyone agrees what the moon-god’s gender is, although I seem to have been brainwashed by Greco-Roman cultural imperialism in my bias toward “she.” There’s also disagreement as to what awe-inspiring powers he/she/it has, but there are some common threads.  The moon is potent, and mysterious, and might make you a little unbalanced. In fact, it might turn you into a werewolf, a vampire, or – eponymously – a lunatic.  Everyone also seems to agree that the moon is the opposite of the sun – and that the two of them don’t always get along too well.  In November in Fairbanks, this kind of mythology makes perfect sense to me.

Don’t be ridiculous, says my scientist-self.  Cosmically speaking, a G2V yellow dwarf star is no more the opposite of a rocky planetary satellite than a jet engine is the opposite of a piece of belly-button lint.  Sure, ancient people were understandably misled about the whole equal-and-opposite thing, because by strange coincidence, the moon appears to be almost exactly the same size as the sun. This only goes to show that binocular depth perception isn’t worth much at astronomical distances – although it also means that solar eclipses are really cool.  Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of the moon as a winter-time booby-prize as our daylight dwindles.

“Are there any people on the moon right now, Mommy?”

“How come there’s no air there?”

“How did the astronauts breathe?”

“Are air tanks heavy?”

“Why is everything lighter on the moon?”

The kids have lots of questions, but they don’t ask why people went to the moon.  Neither did I, as a kid. I remember being sadly let down when I finally realized, as a much-older child, that NASA astronauts were goaded moonward in the 1960s not just by the wonderful tempting proximity of that bone-dry cratered surface, but also by America’s peculiarly immature competition with the USSR. 

And somehow, it’s the memory of that disappointment, coupled with my own kids’ eagerness, that finally sets me straight.  I knew, once upon a time, that the moon is wonderful in its own right, without comparison, and without a hidden agenda.  When my younger self saw the shadow of our national hubris on the moon, it made me squirm.  Now, when I see my former enthusiasm in a couple of new-millennium kindergarteners, I suddenly notice how irritatingly negative I’m being.  I’m failing to appreciate the subtle-yet-serviceable light on offer, because I’m too busy resenting the fierce glow that is absent. Kids provide a fantastic – and often uncomfortably acute – means of self-examination.  They are merciless mirrors.

The moon is a mirror, too.  For millennia, it has mirrored humanity’s fears about darkness and the unknown, and our dreams about magic and eternal rebirth.  It mirrors our desire to divide everything neatly into black and white, day and night, right and wrong, yin and yang.  And, in the simplest and most literal sense, it mirrors the sun’s rays. 

Far from stealing my sunshine, as I stood there in the snow with my groceries and my grouchy mood, Luna was giving a little sliver of it back to me.   Somewhere, on the other side of the world the sun was blazing.  In South Africa, maybe, or India, someone was catching its full glare.  But here in Fairbanks, we were being treated to a magic trick of sorts.  A trace of sun was being conjured out of space, and donated to us here on the dark side.  It wasn’t much, perhaps, but it was enough to guide a sled, and cast a shadow, and see two kids’ grins.  And like many good magic tricks, it was all done with mirrors. 

Luna is waning now.  I already miss her.  In her absence, I have to recharge my headlamp batteries more often.  I need to take a light with me every time I wander out to the outhouse or check on the dogs.  Without her, I have no shadow.  But here in Fairbanks, a single month represents only a small portion of winter.  Before we hit the very darkest of dark days, the moon will be back.

Boo!

The Big Bad Wolf raced after the Wicked Witch, oblivious to the fact that the unicorn was lagging.  The ladybug was swaddled in so many insulating layers that she was sweating profusely on this five-degree-Fahrenheit night.  The mouse, incandescent with joy, had long since stopped caring whether her tail was dragging in the snow. And the 35-pound grizzly bear kept hopping about erratically, shrieking, “Trick or Treat!  Trick or Treat!” to no one in particular.

I love Halloween.

Logically speaking, that should be a sarcastic comment.  This year Halloween was a Monday night.  A week’s worth of unfinished chores and unanswered emails haunted my subconscious.  Nonetheless, I didn’t do a single load of laundry or open the eighteen-page spreadsheet that was festering on my hard drive.  Instead, I spent the evening lurking in the icy darkness with four other parents, a jester’s hat pulled down over my ears.  My job was to hand out glow-sticks and blinkers, haul around the spare clothes, marshal everyone out of harm’s way every time a car crept past, and say fifteen times, “Don’t forget to say thank you!”  The mouse and the bear – my own little beasts -- were filling bags with atrocious foodstuffs at an alarming rate, while cavorting with gleeful greed.  Halloween, after all, is basically a festival of sugar and death, with some mischief thrown in for good measure.  I ought to hate this annual ritual.  But somehow I adore it.

“Just take one!  One!” 

There’s always a house or two where the owners leave out a bowl of goodies, and trust to social graces and good manners – something that can be in scant supply on October 31^st. Maybe I like the holiday for its sheer perversity.  As parents, we all try to teach our kids a few basic social rules.  For example, pajamas and a tutu do not constitute formalwear; begging is never acceptable; talking to strangers is dangerous; and Laffy Taffy is not packed with essential vitamins and minerals.  Then, once a year, we let them dress in gauze, tinsel, face paint, and cardboard boxes, give them each a sack, and set them loose on the neighbors.  The irony is almost as delicious as the mini-Snickers.

“Wait for the unicorn!  She’s only three.  She can’t keep up!” 

She’s trying to, though – and I empathize, because I can remember being a three-year-old. I was convinced that wearing a white pillowcase over my head transformed me into a scary ghost. I was suitably irritated that all my grandmother’s friends wanted me to take it off so they could tell me how cute I was.  This year’s assorted menagerie, with the witch as their mentor, took themselves pretty seriously, too -- despite looking like a waddling brigade of stuffed toys.

My kids adore plush animals so much that they’ve overwhelmed a closet with their collection -- so their costume choices were no surprise.  In fact, they seemed to think the highlight of the evening was visiting the home of the school nurse, because she and her family gave out toys instead of Instant Tooth Decay.  The bear adored the tiny fox.  The mouse was in love with the bunny.  Species confusion abounded in this universe.

Even if she’s not a big fan of candy, the nurse – my friend Sharon -- wholeheartedly supports the creative aspect of this festival, and I have to agree.  By the time I was six or seven, Halloween became a great excuse for ludicrously ambitious craft projects.  The year I was Robin Hood, I wanted to make a bow and arrows that really worked, using only randomly selected bits of wood from our suburban back yard.  When I decided to be a knight, I set out to craft a full set of armor from old cereal boxes coved in aluminum foil.  Now that I have kids, I can leap back into this creative arena.  The mouse and the bear were pretty enthusiastic about costume construction, and harbored an ardent desire to sew on their own ears.  No needle-wounds were inflicted in the process.

“Hey!  You’re stepping on my tail!” 

The mouse made the tail herself.  It’s a trace long.  Her grey fleece footie pajamas had a dump truck on the front, but we hid it with a picture of Swiss Cheese drawn on yellow duct tape.

At the elementary school costume parade, I was a little disheartened by the ubiquitous Batmen, Spidermen, and Disney princesses, all in prefab printed nylon.  Where was the duct tape, the badly-aimed hot glue, the repurposed cartons?  But even if the artistry left something to be desired, I was soon suckered in by the enthusiasm.  Every little Batman exclaimed in excitement over every other little Batman.  No sugar had yet been consumed.  These kids were rocketing along on the mere anticipation of sugar.

I didn’t blame them.  Because, whatever its drawbacks, Halloween is undeniably fun.

Maybe I like Halloween because it doesn’t try to have any purpose besides entertainment.  On Halloween, I don’t feel bad about borrowing festivities from a religion to which I don’t belong, and I don’t feel guilt-tripped by hearts and flowers, fatherly neckties, flags, monuments, or rewritten bits of history.  I am not supposed to think deep thoughts or reflect on my failings.  I’m just supposed to be silly and eat candy.  Even on a bad day, I can usually manage that.  Looking monstrous isn’t too hard either, as several of our neighbors demonstrated.

“Aaaaaaarrrrr!”  The man behind the mask made quite an impression.  In the flickering pumpkin-light, it took me a few moments to realize I knew him, even when he quickly doffed his headgear to avoid psychologically scarring my children.  I often see Tom on his bike, and we recently visited the backwoods cabins he owns at Tolovana Hotsprings, but I never knew exactly which house was his – or that he owned such a remarkable rubber ghoul head. 

Then again, why shouldn’t he?  Halloween also offers the allure of transformation, the chance to change personas for a night, no questions asked – even if it’s been thirty or forty years since you were a kid.  Want to cross-dress?  Dye your hair purple?  Wear fishnets?  Morph into a lime-green Crayola?  Go for it! 

Tom wasn’t the only unexpected friend we found in a circuit of a mere dozen or so houses.  The mouse bounced down the steps of another cabin ecstatically proclaiming that she’d found a classmate there.  It wasn’t particularly surprising, of course.  We were a half mile from home, still in the wedge of Fairbanks that makes up our elementary school’s district.  And yet – it was news to me, too.

And that, I realized, is perhaps the thing I like most of all about Halloween.  It turns every other holiday inside out.  Not that I don’t I love the traditions and festivals that look inward, toward home, hearth, family, and friends.  Generosity and thankfulness are a big part of these, too.  But only on Halloween do we turn outwards so completely.  And when we do, we find goodwill along with the Good-n-Plenty -- not to mention some remarkable amateur performances, free of charge.

As the kids cavorted through the icy darkness, pumpkin after pumpkin grinned at them.  Door after door opened.  There were friends behind those doors, and strangers, and people somewhere in between the two: might-be-friends, and recognizable strangers.  There were people who admired the children’s costumes even as they misidentified them, and people who cooed.  There were people who smiled, and people who mock-terrified.

I was grateful to each of them.  I really earnestly hoped that Mouse and Bear were remembering their thank-yous, because I wasn’t appreciative of those folks just for giving away treats.  I was also thankful to them for showing my kids that the world is full of creativity, humor, kindness, generosity, and surprises -- and that sometimes, taking candy from strangers is exactly the right thing to do.

The Grownups Get the Broken Ones

“But I want a WHOLE cookie!”

My kid’s woebegone plea seemed to voice the opinions of all three five-year-olds.  They trio of them were staring in consternation at the package of Raspberry Chocolate Milanos, as if unable to fathom how the bag might have become just a tad squashed in Jay’s backpack during the eleven-mile journey to Tolovana Hot Springs -- over mountains, ice, and imaginary-troll-infested swamps.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “The grownups get the broken ones.”

My friend Ned, father of one of the small people – the child who sometimes makes my twins look like triplets -- smiled wryly.  “Sounds like the title of a book,” he remarked.

He had a point.  I’d made my crumb-eating promise entirely without thinking about it, but now my words rattled around in my tired brain like the over-delicate confections in the bag I was holding. What I’d said was true enough – I do always get the broken ones.  In the same vein, I give the kids the coveted seats, the softer towels and the warmer blankets.  I’ll eat the peach that requires complex anti-fungal vivisection, while offering my children the ones that look like they came from the Sunnydale Farm of Genetically Engineered Fruit-Spheres.  Where vagaries in quality occur, I routinely take whatever is rustier, damper, squishier, browner, or squeakier.   And yet I’d never really questioned why – or whether it was a good idea.

Am I merely trying to avoid the whining that accompanies childish disappointments?  If so, broken-cookie-consumption qualifies as a form of… spoiling.  Horrors!  Whenever I see parents in Fred Meyers caving to high-pitched nagging for Choco-Breakfast-Yumyums or Super Plastic Action Crapola, I feel smug about my own no-rewards-for-whining policies.  But maybe I need to eat a heaping serving of my own self-righteousness along with those pulverized Milanos.

Then again, the kids don’t seem particularly spoiled – especially not on this trip, I thought, as I started handing out the cookies – the whole cookies – to an appreciate audience of small connoisseurs.  Our two families, plus additional grown-up friends Tom and Amy, had hiked in to this remote cabin at the hot springs.  For the five-year-olds, it was the longest jaunt they’d ever done on their own two feet – and we were expecting them to repeat the accomplishment on the way back out.  To the credit of the young adventurers, the amount of whining on the trail was minimal.  They were too busy playing “eye spy,” carving their names on tree-fungus, asking impossible riddles (“How many roots does that tree have, Daddy?”), and eating vast quantities of snacks.   I munched on whatever was left at the bottom of each Ziploc baggie, and I was rarely allotted a chance to declare that, “I spy something beginning with ‘S’”, but that seemed perfectly normal to all of us. 

Why do I set things up this way?  Even if parent-kid inequality doesn’t constitute spoiling, it’s counter-intuitive that I’m teaching my twins to short-change me when I’m so scrupulous about getting them to be fair with one another.  When they were barely three, they protested when I handed them five picture books to look at while riding in their bike trailer.  “That’s not an even number!  If I get two, she gets three!”  My pride in their math skills surged even as my crabbiness mounted.  I went and grabbed another of Sandra Boyton’s semi-indestructible classics off the shelf.  See?  Everything’s even now.  These days, they can tell me that fifty is half of a hundred.  When the Easter Bunny brought marbles (our bunny is peculiarly sugar-averse) they counted every last one of them.  They know what’s fair.  They know when someone’s getting the short end of the cream-cheese-on-celery-stick.  And they know that, often as not, it’s me.

In fact, the imbalance is so blatant that it’s become a joke. 

“Here’s your share, Mama,” one of the kids will chortle, handing me the trimmed-off edges of an art project or the nibbled-down core of an apple.  Grinning expectantly, she waits for me to feign horror at my pathetic portion.

“What?!”  That’s all I get?”

Giggles.  “Yup, that’s Mama’s share.”

Maybe there’s something wrong with my brain, because I actually find it kind of funny to be ceremoniously handed a used-up roll of duct tape.  Is that a bad sign?  Can someone be diagnosed with a martyr complex solely on the basis of their willingness to eat the tough ends of carrots?  I know self-imposed martyrdom tends to be a female problem – and I’d hate to let my daughter think that I’m sending the message, “Moms don’t deserve the unbroken cookies – or, for that matter, a napkin that hasn’t already been used.”

But no, that idea is just plain silly.  For one thing, the twins are not miniature sultans in an archaic patriarchy.  For another, the grownup male in the household suffers his share of martyrdom, as do other handy role models.  Prior to the dessert course of the aforementioned Milanos, I’d seen Ned scarf down the congealing remnants of tuna and noodles from around the edges of his daughter’s plate.  Tom didn’t bat an eye over the cookie proclamation, even though he a) provided half the cookies, b) is not a parent, and c) takes his dessert-eating very seriously.

Ok, so I’m not spoiling my kids out of laziness and conflict-aversion. I’m not some sort of self-flagellating martyr.  All parents – and even child-free people -- are doing this.   But what, exactly, is it that we’re doing?

And then I recalled what had taken place during our seven hours of hiking – and what, so it happened, would occur again on the way out. 

Eight miles into the venture, when my own kids were not-quite-exhausted, their friend hit a wall.  She collapsed into a sad little heap on the trail, unable to take another step.  When Ned heroically hoisted his little girl onto his own tired shoulders, adding forty pounds to the weight of his backpack, I was worried that the twins would rebel and demand equal treatment from me and Jay. 

They didn’t.  Instead, they understood.  In a bumbling-novice sort of way, they tried to make allowances.

“She’s not as old as we are.  She’s not in kindergarten yet,” they consoled each other, eying their three-months-younger compatriot with kindly (if transparently patronizing) good-humor.  “See how tired she is?”  They tromped their weary little legs on down the trail. 

No doubt a month or two from now, their friend will hand down the same high-minded I’m-so-big attitude toward some hapless four-year-old or cranky toddler.  I don’t always remember to give kids credit for all the simultaneous processing their neurons can manage.  Just as toddlers can happily become bilingual if exposed to two native tongues (monolingualism being an abject failing on my part), they can also learn two overlapping yet distinct moral codes:  be fair… but be magnanimous.  An important lesson is buried in there somewhere: no matter how little you are, there’s always someone out there who’s smaller, weaker, or just more in need of a piggyback ride or a whole cookie.

We teach fairness by example, but we teach generosity the same way.  Hopefully, as those of us over the age of five consumed our slightly sub-par dessert, we were helping to bolster the ethos that kept the marginally older kids moving past mileposts nine and ten.  Fairness is good – but sometimes the right choice is to make oneself content with the metaphorical cookie-crumbs of maturity.

Slightly Askew

 

“What do you mean, the earth is tilted?” 

I could almost hear my interrogator’s annoyance, despite the fact that I was squinting at her words in a chat box.  The question glared at me from my screen, and my heart sank.   This unseen woman was my personal nemesis. Another one who slept through fourth grade earth science.  From here on, the script might as well have been pre-written. I’d try to explain Life, the Universe, and Everything to her in fifty words or less.  I would fail.  And then I’d hate myself for failing.

The problem is, I have a personal delusion: I dream of a realm in which the average American citizen understands and embraces science.  Actually, it’s even worse than that -- I want everyone to like it, too.  In my imagination, cubicle-dwellers, short-order chefs, and CEOs all eagerly test hypotheses on their lunch breaks: what is the relationship between microwave wattage and melted-cheese viscosity?  I picture grizzled fishermen and cheerful grandmas chatting about quasars and nebulae while waiting for packages at the Post Office. In my fantasy world, everyone knows the difference between viruses and bacteria, and anyone could explain why we have leap years.  And then I read an article that brings me back to reality. Almost half of American adults believe that astrology is scientific.  I need to figure out how to stop taking this so personally.

Even though I know it’s hopeless, I still try to make my geek-heaven a reality.  On a daily basis, I attempt to craft lyrical and lucid prose about subjects such as carbon cycles and permafrost thaw.  It’s part of my job, but it’s also part of my psyche.  Even when I’m not at work, my dorkiness oozes out in every direction.  I prattle to my kids about the functions of internal organs – a habit that has interesting results.  At the age of two, Lizzy called plaintively from her crib, “Mommy, my bladder is full!”  Recently, Molly pedantically corrected a kindergarten teacher, “You know, feelings don’t really come from the heart, they come from the brain.”  A few months ago, from the car seat in the back of my vehicle, I heard Lizzy’s instantaneous response to her sister’s challenge to think of a word starting with ‘U’: “Uterus!”  I tell the kids the details of photosynthesis, and the atomic mechanics of solar nuclear fusion.  Sometimes when they ask me a question – will Thomas the Tank Engine sink if I put him in the bathtub? Does Elmer’s Glue work on plastic? Does the cat like oranges? -- I tell them to make a hypothesis, and test it.  I just can’t help myself.  I’m a scientist. 

In fact, at the moment when I was asked to explain the tilt of our planet, I was the Official Scientist.  That is to say, I was sitting at home wearing shorts and a grubby t-shirt, my laptop balanced on my knees, using my pathetically slow typing skills to communicate on-line about the multiple causes of long-term climate variability -- while at the same time assisting in the ambitious Tinkertoy construction being undertaken by the two small individuals on the floor.  Despite my Officialness, I felt that I might be at something of a disadvantage; the woman who was grilling me was in a university computer room, along with a dozen other teachers, all primed to pick my brain, and all presumably wearing shoes and clean clothes.

My actual web-chat theme was how Alaskans can adapt to climate change.  By this I mean climate change caused by humans, including annoyed-naysayer-humans who don’t believe it’s happening, or refuse to think it can possibly be the fault of our spectacularly innocent species, or are convinced it’s all part of some mysterious plot staged by an evil international cabal of atmospheric scientists, computer modelers, and sleep-deprived grad students. Not that I can claim the moral high ground; climate change is caused by Official-Scientist-humans, too, even if they try to duck their guilt by heating the house with little bits of compressed sawdust that look like gerbil food, and biking to work in ice storms. 

But studying climate change isn’t all about feeling guilty and depressed.  It’s fascinating – really, it is. Even Ms Naysayer’s initial line of questioning was an interesting one: How can we claim that humans are changing the climate when it’s been fluctuating for millions of years? I knew that a few minutes of frantic off-the-cuff text was not going to change her mind about the larger issues, but I couldn’t stop myself from trying.  It was a reasonable question.  It was a scientific question, and I was the Official Scientist!  So, I quickly attempted to explain the difference between current rapid human-induced change and various causes of long-term change -- such as minor fluctuations in the angle of the earth on its axis. 

She didn’t buy it.  I kind of expected that.  But she wasn’t questioning the fluctuations.  She was questioning the tilt.  Here was a teacher – a woman certified to pass on her knowledge and expertise to impressionable children -- and she obviously had no idea what causes the seasons, not to mention solstices, equinoxes, and the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer.

It shouldn’t have surprised me.  When the National Science Board polled US adults about their knowledge of science, results showed that many of us have been gleaning our information from news sources such as late-night talk-radio and reality TV.  For example, only fifty-three percent of Americans correctly responded that electrons are smaller than atoms.  This percentage might not seem too bad -- until you take into account that the question was phrased as a true-false choice, meaning that the scores squeaked in a mere three percentage points above blind chance.  Another true-false statement, “Lasers work by focusing sound waves” managed to accrue a majority-wrong quorum.  Oh, and sixty percent of Americans believe in psychic powers. 

But hey, there’s good news!  The New York Times reports that when asked how long it takes the Earth to go around the Sun, the majority of respondents got the answer right, even though the question wasn’t multiple choice!  Unfortunately, by “majority” I mean a skin-of-the-teeth fifty-one percent. Even worse, when I dug into the details, I discovered that this question was only asked of those folks who knew that the earth goes around the sun in the first place.  It seems that one in five American adults haven’t quite caught up with Copernicus and Galileo, and think the sun goes around the earth – and a few wouldn’t even venture a guess as to what goes around what. 

In comparison, the teacher who merely didn’t quite grasp that we’re roughly twenty-three and a half degrees askew on our axis seemed pretty well-informed.  I blundered along with my explanations, mostly punting the basic earth science in order to drag the topic back to the general vicinity of Alaska and the twenty-first century.  I burbled about growing season length (go plant apples!), thermokarst (and then the castle sank into the swamp…) and species shifts (we always knew Canada would invade one day).  I was pretty sure I wasn’t conveying the awesome logical precision and artistry of a well-constructed scientific argument.  I was probably conveying something closer to the artistry of a tangled wad of used dental floss.

Eventually, our time was up.  The session organizer thanked me politely, as did the participants – even Ms Naysayer.  But I couldn’t get over my malaise.  My inner critic was registering another failure.  My dream of sharing my love of science was obviously as hopeless as trying to build a supercollider from cereal boxes and duct tape.  I should just give up.

Down on the floor, the Tinkerytoy brigade saw me set aside my laptop, and immediately perked up.  “Are you all done, Mommy?  Can you play now?”

I sighed.  “Sure.  What would you like to play?”

Lizzy had a gleam in her eye.  “I need a container… and some water… and some dirt…”

I was suspicious.  This was starting to sound messy.  “Yeah?  What do you need it for?”

“Well, Mommy, I need to do a ‘speriment!”

Molly quickly added her support for the proposed endeavor.  “We just need to test something.”

I looked at two grinning faces, full of equal measures of mischief and curiosity.  I thought of the potential research questions.  Efficacy of semi-liquid mud as an adhesive.  Viability of tomato seeds found at the back of a drawer.  Canine hydration preferences: ideal humus concentrations.  Bath-avoidance: a case study.

As I went to find some plastic buckets, I decided that maybe I’m not ready to give up my dream, after all.

Weather or not

 

 “I can’t wait for snow!” 

Jay’s comment, made a few weeks ago while we were stealing a day of partial August sunshine at Chena Lakes, was made with the greatest of goodwill and enthusiasm. 

My response, I am ashamed to say, was not.

After my initial outburst left my husband looking shell-shocked and rightfully annoyed, I stumbled to explain.  “Some of us,” I said, “mourn the end of summer.”

Every year, I fight a mental battle against the fading fireweed and yellowing leaves.  This doesn’t exactly qualify as a unique idiosyncrasy. Fairbanks in August is full of people desperately trying to insulate partially-built houses, persuade tomatoes to ripen before they freeze, and split eight gazillion cords of firewood.  Railing against the onset of fall is so common that it didn’t occur to me that I needed to justify it – until Jay challenged my view of reality.

Winter, my husband maintained – honestly perplexed in the face of my vehement melancholy -- has a lot to offer. There’s so much cross-country skiing and snow-biking to be done!  There are miles of perfect trails right outside our doors.  There are winter races, and trips to remote cabins! 

He’s right, of course.  I enjoy all these things too.  I cast my mind forward to sometime around Valentine’s Day, when rapidly returning sunshine glitters on the snow, the ice park offers small children exhilarating ways to injure themselves, and Jay and I entertain ourselves with hundred-mile ski races and other light frivolity. March in Fairbanks may be one of Alaska’s best kept secrets.  Don’t let anyone know how nice it is, or we’ll be mobbed by tourists.

Other seasons are pretty high on the awesomeness scale, too.  The fantastic March fun lasts well into April.  Hard on its heels, May is like a can of sweetened condensed spring: in the space of 31 days, we go from slush puddles and bare branches to a lush green wonderland liberally splashed with the red-pink of wild roses.  Little reindeer calves stagger about on wobbly legs.  Everyone finds all the possessions they lost under the snow seven months previously.  By the end of the month, it’s summer.

Summers are great here – hot enough for all the hallmarks of the warmest season – sand castles, drippy ice cream cones, free Vitamin D -- but almost never sweaty enough to make me long for air conditioning, ice packs, or a ticket to Antarctica.  Between June and August we get everything we should – shorts, bike rides, lakeshores, butterflies, berry picking – with a few mosquitoes thrown in to remind us that life isn’t perfect. 

So what’s my problem?  What DO I want, climate-wise?   Not, I hasten to add, for the good of the planet.  My official opinion there is that we should stop screwing with the system, pronto, before all the SUV-exhaust and cattle-flatulence turns Earth into Venus’s sorry step-child.  But in the fantasy world inside my own head, in which I have the power to crown myself Grand High Weather Deity (aka Earl), what would the weather look like?

“Look!  The leaves are falling!  That’s why it’s fall!”  The kids are thrilled not only by the fluttering leaves, which they spectacularly fail to catch, but also by their attempt at a pun. I don’t break it to them that this in fact why Americans call the season by that name in the first place.  Fall, autumn – whichever it is, it’s at the height of its splendor.  Yellow birch leaves adorn every hillside, and the willows have turned every Crayola shade between burnt umber, tangerine, and crimson.  The mornings are lightly frosted, but by nine a.m. the sun has burnt away the chill and is promising an afternoon of playgrounds and bike riding.  Perversely, this season whose coming I fought against last month is one of my favorites.  September in Fairbanks is beyond reproach. 

Autumnal grouchiness notwithstanding, I know I don’t really want perpetual July.  Plenty of people yearn for a climate in which halter tops are year-round garb, but I’ve never been one of them.  I spent more than two years living in sunny Jamaica, and I know from experience that unrelenting heat makes me wilt with sweat and boredom.  I missed the sensation of sleeping snuggled under a blanket.  I wanted to eat steaming bowls of soup and drink mugs of cocoa.  I wanted to welcome -- rather than resent -- having a cat curl up in my lap.  I was in a Grinchy mood when I hung baubles on palm trees.  I was perpetually damp and sticky, my skin burned right through the congealing layers of ultra-sunblock, and I longed for a vicious cold snap to kill every creeping, buzzing cockroach and mosquito. 

Cockroaches aren’t a problem in Fairbanks. Winter here starts in October, when the muddy trails freeze firm and the first flying flakes bring back memories of being a kid, Back then, at the first sign of dark gray winter clouds, I’d rush to tap the barometer and comb through the meteorological predictions.  “It’s snowing, it’s snowing!”  Radiators draped with sodden mittens were signs of great joy and contentment.  Even if the grownups felt otherwise, I hated the fact that in the greater New York area, snow turns to brown sludge and disappears within days.  

Fairbanks snow doesn’t disappear.  Here, November and December offer the sort of non-denominational picture-book holiday season that always seemed frustratingly elusive to me as a child.  Sleigh bells?  Sure, just hang some on the dog sled.  Jack Frost?   Yup.  Chestnuts roasting on an open fire?  Maybe a wood stove, but close enough.  White Yuletides are guaranteed.  The winter solstice is imbued with deep meaning to everyone, not just meteorologists and Wiccans.  Our property is almost entirely vegetated by Christmas trees.  My daily commute takes me past enough reindeer for Santa to field a full team, plus substitutes. 

Then the New Year arrives with a thud.  The holidays are over.  It is still woefully cold and dark, and the end is not in sight. In the depths of January, the weather is not just harsh, it’s downright mean.  There’s cold, and there’s nose-hair-crackling cold, and then there’s the sort of cold that makes any inch of exposed flesh try to turn itself inside out.  Last winter, a little boy at the twins’ preschool lost a substantial amount of tongue to the iron railing next to the playground steps.  I always thought this was something that occurred only in fiction, but a long-suffering preschool teacher assured me that in Fairbanks, this sort of thing passes for normal.  She’s thawed dozens of tongues.  Part of my brain, the not-very-nice part, was thinking, “At least it wasn’t my kid.”  Another part, the Eeyore part, was thinking, “See?  This place just isn’t fit for warm-blooded life-forms.”

The problem, I now realize, is not that I don’t appreciate fall, or that I don’t like winter.  The problem is that winter – cozy, snowy, enjoyable season that it is -- is interrupted by another season.  A season of blackness and numbness, of gelling fuel oil, cracking fingertips, and creeping torpor.  A season that steals away time from the other four fabulous quadrants of the year, leaving me with not quite enough beach time, too little photogenic foliage, inadequate bud-bursting springtime, and curtailed sledding.  What I’m dreading is a season called January. 

That day at the beach last month, I told Jay that I mourn the loss of summer because it’s too short, and winter is too long.  I claimed that although I like them both, I wish they were more evenly distributed around the calendar.  Under closer scrutiny, however, I have to admit that this argument is flawed. Winter is not too long.  It’s that other season.  Because, truth be told, January is much too long.  It’s at least thirty-one days too long – and generally more.  The groundhog doesn’t even bother to check for his shadow around here, because he leaves our entire ecosystem to his hardier marmot cousins.  Thus, belying math and logic, January is sometimes up to sixty days too long.

Knowing this doesn’t really change anything, of course, but it does perk me up enough to prevent me from further irritating my spouse. It solves half my problem in a single slice of logic. It’s not January now!  It’s only September, and I love September!  If I behave the way dogs and kids do, living in the moment, I can enjoy all the terrific seasons while they’re happening, without having to mope about what I’m losing or what comes next. 

And when January does arrive, I’m developing a multi-pronged strategy to deal with it, based on well-tested Fairbanks traditions.  The first option involves bundling up myself and my kids in so many clothes that we can be rolled around like beach balls, and pretending that we’re enjoying long jaunts by headlamp.  The second approach is creating an alternate reality in which we hang out in over-heated fluorescent-lit buildings wearing t-shirts and eating ice cream.  The third coping mechanism is boasting.  This involves posting weather reports to Facebook in order to prove that we are suffering more than anyone in Maine or Idaho or Saskatchewan, and are therefore superior, albeit in a fraternity-hazing-ritual kind of way.

I’ve also got a fourth strategy lined up for January.  Jay still doesn’t agree with my perspective, but he’s nice enough to play along.  This leaves me free to employ a tried-and-true method for dealing with at least one week of the unwanted month. That's right -- we’ve got plane tickets.

All I Really Need to Know

 

Last week, I loaded up my twins with crayons, pencils, glue-sticks, and good-bye kisses, and sent them off to start thirteen or more years of formal education.  I tried, of course, to emphasize how much fun they were going to have: Songs!  Puzzles! Elmer’s Glue! But even as I elaborated on the joys of this brave new world, I had to edit my own childhood tales. 

For some reason, my memory (which is like Swiss cheese now) was remarkably good back when I still had all twenty baby teeth.  As a parent, being able to see things from a three-foot-tall perspective seems like it ought to be an advantage -- but I’m not always sure this is the case.  It sometimes messes with my sense of authority.  It often forces me to look at my grownup self as if in a warped fun-house mirror.  And although I do love being able to recall the magic and wonder of being a kid, remembering everything tends to rip the rose-colored glasses right off.

I was pretty sure I shouldn’t tell my kids about Tammy, the bully who bit anyone who tried to use the slide, and Colin, who spent the entire first day of kindergarten sobbing inconsolably.  (Names have been altered on the off-chance anyone actually reads this blog.)  It seemed best not to relate my weird paranoia about the over-large boy with sweaty hands who I never wanted to stand next to at circle time, or the child whose baby teeth were all black with rot.  I did mention Lily, who copied my every movement and threw a fit if she couldn’t hang her jacket next to mine, but I didn’t say anything about Jacob, who had accidents of the odoriferous variety.  I also did not mention Chester.

I was in eighth grade when I first realized that not everyone remembers everything they learned in kindergarten.  My friends and I were rushing through the crowded hallways between classes, but when I saw the flyer advertising candidates for student government, I stopped in my tracks and snorted with mirth. 

“Chester’s running?” I giggled. 

My friends stared at me blankly.

“You don’t remember?” I asked.  “Back when we were five?”

Chester was a five-year-old flasher.  For no remuneration or other obvious gain, this little boy was willing to show everything he’d got to anyone who would look, on the playground of Huntington Elementary School.  Given his age, the show was minimal.  Still, pretty much everyone seemed willing to ogle. 

No one remembered.

If I don’t know how much to tell my kids, I also don’t know how much to ask.  It’s hard not to quiz them as they emerge each afternoon, smiling, with the remnants of their lunches and their carefully crayoned worksheets with titles like Which Mice are Behaving Politely?  I wonder, but don’t inquire, whether they’ve met their own Tammy yet?  Their own Lily?  Their own Chester?  Occasionally, because parents like to worry, I wonder if they actually are any of these characters.

My memories also give me too clear an idea of what kinds of calamities may constitute real drama in the life of a kid. 

“This banana has a BRUISE on it!” The accusation is as vehement as if I’d handed my child fruit covered in mold, salmonella, and mad-cow prions. 

I want to snap back, “It’s fine, just eat it already!” except…

The year was circa 1977.  My mother, who doesn’t even like bananas, had committed the crime of giving me one with a brown squishy spot.  “Cut it off!” I moaned dramatically. “Ewww, cut it OFF!”

She rolled her eyes and snatched the fruit from my hands.  After performing the necessary butter-knife surgery, she remarked, “When you were a baby, you ate the squishiest bananas, all mashed up, and you loved them.”

I stared at her as if she were an alien from the planet Ogg.  I could not for the life of me fathom what this fact had to do with anything.  Babies eat gross stuff, sure, but I hadn’t been a baby for three years!  Grownups, I decided, just don’t make any sense.

Now I’m the grownup.  I don’t make sense.  My memory has stolen from me the satisfaction of being annoyed. I bite off the brown part myself, without a word. 

A surfeit of recollections makes it hard to be an impartial observer, judge, and mentor of little kids, because I feel as if part of me still is a little kid.   I’m adrift between worlds, unable to comply with the ludicrous childish desires that drive adults bonkers, and yet also unable to get righteously vexed over them.  I feel like an ogre when I lay down Necessary Grownup Laws, because I remember too clearly the tyranny of mandated bedtimes, the appeal of picking at scabs, and the tantalizing allure of Pixie Stix.  A few weeks ago, when the twins declared that they were going to start a beer cap collection, I had an immediate flashback to the blue bucket of bent, slightly smelly little treasures bearing mysterious emblems and logos – “Colt 45” sounded particularly interesting -- that my parents insisted I had to keep in the garage, not in my bedroom.  When one of my offspring has a huge meltdown because she can’t find a particular three-inch long plastic truck, I long to shout, “It doesn’t matter!” – except that I know that it does.

Sometimes it’s good to be needed – but sometimes it would be a relief to pretend that I’m not.  The problem is, I can’t pretend, because my reminiscences nag at me. I remember wanting my mother to watch me do a cool trick on the monkey bars -- not just once, but fifteen times in a row.  I remember the terror of the thudding footsteps that I heard in the dark of my own bedroom, which I didn’t recognize until years later were merely the sound of my own frantic heartbeat.  I remember the deep sadness of being told that at forty pounds I was too big to be picked up and lugged around.  Of course, my grown-up mommy-self is bored to catatonia by the monkey-bar trick, doesn’t possess infinite strength, and abhors being woken at miserable-o’clock-in-the-morning, but my memory betrays me, forcing me to at least try to be nice about it.

If I didn’t recall so much of my childhood, I also wouldn’t be forced to face the truth about how utterly dull I am these days.  When I was four, and everyone rattled on and on about the presidential election, I thought, “Hasn’t Ford been President forever?”  Why did anyone want a new one, and moreover, why did anyone care?  Back then, the idea that I would ever spend a birthday party sitting around on a playground bench talking about politics rather than getting nauseous on the merry-go-round would have been unthinkable.  Remembering this, I occasionally swing across the monkey bars, legs doubled up to accommodate my five feet eight inches. 

At this summer’s fair, I plunked my thirty-nine-year-old self onto half a dozen cheesy, creaking carnival rides.  As the Ferris wheel lit up in ten shades of neon, and as the kettle corn and ice cream were effectively swirled in my stomach by the motion of the Dragon Ship, the experience blended in my mind with happy pieces of the past: the sugar-rush thrill of cotton candy at the Bethpage Fair, the adrenaline of Six Flags Great Adventure, and the breathless awe of believing that the magician is for real.  I knew that without those flavors from my childhood, the ride just wouldn’t be the same.  But behind that thought I found a larger truth: without all my crazy, ecstatic, paranoid, tooth-fairy-believing, ant-loving, five-year-old-exhibitionist-viewing memories, my life would not be the same.

I decided that it doesn’t really matter whether or not my memories improve my parenting skills or detract from them, because either way, I wouldn’t give them up.  That 1970’s five-year-old is still part of who I am.  Sure, it’s a little humiliating to realize that Kindergarten Nancy was afraid of dogs, tree fungus, and miniature slide-hogging bullies, but I’m nonetheless deeply thankful that I didn’t lose her somewhere along the way.   

There are a few clear benefits of remembering kindergarten.  I know that nose-picking and Play-Doh-eating do not cause permanent damage. I can rest assured that questions such as, “Why does your eye look funny?” if asked with genuine interest, are not necessarily offensive to the kid with the funny eye (namely myself).  And if one of my kids turns out to be the Lily, the Tammy, the Colin, or even the Chester of the playground, I will know that I don’t really need to worry.  By the time high school rolled around, every one of those kids was more popular than I was. 

If I juggle my personae correctly, I think I can reap the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls.  I can be a properly boring grownup who pays bills, vacuums (occasionally), and worries about the financial crisis and the ramifications of global climate change.  But in the spare moments, the moments stolen from adulthood, I can pump the swing high enough that I almost believe it really can carry me full circle.

Meow. Woof.

 

“Don’t let her in,” I warn.

            “Why not, Mommy?”

            “Because five minutes ago she was chewing the head off a squirrel.”

            The kid looks at the cat.  The cat, all innocence and shedding fur, looks at me.  If she is about to puke rodent brains onto the rug, she shows no sign of it.

            “Well,” says the kid philosophically, “Sometimes the dogs eat poop.”

Oddly enough, I do not find this to be a convincing argument.  The cat stays out.

I am frequently mistaken for a Pet Person.  This is perhaps a not unreasonable misconception, given that I have three canines and 1.3 felines (the fractional cat is seasonal, not dismembered).  I enjoy the company of all of them, although not necessarily all at once.  I appreciate Remus’s slobbery, high-impact, 60-pound-projectile style of affection just as much as Pippin’s snuggle-up-to-the-warm-laptop purring. I converse with all five animals, regardless of species and poor comprehension skills.  I do have pets, and I do love them.  Doesn’t that make me, you know, an animal-lover?  Why do I fight the label?

Maybe it’s just that I wasn’t raised to think of pets as integral members of the American family.  I can remember when I was first learning to read, I marched up to my mother with one of my favorite picture books, A Hole is to Dig. “You’ve been reading this wrong,” I accused, pointing to the offending page.  I’d been erroneously led to believe the words said ‘A dog is to play with’.  My mother did not apologize for her blatant falsification.  “Well, ‘A dog is to kiss’ is disgusting,” she told me.  I nodded.  She was right.  What the heck was this book talking about, anyhow?

Neither of my parents likes dogs much, and as a small child I was petrified of all dogs, large and small.  In part, I was channeling my parents’ feelings, but I also didn’t know any nice canines.  There was a particularly vicious little creature that we had to walk past to get to Main Street; one day it took a bite out of Mom’s leg.  The kids up the street had two dogs, but both seemed to be brain-damaged.  The small one skittered around spasmodically on the linoleum, and the big one barked and growled on a heavy chain, as if it might eat any child who strayed too close.  There were also some large, menacing strays that skulked around the colonial-era cemetery up the street.

However, the two retired ladies next door had a collection of cats, a few of which were neither neurotic nor megalomaniac. My sister and I begged and begged for a cat.  My mother told us our house was too small.  We moved to a new house when I was nine, and soon afterward, my dad took us to the animal shelter and let us pick out a kitten.  In retrospect, this was a pretty sneaky move, because in fact my mother’s primary concern had never really been the size of the house.  She just didn’t want a pet.  In her view, cats were unsanitary creatures that walked with litterbox-sullied paws on counters and tables, and added chores and complications to already busy lives.  She was, of course, perfectly correct.

Our cat was a gray shorthair named Smudge, with a squat physique and a permanently broken tail.  I loved her with unconditional dedication, and she rewarded me by obsessively chewing and kneading all my bathrobes.  I accepted as a given that she would never eat fancy food from a can, reign over us from an elaborate carpet-covered “cat tree,” or drink from a monogrammed bowl.  We trained her (using the shouting and throwing method) to stay off the tables and counters, disproving the notion that cats are untrainable.  Smudge used the great outdoors as her litterbox, and stayed outside or in the cellar at night, except – very occasionally – on nights when I was feeling miserable, vulnerable, or tragic, as only pubescent people can feel tragic.  Then, under cover of darkness and parental snoring, she was smuggled into my bed.  Smudge thrived on cheap Cat Chow, and survived long after I left home, went to college for four years, and joined the Peace Corps.  Although Mom may deny it, I caught her talking to the cat on multiple occasions.  Even in my absence, Smudge was loved – but she was never the cat of a Pet Person.

I warmed toward dogs because the new house that won us Smudge also yielded a neighborhood patrolled by the doggy version of the Welcome Wagon.  Misty and Deacon, both golden retrievers, loved kids.  They loved all kids, including the kids who chased them or pulled their tails.  They even loved pathetic fourth-graders who were, initially, morbidly afraid of them.  Misty and Deacon had a buddy, Bacchus, so named because he’d been found abandoned in a bar.  Bacchus was an elderly three-legged mangy-looking little white dog of indeterminate breed but enormous good will.  He had more self-respect and intelligence than the goldens, but he nonetheless felt it was part of his job description to wait with them at the school bus stop in the morning for the elementary, junior high, and high school buses, and to meet each of these on their return in the afternoon. 

“Now can I let Pippin in?  She really wants to come inside.”  My daughter is still pleading the case of the squirrel-slayer. 

“Um, in a few minutes,” I temporize. Mentally, I add guilt to the list of reasons for my pet-ambivalence.  That squirrel is my fault.  I know cats and dogs are not part of the natural ecosystem in which we live – or any natural ecosystem, given how they’ve been altered by domestication.  Cats kill songbirds.  I know, I know.  Since I could no more keep an indoor cat than I could keep an indoor husband, I know I shouldn’t have a cat at all.  But in my own defense, we didn’t really get a cat on purpose.

The kids love the story of how we got Pippin.  Whenever they ask, I feel like the traditional keeper of an important piece of oral history.  I try to add different details each time I tell it.  “I wheeled my bike into the garage at work, just like I did every day… but on this day, I heard a little noise… a mewing noise…” I tell them how we put up signs, how we asked at the nearby vets’ offices, how we used the chip implanted in Pippin to trace her to a shelter in Anchorage and a former owner in Tok who left no forwarding address and no clues except for third-hand rumors of an allergic boyfriend.

If you are a hungry stray cat, an environmental non-profit is not a bad place to show up when the halcyon days of summer wane and the prospect of a Fairbanks winter chills your whiskers. 

“So you brought her home and adopted her!”  I am always beaten to the punch line. 

“Well, yeah.”  I might as well have “SUCKER” in Sharpie on my forehead.

Our other pets have similarly unpromising histories.  Togiak was an accident puppy in a mushing yard.  She was passed on to a teenage musher, a friend of Jay’s sister, but flunked out even there as a weakling.  Jay adopted her in 1999, when she was a submissive, shoe-chewing two-year-old – or was she three?  We’re not sure, and it’s not as if any of our animals have anything as lofty as licenses, breeding histories, or papers.  It turns out Togiak wasn’t really a wimp.  She just had a bit of a thyroid problem.  Twelve years and approximately 4,000 Soloxine tablets later, she’s pretty chipper for a crone in her dotage.

Polar was also born to mush.  There was never anything wrong with him physically.  He’s a lean, leggy athlete, and he can pull a sled like nobody’s business.  However, to the dismay of his original owners, he would much rather chase a tennis ball than win a race.  The entire concept of competition is lost on him.  But at thirteen, he’s still pathetically eager to please, and happy to help haul the kids’ miniature mushing sled.

Then there’s Remus, our pound dog.  We got him because we needed a little extra pulling power.  Remus is eight now but thinks he’s eight months.  He’s got a nice thick coat that gets him through Fairbanks winters with ease, and he’s tough as they come and oh-so-enthusiastic, but he’s built like a wombat.  His short legs churn through the snow and his tongue hangs several miles out of his mouth as he chases after Jay on snow bike adventures.  A forty-mile day is nothing to this guy, but you have to wait for him on the downhills.

And that brings us to Wingnut, who isn’t even ours, but who is so remarkably tolerant, by feline standards, that she doesn’t mind being shuffled from one house to another twice annually, and actually seems to enjoy being adored as only two five-year-olds can adore a cat.  This involves a lot of cat treats, but also a large amount of awkward lugging and some odd situations. 

“Maaa-maaaa!”  It was three o’clock in the morning.  My eyelids weighed fifteen pounds each.  I staggered into the twins’ room.  “Whuh?” I said, in the most comforting mumble I could muster.

“Mama, Wingnut is being too loud.”

“Too loud?”  If I haven’t already mentioned it, I was not at my sharpest.

“She’s purring too loud!”

I’m not sure how a child who can sleep through thunderstorms and coffee grinders could be woken by purring.  The cat was looking particularly adorable, hogging the Thomas the Tank Engine blanket in the toddler-sized bunkbed.  However, in this court of law, I was prosecutor, judge, and jury.  Out Wingnut went, because Mommy Wanted Sleep. 

Sleep trumps cuteness any day, in my book – and this may be another good argument as to why I am not a Pet Person.  I have an unreasonable knee-jerk reaction against over-romanticizing.  When I say that, I mean in myself.  Sentimentality seems like a perfectly understandable trait in other people, at least in moderation (I draw the line at non-ironic velvet Elvises and Hummel figurines).  If Facebook is anything to judge by, I have a fair number of sentimental feline and canine aficionados among my friends.  I appreciate this – and in the case of Matt, who raises guide puppies for the blind, I humbly kowtow.  My friends’ dogs do genuinely cute stuff.  Their cats do genuinely cute stuff.  Their YouTube video-link-animals do cute stuff, which in moments of extreme procrastination I have been known to actually watch.  I’ll admit, my pets do cute stuff too -- usually right before they vomit squirrel parts.

Giving up on the idea that I will relent and let in the Pippin, the kids are attempting to shower affection on Wingnut.  Unfortunately, Wingnut is feeling about as playful as I would if roused at 3 a.m.

“The cat doesn’t want love right now,” I tell the girls.  “See, her eyes are closed.  She wants to nap.”

“How come cats take so many naps?”

“Because they’re different from people.”  I remind them of the vast and fascinating array of behaviors in the animal kingdom. Some animals hibernate.  Some live in packs.  Some have dozens of babies at a time, and don’t bother to take care of any of them.  Some eat nectar. Some eat road kill.  “Remember all the true books about animals we’ve read?”  Such books triggered our first forays into the nonfiction section of the library.  The twins wanted to know what real animals did – how they lived, what they ate, and what their poop looked like.

 “Yeah.”  The kids are thrilled to know that every species, including our own, is gloriously unique. “But…” they return to an old complaint, “how come there are so many kids’ books with animals that aren’t real -- only amfomorphic?”  I teach them words like “anthropomorphic” so that they will be branded as hopeless geeks in kindergarten, and will have no hope of ever achieving a normal social life.

“I don’t know,” I say.  To me, it seems boring and pointless to write a story with bears or rabbits as protagonists if they talk, wear clothes, and do nothing that is even remotely bearish or rabbit-like.  If the story is about kids playing at the beach, why can’t the kids be kids, rather than badly drawn aardvarks?  I’ve always preferred stories like Watership Down, which attempt the much more interesting and challenging task of writing about animals from a perspective that is distinctly non-human and includes details such as eating their own droppings.

And there, finally, I get to the crux of the issue.  In my mind, stereotypical Pet People are those who have forgotten that part of the joy of relating to animals is embracing their other-ness.  I don’t want my pets to be human.  I don’t want to cook meals for them, dress them in coordinated outfits, give them haircuts, or take them to psychotherapists.  I also do not want to argue about whether dogs are smarter or cats are smarter.  For one thing, this question is akin to asking whether one prefers Team A or Team B (comprised of very rich athletes none of whom are actually from City A or City B).  In both cases, the wrong response will get you in trouble, and a flippant comeback will offend those who feel Very Strongly about the issue.  But even more importantly, I think the question is utterly irrelevant, because “smart” always seems to be defined in human terms. 

I can’t locate half a cookie in a pile of rotting leaves by smell alone.  I can’t catch shrews with my bare hands, sleep naked in a pile of straw at forty below, leap onto shelves at three times head-height, run sixty miles in a day, or find my way home through the forest on a moonless January night.  I also have trouble providing companionship, comfort, and hours-long hugs to those I love without excessive analysis, judgment, conversation, and expectations.  Cats are good at being cats. Dogs are good at being dogs.  I, on a good day, am semi-adequate at being a human.

Of course, there is a price that comes with that other-ness.

“Mommy?  Can we let Pippin in now?”

She is a cat.  She chews on squirrels.  Sometimes, the dogs eat poop.

Mentally, I relax my woefully narrow definitions.  I understand the value of this furry little carnivore in my own life and the lives of my family, so I guess that on my own terms, I am a Cat Person.  And ok, fine, I’m a Dog Person, too -- even if “a dog is to kiss” still doesn’t quite float my boat.

“Go ahead,” I say.  “Let her in.”