Putting the independence back in Independence Day: “When you chase a kitten away…”

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story from ‘Sun City’

June 25, 2013
“Now there’s a man with a smile on his face.” The Master Sergeant made that observation as he and his little white Scottie marched toward me with an easy precision. I was at Duffeeland Dog Park with Naso and he settled into the park bench across from mine. “Given what you’ve been writing, I thought I might see a scowl on you instead.”

Whatever smile I might have been wearing turned into a queasy grimace. In all this time, I have never had the experience of interacting with people who read what I have written, at least not while I’m still writing it, and I’m thinking it’s something I can have enough of. But the old guy had me dead to rights: I was feeling better than I have in a couple of weeks.

I said, “A young friend just asked me to marry him. Asked me to perform his wedding, that is.”

“I didn’t know you were–”

“I’m not. It’ll be my kind of wedding, no church, no state, just two people fully conscious of the commitment they’re making to each other and to any children they may have. It’s fun for me, because I keep thinking that, with the stories I’ve been writing, someone should ask me to marry him. I deeply enjoy being right about things like that.”

He smiled and leaned back with his fingers locked behind his head, letting the afternoon breezes come to him.

I said, “It’s a problem I’ve been working on for the past ten years or so, since this lump of russet-colored fur landed in my lap: How does a childless man go about cultivating grandchildren?”

“Is that why you’ve taken such a shine to my grandson?”

“Maybe. Not immediately, but someday, perhaps. I don’t think that way. I don’t have plans for anyone, not many even for myself. I just plant apple trees wherever I go, so when I walk that way again, there will be apples for me everywhere. But I like that kid. He’s a serious man, and the world runs on serious men.”

The Skatepunk has a right to see how proud his grandfather is of him, proud not just of what he is but what he promises to become.

“So how about you? What happened to your marriage?”

The Master Sergeant scoffed, a sound of disgust. “My son’s a lifelong jackass. Doesn’t that tell the whole story?”

I smiled at that. “So he’s the one at fault?”

His turn to smile, the deep grin of a man honest enough to tell the truth when the truth hurts worst. “I was at fault, of course. It took me eight years after my wife left to come to that conclusion, so you know how hard I was trying to blame anyone but me.”

It may occur to you to wonder why people always talk to me this way. The truth of my world is, the only people who are willing to talk to me are the ones who have managed to get quit of trying to shade and color and tart up the truth. A liar is always painting himself in a better light than he knows he deserves, but an honest man will cheat himself the other way, if he feels the need to scruple.

He said, “When a kitten jumps up into your lap, it’s like a smile from the gods, isn’t it? The kitten can’t speak, but if she could, she would say, ‘This is what you needed most. Now your life is perfect!’ And you chuckle at that, since it’s such a silly notion. And yet you pet and cuddle and caress that little kitty as if it were true, and – just like that – it is. That kitten is just exactly what you needed most, and for that moment your life is perfect.

“And, oh man!, do you feel that way when you’re falling in love. And when you honeymoon, and a lot of the time for the first few years when you’re married. But one day, you shoo that little kitty away. It’s late. You’re tired. You’re trying to concentrate, and you’ve got a big day tomorrow. And maybe you’re a little more strident than you need to be, a little more cold, a little more cutting, even, with just a hint of scorn in your attitude toward the priorities of kittens.

“But when you chase a kitten away, she comes back half as often, with half as much confidence and half as much enthusiasm. And with a fear she had never even known before. And if you cut her back again, she’s half-again ready to try again the next time, and twice-again afraid. And you don’t have to halve that kitten’s love too many times before there’s none of it left…”

I said, “It goes for men, too, you know.”

“I expect it goes for everyone. I wasn’t all that kittenish, myself, after I’d managed to scold and scorn my wife into being an angry old housecat. Rejection is the risk behind every loving gesture. How many of those will either one of you make, after a while, when all you get in return is some form of thinly-veiled rancor?

“But that’s not what we’re talking about. If she was wrong, that’s her problem to work out. Mine is that I know I was wrong. I can’t swear to any higher virtue than that, but I can hold my head high enough to admit that I was wrong.”

The threshold of redemption is the recognition that virtue and vice have the same author – you. The Master Sergeant wasn’t beating himself up too much, just too late. This is not a rare affliction.

He looked me straight in the eye. “It wouldn’t be much of a world without kittens, would it? We want what we don’t have, and we don’t want what we do. But when you chase a kitten away, she never comes back to you.”

Talking to me is brutal, I know it. I can only imagine what my young friend and his bride-to-be are going to go through with me. But this is my vow, stronger now than ever before:

No one who is married by me will be married thoughtlessly…