Pavlov's Cat

Published May 21, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I’ve been wanting to write this piece for some time, mostly about my cat Angel Leon.  But the story from Bakersfield last week about the cat who attacked the dog who was attacking her little boy – that story brought my thoughts into greater focus.

      Her name is Tara.  I forget the family’s name as well as the little boy’s, and who knows what the dog’s name was.  We can sympathize with both families, for the dog is likely history now.  In the video we saw the neighbor’s dog appear nonchalantly from behind the car parked in the driveway, where the 4-year-old boy was unskillfully riding his bicycle.  Suddenly the dog grabbed his leg and began shaking him like a rat.  Within 2 or 3 seconds the cat streaked through the frame, hitting the dog like a rocket, which sent the dog running instantly.  The cat chased the dog around the car before giving up.

       People who haven’t lived with cats and dogs together were astounded the cat was so brave.  I’ve had both, and know my black lab mix was never a match for my calico Siamese.  Everyone, including me, gave her wide berth, especially when it was hot.  I named her Heather for her soft-colored coat, not remembering it’s a fairly prickly shrub.  The name was perfect.

       What astounded me, watching the video several times, is how quickly Tara responded.  Was she watching from the bushes near the porch?  Or was it simply hearing her little boy’s cries and the dog’s growling?  She was there before his mother by 5 or 10 seconds, fast enough to limit his wounds to stitches, not reconstructive surgery.  The dog never knew what hit him.

       My story about Angel Leon is sorta the flip side of Tara’s.  AL got the tip of his tail caught in the backside of a fan last June 4^th and thought something had attacked him.  For the next 6 months, every time his damaged tail nerves twinged, he attacked with ferocity and soon got a taste for his own blood.  Trying to keep him from cannibalizing himself took everything I had and a little more, with copious help and support from everyone at Lindsay Vet Clinic.  Finally his nerves healed and now he’s his normal angelic, regal lion-like self.  But during those long 6 months I saw the carnivore roots of my domestic felines like I’d never seen before.

       Our metaphor of “Pavlov’s dog” has become a way of saying something is stupid, easily trained to slobber at the sound of a bell.  Pavlov’s experiment was actually more profound than that, understanding the strength of natural instincts in response to their environment, something we could benefit from understanding ourselves.  In the case of Angel Leon, all the love I felt and doctoring tricks I’ve learned, in conjunction with Jamie Wilson’s surgical skills and drug treatments, could not convince that cat his instincts were wrong.  It took time and healing and constant surveillance – and finally it took ignoring the problem to make it go away.

       In Tara’s case, her instincts were right, shaped by the love in her household as well as the hands that feed her.  What shocks me most about the story is that people were so surprised.  Protective love is not a purely human emotion.

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Trudy Wischemann is an animal lover who writes.  You can send her your heroic pet stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

If I Had A Hammer

Published in edited form May 14, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette 

If I had a hammer

I'd hammer in the morning

I'd hammer in the evening

All over this land

I'd hammer out danger

I'd hammer out a warning

I'd hammer out love between

My brothers and my sisters

All over this land. 

            When I told my mother I was going to write a piece under this title, I heard her suck in her breath over the phone.  Pausing, she said cautiously “They might think...” 

            Both of my parents were raised in small towns and vowed after they left they’d never go back.  Born in different towns on different sides of the tracks, they both were still massively concerned with what people might think.  To find freedom from that, they made our homes in unincorporated settlements, rural fringes, and subdivisions of larger towns.  But they never got free of their fears about the opinions of other people.  Early childhood learning, I think. 

            I actually do have a hammer, in fact, three claw hammers (tack, medium and large) and a woman-sized sledge, if I knew where it was.  I know how to use them for hanging pictures and outside Christmas lights, re-nailing a board coming loose or pounding a stake into the ground.  With my brother’s fiberglass-handled carpenter’s hammer, I can pry nails out of boards, straighten them on a rock, and nail things back together with the best of them.  My father’s a carpenter: more early childhood learning, learning by doing. 

            His father was a blacksmith, and he hammered metal into beautiful wrought iron fences and gates; he also repaired plowshares and other farm equipment.  Both men saw their hammers as extensions of their creative, productive, useful selves.  However, both men were quick to pound their opinions down the throats of other people, so I know the hammer as both useful and dangerous.  Dad stopped throwing his hammer after it went through a stack of windows he’d saved and he had to eat a piece of humble pie.  He's only recently stopped hurling his words. 

            This beautiful song from the early folk movement started pounding through my head when I read the letter to the editor authored by Councilmembers Pam Kimball and Danny Salinas several weeks ago.  It wasn’t what the letter said about me that was so disturbing: it was their attack on the truth.  They’re not only in denial about the possibility of wrongdoing in the Lindsay PD's arrest of Councilman Mecum, but in denial about their own wrongdoing in making Rich Wilkinson joint City Manager and Director of Public Safety under a contract irresponsibly difficult and expensive to break.  They’re in denial about the staff’s role in generating the lawsuit we filed and their own role in running up their attorney's fees defending against it.  They’re in denial about their role in excluding the public from real participation in city council meetings, the detrimental CalTrans re-realignment of Highway 65, the non-promotion of voluntary water conservation measures in this city, and other leadership challenges too numerous to mention. 

          The song, written by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, has been recorded by hundreds of people and sung at thousands of gatherings over the last 60 years.  I hear Peter Paul & Mary’s version in my head now as I type; according to Wikipedia, singing the Spanish version may have gotten Chilean activist Victor Lara assassinated after the military coup of Salvador Allende in 1973.  It's a song for The Struggle, no matter what country or miniscule jurisdiction you find yourself called to enter it.  Sing the last verse with me in your head. 

Well I’ve got a hammer and I’ve got a bell;

I’ve got a song to sing all over this land.

It’s the hammer of justice, it’s the bell of freedom

It’s the song about the love between my brothers and my sisters

All over this land. 

          Gather up your hammers, bells and songs, friends - we have work to do.

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Trudy Wischemann is an old folky who writes.  You can send your songs of love and freedom (not to mention justice) c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

           

Goodbye, Stranger

Published May 7, 2014 in slightly edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     "Hello, Stranger," he'd say to me as he wheeled his cart through the market door, coming for groceries.  But I didn't know how much that meant until Sunday when I heard the news that Henry Servin left us early that morning.  Whether he went voluntarily (and by that I mean that he was in some way ready,) or the Lord just came and took him, I don't know.  All I know is that his beaming spirit will be missed among those of us he befriended regularly, constantly.


     "He was my only hope," one checker commented as we closed that night.  When I asked what she meant, she said something about decent customers.  We have many decent customers, so I contemplated what he brought that was so special, and it was that he reached out to each of us as unique, equal individuals.


     He had different names for each of us.  I thought he called everyone "Stranger," but discovered that may have been saved for me.  One of the newer checkers he simply called "Mija," while he used the real names of those who'd worked there longer. I may have been the lone Stranger.  I felt somehow properly identified.


     Elise Boulding, one of the great Quaker peace activists from the last century, wrote a beautiful passage about the word.  "I would like to suggest a new word to replace enemy.  It is "stranger."  It's a very old word, and a good one.  We have no more enemies, but we have strangers.  Sometimes we are estranged from ourselves and God.  When we meet a person we call a stranger, that person has to be listened to... There is no tribal group to my knowledge that does not have a tradition for dealing with the stranger."


     And maybe that was Henry's gift:  listening.  He was always full of words, and they came out fast, like a man on a mission.  But when he asked how we were, he was looking us in the eyes and really wondering.  He noticed.  And he brought life into the store every time he came.


     I was missing in action the night before he died, at least from the market.  We held our concert celebrating Lindsay's recovery community at the Methodist Church, and I took the night off from work in order to hand out programs, emcee, sing a couple of songs and clean up.  It was a glorious night.  Spirit Driven, the band that performed, knocked the socks off of everyone who came to sit in the pews.  The people who run the two 12-Step programs that meet in the church were there to speak of their hopes for the community.  One longstanding participant in 12-Step programs bore witness to the spiritual training inherent in those Steps.  Most important, we built a sense of community: that those who suffer from addiction and those who help them are not alone.  Anonymous, yes.  Alone, no.


     The truth is we are members of each other, to borrow from Wendell Berry's Wild Birds:  "All of us.  Everything. The difference ain't in who's a member and who's not, but in who knows it and who don't."  Henry knew himself to be a member of this community and recognized the rest of us as members also.  As we feel his loss, may we keep that spirit alive.


     Goodbye, Stranger.  See you later.
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Trudy Wischemann is a cashier at RN Market who writes.  You can send your stories of Henry and other strangers to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.