Every So Often, Not at Great Speed

So up there in Seward, Alaska, at the Alaska Sea Life Center, they had this Octopus called Aurora.

Aurora was about five years old when she died. A Giant Pacific octopus, she was found outside the Sea Life Center when she was only about the size of a softball.

She was living inside an old tire that had filled with water from the rain. They took her to live in the aquarium and she did pretty well.

Octopuses are really smart - maybe as smart as dogs. They are excellent problem solvers and can learn to recognize symbols and play games. But they don’t live very long.

Aurora lived at the aquarium for three years before somebody had the idea to try to hook her up with the other resident Giant Pacific octopus, a male by the name of J-1.

J-1 was the largest known octopus in the world. He weighed 57 pounds. He, too, was a foundling - found on a beach when he was only the size of a quarter.

He was about five years old at the time he was introduced into Aurora’s tank. He was pretty near the end of his life. His skin was beginning to wear away and his suckers were cracking and becoming pitted. He had never met another octopus.

When they dropped J-1 into Aurora’s tank, Aurora freaked out a little bit. She retreated to the bottom and bunched herself into a ball. Eventually though, it was Aurora who approached J-1. She reached out a tentative tentacle and touched the old guy. Then she ran away, scrunched herself into a corner of the tank.

Little by little, J-1 pursued Aurora and won her over with, I dunno, charisma. Maybe he did the thing where he squeezes into a really little jar.

Anyway, at some point, the two of them suckered themselves onto the back wall of their glass enclosure with J-1 on the outside, completely covering Aurora. They stayed like that for more than eight hours, mating. At times during this somewhat alien lovemaking, J-1 flashed several different colors in rapid succession, from deep red to ghostly white, which is a thing octopuses can do. Nobody really knows what it means, though.

When they finally separated, J-1 had done what he could, but nobody was sure if the two were too old to conceive.

A month later, Aurora retreated to a rocky outcropping in a corner of the tank and laid tens of thousands of tiny, pearlescent eggs. She began the long process of caring for her unborn young by drawing water into her mantle and blowing it over them, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This was June. If all went well, in six to eight months she would hatch her eggs and then die of starvation and exhaustion.

Octopuses stop eating entirely while they tend their eggs. They really only die because they give up everything for their eggs.

But early on, there were problems. Her eggs weren’t developing. They failed to grow or change color as they should have. Probably Aurora was simply too old to be an octopus mother. Still, she sat next to her eggs and kept the water moving over them. Occasionally she would have to get rid of a curious starfish or two that snuck in at night, looking for a meal.

In September of 2004, J-1 died of old age and Aurora was still tending her (most likely sterile) eggs. She hadn’t eaten anything in months.

When December rolled around and still the eggs showed no sign of developing, Aurora’s keepers decided to drain the tank and remove the eggs that were slowly killing their well-intentioned mother.

Aurora had other ideas.

As the water level fell, the eggs were slowly exposed to the air and, in order to stay under water where she could breathe, Aurora was forced further and further away from them. She repositioned herself, half in and half out of the water, and began spraying long streams of water onto the now exposed rock face where her eggs were slowly drying and dying in order to keep them moist.

An intern charged with clearing the undeveloped eggs from the tank noticed that some of them had little red dots inside them - eyes.

They were woefully undeveloped after seven months, but Aurora’s eggs weren’t sterile after all. They hastily refilled her tank and she moved back next to them and resumed her vigil. She would have a long while left to go.

It should have taken - at most - eight months, but it took Aurora and her eggs more than twelve.

Finally, one day in April 2005, a tiny, almost spherical, baby octopus hatched from one of the eggs and began floating around in the tank. The keepers were sure that would be it, but in the coming days, in ones or twos or tens or twenties, "every so often, and not at great speed", thousands and thousands of babies were born.

They had to set up additional tanks just to hold them all.

As the eggs hatched, Aurora became noticeably more active for the first time in months, stretching herself across the glass and moving around her tank.

Aurora, who had weighed 37 pounds at the beginning of her long ordeal, was now a cephalopod waif. She hadn’t eaten on her own in more than a year. Her keepers had been hand feeding her fish and crabmeat in an effort to extend her life. They were successful, after a fashion. She lived until August of 2005, four months after the first of her babies were born, when she was euthanized out of concern for her comfort.

For octopuses, birthing is a numbers game. Out of thousands of babies, some two dozen of Aurora’s babies (a huge number for an octopus brood) have survived and grown up and are being cared for at the Sea Life Center today.

Here's a picture of Aurora, who was a hell of a mother octopus:

While the Cat is Away

. . . the mouse will sort of sit around, feeling bored and kinda lonely.

So Chiara took a jetplane to Italy on Sunday, and she left me and the cat (the actual cat) to hold down the fort. The cat might disagree, but I think it’s going all right so far; I almost always remember to feed her.

I mean, sure, the place is getting a little frayed around the edges, but nothing catastrophic. It is like the end of the Roman empire: it just gets more decadent and unkempt, and the dustbunnies make some inroads into the interior (in this metaphor, they’re the Visigoths), and eventually Chiara comes home and clucks and tsks a bit and we clean house and presto, Renaissance!

Thing is, when your wife goes out of town for a month or so, you spin these gossamer webs in your mind’s eye about what it’ll be like. You imagine that now, at last, you’ll have that poker game, or smoke those cigars, or watch those pornographic movies, or go to those bars with your bachelor friends. You think that you’ll play music as loud as you want because no one will be in the other room trying to watch the Biggest Loser. You think you’ll go out every night and the cat thinks she’ll be allowed to sleep in the bed.

Of course, the reality is somewhat more tame. Mostly you just wish you had something to do. You feel sort of depressed and suddenly feel sure that, were your wife around, you’d be having sex. And you feel sure it would be way crazier than any sex you actually have with her. The bed is noticeably colder and the house noticeably quieter.

I guess you play the music (mostly so you don't feel so alone) and you get to dance like an idiot, but that’s more fun when someone is there to roll her eyes at you.

And you don’t really like cigars or strip clubs or whatever anyway.

And the cat? Hell, she’s batshit crazy. Who knows what she thinks about cigars or stripclubs? And if I let her in the bed, Chiara will probably knife me.

So, unless someone gets me out of the house, This’ll be more or less just a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. I’m looking at you, Grapes of Wrath.

Well, and the porn. That part is just like you imagine it will be, more or less.

The Fortress of Not So Solitude

I do my best thinking in the shower.

Really. I find something about the experience conducive to clear, organized thought. Maybe it is the hot water, or the white noise of same, or maybe it is simply being in a small room without distractions - like a deprivation chamber.

Like in Altered States.

It could be that the act of showering has been repeated so many times that it requires no thought whatsoever anymore and that rote quality itself frees my mind for other things. Maybe a Freudian would tell me that it approximates the warmth and wetness of the womb and thus unconsciously calms me.

In any case: I do my best thinking in the shower.

I come up with ideas for the Great American Novel, I practice speeches to the United Nations General Assembly, I imagine solutions to the problems of the Iraqi constitution, I invent inventions.

All while I am shampooing my hair!

I have even extended the range of this effect by studying in the outer chamber of our bathroom. I can’t study in the loft because that is where all the books are and the computer. I can’t study downstairs because that is where Chiara and the television are. So, I move my books and papers onto the bathroom counter, turn on the overhead heater (for the noise - it drowns out the Oprah Chiara is inevitably watching) and get cracking.

The shower (and the bathroom) is like my Fortress of Solitude - it is white, it is quiet, and nobody is allowed in.

The problem with having a Fortress of Solitude is that Lois Lane knows all about it.

Chiara doesn’t seem to respect my study-system. I swear she follows me around the house to check up on me, and few of my activities perplex her more than studying while standing up in the bathroom. Moreover, she hasn’t the least concern for my privacy.

To me, the shower is like my inner sanctum. She isn’t supposed to be in the room unless there is to be shower sex.

Now look, I’ve dated women who wanted an open-door policy in the bathroom; girls who either wanted me to do everything without privacy and/or girls who, themselves, wanted to expose their bathroom activities to me.

I’m not a believer in it.

And, in point of fact, neither is Chiara. It is only that, for her, these other, academic, functions of the bathroom are not deserving of the same privacy.

And, to top it all off, she is constantly grooming me when I am in my Fortress of Solitude. It is like having a gorilla for a wife. I’ll be shaving, let’s say, and she’ll come up behind me and inspect my shoulders for the stray hairs that occasionally try to colonize that otherwise bare expanse of skin. If she finds one, she’ll pluck at it with tweezers until she gets it out. If I have dried my hair, she’ll start stroking down cowlicks and flyaways. If I am getting dressed (she watches me do that, too), she will pluck at places where the fabric is pilling, or tug at where the material has bunched.

God help me if she finds a clogged pore on my face.

And I am nearly always being lint-rolled.

Now I know why they usually build Fortresses of Solitude in the middle of Ice-bound, antipodal plains.

Of course, maybe Superman has stray hairs on his shoulders.

The End of Elephants

In the small town of St. Thomas, in Ontario, there is a massive (and life-sized) statue of an African elephant. This is because St. Thomas is where, on September 15, 1885, Jumbo the Elephant died after being hit by a steam locomotive.

Jumbo had an interesting life, for anyone, elephant or human. He was born free, sometime around 1861, in the Sudan. The French, who then controlled the Sudan, captured Jumbo as a young elephant and brought him by rail to Cairo, where he was sold and then taken by boat and then again by rail to Paris, where they exhibited him in the Jardin des Plantes near the railway station. He was probably chained.

In 1865 he was given to the London Zoo. More boats on the ocean and trains chugging across unfamiliar landscapes.

In London, he became a favorite among children for the remarkable docility he showed. Even though by this time he was far and away the largest elephant ever held in captivity (standing some four meters tall), and though he had never been trained to do it, he routinely allowed visitors to the zoo to ride on his back. In fact, he so impressed one particular visitor with his demeanor and ever-increasing size, that he ended up being sold again for the tidy sum of $10,000 - to P.T. Barnum. This transaction was made over the public protestations of Queen Victoria herself, who had taken rather a fancy to Jumbo, it seems.

Jumbo then became the star attraction in the Barnum and Bailey circus. He became so famous that his name (a corruption of the Swahili word for ‘hello’) became a household word. His name has survived in the English language to this day as a descriptor for anything gigantic.

He was an icon of the early industrial age, traveling all over the globe in an era when most humans never went far beyond their hometowns. He was, very nearly, the most famous anything in the world. People waited in line for hours just to see him and feel awe.

In 1885, while being led onto his car on the circus train along with the smallest elephant in the circus, Tom Thumb, Jumbo was struck by an unscheduled (and yes, speeding) locomotive coming from the other direction.

Later, P.T. Barnum would claim that Jumbo’s final living act was to grasp Tom Thumb with his trunk and throw him twenty yards away, out of the path of the hurtling train.

The beast of iron and wheels met the “mountain of bone and brawn” and was completely derailed - was, in fact, so damaged that it had to be scrapped - but Jumbo too was crushed, and his six and one half ton body was badly broken.

It took 160 men working together to drag his body into the ditch alongside the rails where he finally died.

Jumbo’s handler, Matthew Scott, stood guard over the fallen giant all night, waiting for the heavy machines to arrive which would be able to lift Jumbo’s immense corpse onto the train that would take him away.

When Scott finally collapsed from exhaustion, scores of eager souvenir-hunters rushed the body with knifes, hoping to hack off a piece of history. Scott had been fighting them off for more than ten hours and wept pitifully when they finally overwhelmed him.

Jumbo's bones now reside in the New York Museum of Natural History. His skin was stuffed and displayed at Tufts University (whose mascot Jumbo still is) until it was consumed by fire in 1975.

Jumbo is only the most famous in the surprisingly long roster of famous elephants killed in tragic circumstances far from their homes. To wit:

Abul-Abbas, the famed elephant of Charlemagne, who died of pneumonia after swimming the Rhine in the winter of 810.

Hanno the Blessed, elephant of Pope Leo X, who died after he was given a laxative by the Pope’s doctors in 1516.

Topsy, who was fed a lit cigarette by her trainer in 1903 at Coney Island’s Luna Park and then went on a rampage in which she killed three men. Topsy was electrocuted to death by Thomas Edison, who wanted to use the opportunity to further his war with Westingouse and Tesla and alternating current. Edison filmed it for his propaganda. You can watch the film he shot on YouTube, but is is graphic and it will stay with you.

Mary, the circus elephant who, in 1916, finally reacted to years of physical abuse by throwing her trainer against a drink stand and then deliberately crushing his skull with her foot. She was hung. On the first attempt she snapped the chain meant to hang her and fell to the ground, breaking her hip. They strung her up and tried again - this time successfully.

And perhaps not finally, but less depressingly, there is the still living Ruby, the famous painting elephant of the Phoenix Zoo, who once had a painting of hers sell for more than $10,000 - the price of one Jumbo.

An Obit for Old Adwaita

I read today that the oldest animal on earth died last week In Calcutta. He was a tortoise called Adwaita. In Bengali, his name meant ‘The Only’.

He was - they think - some 256 years old.

He was born in the Seychelles but was captured there by British sailors and brought to India, where he was presented - along with three of his brothers - to Robert Clive, the man who forged the British Raj in India for the East India Company. This would have been sometime in the 1750s or 60s.

For one hundred and some-odd years, Adwaita lived on the sprawling estate of the Adventurer, Robber Baron, Statesman, Opium Eater, and Suicide, Robert Clive.

Eventually, Adwaita outlived his three brothers, Clive, and the British Empire.

In 1876, he was moved to the Calcutta Zoo, where he lived the life of a bachelor until his death last Wednesday.

About a month ago, his massive shell cracked and he developed a wound that wouldn’t heal. His keepers came to feed him one morning and found him collapsed under his own weight. They will preserve his shell and use carbon dating techniques on it to ascertain his age with more certainty than was possible while he lived.

Having had, at one time, a pet tortoise of my own (Shellbert, by handle), maybe this all hit me harder than it otherwise might have.

Shellbert hibernated nearly all the time. He was usually buried somewhere in the garden - his preferred situs for his project of endless sleep. When he reappeared occasionally, we’d ply him with strawberries, which he ate with abandon. You could hold them in front of him and he would rush at them with a speed you would not expect from such a slow little creature.

Strawberries are a tortoise's favorite thing in the whole world, in my experience.

One day he simply disappeared. Either he had buried himself yet again in the flowerbed and we simply didn't see him on the days he happened to emerge or he had escaped our backyard for the wide world. I think about him sometimes.

I read once about the tortoises that were kept by the Ottoman sultans on the Topkapi Palace grounds on the Golden Horn. They wandered freely through fields of tulips with gigantic candles fixed to their backs and at night, the candles were lit so that - in those days before electric lights - one could look up at the gently sloping hill from the banks of the Bosphorus and watch the sad creatures’ nocturnal movements by the slow, pendulous motion of the flickering candles on their backs.

I like to think Adwaita’s days on the Clive Baronate Estate were like that: full of balmy nights under quiet stars, with a belly full of flowers.

I hope that his long years at the Calcutta Zoo weren’t anything like the only tropes I know for zoo animals. I hope they gave him strawberries sometimes.

I hope he didn’t have the kind of memory we do - one that endlessly ferments everything into treacly nostalgia, no matter what we pour into it; I hope he didn’t think much about the Seychelles or about other tortoises.

The Egyptians have this thing they say about the Pyramids:

“All men fear Time, but Time itself fears the Pyramids.”

The story of Adwaita the tortoise feels like that to me, mixed up with the sensation I get when I see homemade posters stuck on stop signs advertising lost dogs and cats.

I am strangely moved by the passing of this reptilian monument to time and I never even knew he existed until today. If I ever go to Calcutta, I will be sure to look for his great shell, horny and calloused, wherever it hangs - as it is sure to do - for a reverent public to view. Maybe I will feel like I feel when I visit the grave of someone I admire.

Cancun: Tim Orders an Odd Dessert

“Tim’s breath always - always - smells of corn.”

This from my sister during a brief pause in the conversation last night at dinner.

“Except when he eats creamed corn. Then it doesn’t smell like anything at all,” she added after a moment’s scrunch-nosed thought.

This was presumably a segue from the discussion of one of Tim’s more surprising actions of the evening: ordering the corn ice cream off the dessert menu.

When it arrived, it came inside an actual cornhusk and was the creamy color of French Vanilla. I guessed it would be less bizarre than, at first blush, it seemed it would be. After all, I reasoned, cornbread is sweet - after a fashion.

This ice cream smelled strongly of raw corn and, delighted at our trepidation, Tim dug in with gusto.

“It’s not bad,” he said. “exactly."

After another spoonful and a moment of thought: "It tastes like corn.”

We pressed him.

“Well, it doesn’t taste like cornbread as much as corn juice.”

This brought a joyful horror to all of us.

Tim ate about half of the stuff before giving a kind of full-body shiver that started from his head and moved down his arms. He set his spoon quietly down on the table and pushed the plate of ice cream away from him.

I got up to go to the restroom and stumbled on the leg of my chair to everyone’s delight.

“It’s an old tequila injury,” I explained. “Acts up sometimes - always tells me when I’m drunk.”

Tim’s breath, it was reported to me later, had not even the faintest trace of corn-smell after eating the corn ice cream.

Cancun: A Difficult Dinner

Dinner last night began in the same way it so often does - with me feigning indignation for comedic effect.

My mother had ordered a bottle of pinot grigio for herself and, after receiving it and tasting it, declared that it was pretty good. My father asked to see the bottle and when he took it from my mother I leaned over Chiara to have a look at it myself.

The first thing I noticed was that it was not, strictly speaking, a pinot grigio at all, but rather a blend of chardonnay and pinot grapes. I slammed my fist down onto the table in mock disgust and cried out “A blend!? Mother, how could you!?”

I then asked my father where the wine was from. He read the back of the bottle and informed me it was from Vera Cruz. Again I slammed my fist down on the table, rattling the flatware.

“Vera Cruz!?” I shouted in faux consternation.

“What’s wrong with you?” my father asked me.

“Nothing,” I replied quietly. “I’m feigning indignation.”

“Why?”

“For comedic effect.”

Stare. Silence.

Later, while discussing the adoption of Children, Tim impressed upon me the importance of a child having a cool name.

“Like Kobe or LeBron?” I asked. “Yeah,” said Tim.

I offered to call an adopted son LeJeff or LeKobe. Somehow or other this led to a more earnest discussion of potential baby names. Jennifer volunteered that she and Tim had already selected baby names for their theoretical children. The top boy name? Finnegan.

I said I thought it was a terrible name with a great nickname: Finn.

My dad said it was a terrible name because it was Irish.

This, as you might have expected, was the screeching turntable of the evening and rather upset my sister. It also rather perplexed the rest of us.

We pursued the topic with abandon.

Turns out my father believes that an Irish name dooms a child to a life of prejudicial treatment because, and i quote:

“Everyone knows that the Irish are a bunch of drunks and criminals” and “No one would ever think an Irish name was anything but low-class.”

It should be noted, for the record, that mine is, of course, an (ethnically) Irish family. Indeed, my father's actual surname is O'Brien.

We tried to explain to my father (over Jennifer’s mild protestations) how dashedly pretentious and upper-crusty a name like Finnegan actually was, but he wouldn’t have it. Instead he insisted over and over again that we must be incredibly ignorant if we didn’t know what people thought about "the Irish."

Tim asked him if he still called it a paddy wagon.

You can guess how this all went over.

Later, my sister offered up the middle ground (and perfectly true) position that words and names change their meaning with time and use. She mentioned the etymological history of her own name ‘Jennifer’ and how it came originally from ‘Guinevere’ who, according to my sister, was a slut.

This really caught in my father’s craw for some reason.

“How was Guinevere a slut!?” he demanded in far too loud a voice.

“Uh, because she slept with someone who wasn’t her husband!” my sister replied, pitched over the table and pointing a fork at my father.

“A knight!” he replied, red in the face, bubbling with anger. “You can’t be a slut for sleeping with a knight of the Round Table!”

“Of course you can! Especially if you are married to King Arthur!”

Here I tossed in that maybe she felt neglected because he was always off somewhere with Merlin, playing cards and whatnot. Tim smirked and, looking down, stirred the food on his plate in ever-tighter circles.

From here things got progressively more ridiculous until, almost as if the weight of the conversation caused itself to collapse, the whole thing just fizzled away leaving little more than a smell of burnt ozone and a cloud of steam.

We ate more or less silently for the remainder of the meal.

Cancun: My Father's Jokes Go Unappreciated

At dinner last night, Tim and my father and I all ordered Margaritas.

I opted for the Cadillac with Don Julio reposado tequila. Those other two got the house.

Good luck explaining to them about the bottle of Pancho Villa-wouldn’t-piss-in-it tequila they ordered. Anyway.

The waiter brings the drinks: Pinot Grigio for my mother. Coke for my sister. Coke for Chiara. Then he places my drink in front of me and announces it (as it deserved):

“the Cadillac, Señor.”

When he goes to place my father’s leper of a margarita before him, my father chimes in loudly:

“Ford!”

The waiter pauses in mid-action, the watery concoction disguised as a margarita suspended mere inches from the tabletop. He looks at my father.

“Ford!” my father again cries out, beaming at the poor waiter.

We all sit still as statues, confused or petrified; no one has the foggiest idea what we should be doing.

“Chevy!” my father yells.

By now, people at other tables - human resource managers in town for conventions, families of Iowans just vomited forth from cruise ships, chain-smoking New Yorkers happy to have someone other than the waitstaff to sneer at - are all pausing in their conversations, forks arrested halfway to mouths, to stare at our table.

And still the waiter holds that drink above the table in front of my father, perplexed.

And still my father beams his toothy smile.

“Cadillac.” says my father, gesturing at my margarita.

“Chevy! Ford!” he exclaims, pointing at his, still hovering before him in the waiter's hand.

With a sigh of either final comprehension or relief, the waiter chuckles briefly if unconvincingly and quietly and places the margarita in front of my father and then hands the other to Tim.

I take a deep breath and resolve to eat quickly.

The Would-Be Sultan, Subverted

I once went to a rib joint with my friend Joe. We were waited on by a stunning brunette who seemed to be flirting with both of us rather brazenly.

When she brought our dinners to us, she offered us bibs with a wry grin and a tuneful laugh. Joe and I exchanged glances and almost with one voice said to the girl “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

It seemed a charming sort of a lark - an opportunity to demonstrate how game and secure we were and what keen, ironic senses of humor we possessed. Our confidence and joie de vivre would communicate amply what giving and lyrical lovers we would make, surely.

She offered to tie the bibs on for us. As she came around behind me I arched my eyebrow at Joe and gave him a lopsided smile, full of significance.

Having an attractive woman gird a bib onto you in a restaurant is a heady experience. More than any other service of modern life save perhaps the massage, it suggests a kind of opulent servitude. In the moment, it felt like nothing so much as having a harem girl in a diaphanous gown feed me grapes, or fan me with a palm frond, or fill my goblet with wine from a bejeweled decanter.

The dance of the seven veils bibs.

In short, I felt important and powerful.

But when she had secured the bib and moved from behind my chair in order to repeat the task for Joe, a curious transformation of my mood transpired.

I felt stupid.

It was more than that, though; in the split instant of time between the bib being placed around my neck and the waitress removing her hands from my person, I underwent a profound reversal of emotion. I went from feeling regal and pampered, to feeling emasculated and childish.

I was, after all, just fitted with a device designed to catch foodstuff that fell from my mouth accidentally as I ate.

The experience of having that girl tie the thing around me was exciting. The experience of wearing it in front of her was painfully embarrassing.

As I watched the waitress tie on Joe’s bib, I saw in his eyes the same sudden swelling of potency and then, as she completed the operation, the same deflation in his demeanor. The girl left us to our meal and Joe and I stared silently at one another for a long, awkward moment before removing our bibs.

The girl never said anything or gave any sign that she noticed or cared that we had cast our bibs aside. She continued in her flirtatious vein and was attentive in all the usual waitress ways, but Joe and I hadn’t the anima left for any flirting in return. At least the act of eating ribs was still masculine and primal. It was likely that fact alone that salvaged whatever could have been salvaged.

Oh, and neither of us dropped any food onto our shirts. We aren't animals.

Someone in this Story is Gregor Samsa

While sitting on the sofa the other night, watching the Colbert Report, my mirth was shattered by a piercing scream from another room.

Chiara.

I leapt from the sofa and ran toward the shriek, to the kitchen, all the time crying out “Chiara!? Chiara, are you okay!?”

There, in the kitchen, Chiara was paralyzed with fright.

I grasped her hands and asked her what the matter was. She pointed to a narrow gap between the fridge and the wall.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A aneemal!” she shrieked.

(She nearly always calls all living things simply ‘animals’ - insects, spiders, lobsters, snails, mice - it makes it exceedingly difficult to steel oneself appropriately for whatever variety of household critter removal one might have ahead of oneself.)

With a silent, frustrated eyeroll, I poked my head around the corner of the fridge. Sure enough - an animal. It was a big cockroach looking thing. The size, perhaps, of a circus peanut. I had no idea how to proceed.

I was afraid to try to spray it with an insecticide, thinking that it would simply dash under the fridge before I could deliver a lethal amount of poison. I was equally afraid to reach back there and squash it with a paper towel - what if it jumped on me? I quickly determined that Chiara would not allow me to use any of our kitchenware to capture it. I was in a pickle.

I went back to the fridge to see if the little bastard was still there. On closer inspection, it was belly up on the linoleum, its horribly articulated legs curled in a final supplication. But ominously, as I watched for any signs of life, its antennae waved gently.

I knew not if they moved by operation of the last spark of life granted the miserable creature or from the slight flow of air created by our central heating. I secretly feared it was only resting in some mockery of mammalian sleep and would leap to attention and arm-crawling-on as soon as its reverie was disturbed. I reached toward it tentatively with the broom.

It was as dead as a coffin nail (as Dickens would have it). I swept it into a specially prepared zip-lock bag and sealed it tight. I resolved to have an exterminator out the next day to whom I would show the insect. Hopefully something could be done about the army of its friends I imagined watching from under the broiler and from behind the dishwasher and inside the vents.

The exterminator’s name, when he arrived the next day, was Ken. Ken took one look at my trophy and pronounced it an oriental cockroach. Basically solitary, Ken assured me, they live outdoors and only come inside by accident or to get out of a deluge.

Ken offered to spray around the perimeter of our apartment so as to dissuade any other oriental cockroaches from coming in. While he did so, he talked.

Ken has horrible stories that we will never have. He has horrible bee stories and ant stories and raccoon stories and termite stories. He knows which restaurants to merely avoid (he wouldn’t tell me) and which to avoid like the plague (all the fast food places).

I gave him a glass of water and he said a curious thing: “I don’t want to drink out of your glass because I am sick.”

Did he imagine that I would drink from that particular glass before washing it? Did he have some sort of disease that dishwashing couldn’t thwart? Whatever his reason for trepidation, he was quickly cured of his worry or his disease as, by the time he finished refusing the water, he had already begun to drink thirstily.

As he was leaving, I pressed him to reveal what he described as “the worst job I ever been on.” He hesitated, but having brought up the topic himself, he was cornered. It involved an opossum, he warned me.

An opossum? What’s so bad about them?

“It was stuck in a drainpipe when I got there, wriggling and twitching,” he began. “I put on my gloves and reached down to pull it out. I grabbed it and gave it a tug and it just tore in half. The whole thing was filled with maggots.”

Then he left. I didn’t shake his hand.

I went upstairs and tossed the cockroach in the trash and then covered him with a layer of crumpled paper towels so that I wouldn’t have to see him every time I threw something out in the coming days.

Sic Transit Pestilentia.

A Smell of Satisfaction Prevails Throughout

Bertrand Russell relates a story told by William James:

A man found that whenever he was under the spell of ether he knew the secret to the universe but, when he came out of it, the secret was lost to him. Finally, after enormous effort and many failed attempts, he was able to write it down one afternoon after it came to him from the ether. When he had slept off the effects of the drug, he looked to his note. It read: A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

I don’t know about that, but a bottle of port is a delicious companion on a lazy afternoon.

It also does wonders for the sounds of a melismatic travesty wafting in from another room when one’s wife is watching American Idol and one is trying to listen to the Luna album Penthouse.

By tradition, port is always passed to the left around a table (to port, as it were). If ever the passing is suspended, it is considered bad form to ask the person then possessing the bottle for the port directly. Rather, one should ask the person who has the bottle whether they know the Bishop of Gloucester (or anywhere else). If they reply that they do not, one should then inform them that the Bishop is a nice fellow, but he never remembers to pass the port.

It seems unclear what one ought to do if the person so queried does, in fact, know the Bishop of Gloucester (or anywhere else). Engage him in a conversation about bishoping?

Alternatively, you might switch to a drink that is less fussy about decorum.

Barring that:

Try the Fonseca 20 year old Tawny or the Taylor Fladgate 10 year or the Dow's Colheita.

Please enjoy them with a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

On the Platypus, Bitches

1. Although it is a mammal, the female lays eggs. The only other mammal to do so is the (related) echidna.

2. It maintains an average body temperature well below that of all other mammals - about 90 degrees fahrenheit.

3. Its ‘duck-bill’ is not a bill at all and does not open. it is their nose, more or less, and the mouth is underneath. Also, as adults, they have no teeth.

4. The platypus is one of the only venomous mammals. The males have spurs on their back feet which deliver a powerful toxin that, while probably not fatal to a human, can cause excruciating pain lasting for months.

5. You might think (as I did) that they are about the size of a beaver or river-otter - that is, more or less the size of a smallish dog. In fact, they are tiny. They are scarcely larger than a small housecat. And that includes the tail and everything.
6. The platypus uses electrolocation to hunt for its prey, sweeping the sensitive bill back and forth underwater to detect the tiny electrical currents given off by the muscles in the bodies of small crustaceans and the like. It is the only mammal known to have such a sense.
7. When the animal was first taxidermied and brought back to europe, naturalists were convinced that it was an elaborate hoax.

8. The plural is not “platypi” as this is a Latin-style plural and “platypus” is a greek word (it means flat-foot). The correct plural is either "platypuses" or "platypus" or even "platypodes." (Incidentally, this is also true of octopus, another Greek word often incorrectly given a Latinate plural.)

Italian Night Terrors

So Chiara has a lot of nightmares. Incubi, in Italian.

The fun part about her nightmares is that she’s also one of those hilarious people who talk in their sleep occasionally; a somniloquist.

If you are the other person in the bed, it is a little like an old radio program, dimly received and tuned into in the middle of the plot. I often lie awake, propped on an elbow, debating whether to wake her and soothe her, or to wait it out and see if anything funny happens.

I usually wait it out. Funny things often do happen.

Once, I awoke to her mewling and twitching beside me and was about to wake her with comforting words, when she began speaking.

“Dracula!” she cried in what seemed to be real terror, “Dracula!”

She often has nightmares about Dracula. How adorable is that? It is like having nightmares about Frankenstein’s monster or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s ridiculous. What could be less genuinely frightening than Dracula? Bigfoot, maybe?

I let that dream run on until she just fell back into a calmer sleep of her own accord.

Another time, I came to bed much later than her and my final preparations for sleep must have stirred her up somehow. She sat up like a bolt and began berating me in Italian. She wagged her finger and furrowed her brows and yelled and prattled in a rush of vowels and consonants that I was completely unable to translate at that speed.

Her eyes were open. I assumed she was awake. I asked her repeatedly to slow down. I reminded her that I don’t speak Italian well enough for this and that I couldn’t understand her.

Eventually, after it ran its course, she just flopped back down onto the bed and slept.

That was the first moment at which I realized she had never been awake. In the morning she had no recollection of any of this. I still have no idea what she was so mad about.

Usually her nightmares only manifest themselves as a kind of faint whining sound and the occasional full body spasm. She frequently has dreams where shadowy figures (often Dracula) are suspended directly above her or are following her through dark spaces and drawing ever closer to her. She tries to scream and finds she is paralyzed or rendered mute. The noises I hear are the sounds of her trying so hard to scream inside her head that it leaks out a bit.

It sounds horrible, I know. But the things she wants to scream about!

Lately she is managing to actually cry out - loudly - in the middle of a nightmare. The other day it was because she was in her childhood home and there were people in it that she didn’t recognize.

Alright. That's creepy I suppose. But last night the topper:

I wake up with a start; Chiara is shrilly screaming. I hold her and softly repeat to her that everything is okay, that it is only a dream, that I am here - the usual ameliorative things one says in these circumstances.

I ask her, after a long moment of peace, what her dream was about. She tells me she’ll talk about it in the morning. So this morning I ask.

Here, in her own words, in its entirety, is Chiara’s description of her terrifying dream:

“There was thees table . . . and behind eet . . . I saw the top of a bald head!”

I Cannot Return to the Nursery

I have a problem.

The guy at the Armstrong Nursery Center on Pacific Coast Highway thinks I am someone I am not. Though it’s partly my fault, I suppose, I can never go back there. I will have to drive fifteen minutes out of my way and purchase plant food or flowers or terra cotta pots or whatever at another location.

I don’t see any other solution.

I was dropping by with a soil sample to inquire about some funny little white bastards living in the pot of my lemon tree.

(Turns out they are soil gnats. There’s a spray you can get.)

The manager is a nice guy, although a little lispy; it grates on you if you hear it for too long.

Anyway, as I’m waiting for one of the high school kids who work there to retrieve my gnat-killing spray, the manager guy says to me “So how is that avocado tree doing?”

But see, I don’t have an avocado tree. Never did.

I’d tell the guy, except that he’s made this mistake once before and I didn’t hear the question or something and said "fine." So now he, in his mind, correctly associates me with avocado trees, but I still don’t have one.

I decide I have to fix up this confusion.

So I tell him that my avocado tree is doing fine but is not making any avocados. He asks what kind of exposure it gets and I say southeast. That’s the problem, he says. I agree.

Then, he asks me if I still work at Boeing.

I am not going to lie to the guy. A houseplant mistake is one thing - he just misremembered what kind of plant he sold me - no big deal, but a mistake on this order suggests he has confused me with another person altogether. So what do I do?

Naturally, I tell him no, I don’t work at Boeing still.

But before he can ask me about my kids or my boat or my trip to Senegal, I get out of there. And can you imagine if he saw me with my wife instead of the woman he might imagine me to be married to?

But obviously that will never happen because I can never return.

Fuck.

The Jennifer Dispatches: My Father versus Cheese and Bread

My sister relates a story of my father on Superbowl Sunday:

Halftime. The family sits around a coffee table laden with snackfoods and appetizers. My father voices a complaint:

“Next time, we should really make some plans for dinner and not just snack. We should have some protein for dinner. I’m tired of having Cheese and Bread all the time. We should have gotten those ribs at the supermarket.”

My sister responds: “We weren’t going to just snack for dinner. Mom ordered a pizza.”

“More Cheese and Bread! Why would I want more Cheese and Bread?!” cries my father.

“Well then why don’t you go to the supermarket and buy those ribs?” asks my sister, foolishly.

“I don’t want to go all the way out to the store to buy the ribs! I just don’t want to eat any more Cheese and Bread! All we ever eat is Cheese and Bread since you came here! This must be your doing!”

“Are you talking about the hors d’oeuvres? There isn’t even that much Cheese and Bread,” says my sister.

This is the last straw apparently. My father leaps from the sofa and hunches himself over the coffee table. Extending one of his stubby index fingers he points violently at a bowl of French onion dip and its companion plate of Ruffles brand potato chips.

“Cheese and Bread!” he exclaims

He jabs his finger at a pate.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He, predictably, stabs his thick digit into the wedge of jarlsberg.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

Even the bowl of sweet pickles is not immune from his wrath.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He punches with his finger at a bowl of Cheetos. He’s almost perspiring with the force of his hate.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

The twin bowl, filled with Fritos.

“Corn Chips! Just like Pizza!!”

My sister, always the glutton for paternal punishment, interrupts my father’s reverie of rage.

“How are corn chips just like pizza?” she asks.

“Shut up!” responds my father, “I’m speaking to your mother!”

My sister announces that she is going to go work on her art history paper. She goes to her room and does so. Later, when the pizza arrives, she leaves her room to find my father, perched stone-faced and alone at the dining room table eating the enormous porterhouse steak and gargantuan baked potato that my mother prepared for him.

My sister went into the living room and finished the game - and the pizza - with my mother.

To an Anonymous Punk, My Rebuttal

The other day, in the parking lot of a bookstore, I strolled by a small group of militant old-school punks drinking on the hood of an old beater. These guys were classic. Mohawks, studded leather, overweight girlfriends.

I wanted to walk as near to them as possible as I passed them on the way back to my car because I wanted to communicate to them (my blazer and flip-flops aside) that, in some cosmic sense, I was one of them.

Or anyway, I wanted them to know that I sympathized with them enough to not avoid them outright. I tried to emit early Ramones vibes at them as I strolled by plucking the price sticker from my book of Sontag essays.

The lead punk, his primacy evidenced both by his size and his possession of the plastic jug of vodka, greeted me with a “hey, man!” and I returned it with vigor.

“Isn’t this a magnificent evening?” he offered up lankily.

I replied that it was, but beginning to question my wisdom in instigating the exchange, I veered slightly and made for my car as casually but as quickly as I could.

The punk had a parting query for me and I’ve thought of it intermittently since:

“Don’t you wish everything was free?” he asked me in his hale timbre.

When I climbed into my car (a convertible), I took especial care to turn down the volume on the Belle and Sebastian song then playing on my stereo; I didn’t want to offend or rile the punks.

I muttered something supportive to them and drove away.

Afterward, I made for the dinner party I was attending that night at the Hometown Buffet.

I'll let that sink in.

The terrors were legion.

The place shared a wall with the 99cent store. Pay at the door and then take as much food as you like.

Lemme give you the tour: Here’s eggs. Here’s pot roast. Here’s spaghetti with ketchup. Here’s a vegetable - no, wait, that’s a chicken finger.

At one point a woman (one hopes) in a large bee costume sat down next to me and gave me a sweaty hug. The pilling felt of the costume’s gloves was used to caress my cheek. The black tights of the outfit had pooled around her ankles and spilled over the oversized sneakers. The smell was reminiscent of nothing so much as the ancient t-shirt I once discovered under a seat cushion on a houseboat.

Point is, I desperately wanted to be somewhere expensive as all sin. I think that punk had the wrong of it; I don’t want everything to be free, I just want to always have enough money to dine at an establishment where I can eat food that hasn’t been sitting under a lightbulb for a week and a half and takes less than an hour to chew.

But you can’t say that kind of thing to a punk, not when you have a haircut like I have.

Park City: My Father Explains a T-shirt

On Main Street last night, while taking an after dinner stroll, my father pulled Chiara and I over to a shop window and directed us to look inside. He pointed out a t-shirt on a mannequin and read its slogan to us with glee:

“Bike Naked . . . Show Off Your Rear Suspension”

I rolled my eyes and moved on up the street. Chiara (perhaps she was in shock) just stared at the shirt in the window while my father jostled her lightly, a silly grin playing around his John Ashcroft head.

“Get it? Get it?”

Chiara raised her delicate eyebrows and shrugged.

“You know bicycles have rear suspension?” My father went on, smirking. Chiara nodded and assented that she did, though I think she had no idea what he had asked her.

“And so, get it? ‘Bike Naked. Show Off Your Rear Suspension’?”

Chiara: “I theenk so.”

My Father: “Hahaha! That’s really clever. Rear suspension. Don’t you think that’s clever, Jeff?”

Me, from up the street, not looking: “Clever.”

He then nudged Chiara again and repeated himself.

“I think that’s really clever. Show Off Your Rear Suspension. You want a shirt like that, Jeff?”

“No.” I said, my eyes clinging by their fingernails to stay inside my head.

But I should have said ‘yes’ you will tell me.

You’re right, of course.

Park City: My Father and the Steak Diane

One of the things you do when visiting the family for the Christmas holiday is to bring your family out into public so that you can feel embarrassed not just at home, but in a variety of places.

While dining the other night at a restaurant in Park City, my father spotted Steak Diane on the menu. Like a bite of Proust’s madeleine, this sent him into a kind of reverie.

“It was while your mother and I were living in Northridge,” it began.

“We were driving to Sequoia or somewhere. Anyway, we were near Modesto or Fresno and we were hungry.”

“We were driving through this small town at night, and on either side of us there were scores of car dealerships - and I mean fancy car dealerships - Lincoln, Cadillac, Oldsmobile . . .”

(Chuckles from my sister and I. My father oblivious.)

“We followed the road until we found a little restaurant and stopped for dinner. We both ordered the Steak Diane. Maybe that was the first time I ever had it. The waiter brought it to the table on a cart and it was served flambé. He rolled up the sleeves of his tuxedo jacket and cut our steak right there at the table. It was decadent and it was just delicious. I always remember that.”

Later, after Tim and Chiara had been convinced (how?) by this story to order the Steak Diane, my father lamented the inferiority of the Steak Diane served to them - which did not come flambé.

“This just isn’t Steak Diane,” he said with a shake of his head.

Barbarian Musings

It’s this time of year, when the mercury falls and the thermostat rises, that I often reflect on beards gone by.

The Christmas Beard is the gift I have to give myself every year, but I’ve neglected myself once again. I miss my beard. I should have shaved off the rest of me instead.

There are two sorts of people in the world, of course: people who like beards . . .

And women.

Women in the audience should know a curious thing: wearing a real beard provides almost the exact same sensation as wearing a false beard held on by cosmetic glue. Should any of you ever wish to experience an hour or two of facial hair, simply purchase a kit from your costume shop. You won’t be disappointed. Or you will be. In either event, you will have magnified your knowledge of beards.

Under a beard, one forgets oneself. Or, anyway, one forgets the contours of one’s chin and jaw - which is the same thing.

When you cut away the beard from the rest of you, you reveal mostly regret; a pasty, raw, unfamiliar kind of regret that you’d just as soon cover with bristles.

Oh well.

Don’t shampoo your beard in the shower, imagining that it would benefit form the process as does the longer, softer hair of your scalp. It only makes your beard itch more, I’ve found.

A beard is the scaffolding upon which a mustache is constructed.

A beard is the camouflage that conceals your true purpose. Then, like the sculptor sees in the stone the statue’s final form, you find the final courage to carve the mustache from the hairy medium.

But mustaches are an advanced maneuver and should not be attempted lightly or with much hope of happiness or success. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

It feels weird to brush beards out, away from your face. It hurts, but in the way that chewing on a canker or worrying a hangnail hurts. That is to say: it hurts in the way you cannot quite stop yourself from doing, though you know you will regret it.

It doesn’t really keep you warm, a beard, but it cuts the wind. It denies you the pleasure of a cool pillow on your face. This is a thing you learn to miss.

It gives you something to do when you are thinking about something. Stroking a beard while musing or concentrating is a terrible cliché. Like most terrible clichés, it works.

Everyone should grow a full beard at least once in their life. That so many will not is a kind of tragedy. Beards are to the male experience what childbirth is to the female.

Maybe haircuts would be a better fit there.

In any case, as the narrator in Cheever's The Swimmer had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not throw themselves into pools, so I have an abiding distaste for those who shave every morning. And a special hell is reserved for those who ignore the grain of the ingrowing beard by shaving against it.

You might surprise yourself by growing a beard an entirely different color from the hair on your head.

Also, with a beard, you’ll look better in a baseball cap, but worse in a collared shirt, but better in a crewneck sweater, but worse in a sportcoat. These are the wages of beards.

When you finally do buckle under the pressure from the women in your life and shave your beard away, you will feel a sickly regret and loathe your puffy face and ill-defined cheekbones, not to mention your gullibility and the ease with which you folded under pressure. You’ll want nothing so much as to pluck the hairs one by one from the sink and glue them back to your face.

It will take a while to tan the bottom part of your face. People will notice.

Siena: Black Market Pizza

In Siena, on Banchi di Sopra, just above the Piazza del Campo, is where one may find black market pizza.

If you go there at night, say after one or two o’clock in the morning, you can find the open door that leads to the back room of a closed bakery.

Inside are the ovens. Hot. With them are the night bakers. The night bakers are scroungy, scruffy men who wear little but a thick coat of flour and their underwear, which may or may not have been made from dough.

If you signal - just so - to the Head Baker (you’ll know him by the ashing cigarette he hangs from his lip) he might come over and regard you menacingly. This is a good start.

The thing to do is to hold up a number of fingers and then to say that number in Italian as best you can. If all goes well, the Head Baker will sputter something from behind his cigarette and shuffle back toward the ovens to turn up the volume on the radio (which is playing schmaltzy Italian pop songs). He’ll say something to the men who work under him and then retrieve some fresh dough from the man-sized mound that sits on one side of a long counter. He’ll shape this dough into as many little pizzas - pizzette - as he thinks you asked him for. Now you wait outside.

Sit on the sidewalk. Drink from the bottle you picked up earlier in the evening but have not yet finished. Listen to the argument between a man and a woman and a vespa somewhere uptown, echoing through the warren of streets and alleyways.

Finally, after he gets just the right amount of cigarette ash and sweat worked into the pizzas, the Head Baker sets them in the oven for just long enough to wake up the bacteria and convince the cheese that melting is something that exists, but isn't meant for it, not in this lifetime anyway. Then he’ll find you outside and hand you the pizzas wrapped in parchment paper.

He’ll qoute you a number. It doesn’t matter if its the same number it was last night, or even twenty minutes ago; it’s the price and you pay it. He puts the money into his (dough?) shorts and sticks out his bottom lip and chin while he raises his shoulders just a touch. He grunts at you and you get the hint: What are you still standing there for?

You leave and eat your black market pizza on the piazza.

It won’t taste very good to your tongue. It tastes fantastic to the part of you that wants it to.

If you go back to the bakery in the morning there’ll be no sign of the night bakers. The door to the oven room will be shut. The woman at the counter that you approach through the front will grudgingly sell you cold pizzette for less than you paid last night.

But you won’t enjoy it half so much.