Animal stories

While in Boston earlier this month I heard two interesting animal stories from friends, one more sad than the other. My friend Linda, whom I hadn’t seen for almost 20 years, works at Massachusetts General Hospital. For 10 years she worked as a medical social worker in one of the cancer wards, working with patients with illnesses like the colon cancer that Stephanie’s mother is fighting. A month ago she shifted to working at the smaller of the hospital’s two cancer resource centers. We visited in the cancer resource center and had lunch outside a nearby deli (I also used the computer in the resource room for an hour while she was at a meeting.).

The last time I saw Linda – only the second time since 1983 – she was living in Atlanta, about to get married to an Episcopalin priest who soon transferred up to a New Hampshire parish. Linda got a job working with a New Hampshire hospice, but then they got divorced, apparently after eight years. Wednesday Linda told me why they stayed married so long. I joke that one of the many reasons why Stephanie and I can’t get divorced is that she’d when the custody battle and wind up with Frisco. But Linda said this was no joke. Although Linda and her husband John had no kids, he did bring a dog that she got very attached to into the marriage. She said after a few years she wanted to get a divorce, but she knew he’d win a dog custody battle. The dog (I’m afraid I forget the dog’s name and breed) was old and Linda figured he’d die after a couple of years. But he survived, and Linda finally gave up and she and her husband got divorced. She got to dogsit occasionally, as she and her ex- were still on speaking terms. But, Linda said, the dog was a herding dog – he wanted his people to be together. She said every night until the day the dog died, a couple of year later, the dog waited at the door for Linda to come home, until her ex- had to drag the dog back to another part of the house. This seemed like a sad story – all the more because I imagined another long separation between me, on the one hand, and Stephanie, Vincent, and Frisco, on the other hand, if I got laid off and had to take a job in another city while they stayed in Louisville. Sad story, nice afternoon, long time.

In June, you might recall, I drove up to Davis, briefly, to see my friend Jenny, her house, her kids, and then saw them all again the next day, along with Rachel and her kids (all of them former Swarthmore classmates of mine), at a farmers’ market in Oakland/Berkeley. This weekend Jenny and the kids – and Phoebe – were back, along with their father, John, a sociologist at the University of California at Davis. I saw John first at the Association for the Sociology of Religion conference. Saturday afternoon I abandoned the sociology conferences and accompanied John, Jenny, and the girls on the “T,” the Boston subway, to the Museum of Science, which on a rainy Saturday afternoon was amazingly packed. It was a great museum, with cool dioramas and neat kid-friendly exhibits. The older kid got on a see saw that illustrated balance beam/lever principles. She and Phoebe left their shadows on a kind of phosphorescent wall.

As we left we came across another anthropological/natural history museum with some big stuffed bears. Then they told me the bear story (and showed me the pictures on their camera).

The four of them were staying in a cabin near Lake Tahoe. They went for a hike and locked the door of the cabin – but a window was slightly ajar. Apparently as they hiked, a bear used the window somehow to break in and ate some of their food and even got paw prints all over John’s Mac. The interesting thing was that the next night the bear – they’re creatures of habit – came back for some more food. John saw the bear through the window and grabbed a camera and took a picture of the bear. But the flash went off and scared the bear away (though John got a second picture of the bear, from the back, fleeing). Good story, great pictures, fun museum, nice time.

-- Perry