Animals, Divorce, Picador: Living in the Moment

I once heard George Carlin say dogs can't tell time; they don't differentiate between one minute and one day, so when we leave them, upon our return we get the same exuberant greeting whether we were gone for three hours or three seconds. This merits some thought. Is it that animals don't recognize time or that they don't worship time the way we do? We obsess over time lost and time coming; we struggle to retrieve the past, seeking some previously missed key to consequences we endure in our ongoing life sagas. Or we project and fantasize about the future, what will be, what could be, what we want. Doing so, we miss the present moment, the essence of a happy life. The Buddhists teach us that by living in the moment, we have no expectations and feel neither sorrow nor disappointment. So sensible. So difficult. Do our animals experience disappointment and resentment? If they do, such states are momentary.

I am still winding through my fresh divorce, which I know in my heart was inevitable despite loving my husband. Yet I sit here and dissect the last 12 years of my life looking for mistakes I may have made, and finding few, look again, deeper, because there must be some wrong I committed to have placed here, but instead I land in a pit of sensory images. I see our early years. I smell optimism, excitement: the night he proposed, visiting his parents that Christmas and singing oldies during the entire two hour drive, taking pictures on our wedding cruise, eating oysters on the balcony at KPaul's, unpacking Farberware in the new house, his kissing the Blarney stone, his kissing me all of 3,188 mornings with an "I love you, Munchkin, see you later," all scenes dripping with the hope of a joy-filled, "normal" life. I am pained physically by my loss of hope, this well of disappointment, of failed expectations. Without exposing the demons in my ex-husband's closet and publicizing the details of his final month-long hateful treatment of me, I -- and every person who watched this union disintegrate-- can say that I worked harder to preserve the "us" than most people would have, that I bore more figurative cuts and jabs than most sane women would have. In assessing the last month, I find only one word: picador. And I ache. Because I took it.

I never understood what hope meant until now, and really, it's an almost terrible word to me.

So where are the animals in the midst of my reflective meltdown and our newly quiet space? A couple of them seemed to love my ex-husband. But they're not moping. They don't wait wistfully by the door until midnight. They act no less happy than they ever have been before. Except for Baby, the macaw -- the creature whose temperament and emotion parallel a human's. For years, he has been battling feather picking, making himself bleed and leaving his pink, dimpled chicken skin chest exposed. He's been e-collared, medicated, fed a natural diet, and isolated from scented and toxic household substances, but he has continued picking himself raw.

My ex-husband did not like the bird. He's actually told people he hated "that (*#$&(*&$#(*& bird." Deeply. ( Both my vet and I still want to know how Baby mysteriously broke his leg while I was out, a break repaired by an $1800 microsurgery ) But in his absence I see promise. In three weeks, I see healing. Today I examined Baby, finding a patch of new green feathers, the first in over a year. I cried. How little we know. How much the animals do. We should listen.