Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

Once Was Lost

In the middle of my life, on a warm but drizzling April afternoon, I found myself in an obscure woods, situated anonymously between suburban Westchester houses and a fenced-in park. This was in 2003, about a year and a half after 9/11 and my mother’s death a continent away. Drenched and exhausted, I ran as briskly as I could manage given my fifty years and the tumbledown logs in my way. I would turn and peer into the darkening mists between the barren Beckett trees, and turn and peer again, pausing to catch my breath and call out, “Strawberry.” And “Strawberry,” again. My lungs burned, my side was pinched, it was muddy and twilight, my voice was cracking, I was cracking up, and calling out, “Strawberry.” My daughter’s dog had taken o¤, out of the house, the yard, the neighborhood , and into the woods. I was on a mission to retrieve the mutt, and Strawberry was on a mission to run away. All around me were neglected trees and tangled vines; no path, only used-up stone fences and the gullies of desultory streams. Occasionally—three times, actually—I would glimpse the red dog with a bushy tail. At a distance, she would turn to look at me over her upturned tail. I would jingle the leash and call her; and after a moment’s deliberation, she would make her choice and disappear into the woods. “STRAAAWberrrry.” I made the name sound kind and fetching, adding “Here, girl” now and again, but the dog heard my need and split. Liana, our newest child, was the first to bring my attention to the potential value of dogs. Until then I had myself been dogless and happily so, indeed petless. I should disclose Twitch, my older daughter’s rabbit, which we kept, some years ago, in a cage in the basement for a brief period of time. Twitch kept to herself pretty much, giving my two girls little diversion, until one spring day she revealed herself to be a he on my leg. Twitch’s chief accomplishment had been the ability to ingest, on a regular basis, a sack of Once Was Lost j o hn br yan t 100 02 Part 2_Manu 7/1/2010 5:30 PM Page 100 small brown alfalfa pellets and convert them daily into a pile of small brown fecal pellets of precisely the same size. For me, well after my daughters lost interest and well before she or rather he passed on, Twitch was more of an insight than a pet. A pet should o¤er some consolation for your having caged it; a pet should be something you can pet and be petted in return. Twitch just kept to the cage, mechanically ingesting, mechanically pooping. Perhaps I should have released her into a neglected woods. Twitch was long gone by the time Liana first arrived. Linda, a friend whom we had known since before graduate school, had adopted one-yearold Liana from China. Linda had just turned fifty, had an extended family of cousins but no longer any mother, father, or siblings; she had wanted a child, but rules did not permit her to adopt in this country. So she found Liana in Nanjing. Liana—we are not so sure. The story is that she had been left, at birth, at a Nanjing orphanage by parents now unknown. Linda found her there in swaddling and brought her to New York, believe it or not, on Christmas Day. Linda lived upstate in Columbia County in a tidy, quirky converted farmhouse , where she raised Liana among cats. I think we can agree that the less said about cats the better. Linda would have disagreed. Although she was our closest friend, Linda was a magnet for that class of cat you would have to call—and I think I am being kind here—mentally challenged. One was minus a foreleg and used her phantom paw vainly to wash behind her ear. Another had feline dyslexia (the only term I know for this condition) and was not able to negotiate a doorway without hitting the jamb head-on; and a third, the one with a terminal case of cynicism, who eyed us all with utter disdain, passed on from some hideous infection. These were Chloe, Babo, and Sweetpea. As godfather to Liana, I would take her by the hand to visit Sweetpea’s grave, over by the hedge. Although she and Linda did not...