what I am most grateful for in all the world…

…is also what I am most envious of, and that is our cats’ unshakable certitude that their perfect happiness among us will never ever end.

maddy at our taft hill road rental house

first instance

my father’s family hails from somewhere in north korea from before the war. once war broke out, soldiers came to my grandfather’s house and shanghai’d my father’s oldest brother, my uncle, to join the senseless fight in its invasion of the south. afterward, my grandmother and grandfather took it upon themselves to escape the north through the mountains and get the family as far south as they could, lest they lose more sons.

I bring this up because it’s the only story I have that was evidence, during the whole of my childhood in Hollywood, CA that my father once possessed a humanity and love of animals, that there was a source to my eventual path.

at the time of their escape, my father owned a german shepherd dog, a female, whose name’s long been lost. they couldn’t take her with them on the journey, and so they left her with a neighbor of theirs to whom they had also given their home. as they were leaving, this dog cried and bayed and did everything she could to break the neighbor’s hold on her to catch up to my father and the only people she’d ever loved as they began their night’s trek. my father, who was 10 at the time, tried to go back – not to return alone to the house they’d just abandoned to a neighbor at the outbreak of war, but to retrieve his dog, this girl german sherpherd. but of course they couldn’t have taken the dog with them on their journey south. sacrifices enough had to be made, sacrifices none of them had known were coming, if they were going to successfully escape the war-obsessed north and survive the journey intact.

he told me this story just once, and to this day I don’t know exactly why he told it to me. what had promted its memory or the occasion of its telling. it’s a mystery to me still, why, after the man he became and the young man I became as a result and had to fight like hell to emerge from whole had set fire to whatever remained of our relationship, that he would tell me of this one instance when, as a child, he, too, felt love for an animal who he knew loved him regardless, but who he had to nevertheless betray.