As a child I dreamed and expected that I would grow up to be a veterinarian, because I believed that I had a special understanding with animals, a secret channel of empathy, particularly with those animals who remained still enough long enough or were captive or restrained enough that I could concentrate on them for a long time. The idea had to have been informed by my understanding of the Vulcan mindmeld. I suppose I wished to mindmeld with animals rather than people simply because I felt closer to animals at that time in my life.
Animals are an extensively represented demographic in Sweet Potato’s constituency. She learns about them in three forms: toys, books, and live. First, there are her stuffed animals. The first among the first is Lovey, a bunny, who has always been the most-loved. (It was one of our shrewdest parental investments, once it was clear which Lovey was The Lovey, to go ahead and scoop up several understudies; they are all Bunnies-By-The-Bay products.) Top lieutenants include Arf (a very silky white dog), Guys (a couple of floppy, long-limbed monkeys), and Bear (any one of three or four Paddington or Pooh types). Then there are some other bears, birds, dogs, kitties; then the bath toys, of course.
Animals in books are also important. A kid's ideas about animals are animated by the stuff that happens reading her books. We got into the practice of singing a couple of Eric Carle books -- Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Polar Bear, Polar Bear -- to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle. Now Sweet Potato has taken to serenading other animals with a round or two, ad lib. The other day in a dingy strip mall (plant) nursery, she found a sorry flock of lawn flamingos, studied it for a moment, then let it fly:
Mingo, Mingo, what chu hear?
I see See-Tato sing a song a Mingos!
See-Tato, See-Tato, what chu hear?
I see Daddy buy some something!
As above, she generally describes her own activity in the third person. The other morning in the back yard she saw a neighbor’s cat in the window.
Polar bear, polar bear, what chu hear?
I see Potato looking atta kittycat!
meeee-ow, meeeow!
When she sings she sets her feet squarely toward her audience and gives a solid delivery, hands at her sides, brows knit a bit, hips swaying.
Lastly, of course, there are “real” animals. At the zoo she spends most of her time studying the animals she’s seen in books, and is particularly intent on watching flamingos and elephants, but a recent absence of the giant porcupines (their display has been under renovation) has been the subject of concern at home over the past few weeks ("Poka Pine not there! Where the Poka Pine?"). In our yard she digs the squirrels and birdies, and the occasional kittycat or possum; and our neighborhood is just about infested with dogwalkers. Last week she sang Happy Birthday to a squirrel raiding a birdfeeder.
Most of us, including myself now, feel that we are wholly and thankfully separate from other animals, but Potato’s songs remind me of my childhood empathy, and the fiction of separateness lowers a bit, as when I find a broken goldfinch or falcon on an office building sidewalk, or run over a squirrel, or read about underwater nuclear testing, or imagine a giant asteroid hitting the earth a hundred million years ago.
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While drafting this post I read the title essay of a David Foster Wallace book called Consider the Lobster. DFW took an assignment to cover the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine. The first quarter of the article covers the taxonomy of the animal and a description of the sluggish, swarming homogeneity of Maine summer tourists; the rest is a creeping, ingenuous disquisition approaching the moral issues of boiling the animal alive. I’m laughing aloud right now imagining the what-the-fuck expression building on the face of the magazine’s articles editor.
DFW allows himself a sort of moral or philosophical pain unrelated to a child’s imagined ability to mindmeld with hognosed snakes, but both remind me that Sweet Potato has to take her place in a beautiful and terrible continuum of living things.
