pets | Michael Valliant

Can the fishes see it’s snowing?

The Christmas story I re-read every year has firemen and a house fire, snowballs waiting for cats, mentions of wolves, postmen, a celluloid duck, and a possible ghost joining in for caroling. And it’s all true. Or at least remembered true.

Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is the kind of opening of nostalgic floodgates you expect from a poet’s vivid and quirky memory. And what he remembers aren’t gifts (those get a comic couple paragraphs) but the experiences he had, what he and his friends got into, uncles and aunts visiting, and what the town looked and felt like in the snow.

As Thomas and his friends walk in the snow along the shore, trying to decide what to get into, someone asks, “Can the fishes see it’s snowing?” Maybe those are the moments of true and honest friendship and the things we build our memories around.

Christmas is certainly a time when nostalgia hits us over the head like a cartoon wooden mallet, this year especially. I stumbled across this piece I scrawled out a couple years ago and if nostalgia is the path you want to run down, it might walk there with you. As I sit here with waves of Christmas memories crashing over me, I have written about for 30 or so and thought about Christmases past for maybe 45 years (the memories had to build up for the first three). I find myself coming back to the same thoughts, the same books, the same memories, and the same themes.

Clark Griswold understands the pressure of trying to create and re-create the perfect Christmas.

I’m thinking about the pressure we put on Christmas–finding and buying the perfect gifts, wanting to create the perfect memories for our families, wanting to get past the commercial and to the spiritual, communal aspects of Christmas. And I think about the fact that my Christmases as a kid are vivid memories, then not much to call up in my teens and 20s. Thinking about Christmases having young kids, crystalline again, and now the girls are well into their teens, into the age of unmemorable Christmases. And maybe I am caught in a place where the next memorable Christmas won’t be until there are young kids in the picture again (which I hope is a good ways off…).

But maybe that’s the key. Not young kids, but seeing things with eyes like that again. When he picks what memories to share, Dylan Thomas goes back to when he was a child. Because that’s where the vivid memories are; that’s where his eyes were fresh and impressionable. Maybe that’s what I/we need, especially during a pandemic year when I know my family won’t be gathering on Christmas Eve or Day.

Looking with the eyes of a child.

In his book, “Love Is the Way,” Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, writes:

“Jesus said, ‘Unless you change and become as little children, you will never see the kingdom of heaven’ (and thinking on a lecture he attended by Terry Holmes, Bishop Curry continues)… children have vivid and boundless imaginations. They dwell happily in that space between fantasy and reality. Theirs is often that land of the fairy tale, the cartoon. They fantasize, they imagine, they dream. I think Dr. Holmes was right. To behold the reign of God, the perfect realization of God’s peace, God’s shalom, God’s salaam–the dream of God–we must become as little children. We must imagine and… dream.”

I was talking to a friend recently about that exact thing, how Buddhists use the term “begininer’s mind” and Jesus talks about seeing with the eyes of a child. If re-think where I am right now and go back to my surroundings, I smell the evergreen/fir smell of the Christmas tree; I see the white lights on the tree that the girls asked for this year to replace the rainbow lights that I generally use to conjure up trees from my youth; I can smell and taste the coffee, which makes me think of my grandfather this time of year. I can see the cat and dog half-sleeping on the couch, waiting for movement toward the kitchen.

We’ve always got all the tools we need to build the perfect Christmas. If I choose to focus on sitting down to have a Sunday afternoon lunch with people I love rather than looking at what I find or don’t find shopping, I am creating the right kind of memories.

This isn’t a post about what Christmas is or what it means, but more about what lenses/eyes we use to approach the whole experience.

Our dog gets up and runs to the door or window every time the same neighbors walk by. It’s a new experience for her every time. Even she has the child-like enthusiasm and wonder idea down. I can learn from her example and reminder.

If I am open. If I see with the eyes, imagination, and wonder of a child. Maybe I won’t be stuck having a conversation with the ghost of Christmas past. Maybe I will be in the moment, caught up in wonder and conversation, and I can again ask questions like, “Can the fishes see it’s snowing?”

Carlos

When you lose a pet, what you have left is memories, stories, and love. For the girls, their two Humane Society adopted cats, Carlos and Sesame, have been with them since Anna (now 17) was in kindergarten (Sesame) and then a year later for Carlos (we kept the names they were given at the shelter). The cats have been to different houses, have been dressed up, played with, harrassed, and loved on for a good while. Carlos passed yesterday. I always dug his name because it reminded me of a favorite writer, William Carlos Williams. When he was an indoor/outdoor cat, he was a collector of critters, which he loved to bring in the house and show off.

He had a chilled-out personality. One of the ways I connected to him was being able to find him when he either got stuck somewhere or decided to go on a walkabout. I once came home from a vacation in Ocean City after he had gotten out from friends watching him, and managed to find him in the woods. But a memory that sticks out was one that I wrote about 10 years ago. So I am moving that memory here, told in the same language. Memories, stories, and love remain.

Banging the Plate

December 15, 2009

When our cat wanders off we go outside and bang the plate. Like ringing a dinner triangle, he generally pops out from a neighbor’s yard and cruises home.

So banging the plate calls back lost things. Boomerangs a cat with wanderlust. For me, it has become a bell of mindfulness inviting me back home as well.

Up until Sunday/Saturday, banging the plate has generally worked. It can take a little time and it might be towards midnight, but he would appear out of the chilled dark ready to come in.

Saturday night/Sunday morning, nothing. The cold is kicking, rain is imminent, it is 12:30am. I’m beat and need to sleep, no cat. So he’s out for the night.

Cats being stubborn, free-spirited, strong-minded, “in-de-pen-dent” (it is Christmas/Rudolph time, after all), a cat could quite easily play the role of Muse. The artist/writer has to invite the muse back, bang the plate to get it to come home to the house he or she has built for creating their particular art. And we’ve all got those plate-banging activities that we use to call them. Writing in a particular kind of notebook, particular time of day, specific kind of pen, or place in the house. We bang the plate to get the Muse to come sit with us. We hope that it works. And when we find something that works with success, we stick to it. In some cases, we may hang on like crazy even at the risk of choking it. Note: don’t choke the Muse!

Sunday morning, I’m banging the plate in the rain. I’m wandering the cul-de-sacs of our neighborhood. I’m up and down the streets and sidewalks of the cat’s normal haunts. Nothing. Occasionally I think I hear a faint meow, but birds and rain and sounds are having their way with my imagination. False cats.

We’re on towards 11am. It is obvious I need a new approach. Other than a raincoat, I’m not dressed for mucking, but I walk up through one of the cul-de-sacs near Rails-to-Trails that leads up a flooded, grassy path. This isn’t where he goes, but nothing has worked so far. I bang the plate.

There is a faint trailhead, off more toward the field and back toward our side of the neighborhood. More flooded, but it gets me back closer to home anyway. I bang the plate. I come out in the field nearer to our house. Boots and jeans soaked through, but not cold. Nothing to lose. A hunch coming from the gut.

I cruise through ankle-deep water and mud of a flooded field and walk up a wooded path behind the houses across the street from us, between our neighborhood and Route 50. This is his stomping grounds. Where he likes to hang. But there is a lot of ground to cover and he’s one cat.

At this point, I’m not really driving with my head. It’s more intuition, and I’ve been putting myself in his eyes, where he’d likely go, what he’d do. It’s new territory. Off the paved streets and sidewalks, into the muck of fields and woods during a soaking rain. I bang the plate.

After playing hunches and letting the gut drive, I wander next to the woods for maybe a minute, banging the plate, when I hear a high pitched meow (he was neutered early) and see his familiar gray and white prance pop up over brush and out of the trees. Ankle-deep flooded fields, are not a cat’s idea of a way home. I scoop him up and cruise back to the house.

My old notion of banging the plate didn’t cut it. I couldn’t just go through the motions to bring him home. But Sunday’s experience opened up a whole new level of following the gut, intuition. I was sort of following blindly and trusting, but at the same time, intensely aware and alert. The process led me right to him. And thinking on it, he was likely lost and not willing to walk through the deep water necessary to get himself to familiar turf. Going to him was likely the only thing that would have found him.

So I think about the new version of banging the plate. And I think about it in terms of the Muse. And how to invite it back, but also to trust and follow the gut as to where and how to seek it out, when it takes more than just showing up. When the process deepens.

To Sit With a Dog

I lived with pets for the first 42 years of my life. I was preceded in my family by a grouchy, black cocker spaniel mix and a large Siamese cat. Dogs and cats were a part of life until separating in 2014, and rental agreements prohibiting pets.

Truth be told, at first I liked the quiet. And the clean. And not having to worry or be responsible for a pet. Daughters were enough. I was burned out.

But a funny thing happened in a quiet home. Quiet became silence. Silence became stillness. And home wasn’t home. There was a void. And the girls saw what it was before I did. They started asking to get a dog. As kids do. But I felt it. I am dense, but at some point it sank in. And our landlord agreed to allow a small dog.

We knew we wanted to rescue a dog, knew a bit what we were looking for, and through Operation Paws for Homes in northern Virginia, found Harper (named for Anna’s favorite athlete Bryce Harper and for author Harper Lee).

From someone who takes a philosophical approach to life, dogs teach us more about life and about ourselves than we ever teach them.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil, or jealousy, or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace. – Milan Kundera

When I walk Harper through town, just the two of us, something different happens to my mind. I am slowed from running, not in a hurry, and watching what she sees. Hopefully not a squirrel.

I need more “mindful” and less “mind full” in my life. And dogs can help get us there. Harper helps me get there.

Harper was found on the streets. She is skittish around big machinery; you can see some of what she’s been through. But at eight months old, she is one of the most chilled out puppies I’ve seen. And she puts smiles on the girls’ faces and laughter in their hearts in a way I haven’t seen in my house over the past two years.

Most everyone in our neighborhood knows Harper and speaks to her by name when they walk by and she’s in the yard.

She sleeps in the bed, against the back of my legs. On nights the girls are here, she often rotates sleeping with one of them. As I write, she is crashed out on her dog bed in the sun room. She is constant, consistent, boundless, loving unconditionally. Except maybe food and walks, those might be her terms.

There are days when I come home from work, and Anna or Ava will tell me that they took Harper for a walk around the neighborhood, and detail their route and what they saw. This has quickly become one of my favorite things.

I understand Jim Harrison when he says:

Barring love I’ll take my life in large doses alone–rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.

In our case, Harper has added something to our family that we couldn’t have found any other way.