the truth about cats and apes

Once, when Collin and I were dude and lady, he brought a very special movie to my house just for me. Few men would be thoughtful and bizarre enough to select this movie with their special lady in mind, and that's probably why I was so nuts about Cocopants. The movie? Koko: The Talking Gorilla.

That's right. Collin seduced me with a documentary about primates, and it was HOT, I tell you.

Anyhooter, I mention this now because I've been consumed with monkey thoughts ever since the Travis-the-Chimp incident, and because Koko and her kitten (who was not featured in the film, much to my disappointment) have come up frequently in conversations of late. (Am I the only one who's been talking a lot about overprivileged monkeys during the past few months?)

Those of you who did not regularly purchase books from the Troll Book Club in elementary school need to know that Koko was a gorilla who learned sign language, but was unable (and perhaps unwilling) to learn how to mate successfully, which meant that she had no gorillababies, which prompted her to ask for a kitten, which prompted many smart photographers to take pictures of her and her catbaby and put them on posters to sell to children through school book clubs, and which may have inspired more than one of those children to become quite agitated when her mother refused to give birth to kittens instead of human children, and may also have inspired that same child to make a promise to herself that she would only ever have kittens for babies, which now looks like a painfully likely fate for the aforementioned poster-buying child.

I recently had a disagreement with my friend, Mark, about whether or not Koko was responsible for the death of her first kitten (who, Mark informed me, was named "All Ball" because she had no tail; get it? she was all round, all ball... a detail I was jealous that I had not remembered, and which seemed to make Mark a more credible source of information about Koko and her kitten).

In my mind, the truth was that Koko had accidentally manhandled the kitten, killed it, and was immediately given a replacement, so that more pictures could be taken, more posters could be made, more children could doom themselves to childlessness, etc. I had this idea (blame my fascination with tabloids) that Koko's handlers attempted to keep All Ball's fate from the public, but that the awful truth was later leaked somehow.

Mark thought I was nuts and that I'd made the whole thing up.

The debate was obviously of the utmost importance, so I used my highly developed investigative skillz to find out the truth. On the Google. And then on the Wikipedia. And then on the Yahoo.

This is what I discovered:

Koko proved a wonderful pet owner and mother. She was very gentle with the kitten and treated him much like a baby gorilla, carrying him on her back and trying to nurse him. When she was in a playful mood, she would dress All Ball up in napkins or sign to him suggesting that they tickle each other, her favorite game.

Unfortunately, their relationship ended abrubtly in December of 1984, when All Ball escaped from the gorilla cage and was killed by a car.

...All Ball was followed by two other kittens, Lipstick and Smoky, and a number of other pets.

--http://ask.yahoo.com/20000905.html

I thought you'd like to know this. It clears Koko's name and makes me feel a lot better about my own potential as a kitten-mother.




Post-script for the perverse:
On the Wikipedia, I discovered something very disturbing about Koko. I won't lower my extremely high blogging standards for truth and morality by re-typing the allegations here, but if you want to know more about Koko's bizarre affinity for motherly things, click here and read the "Sexual Harrassment" section. She's no Travis, but she's still a little creepy.

Re-routed

Lat Wednesday, my friend Brittney was magically stranded in the Salt Lake City airport on her way back from her trip to Venezuela & Colombia.  Her husband and baggage had both gone on to Portland, but somehow she ended up right here with me.

I had six hours with Brit, who I hadn't seen in years, and the friendship I found was one that I hadn't anticipated:  we had grown together by virtue of becoming ourselves.

What did she want to eat? 

Chocolate covered strawberries and Coca-Cola.  

What did she want to talk about?  

The way that we struggle to come to terms with ideas that are too complicated to ever really come to terms with: faith, love, family, storytelling...

Did we laugh?

Yes, and loudly.

Did we cry?

Some, but quietly.

Did it feel like a miracle?

I'm 'onna let Walt Whitman answer that:

Miracles

by Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle? 

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,  

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,  

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,  

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,  

Or stand under trees in the woods,  

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,  

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,  

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,  

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,  

Or animals feeding in the fields,  

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,  

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,  

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;  

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,  

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

crush

i am a girl who loves a good crush of any kind--romantic, impossible, worshipful, painful, orange... i like 'em all.

i have long had a crush (i've realized that maybe it seems like i only get crushes on women i admire... not so: i have a crush on a boy right now, even as i type, so there), anyway, i've had this crush on ada limon since i met her years ago through another crush/friend.

and, what do you know, ada just had a beautiful poem published in The New Yorker.

yeah. that's right. i said THE NEW YORKER. (if you are not unbelievably impressed by this, read two issues and call me in the morning.)

the poem is called, "Crush," which makes me love it and ada even more.

i wanted to copy and paste it, but i think that might be uncouth, and i am nothing if not couth. so please click the link and read it. it will do you good.

radio silence

So many things to think about, put off, get done, be grateful for, love, hope for that I can't even begin to unpack them all.

Words fail me (shout out to Ms. Virginia Woolf).

Among all of the things flooding my brain:

friends re-found or re-born.

One of those lost and found friends--Ms. Brittney Poulsen-Carman, the genius woman who inspired my very first short story, and whom I had a secret crush on for many long years--recently sent me this poem.

Reading it, I knew that my crush on Brittney was one of my better ideas.

The Quiet World
by Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

plus/minus

I love being with my students in part because I like the sense of gaining, accumulating, adding that always accompanies my time with them. The second graders in my poetry workshops, the freshmen in my composition courses, the high school students in Harlem writing college essays, all soak up so many new things every day; it's awesome. The good students--the best ones--are so eager to add to what they see, how they think, how they can express it. I love the idea of life being like this--a neverending expansion of understanding, love, insight, and vision.

In the past few months, though, I've been given strange glimpses of how integral loss is to living and growing. It scares me when I see people lose such important things, things that seem essential to their lives being ones of endless addition and multiplication: spouses, parents, dreams, time, health, children, capabilities, work, faith, hope.... It seems that there is nothing that can't be lost, like at some point our lives become as much about subtraction as addition.

And I don't know what to say to this. It seems too easy, too cliche, to say that something greater is always found. Because I don't believe that it is. I think sometimes losing is just that: gut wrenching and awful and unfair. But I do believe that we are always left with something, and that from that something, we can make something new.

And I guess that has to be enough.

On Tuesday, I was visiting a first grade class that I only see once a month. When I arrived, one of the little girls--Maya, I think--rushed up to me before she sat down on the rainbow rug and said, "I write poems every night!"
"That's wonderful," I told her.
"I do it because I'm always thinking of you," she said.
The impossible made possible in one tiny moment.

Two poems, then:

Since Hannah Moved Away
by Judith Viorst

The tires on my bike are flat.
The sky is grouchy gray.
At least it sure feels like that
Since Hanna moved away.

Chocolate ice cream tastes like prunes.
December's come to stay.
They've taken back the Mays and Junes
Since Hanna moved away.

Flowers smell like halibut.
Velvet feels like hay.
Every handsome dog's a mutt
Since Hanna moved away.

Nothing's fun to laugh about.
Nothing's fun to play.
They call me, but I won't come out
Since Hanna moved away.

Affirmation
by Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

Summer in Spring

This weekend has felt so much like summer that I've forgotten myself. It's slipped my mind several times that there are still classes to teach, students to convince that they can write something better, something more true. There are still grades to give, meetings to attend.... But the sun, the heat have erased all of that from my mind for these few hours and afternoons, and it's been glorious.

Thank you, weather.
Thank you, sun.
Thank you, Central Park.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And what about this?

Going There
by Jack Gilbert

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

Thank you, sweet disasters.
And thank you, life-not-in-ruins.

a.k.a./terms of endearment

Here is a list of nicknames I've wanted to have, but haven't (because you don't get to nickname yourself, and nobody I know thinks of these names when they think of me, apparently):

1) Petal
2) Liv-of-my-life
3) Gidget
4) Charro
5) Lola
6) Livicita
7) "the American" (when I lived in London)
8) Firecracker
9) Poppet
10) Xuxa
11) Pandy
12) RamonaQuimbyAge8
13) Peaches
14) Lulu
15) Tapdance (or Tapdance Queen)
16) Blossom
17) Luscious
18) Mengmeng
19) Julep


I could make a list of the alternative names I have been called, but I'm trying to not say swears so much anymore.

Am I the only one out there who secretly wishes for things like this?