Our Monkey

I made a sock monkey for our baby, who is due today.

For the past months, November 24 has blazed across the sky of my mind, some strange icon, glowing, symbol of a question...who will this baby be?

Months ago, when I penciled a heart around the baby’s due date in my calendar, I noticed that November 24 was also a full moon. Will the full moon increase the likelihood that the baby will be born on November 24? I wondered. How many babies are born on their actual due dates, anyway? (Some quick googling--which, by the way, I recommend you avoid if you’re pregnant--reveals that the answer is around five percent, or fewer.)

Of course I had to make a monkey for our baby. It took me a long time to find the right socks, but I finally found a nice silky blend, thick enough to hold the stuffing in without showing through, but soft enough as well. I love making sock monkeys. But sock monkey faces are the hardest part. For me, the eyes are the feature most difficult to get right. I’ve often embroidered a face, only to tear out whichever feature didn’t look just right, or didn’t harmonize with its friends...too wide a mouth, or too small and stiff, eyes not friendly enough, the features combine to make an impression, and what if it isn’t just right?

In preparation to make the face on this monkey, I perused baby pictures of me, of my husband. But those photos hold faces impossible for me to objectify, to analyze. Even with the experience of redoing monkey faces, the entire unmarred surface of this monkey’s face has me completely still. Our doula suggested that maybe I need to wait to see our baby before I can do the face. Perhaps she’s right.

I saw something in this monkey’s face today. The world. More than the world, all possibilities, all that can hoped for but can’t be known, all dreams and wishes and love and fear and whispers, and night-tremblings, and skinned-knee realities to come, sullied ideals, in all their brazen realness.

Houdini the cat: 7/14/90-8/8/07

My husband and I had our dear seventeen-year-old cat, Houdini, put to sleep on the evening of August 8, 2007.

For several years, she struggled valiantly with chronic renal failure. When she was fifteen, she came through a pretty scary crisis, when she was getting sick everywhere and ended up very dehydrated, flat on the floor. She wouldn’t purr when I petted her. (This became a litmus test for me--when she seemed under the weather, as long as she was purring, it wasn’t a true crisis.) I was in denial back then about losing her, but it made me realize that all the extra time we had with her was bonus. I believe her strong personality and crankiness were key to her long survival.

She deigned to let me take care of her since 1990. I met her at the Seattle Animal Shelter where I went to choose a kitten. She was three months old, and when I picked her up, she clung to my shoulder, needling her baby claws into my vintage suede jacket. I fell in love with her. Because it was mid-October, and she was three months old, I decided to celebrate her birthday on Bastille Day, a day I could remember. (Later I noticed she always got dreamy when she heard Edith Piaf songs.)

While I said goodbye to her, scenes from her life flooded my memory...when she was spayed, because she was still so tiny, the plastic collar the vet had given her was too big, and protected her stitches but turned her into an unwitting physical comedy act. Instead I made a "sweater" by cutting arm and leg holes from a sock so that she’d leave her stitches alone. Every night she’d wriggle out of that sweater and in the morning I’d find her curled up, the sweater/sock a limp yin to Houdini’s yang. I recalled during her mid-years, trying to toilet train her--which sounded good in theory, but traumatized her pretty fully. All my apologizing paled next to how loudly she purred when I finally gave up and she saw I had set out a new litter box. (I could hear her purring from across my apartment.) I apologized again about the toilet training era before the vet put her to sleep.

We buried her body in the backyard, under the shelter of the young redbud that close friends gave us for our wedding. I read T.S. Eliot's poem "The Old Gumbie Cat" which has always seemed a perfect tribute to Houdini's cantankerous and judgmental yet immaculate nature:

****

The Old Gumbie Cat by T.S. Eliot

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;
Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.
All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat:
She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.
And when all the family's in bed and asleep,
She slips down the stairs to the basement to creep.
She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice -
Their behaviour's not good and their manners not nice;
So when she has got them lined up on the matting,
She teaches them music, crocheting and tatting.

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;
Her equal would be hard to find, she likes the warm and sunny spots.
All day she sits beside the hearth or in the sun or on my hat:
She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.
As she finds that the mice will not ever keep quiet,
She is sure it's is due to irregular diet
And believing that nothing is done without trying,
She sets straight to work with her baking and frying.
She makes them a mouse-cake of bread and dried peas,
And a beautiful fry of lean bacon and cheese.

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;
The curtain-cord she likes to wind, and tie it into sailor-knots.
She sits upon the window-sill, or anything that's smooth and flat:
She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.
She thinks that the cockroaches just need employment,
So she's formed, from that lot of disorderly louts,
A troop of well-disciplined helpful boy-scouts,
With a purpose in life and a good deed to do -
And she's even created a Beetles' Tattoo.

So for Old Gumbie Cats let us now give three cheers -
On whom well-ordered households depend, it appears.

****

She had an opinion on and a solution for everything, usually involving salmon. After the burial, our neighbor's dog Joe came down the hill, appropriately dressed in his black and white tuxedo-style fur coat, to pay his respects.

Houdini Gatallini Bambini Baby-ini (her full name) aka "Noodle", aka "Munchkin", is survived by her loving human parents and her supersized 10 year old adoptive brother, Dante, aka "Big Tiny". Dante's eyes have been wider than usual since we showed him the body. The night after she died, he slept in the spot where she had slept the night before.

I think he's still looking for her.

I saw something today in this photo of Houdini, taken several months before her death. The light and dark of loving and grieving, the complicated contrast between sadness and relief, the guilt I feel in letting her go. Her posture, defiant, beautiful, a true Gumbie cat with standards so high that I wonder if we ever met them. Sometimes, I think we came close.

So friends, if you visit our house and it's a bit more chaotic than usual, do not be shocked. It's just that scrawny, cat-shaped void.

We miss you, Houdini.

Forgiveness #1

The idea of forgiveness has been part of a class that I’m taking this year. Whether and how to forgive, the impact of forgiving (or not forgiving) on others, on oneself. I’m still learning about forgiveness...still deciding how and when to use it.

But I heard something today in a beautiful interview with Guillermo del Toro on Fresh Air. I think I was wrong about him! He really does believe Ofelia. So many things he said in the interview resonated, from the genesis of his inventiveness to the way he sees psychology, dreams, iconography in fiction...still so connected to his child imagination, he clearly values the world an artist creates...he even credits Arthur Rackham as having influenced his imagery. (Rackham illustrated J.M. Barrie’s 1906 Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Barrie and Peter Pan are hugely important to me.)

I will watch the movie again, with new insight from this interview. Thanks for all those who commented on my last entry--you have helped me think about this problem in a different way.

And Guillermo del Toro, if you’re reading this, or even if you’re not, I forgive you.

Dream-bursting

I’m going to be a purist. I recently saw Guillermo del Toro’s “El Laberinto del Fauno” (translated badly in English “Pan’s Labyrinth”--badly because there is only one Pan, but this movie concerned one of many “fauns.” And don’t get me started on Peter Pan.) I expected a lot, not only due to the hype surrounding the film. I’ve written a novel that concerns a young girl like Ofelia: absent parents, a child who sees a ghost. Like Ofelia, she is caught in a realm that, to an outsider, might seem imaginary. As I wrote the novel, I grappled with the question of what was real. Out of respect for my protagonist, I always fell on her side--that is, I take what she sees and experiences as real. I decided that if readers needed to see her as lost in her imagination, if they needed a scrap of the rational to hang onto, fine, but as storyteller and creator, I trusted her perception.

Guillermo del Toro’s film is stunning. His inventiveness and the way he realized the piece was a treat for the senses. But I was disappointed when rationality crept in at the end...bursting the “dream” of the story, to show us what “really” happened. To me, he betrayed the beauty he’d created.

I’m always bothered when adults disparage imagination, when they dismiss anything other than kitchen sink-realism as escapism--as the adults in the film essentially did the same to Ofelia. I admit I sometimes feel haughty when talking to people who have dismissed fancy--quietly I cheer the fact that I still allow myself the freedom to believe in story. I want a creator to let the dream be the dream that it is; I love when a creator lets the story be “real." And by this I don’t mean realism. This letting the dream be real can make something transcendent, much more than escapism. In fact, things seem more like escapism when a creator shoves your nose in the “real world,” as a contrast to the imaginary world. This usually comes at the end, thereby reigning in imagination, shoving its messy boundaries back into its proper box: childhood, or perhaps the asylum.

I took a creative writing class in high school. Our teacher had one rule: no story could end with, “and then I woke up.” “And then I woke up” is what makes something imagined turn into escapism, the acknowledgement of the serious, the real, the rational life we busy adults must get back to, come now you foolish thing!

But isn’t it better, in this nasty, brutish, and short life, isn’t it better to leave the imagination alone, let it be what it is? To let it thrive? How many inventions and dreams would not have been realized if we always have to wake up from the dream before the story is over? If we need creators to remind us that life is mundane, to pull us back from that dangerous abyss of invention.

It used to make me mad when I encountered one of those “and then I woke up” moments in film or fiction, when the cold slap of reality hit my cheek. But this time, imagining that del Toro must have felt he had to let that ugly lump, rationality, back in, I just felt sad. I felt pity for him, and sad for me.



I saw something today in this photo of a creator, peering through the window. The furrows in his brow could mean anything, but I like to think he regrets that he didn’t let Ofelia (and, by extension, his audience) feel the full extent of her mud-smeared, harrowing dream.