Who ARE those people?

About a month ago, I was fired after eight years of working for the same widget assembly plant. I spent most of my last days there inside, fretting and worrying. When I would have to work outside the factory, say around 11:30am or 2:15pm, I would drive down 3rd Street or Melrose Ave and see all those people sitting langourously in cafes, talking and chatting. Or I'd be rushing into the Gap to buy a shirt to replace the one I spilled widget sauce all over, and I'd see people browsing aimlessly through the racks, as if time had no meaning.

And I wondered, in my widget induced misery, who ARE those people? Why aren't THEY working?

Just the other day, I was sitting in a coffeehouse catching up with a friend. It was 3pm on a Thursday, normally the high tide of widget drama and tension, and I realized in a flash of caffeine induced clarity, that someone rushing into the store to grab a cup of joe before heading up the 101 to the horn-doogle factory, would look at me and say, who IS that person?

Aside from the obvious pluses of temporary unemployment, there's another benefit. At the widget factory I was so drained by talking to people for a living (I was involved in widget external relations), that I had no energy left at the end of the day to really get to know the bit players in my life.

Most normal people talk to the mailman, the pizza delivery guy, the receptionist at the vet. I just didn't have it in me. But today, in my grief-stricken yet mostly relaxed frame of mind, the boyfriend and I walked into a pizzeria at 11:30am and ordered two slices. We struck up a conversation with the woman behind the counter, mostly because she had a wicked Mass accent, which is one of the few things to bring out the chatty in my normally shy-to-strangers b.f.

We talked about jobs and firings, and how we all escaped to California. The topic turned to pets. The woman behind the counter told us about her two rescued pit bulls and how one ended up with plastic and string wrapped up in his tummy. Fixing this cost her $10,000 dollars. The BF and I looked at each other incredulously. Between us the look was interpreted as "oh my god, she's one of us!" She of course, thought, we were one of "those people" --the ones who say "Just put the damn dog/cat/grandmother to sleep!" Her former boss was one of those people.

In my life, they pop up where least expected. A good friend’s husband, two days after Bitey died, said, “So…your cat died, huh?” I said yes, trying to remain immune to his callous delivery. He said “So…all that money you spent was kind of stupid huh?” Now any logical person would have said, oh I don’t know, “Fuck You” or burst into tears or something to that effect. But I have learned, with “those people” to just say “Yup, pretty stupid” and move away as fast as possible. What they want more than anything in the whole world is for you to fight back, so they can tell you, with glaring superiority, why you wasted your money, and how that same amount of money could have been a down payment. Or they say, “When you have kids you’re going wish you had that money for their college.”

Now all that is undeniably true. And it’s my belief that a person with three kids, two kids or even just one kid is going to feel differently about dropping that kind of dough on a cat, no matter how beloved. They have every right to say, “I just can’t do this” and they have my sympathy and support.

But the petless person who so callously suggests that you are a retard for caring too much is forgetting the cardinal rule of friendship. My friend doesn’t have to love cats because I do; he doesn’t have to agree with spending the money. But a real friend respects the depth to which you love your cat, because at one time in their life they loved someone that much too. Or better still, they understand that the same love which drives someone like me to go broke trying to save the life of a clearly doomed cat will go to hell and back again for them, should they ever really need it.

Back at the pizza counter, the woman behind the counter started to her own defense, and we hastened to make ourselves clear, explaining that not only did we spend ten thousand dollars on our cat, with even less hope of success, but that we wrote about it, often, and in great detail.

On the bottom of our check we wrote the address for this site. On a random postcard for a real estate broker, the woman behind the counter wrote the name of a poem by John Updike. She warned us "you may not be ready for this poem." We said we were looking for things to make us cry, so that we could get it out of our system. She said, "this'll do the trick."

And that’s how a stranger behind a pizza counter gave us a greater gift of understanding than someone I’d known for almost ten years. So in life’s funny little way, becoming one of “those people”--the random shiftless unemployed kind--helped me deal with the unintentional cruelty of “those people” who would rather laugh at your shoes than walk a mile in them.

As for the poem itself, it certainly did do the trick. It reminded me with heart-piercing clarity of this moment back in the bad old days of February 2006. (And again, this is a TMI alert).

"Thursday February 23rd 230am. I awake to a gross noise and a bad smell. I find Bitey sacked out on the bathroom mat. He is covered in shit. But I am awed by the fact that he has dragged his (literally) paralyzed ass from his cage into the bathroom and made it to the litter in time. That's class. I spend an hour cleaning him up, thinking grim thoughts about his quality of life."

Updike of course, already a hero in this Red Sox obsessed, writer wanna-be family for coining the "lyric little bandbox of a ballpark” gem, says it better.


Dog's Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin.
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.
Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.


Good Bitey.