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11/16/2004: "Day 269 The Fate of Ping"

There are few species braver than mothers. They must not only deal with their own fears, tics, and phobias, but must struggle with knowing which fears are healthy, and should be passed on to her children; and which fears are neurotic and should not.

The fears of germs, strangers and oncoming traffic are healthy. But what of a fear of heights? My mother’s was fairly intense, but she vowed to grit her teeth and wave as her brood of five madly ascended to death-defying heights. One such occurence was captured by a famous family photograph, when we posed for a picture at the very top of a French aqueduct--Le Pont du Gard. In the photo there is no evidence that we children are supported by any structure whatsoever. The Valley of the Gardon can be seen, stretching vertigo-like behind us. From below, on terra firma, my mother watched, her heart in her mouth and her arms full of sweaters we plied onto her while we raced to touch the summer sky. I imagine she must have hugged tightly to those sweaters that she had knitted herself, l a human coat check relieved to have something to hold onto as she closed her eyes and counted to 10, praying that when she opened them again we would be back to earth swarming around her. Then she could count to a mere 5, one for each of us, and breathe again.

Another fear my mother divulged when it was too late in life to pass on to us, was an intense phobia of having her head below water. Considering this is a state of affairs in which one can’t breathe, it is a pretty understandable fear. But, happily, kids rarely develop such a phobia if they grow in pools. My father put an above-ground 3-foot pool in our backyard in 1964, where it stood for three summers, and we were all soon inebriated for life with the joys of swimming--the only sport which came easily to my otherwise unathletic father. My mother took the occasional careful dip, but was mostly consigned to making sure we didn’t swim until ½ hour after eating. (Jon Stossel of 20/20 has reported this as “1 of 10 most enduring myths,” but damn if I would let any kids under my supervision take a plunge before waiting for the proper wait time.)

Then there were the dogs. The French are, in general, fairly dog-friendly, but my mother’s father was not among them. He owned a shirt-store in Avignon, a small southern French city known for its ramparts and Pope's Palace, and had the mindset of a provincial merchant. Life was full of duties and responsibilities, a dog would have made the world heavier for him, not lighter. My mother didn’t inherit a fear of dogs, but neither had she any experience of the boundless affection and unconditional love they bring, even with the responsibility that comes with their care.

In 1962 my parents got very lucky. Friends of theirs went to spend a year in Europe and let us housesit for the year. . It was a dramatic house that aspired to a Frank Lloyd Wright look and succeeded admirably. It was at the edge of a forest remnant in the hills of Montgomery County, not far from Washington D.C., amidst the kind of semi-rural sprawl where puppies were born at neighbors' houses and brought home by kids before Mom and Dad could say no. There we had turtles and turtle races, my eldest brother wowed us (and himself, in retrospect) with his ease with snakes, and from somewhere or another we adopted a pair of beagle/basset mixes. They were promiscuous dogs who may have been pretending to belong as well to other families that occupied homes at the other side of the perimeter of the woods. That seems the least painful explanation for their disappearance soon before we were due to move. Maryland at that time was like much of the country, a place where dogs tended to run free and get run over a lot.

There was another dog after Ruffy and Tuffy, and, when we moved to West Ritchie Parkway, a black cocker spaniel named Zorro, for a few years. I can neither recollect the reason or manner of his departure from the scene, but I am sure we were upset about it. When we met the Sagans, we kids were pining for a new dog.

The Sagans were a family we understood, were in sympathy with, because like us the family dynamic revolved around a charismatic European mother who came here after the war. Ginetta Sagan was short and fiery, an Italian Edith Piaf with a story as dramatic as one would imagine for a cofounder of the U.S. branch of Amnesty International.

When my mother and Ginetta became friends, the war was only 20 years behind them. The Fifties had gone by with millions resolutely facing forward, the Cold War offering more than enough worrisome distraction from memories still raw and painful. My mother may have been the first kindred spirit Ginetta met in American Suburbia, someone for whom occupation, torture and collaboration were not just abstract concepts but things that had happened to people who had breathed the same air they had. And in Ginetta's case, things that she had experienced much more directly than my mother.

I have a vivid memory that may be genuine, or may be the product of my imagination, implanted retroactively after hearing my mother tell me Ginetta’s story. Whichever its provenance, it resides now in my cerebral cortex. My memory is of being seven or so, standing in our kitchen looking out through the screen door onto our red cedar porch. My mother and Ginetta had just finished an outdoor summer lunch, from which the kids were excused after the introduction of salad and cheese and adult conversation, which was no doubt in French. I suppose I played with the other kids for a while, then drifted back to the screen door.

As I child, I was inordinately fascinated by watching parents as they behaved as adults with other adults. I often maneuvered into an opportunity to observe them in their "natural" environment (sans kids around). I was no more able to understand the conversations between adults than the chirping of avians my father birdwatched, but I thought that was a failure on my part. Whether the topic was politics or the mortgage or the neighbors, whether the language was French or English, I thought in my heart that if I just listened carefully enough, I would understand.

Of course, even if my mother and Ginetta had spoken in English, my tender age would have rendered the content opaque and impenetrable. But the image that I return to, again and again, is that of Ginetta crying, her arms splayed on the table, her head pitched forward on her hands. And sitting across from her, my mother, tears in her eyes, saying nothing because she knew that at that very moment, Ginetta needed most simply to be heard. I suspect as well that their acquaintance was still to new for my mother to console her physically, though unquestionably, they would be forever close thereafter.

And then, to break the tension of the moment, plop, into Ginetta’s lap jumped her Pekinese dog, which she’d brought over along with her children. The dog instinctively knew to console her mistress, and rather perfectly resolved the kind of awkward moment with my mother that wasn’t resolved easily.

Whether this really happened or I’ve imagined it, there is no doubt that it came to pass that we got a Pekinese from the Sagans. I don’t know the particulars, but I do remember Dr. Sagan, Ginetta’s husband, telling me that Pekinese once had very long noses, but had been made to compete in a great race by a Chinese Emperor. One of them was so fast he could not stop at the finish line and rammed into the Great Wall of China, smushing his long nose into the form we knew ever since and after, and in doing so becoming the procreator of all future Pekinese.

The story delighted me as I could easily repeat it. Leonard knew how to talk to kids, he had three great boys. I thought they were so much cooler than we would ever be. They lived in a huge old Victorian in the center of Rockville that I would check at great length for secret panels when we visited. When that was finished we’d watch Mission Impossible. What could be cooler than that theme music and the tape self-destructing? Leonard was not a practicing medical doctor, but he had an M.D. and he agreed to see me at my mother’s request when I complained of severe headaches for which my pediatrician could find no physical cause. The headaches were quite real, I remember them well, but they occurred (Dr. Sagan discovered) exclusively on Sundays.

Being an eminently sane and healthy child, the Catholic Church made me ill. Even at an early age, before I understood much of any of it at all, it seems I understood plenty enough of it quite well. I was allowed to stop going to church, and the headaches went away. As the Vietnam War escalated, my mother got her own headaches at the refusal of the church to take an antiwar stand. We went to an alternative church, in Georgetown, to a service held by the antiwar priest Father McSorley, who also ministered the Kennedys themselves. Father McSorley’s service didn't give me headaches, but I much preferred our family's post-service visits to the sights of Washington. To this day I remember the hallways of the Smithsonian, the huge elephant where we were instructed to wait if we got lost, and the Hope Diamond that became the prize sight at the end of a delightful maze of treasure-laden hallways.

We named our new Pekinese Puff, and fell madly in love with her. Puff, like most small dogs, thought she was huge, in fact Puff thought she was the Empress Dowager of our household--her kingdom. For the first time, our canine companion was not an all-purpose mutt. Puff had papers, she was a handsome and stately purebred. Our neighbor Mrs. Timmons, who bred championship pugs for competition, even said so. I don’t know if she was the one who encouraged us to breed Puff, but perhaps the fact that she was across the street gave us the courage to try.

Somehow a stud was found, and a date set in our cellar. Being small of course, Pekinese tend toward small litters, and the agreement was we’d keep one puppy, they’d keep one, and I have no idea what we agreed on for any improbable third. In any event, coitus was so successful my mother had to call Mrs. Timmons and ask how to get them apart. I don’t know if it was a suction thing or what, but my poor mother spent a good hour massaging the pair till they unstuck. (The two Pekinese were rather Siamese for a while there.)

We still have the super-8 films we took of the birth of Puff’s three offspring. It was a lot of drama over what, in retrospect, seems hardly the earth-shattering event it felt like at the time. I think perhaps my parents were somewhat relieved at the assumption that finally all things concerning the birds and the bees were made graphically clear to us. Was that ever wishful thinking. The birth part was old hat. The part I didn’t understand was the part a little farther back on the tape; excitement, erection, insertion, ejaculation. I suspect it’s the part all kids eventually find out the way nature intended--through rumor, guessing, half-truths, older siblings and worldly friends. After all, what child would believe that his parents could commit such unthinkable acts with each other, and what parents could be descriptive about themselves enough to truly answer the crucial questions?

After all the birthing brouhaha died down, we could not help but notice soon enough that something was wrong. The two males, christened Ming and Ling, were suckling happily. But for some reason, Puff ignored the third, Ping. Mrs. Timmons was summoned, she called her vet, the vet made a quick diagnosis that there was an obstruction in Ping’s throat. She couldn’t suckle, nothing would go down.

This was unbelievably cruel to me. Lapsed Catholic that I was, God was already on thin ice with me. I decided then and there that if there was a God, he was either too cruel or too powerless to be worthy of worship.

The doctor held out a small hope that hand-feeding might work; odder miracles had happened. My mother tried for two days, but the blockage was not a temporary one. There was only one kind thing to do. Any my mother could not bring herself to do it.

After a few days, I remember coming home from the third grade to find my mother with tears streaming down her face. Ping had died, but my mother was not crying because of that. She was crying, she told me, because she hadn’t been brave enough to drown Ping first, and put her out of her misery. I don't know whether, or how much this had to do with her own phobia of having her head below water, but one certainly can imagine the act would be difficult for anyone who had never killed anything but a mosquito.

I don’t really know either if my turning away from traditional Christian concepts of God dated from this time or not. But I strongly suspect it was the first time I confronted a timeless ethical dilemma in such stark terms. The first time I understood that certain kinds of killing cannot be viewed in the same way as other types of killing. That cruelty is not always cruel, that kindness is not always kind.

I retain a belief in at least one scriptural teaching: "Bless the Beast and the Children.” But to it I would add “and the Mothers.” For without them, the beasts and the children would find themselves at the mercy of the God I'm not sure I believe in, but whose blessing on which I insist.

MCO 2004