Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (32 page)

I just spent two days in Toulon. You go there much?

Toulon, Illinois, is 125 miles southwest of Chicago, 40 miles north-west of Peoria and 7 miles from the town of Wyoming. Toulon's population, 1,390. How you feel about where you've been depends partly on luck. If you hit it just right and everything goes smoothly, you leave a place with fond memories. It only takes a flat tire or a bad meal to turn you against a town forever.

I hit Toulon just right. It was a lovely spring day when I got there, with temperatures bordering on summer. Everyone in town was brimming with friendliness, the flowers were blooming, the farmers just outside town were harrowing their fields. All was right with Toulon that day and I found myself wondering why the whole world wasn't headed there to live.

“You have to go back to New York tomorrow?” a native asked, incredulous at the thought of such a dreadful fate. “I was to New York,” he said. “Or to New Jersey, anyway, right near New York. I had to meet these people at a motel all right but I was on the wrong side. Road was divided, you know. Took me nearly forty-five minutes to get back over there to meet them. Just maybe fifty feet away and it took me forty-five minutes. Traffic? Man! I sure wouldn't want to live in New York. You like it there?” he asked, challenging me to make a fool of myself by saying I did.

I hedged.

There's a continuing argument about the best places to live in the United States.

There are people who love Florida, people who hate Florida. There are those who wouldn't live anywhere but California. Southerners can't imagine living anywhere but in the South and Midwesterners think anywhere else is something less than 100 percent American.

There are those who love New York and those you couldn't pay enough to live in New York. The biggest argument of all is the argument over whether it's best to live in the big city or the small town. The strange thing is that the fewest people live where most people say they'd like to live; the most people live where most people say they wouldn't want to live.

Everyone talks as though they'd like to live in the country. Everyone loves the small town and the little village, but in spite of all the sentimental talk, the movement is out of the small towns and the country and into the big cities. Those who live in the city yearn for the country but they don't move there.

When you fly over the wide open spaces of America or drive to a small town, it's hard to keep from wondering why the crowded, unhappy, homeless people of the dirty cities don't go to the small towns.

I know there are good reasons. The homeless would still be homeless when they got there and the people already living in town wouldn't welcome them or have the same facilities for helping them that the cities have.

The argument between big-city and small-town life comes down to this: Is it better to fill your life with a wide variety of friends and events in a big city and expose yourself and your family to all the evils that exist there or is it wiser to settle down to the comfortable, the familiar and possibly dull, in a small town? Can you live a fuller life and thus make life seem longer by going places, doing things and mingling with more interesting people in a big city? Or is the quiet continuity of life in a small town more fulfilling?

I loved Toulon, but I'm back in New York by choice.

ANIMALS
AND PETS
 

Cats Are for the Birds

I have never met a cat I liked.

As an animal lover, I'm constantly disappointed with myself when there's a cat around.

Don't think I haven't tried to love cats, because I have. I always try to win their affection or, at the very least, try to establish some kind of relationship. Nothing. A cat will walk on my lap, jump on a table next to me where my host has put a dish of corn chips, or rub against my pants, but there is never any warmth in the cat's gesture.

“He likes you,” the host will say.

Well, if those cats I've met like me, they have a plenty strange way of showing it. If I got the kind of affection from the people I like that I get from cats whose owners think they like me, I'd leave home.

Cat owners are amused by things their cats do that don't amuse me at all. I am not at all inclined to laugh when a cat walks in my potato chips or plants its claws in my clothes, the better to climb into my hostile lap.

“He can jump from the top of the refrigerator to the shelf in the pantry,” the cat lover says as if it were one of the most desirable things in the world to have a house pet do.

“Cassandra!” the owner will say sharply to the cat with the cute name. “Get down, Cassandra!”

Has any cat in all history ever got down out of a stranger's lap when requested to do so? Cat lovers point out with pride that cats are independent and beholden to nobody. So who needs a cat as a pet? Our whole lives are filled with people who are independent and don't pay any attention to what we say. In addition we should have a cat who treats us like dogs?

I've known divorced couples who are friendlier toward each other than the average cat is to its owner.

Cats have come to my mind today because I just read a newspaper article that said cats are now more numerous as pets in American households than dogs. There are 56 million cats and 51 million dogs, according to the article, although I don't know how they got the cats to stand still long enough to be counted.

The story used the word “popular.” It said “Cats are more popular as pets than dogs.” That is ridiculous. Cats may be more numerous than dogs but it doesn't mean they're more popular. Easier to take care of, maybe. Inclined to reproduce quickly and in large litters, certainly, but if cats are more popular than the greatest animals that inhabit the earth, dogs, then I am more disappointed than usual in the human race.

I want to be honest with you—I hate everything about cats. I hate the smell of a house or a store that keeps one. I can't stand the way they gum their food, and having a pile of kitty litter in the corner of my kitchen is about as attractive a thought as inviting a horse into the living room before the parade.

Cat lovers find charm in the untamability of the animal. I concede that they are absolutely unsusceptible to taking direction of any kind from any human being but it is not an attribute I cherish in a pet. I was never amused by dogs that would roll over on request but there is something lovable about the dog's willingness to do the trick just to please its owner. I see nothing wrong with having a pet that gives the uncritical kind of love that most dogs give.

Cat owners go a long way looking for ways to praise them.

“We never have any mice, not with Cassandra around,” the owner says with pride.

“No,” I say, “and you never have any birds around, either.”

It's true. Cassandra would just as soon torture a hummingbird to death as kill a mouse.

Killing things is Cassandra's idea of having a good time. For my part, I prefer mice to cats. At least mice don't climb in my lap. What worries me most is not cats but people. If people prefer cats to dogs, how can we trust them to choose a president?

It's a mystery to me where wild animals go in the daytime.

This morning, like every morning of my vacation, I got up before six o'clock because I don't want to waste my vacation sleeping. As I pulled myself into my underwear, I looked out the window and saw a deer peek cautiously from the bushy edge of a wooded area that lines a path leading back from behind our house.

The deer looked both ways up and down the path and, seeing nothing and having no way of knowing I was watching it from my bedroom window, it walked out into the open and sauntered down the path. I judged the deer was just getting up too.

“How nice,” I thought to myself, “to have a house far enough away from the crowd to have a deer living nearby.”

But why doesn't it live here during the day? Where does the deer go? There aren't that many good places to hide. I don't know whether it's the same deer or not but I've seen a deer ten times this month and always at dawn or dusk.

The deer had come from a place about twenty feet behind this pentagonal-shaped little building I put up a few years ago to write in. I know the deer sleep there because the tall grass between the trees is matted down and there are well-worn paths leading through the woods.

Even though I've looked out back at all times of day and night, I've never caught one deer asleep. Last night I came out here at eleven o'clock and there was no deer there. Where were they?

There are lots of deer around and it's always a happy event when we see one. It's always “Hey, look! A deer.”

Last year we had a mother with triplets. I wish I knew whether this deer I saw today was one of them. I wish I knew where the other two are. I have a terrible feeling about that, of course. We aren't here in the fall.

Deer have a remarkable ability not only to hide but to thrive side by side with people. They often live in residential areas. You wouldn't think there was much of any place for them to hide but they seem to find them.

It's a good thing people haven't scared away all the deer. They're so nice. I've never heard of a mean deer and they seem so vulnerable, so
unwarlike. I guess there'd be too many of them if a lot weren't killed but I can't imagine shooting one. Bang, bang. You're dead.

Deer aren't the only animals good at hiding. I know they're here but we seldom see a raccoon, a fox, a skunk or a wildcat. I don't know why woodchucks are so fearless and why the raccoons are so afraid of being seen. Maybe the raccoons have decided to come out just after dark because they know the garbage is best after dinner.

Yesterday afternoon we had a torrential downpour. Where did the chipmunks go? I've never seen a chipmunk out in the rain. I'm kind of surprised animals don't like getting wet. Even the robins disappear when it rains. Where do all the robins go that are usually picking worms out of our front lawn? I can't believe the robins all go to nests. I see an awful lot more robins than robins' nests around here.

There has been a mouse around our kitchen at night for the past few weeks. I came out for a drink from the refrigerator the other evening and saw it. I can't figure where the mouse goes in the daytime. I can't find a hole anywhere that it could get in or out through.

When I find a box of cookies chewed open, I hate mice. I have some of the deer hunter in me. I get vicious. I decide to buy traps and kill all the mice. Then I remember the only time I did it and the sight of the mouse, eyes bulging, with blood in its mouth, caught by the neck with the spring-drived bar, was more than I want to face again. I shouldn't eat so many cookies on vacation anyway.

There are times when I wish I was as good at hiding during the daytime as the animals around here are.

The organizations trying to eliminate cruelty to animals are right but they're a little shrill. They give people the impression they're on the lunatic fringe. Readers tend to associate them with the rich woman who dies and leaves a million dollars to her cat.

With the probable exception of Greenpeace, which has been effective against the baby-seal slaughter, and a few notable local groups, organizations trying to protect animals from abuse and torture have been largely ineffective. They certainly haven't discouraged women from wearing fur coats.

The steel-jawed spring trap with jagged teeth that snap shut on an
animal's leg has been the object of humanitarian organizations' attacks for a hundred years. Their work has made animal lovers feel better but it hasn't done much for the animals. There are more leg traps and more animals being caught by the leg than ever before. Thoughtful, compassionate women who would open the screen door to let a fly out before they'd kill one do not associate the fur coats they wear with the cruel and bloody death of the animals whose skin they are made of.