Tag animals

Elephants, moms, and memories

Nancy Crowe

UnknownAfter starting Jodi Picoult’s novel, “Leaving Time,” I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish it. A reference to an elephant named Mary being tried and hanged for murder in 1916 in Tennessee led me to look it up to see if this really happened. Sadly, it did, and it haunted me.

I was drawn in by the story, though, and couldn’t resist a tale that included a stumbling, self-doubting psychic. So I forged ahead.

Thirteen-year-old Jenna is a solitary soul who reminded me a little of Tatum O’Neal’s character in the movie, “Paper Moon.” Jenna’s mother, Alice, was an elephant researcher with a particular passion for studying how elephants grieve. Her brilliant, mentally ill father, Thomas, ran the New England elephant sanctuary where they lived and worked.

The novel hinges on what happened, or may have happened, on a night when Jenna was  three and Alice disappeared under mysterious circumstances. As a young teen, she’s busy working the missing-persons sites on the Internet and poring over her mother’s old journals, longing for the mother she both remembers and never knew. On the fringes of her life are her grandmother, with whom she lives, and her father, who now calls a psychiatric hospital home. Jenna finally hires jaded private investigator Virgil, who worked on her mother’s case when he was a police officer; and disgraced former celebrity psychic Serenity.

A precocious child, a boozy ex-cop, and a psychic with a past. Cue the cute music, right? The three form an uneasy, unlikely alliance as they try to piece together what happened that night, what led up to it, and who might know. Another sanctuary worker, Nevvie, died — accidentally trampled by an elephant, so the police report said — the night Alice disappeared. Was Alice responsible for Nevvie’s death, or did Alice herself die at the hands of her increasingly unstable husband?

The hardest question is the one Jenna has to face: If her mother is alive, why did she leave Jenna behind? As Virgil and Serenity draw closer to the answer, they increasingly want to protect her from it. Until Jenna takes the case back into her own hands and hops a bus for Tennessee.

And that’s just the humans. The elephants themselves, one named Maura in particular, have their own bonds and losses. Elephants are exemplary mothers; mother and baby elephants are part of a complex social structure. When Maura’s calf dies, Alice — both as a scientist studying elephant grief and as a steward and friend of the elephants — stays with her as they all process what has happened.

Grief is an experience of all creatures great and small. I had two peppered corydoras catfish in my aquarium, and when one died, the other stayed by his body for several hours.

Back to the book. The story resolved in a way I probably should have picked up on earlier — but I’m kind of glad I didn’t. You may find yourself, as I did, going back and reading earlier scenes.

Street cat smarts

Nancy Crowe

Unknown-1“My goodness, that was strong talk for an Englishman,” says the Earl of Grantham to his valet, Bates, after a brief discussion of feelings in Season Four of “Downton Abbey.” Though divided by social position, these two Englishmen are among each other’s best friends and allies.

Fast forward nearly a century to two more, very real Englishmen who formed an unlikely and unique bond: James Bowen, a London street musician; and a ginger tomcat named Bob. Bowen tells their story in “A Street Cat Named Bob” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), subtitled, “And How He Saved My Life.”

Bowen was a recovering heroin addict who, as he describes it, had failed to take any of the many opportunities he’d been given. Then one evening he came home to find a ginger tom curled up in front of the door to one of the ground-floor flats in his building. “There was a quiet, unflappable confidence about him,” Bowen recalled. Having a soft spot for felines, he said, “I couldn’t resist kneeling down and introducing myself.”

He stroked the thin cat’s neck; there was no collar and his coat was in poor condition. Bowen wanted to take the apparently homeless creature home then and there — but his friend said the cat must belong to whoever lived in the flat whose door he was camped outside. Reluctantly, Bowen agreed. After all, the last thing he needed was the responsibility of a pet.

The cat was still there the next morning. Again Bowen stopped to pet him, eliciting purrs. That’s when he noticed the scratches on the cat’s face and legs, and became even more concerned. Reluctantly, he headed out for another day’s work busking at Covent Garden. When he returned that night, the cat was gone — but in the morning, there he was again in the same spot. Bowen finally knocked on the door. “What cat?” the tenant said. “Nothing to do with me.”

Bowen fed the cat, treated the abscessed wound on his leg, and tried to figure out where he belonged. Concerned about the wound — and about fleas, which had been fatal to a kitten he had as a child — Bowen took his new charge to the nearest RSPCA clinic. He went home with an antibiotic and a couple of weeks’ worth of cat food. The exam, medication, and food cost all the money Bowen had. Still: “I don’t know why, but the responsibility of having him to look after galvanised me a little bit.”

The four-legged half of the duo got a name: Bob, after Killer Bob in the TV series, “Twin Peaks.” Like most young felines, he could go from zero to maniac in seconds, but he took his meds well (an easily pillable cat is something special indeed) and understood everything he was told. Bowen, however, resisted forming too strong a friendship, and after Bob was well he tried to send the cat on his way.

But Bob had chosen Bowen, and of course the cat is the one who does the choosing and adopting. He began to accompany Bowen on his daily busking ventures, trotting along beside him on a lead (or riding on his shoulder, as he charmingly does on the book cover). While Bowen played his guitar, Bob sat nearby or curled up in the case. He was quite a crowd-pleaser. There was an increase in contributions, and some people who frequented the area brought gifts for Bob. Bowen learned the name for “cat” in several languages.

One day, a man’s threatening behavior frightened Bob into running away. Bowen searched frantically, fearing for Bob’s safety in busy London and that perhaps his feline friend really didn’t want to be with him after all. Those fears were dispelled when the two were reunited, thanks to two kind shopkeepers who took the cat in.

The busker with the cat also drew the attention of the local police, and eventually Bowen had to find another line of work. He began selling The Big Issue, a professionally-produced newspaper sold by the homeless, vulnerably housed, and marginalized. (I had never heard of this publication, but it’s heartening to hear of a print publication doing well enough to sustain street sales.)

In addition to all the challenges the two faced on the streets, Bowen nursed Bob through a scary, garbage-induced illness. That helped inspire Bowen to take that final step toward getting completely clean himself: getting off methadone. Bob stayed right by Bowen’s side through the worst of the withdrawal. Bowen realized he had reached a level of recovery and stability he’d never thought possible. Bob became known as The Big Issue Cat.

He and Bowen have become celebrities, with Bob making appearances in hand-knitted scarves and obligingly giving high-fives, and it looks like a sequel and one or two books have followed. By all accounts, though, he remains humble, a ginger tom who loves his human.

You probably won’t see James and Bob busking at Covent Garden these days, but you can find them on Facebook.

Cat got your tongue?

Nancy Crowe

The first thing I noticed about “Love Saves the Day” was, of course, the rather cheesy title. My eye would not have lingered further if not for 1) the tiger cat on the cover and 2) the name of the author, Gwen Cooper, who wrote the bestselling memoir “Homer’s Odyssey.” Sold.

In “Homer’s Odyssey,” Cooper told the captivating and remarkable story of Homer, a blind black cat who would change her life — and even save it on one terrifying occasion. He also helped her find her voice as a writer.

One of the voices in “Love Saves the Day,” a novel, is that of Prudence, a tiger cat with some very definite opinions about the Way Things Ought to Be. She has lived with her human, Sarah, in a little apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and has had everything pretty much the way she wants it since Sarah found her at a construction site when she was a kitten. Prudence is a one-person cat; any other human is peripheral at best. She reminded me very much of Idgie, my diva tiger kitty who passed a couple of years ago.

Some readers may have a problem with animals as narrators. I do not. If I did, this is written well enough that I could probably still “listen” to what this feline narrator has to say about the way we humans treat cats, not to mention one another.

One day, Sarah does not come home, and soon Sarah’s daughter Laura and son-in-law Josh come in with boxes. They begin packing up and clearing out what Prudence sees as her life with Sarah, finally carrying out Prudence herself and taking her to “Upper West Side, which is obviously all the way on the opposite side of the world,” Prudence reflects.

She keeps waiting for Sarah to come back from wherever she is and take her home. In the meantime, she has two new humans, a strange apartment, and even new food (organic instead of the grocery store stuff and “people food” Sarah gave her) to manage. Prudence discovers that some people are woefully unschooled in cat protocol — and have their own issues as well.

The story is told alternately by Prudence, Laura, and Sarah. Beneath the present conflicts lie old wounds suffered (and inflicted) by mother and daughter, which stem from a years-ago trauma when they literally lost everything in a day.

It’s a good read if you love animals, especially cats, who have their own set of rules and appreciate being kept respectfully informed just as much as anyone else does.

* * *

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

For a book called “Love Saves the Day,” this was a pretty rough read. When Laura was fourteen, she and Sarah and all their neighbors were evacuated from their Lower East Side apartment building on a Saturday morning, presumably because some bricks fell off the back of the aging building. First they’re told they can go back in as soon as the building is declared safe. As the day wears on, they are told the building is being condemned and no one can go back in at all. Laura and Sarah’s neighbor, Mr. Mandelbaum, begs to be allowed to retrieve his cat, Honey, but he is barred from doing so. Desperate, Laura sneaks in and tries to get Honey herself, but the effort fails and Sarah is frightened and furious. The building is torn down that night before anyone has a chance to file a petition, grant a stay, or otherwise intervene. The residents lose what little they have in the course of a single day. For Laura, trust and security crumble. (I was horrified to read in the afterword that a century-old tenement building was evacuated and demolished by the City of New York in 1998. Two cats, one named Honey, and a parrot were inside, and their owners were not allowed to retrieve them.)

That agonizing scene comes on the heels of Prudence’s present-day realization that Sarah has died. Grief-stricken and frightened by a quarrel Laura and Josh have just had, she starts nibbling on some lilies Josh brought in for their anniversary. Lilies are toxic, and very often fatal, to cats. As Prudence loses consciousness, it appears she might be joining her beloved human on the other side. Later, she hears Sarah singing to her . . . then wakes up in the vet clinic to discover it is Laura singing to her, asking her to stay.

As it turns out, the abandoned construction site where Sarah found Prudence was where their apartment building once stood, where their lives and hopes had come crashing down years before in a senseless power struggle that had nothing to do with them. “I know now what Laura knew already that day when she risked her life for Honey’s — that love is love, whether it goes on two legs or four,” Sarah says. “I was meant to find Prudence that day. … I’ve always known I was keeping her for Laura.”