ON CANCELLED BIRTHDAYS, AN ETHICAL REVIEW OF CARETAKING, AND FLYING THE FLAG WITH A DISCLAIMER
Thursday July 22 and Friday July 23 2021
Dear Sarah,
Welcome back home! We’ve rehashed your nightmarish Nantucket plane ride(s) verbally at this point but I’ll state for the record that I was both amazed and offended that that woman could and would read your texts between the seats! It seemed to me as if she was making a scene while also checking around her to see how her scene was being received. I’m glad that episode in your life is over!
As I described when we chatted briefly yesterday — on Wednesday I found a baby bunny while I was out on a morning walk. He was gently wiggling in the road near a curb, not in the lawn and with no apparent nest nearby. I wasn’t initially sure what to do but it seemed wrong to leave the bunny there. I scurried home and asked M to join me in at least relocating him to a better location. While I was picking him up in my gardening gloves the man whose home was set back from the lawn on that corner hollered at us to see what we were doing; M told him we found a baby bunny, and the man said we could “have it,” as if he owned that baby bunny wriggling in the street. One had to be paying a bit of attention to the road to have seen it in the first place; I’m sure he didn’t know it was there. (Maybe he thought we had found money!) In the end we brought the baby bunny home and made a little bed-nest in a box and I ran out to a pet store for kitten milk replacer, as recommended by mybunny.org. We fed him a few times over the course of the day on Wednesday and he remained alive.
On Thursday morning he was a bit lethargic and so I took him to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, and I wondered why in fact I hadn’t done it sooner. For some reason this situation took on the presence of a case needing ethical review in my mind, and in this particular case I think the lever tips toward more good done than not, but it felt important to assess my feelings and motivations even in such a tiny case. Perhaps I’ve been feeling emotionally fragile this week! In hindsight it feels like I am being a little bit hard on myself, but I’m still going to proceed here with sharing what I was thinking when I wrote these notes!
I had been prepared to take the bunny somewhere Wednesday morning, first calling a vet nearby, then animal control, then dialing the rehab center and understanding that that was the place to go with a found animal. Instead, M and I turned toward trying to feed and care for him ourselves for a bit. This was going to be a short-lived experience in any case, since we are about to go out of town, and also have no inclination to take on a rabbit as a pet.
To hold a tiny baby animal in my hands is a pleasure I have never had, or perhaps have had rarely. It is precisely the kind of thing I don’t usually do. (I have held a kitten, but not such a young kitten.) The baby bunny was soft and delicate, his eyes not yet open. He had the tiniest little front teeth that I could feel bumping gently against the nipple of the bottle from which we fed him. We named him Hugh after a Star Trek episode we’d watched the night before. Baby Huey.
In my Thursday emotions I was feeling particularly critical of the choice to hold onto an animal even for a bit that we had no intention of keeping as a pet, to name him, to try to care for him even though we are inexperienced humans who do not typically deal with wild animals in an up-close-and-personal way. To have considered the rabbit’s life first and foremost, it likely would have made the most sense to take him straightaway to the rehab center on the morning I found him.
Had I not gone out for that walk Wednesday morning — or had I taken a different route, or had I gone for a run instead, which would have inherently involved a different route than the one I chose — the bunny would have been no part of my days this week; I would not have known of its specific existence; it may have lived on if its mother or father returned to it there at the curb (impossible to know the likelihood of that happening) or if another passerby picked it up and similarly brought it to the rehab center 25 minutes away; or it may have died if another animal found and ate it, if it had managed to squirm further into the road and gotten run over, if it had simply perished from being new and small and vulnerable there on the concrete.
M and I improved his chances by picking him up; we may have diminished his chances by keeping him for a day rather than taking him to the center straightaway. Our impulse was that we might keep him in our house until the weekend, at which point we would take him to the rehab center because we were leaving town; the plan was always to take him straightaway to the rehab center if he wasn’t thriving. We did rescue him, yes, but he was also providing us with a form of cuddly animal entertainment, as well as some kind of test of what it would be like to care for something small, to feel its tiny body in our presence and to see if it could live under our care. We didn’t need to care for him; we could promptly have taken him to a place that was likely better prepared to care for him.
It did make me think, in the most fleeting way, about what it means to care for something third in our home: M and I are usually the only living things here (on a permanent basis). For 24 hours, there was a tiny living animal also in our house with us. We would peek into his box throughout the day and see how he was doing, if he had moved a bit, if he was ready for a feeding. The line between M and I became a triangle with another living being making that third point. We are hopeful that Baby Huey the bunny has been snuggling with other baby bunnies at the wildlife rehab center!
I am just thinking to myself a bit about how sometimes we have things we might talk with each other about over a call and how we’ll sometimes say, I won’t say any more because I’m going to write about it my letter! It is interesting to have each other verbally on the line and to say, no, I’m saving those words and thoughts for the letter. On one hand, something needs to be left for the letter each week! (Or does it? In any case, it’s impossible to say all the possible things in any given phone call!) On the other hand, some things perhaps also lend themselves to a bit of quiet mulling on the page before sharing with each other. No particular lesson I’m taking away at this moment, only reflecting… some stories are not about urgency even if they might be found at the tips of our tongues; some stories can wait to make it into writing, where they become the subject of a monologue!
It’s Friday! I’m glad to be traveling and taking a bit of a computer break over the next week. I’ve got a fresh supply of masks for the airport and airplane, and here’s hoping our air travel will be smooth and generally less eventful than yours was!
Until soon!
Your friend,
Eva
July 23, 2021
Dear Eva,
It is just after 8 PM on this Friday evening, and I am finally settling in to write this letter after putting it off all day. I want to blame work, but then I remember that I took time during my work day for a phone call walk with you, for a bike ride, and for a recording of Long Distance Questions. I have no regrets! Those activities made the day far more pleasant and Friday-ish. Tonight over pizza, Dairy Queen, and Game Night (we skipped a movie because the kids went to a movie today at the theater with the nanny), I found myself suddenly entering a state of sensory overload. This is something that happens to me occasionally, where I start to get unreasonably agitated by too many inputs and then swiftly curl into my own brain and wait for it to end. I am quite certain I have cited this recurring state of mind in past letters, but I’m too lazy at this moment to do a search. In any case, I feel like you will understand, or at least empathize. I can imagine many people I love not getting it at all. You are irritated by people talking to you? Noise? Huh? (As I write this, my beautiful silence has evaporated and the kids now appear to be doing the loudest possible bashing around in their bedroom. Maybe I need to cultivate some sort of zen practice that will help me navigate these moments. For now, I’ll just grit my teeth and wait for it to end..)
I am very happy to be here in my home! Our travel snafu on the return leg of the trip made the welcome back all the more joyous. I slept like a baby that first night back in our own cozy bed. I love the anticipation of a vacation. I love vacation. And I love coming back and resettling in our familiar patterns and practices. This weekend I am looking forward to finally having some down time to fully unpack, resituate, clean, and get my bearings again. Thankfully, things seem to have worked as I hoped, and the time away from home and work life has given me a renewed zest for the imminent newness of fall. We have started receiving messages from elementary school, scheduling back-to-school physicals, and generally readying ourselves for a new season. Which is not to say that summer is over! There are still four more weeks of good pure summer ahead, and I am planning to make the most of it. Tomorrow we are doing a redux of J’s birthday (his real birthday was cancelled by Delta Airlines), and we are having a family gathering with walking tacos and s’mores. Sunday we are having our first brunch at a restaurant since sometime long before the pandemic, and kid-free, no less! Overall, it looks to be a smashing weekend, and I cannot wait.
Before I sign off for the evening, I have a small collection of books and media I wanted to tell you about. We finally listened to the 1619 podcast on our Michigan drive, and sheesh, now I know why everyone has been talking about it for nearly two years. I also know why conservatives are scared. The reclaiming of the American narrative is powerful. For the first time in my entire life, I now have the instinct to put up an American flag. (B joked that we would need a plaque with a 500 word disclaimer next to it, explaining our rationale for raising the flag, lest anyone think we are supporting the whitewashed version of our nation’s history.) We also relistened to the prologue episode of a podcast called 70 Over 70, where the host interviews his 80 year old dad about life and aging. I think I mentioned to you in Minneapolis how it made me sob. I didn’t do much better on my second round of it, but I loved it just the same. As far as reading goes, I finished Minor Feelings and really enjoyed the perspective and fresh writing form. I gobbled up the memoir B got me for Mother’s Day called Spilt Milk. The writing in it felt familiar and accessible, like I could have almost tricked myself into believing I wrote it myself if I had had a different life. Because of that, it was inspiring. I need to get to writing! The rest of vacation I read a book I picked up at Nantucket Bookworks, We Are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer. I have been mesmerized by it, even though it is heavy. Apparently I will soon becoming a vegan before dinner, or at least I assume I will by the end of this book. I was devouring it until we left Nantucket, and I did not read during our travel purgatory or during this hectic workweek back in Iowa. Perhaps tomorrow morning, from my bed with a cup of coffee. Don’t mind if I do.
On that perky note, I will end this letter and join B for a glass of wine and a movie. I hope you are reveling in your pre-vacation anticipation tonight and will throughout this weekend! Bliss awaits, and seeing it on the horizon is almost as enjoyable. I guess I will speak to you in two weeks, rather than one! Have an absolutely fabulous time, my friend! Take extra books in case you end up in travel hell, and whatever you do, do NOT text on the airplane.
Yours,
Sarah