The best way to discover which activities you love is to ask yourself, “What am I doing when time flies by the fastest?” To my surprise, I’m finding this happens during opera rehearsals, despite my fear and fretting. Hours whiz by before I think to check my watch, even when my tiny crew of choristers is not being put through our paces. This is because we get to hear the principal singers practice. They know their roles cold – all of them have done this opera before – so they can stop and start on a dime. Amazingly, they can create the magic of this love story, stop in mid-measure to discuss a vocal technicality or a change in staging, and resume creating the magic.

Maybe I wouldn’t have this admiring reaction if we were doing, say, Dr. Atomic, a brand-new opera about the inventor of the atom bomb (now there’s a musical theme for you!) or St. Francis of Assisi, another plot-free modern work that goes on for five hours.

It’s hard to believe, but, like several of the other absolutely classic operas, Butterfly was not well received at its premiere. Don’t you wonder what those audiences were thinking? From this distance, it’s easy to sneer at them, but meanwhile we may be turning up our noses at creations that will eventually become classics. Will Dr. Atomic (which got tepid reviews — deservedly, in my opinion) some day be considered the most enchanting evening in the theatre that was ever composed?

I wonder what it’s like to have a really fine musical instrument in your throat.

One chorus member has had a death in the family, so we are down to four. There are no men in the chorus and we have been asked to perform some work chanteys sung by the sailors in the port. Finally, a moment in the sun for my deep notes! We’ll be offstage. I rather relish the image of four women in kimonos huddling in the wings, putting out throaty yo-ho-hos.

Now they’ve taken away the conductor! Just as I was sinking blissfully into a cloud of relief that I could receive his signals at key moments, I learn that because our performance venue doesn’t have an orchestra pit, the musicians will be backstage, out of sight. We choristers really will be on our own.

Tuesday night we had the sitzprobe. This German word refers to the rehearsal when the singers and the orchestra get together for the first time, after rehearsing separately for weeks. There’s no staging, and one is allowed to have one’s sheet music (whew). The rehearsal hall is empty, as the sets have been moved to the performance hall. I greet the harpist, whom I knew years ago when I was playing professionally, and sit in one of the folding chairs facing the orchestra. I love this. I’m sitting right next to these truly wonderful singers, and, just like them, I stand up when it’s my turn to sing. I taste the secret thrill of pretending I am a colleague, not a peon.

Hey! They’ve cut my lines! * sigh* The actor’s lament. Just as I was proudly polishing my yo-ho-hos – which were the ONLY parts of the score that magically I could get right the first time, every time – I’ve been informed that they have found some actual men to play the (offstage) sailors. Pooey.

As a neophyte opera chorus member, I tried not to be too hard on myself, but after weeks of struggle, I was still rehearsing new apologies and fishing for reassurance from anyone who would listen. I grew up believing that I could and should do anything I set my mind to. It was a momentous discovery in my 20s that I could actually utter the words “I don’t know” and live to tell the tale. Even now, it seems anathema to give up on something I’ve truly tried to do. But I simply cannot find those C# notes during rehearsal, no matter how well I nail them at home. If I try to stuff my pitch pipe into my obi (kimono belt) and sneak it out for furtive bleats behind my fan, they’ll undoubtedly spot it and frisk me every night for the rest of the run. Telling myself that I’m losing IQ points by the day doesn’t help. So, recalling the expertise I used as a cognitive therapist in my former career, I conducted an internal interview, as follows:

How many voice lessons have you had in your life?

One.

How long ago did you sing in a choir?

Several decades.

Did you get individual instruction while singing in this choir?

[Me: smothered guffaw]

When you were living in Italy, did you speak regular conversational Italian or poetic libretto Italian?

Regular conversation.

How long ago was this?

Several decades. One year in Florence.

Is poetic libretto Italian difficult?

Yes, there’s no rational correlation between words and notes.

Have you ever sung in the chorus of an opera?

No, but I was in the chorus of Finian’s Rainbow for six performances when I was 20.

How did that go?

Lots of accidents and illnesses among the cast, most of them onstage. By the end of the run, the head usher was asking physicians to identify themselves at the door.

Were you one of the casualties?

Yes.

What was the nature of your accident?

Broke my foot onstage during “That Great Come and Get It Day.” I still can’t do some yoga positions. I tell people it’s an old dancing injury.

Could this experience have colored your view of the safety of the performing arts?

Gee, I hadn’t thought about that in years.

Really? Let your mind go back to that period of your life…..

At this point I realize I am not dealing with a true cognitive therapist, who would continue the session as follows:

How much are you being paid to sing in this chorus?

Paid?

So, to sum up, you are doing something you haven’t done in decades, in a foreign language, as a volunteer, with limited rehearsal time, at a higher level of expertise than you have ever attempted before. Is this correct?

Gee, now that you put it that way, maybe it’s no surprise that I’m struggling.

This reminds me of an interchange I had with a client some years ago. A musician wanted an orchestra job but feared the tryout, saying she hadn’t been practicing enough. I wasn’t sure whether this was true; she was so self-critical that she never gave herself credit for anything. In the weeks before the tryout, she vacillated between extremes of hope and doubt, unsure whether to even attend the audition. One day, halfway through her therapy session, she said, oh, by the way, she got the job. “Congratulations!” I exclaimed. She didn’t respond with the happy enthusiasm one would expect. (This is not unusual among bulimics). I repeated my congratulations. She shrugged. “They probably gave it to me out of pity.”

“Why would they do that? You’re thinking they’re going to fill the first violinist chair in a professional orchestra, someone they’ll have to play with in public – for pity?”

“Well, they probably knew it was me.” This really baffled me.

“How could they not know it was you?”

“Oh, you can tell sometimes.” This was getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser.

She added, “Maybe they could see behind the screen.”

“There’s a screen?”

“Oh, yeah. Auditions are supposed to be anonymous.”

“Oh, I see. They have a list of the candidates – ”

“Not exactly. The day before, I told them I wasn’t coming. I just went on the spur of

the moment.”

“Let me get this straight. You believe that people who can’t see you, who don’t even

know you are there, who are putting their own reputations on the line, hired you out of

pity?”

[This true story was published in my book How People Recover from Eating Disorders available from Xlibris.com or from me at author’s discount price]

Oh. Unbeknownst to me, he was purposely giving us cues.

What a concept. We redid the passage, and at the key moment, sure enough, he lifted his baton, looked right at us, and signaled that it was OUR TURN TO SING.

Later that night, as I shamefacedly described the scene to my husband, I felt like an idiot for never even imagining that the conductor would actually help us. Pondering a bit more, I realized there were three reasons for my blankness.

One. I remembered from the acting days of my youth that when the stage lights are up and the house lights are down, you can’t see the audience. They are there as a strange, dreamlike, breathing presence whom you are trying to please, but you can’t see them. So while preparing for an opera performance, I assumed I would not be able to see the conductor. I thought he was there in the blackness to watch the stage and try to keep the orchestra caught up to the singers.

Two. I was sure that people onstage are not SUPPOSED to look at the conductor – that doing so would break the illusion of the “fourth wall” (the impression that the audience is secretly peeking into other people’s living rooms). They don’t do it in the professional productions I’ve seen, maintaining rigorous discipline and looking only at each other.

Three. It had never occurred to me that we lowly choristers would actually have someone to rely on, that we wouldn’t have to flounder in a shapeless sea of sound.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to seeing my (blond) self in a black wig, white makeup, and kimono. With parasol and fan, I might just pass as a geisha if you’re a near-sighted person in the second balcony. I think I’ll send a photo of this spectacle to my faculty colleagues at Saybrook Graduate School and see if they can guess who it is.

A key character in Madama Butterfly is her little son, who is born after Act I. A toddler when he appears onstage, he is the focus of his mother’s adoration and part of the heartbreaking finale. One day at rehearsal, one of the younger chorus members brought her son to meet the director. However, he is seven years old and a husky youngster, too large for even the most forgiving audience member to mistake for a two-year-old. Certainly too heavy for a soprano to lug around onstage while warbling a lullaby. I wondered if my little neighbor Olivia would do… she is five and part of a family heavily involved in music, dance, and theatre. As we drove to her “audition,” she boldly sang the entirety of the title song of “Hello, Dolly.” Since Butterfly’s little son does not speak or sing, this impressive talent would regrettably not be exhibited to our operatic audience, but I pondered whether to nudge her to sing it for the director. As it happened, he just wanted to talk to her, explain the plot (expurgated), and see how she reacted. He is in his 70s and was a busy tenor for decades, so I imagine he has interviewed numerous tots and knows how to pick the one who will steal hearts onstage without picking his nose or starting to cry.

Behold, she has been given the role! I’m a little nervous about this, as the job of the toddler (nicknamed “Trouble”) is to sit here and there without moving very much. How can you expect a very young child to sit still for so long? But my little friend did splendidly on her first rehearsal. She was more patient than I was! Maybe it was a test, but the director made her wait almost three hours before he called for her to rehearse. All this time, the principals were singing, the stage manager was taking notes and whispering to various assistants, and the conductor was stopping and starting the action to give comments. Olivia sat on her mother’s lap or wandered around quietly looking at the artificial cherry tree, which was being festooned with blossoms by a woman who would stand back, look critically at her work, then step forward to attach another blossom. Olivia had been given her costume, so dressed in red and black embroidery with a flowing red robe, she was a bright little dot in the cavernous warehouse cum rehearsal hall full of people in blue jeans and t-shirts.

Finally, she was called. I was agog* to eavesdrop, but I was sitting too far away.

* Actually, I was two gogs.

I could see her listening solemnly to instructions and dutifully falling asleep on command. By the end of her rehearsal time, she had made such an impression that the director decided to give her extra little things to do. I’ll have to wait until her next rehearsal, or maybe even opening night, to see the staging they’ve given her. Go, Olivia!

(in which our heroine, an admitted music lover, attempts to crash the world of opera by joining the chorus of a local production of Madama Butterfly).

In Madama Butterfly, the chorus’s lines are sporadic outbursts that come out of nowhere (that is, with no helpful orchestra hint to tell you what your note is) and just as suddenly disappear, leaving you to scramble desperately for your note when it’s time for the next outburst. By the way, even though Puccini’s music is rhapsodically lyrical and unforgettably beautiful, it also contains truly weird chords that took me weeks to grasp. Sometimes I rush at the note like a defensive halfback trying to catch an elusive tight end.

I decided to cheat. On difficult passages I would simply mime. Pretty soon – maybe at the next rehearsal – surely the rest of the chorus would show up and I could hide among the multitudes. I would be an onstage umbrella twirler, the female counterpart of the spear-carrier. After all, this scene is supposed to be a big wedding party and bodies are needed to swell the crowd. But week after week, we five were the only ones to appear at the chorus rehearsals. Our accompanist denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of the tenors and baritones. An uneasy feeling began to sink in that there WERE no tenors or baritones or additional sopranos or (gasp) fellow altos. But we persisted and gradually one could begin to perceive the outlines of our choristical contribution to the wedding scene. Pretty soon we would get to meet the principal singers and even get to rehearse with my friend Michael, who is singing the role of the matchmaker. I wondered if I would know any of the four principal singers, since I have been involved in the Bay Area opera scene (as enthusiastic audience member) for a while and knew the folks who sing in our little regional companies.

One day the shock came. I learned that the principals are not friendly minor local singers who are grateful for a chance to sing a leading role and sure to be kind to the amateurs. They are solid professionals being flown in from around the country, with respectable resumes and admiring reviews in music publications like San Francisco Classical Voice.

Oh, s***. I can’t tell if I’m more upset about ruining the work of these artists with my meek off-key chirps, or of humiliating myself on stage. My husband is a gem and will overlook my failings, as always, but I have foolishly told all our opera pals about this production, and some of them may actually attend.

Too late to back out now. I really considered it. But there are just too few FOBs (Friends of Butterfly). How can I abandon the other four of them now? So I gulp and increase my home practice time. Finally the lyrics begin to come automatically, little burblings of rhythmic gushing gossip. Now I just have to stitch them into the correct sequence and match them to the music. Did I mention that all those clichés about Italian being such a musical language are BS? Sure, it’s a beautiful lyrical tongue, charming to speak and to hear, but for some reason opera composers have decided that it is NOT NECESSARY to match the syllables to the music! So everywhere in the score one finds a single note with three words crammed into it, and another word stretched out over four notes. There is no logic to this random madcap distribution, so there’s nothing for a hapless volunteer chorister to do but to drill the phrases repeatedly – while driving to the store, taking a shower, cleaning out the cat litter box….

So I bought a pitch pipe, a palm-sized round harmonica into which you blow to get your note (pitch). Yay, I thought, $27 is steep for this little toy from the local mom ‘n pop music store, but now I can practice finding my note even if I’m not at home with the keyboard. Thirteen little holes are distributed around the circumference of the pitch pipe, each labeled with a note (A flat, C sharp, etc.). You have to find your own octave, but it’s a start.

I should have tried it out at the store. When you blow into this little gadget, whose ancestors doubtless date back to the Baroque era, you receive a vague honking sound that may or may not resemble an actual pure tone. Ok, so maybe you have to turn it over or blow across the hole the way you did over coke bottles as a child. No such luck. New whistling drones were emitted and they never seemed to be identical to the ones they emitted last time. I blew and breathed and panted into the thing.

Oh wait. Maybe you’re supposed to suck.

Tried that. Silence.

Now I’ve breathed all over the pitch pipe and don’t want to take it back to the store. Besides, I’m a bleeding heart for small businesspeople, so I keep trying and finally get some use out of the thing. But I’m still waiting for someone, anyone, to find me a fellow alto.

It all began innocently enough, with a stroll through our town’s wine and food festival one summer day. Suddenly a woman literally leaped out of a booth and accosted us. She looked at us fiercely, grasped my husband’s wrist, and demanded,

“Are you opera lovers?”

As our hearts returned to normal rates, we saw that her booth was marked “Martinez Opera Company.” Now Martinez is the neighboring town, best known as county seat (where one goes to deal with jury duty and driving infractions) and the home of Northern California’s smoke-belching oil refineries. We had not, until that moment, associated it with fine arts.

As it turns out, we ARE opera lovers, and we entered into a spirited discussion with this lady, whom we never saw again. Angel fanciers, take note. We learned that this lazy little town actually has an opera company that mounts one production a year, most recently La Traviata. Excitedly we took the brochures she handed out, signed up for email announcements, and vowed to learn more.

Long silence. Finally a few months later we got a casting call for that other contestant for the-most-loved-opera-of-all-time, Madama Butterfly. A chorus was needed. Oh, good, I thought. A place to sing with lots of other people on stage; I could mingle in the background with the altos and contribute respectable tones to a crowd scene. I responded with the information that I had participated in high school and college choirs, spoke Italian, and played the harp professionally. They accepted me sight unseen, or should I say voice unheard. I had neglected to mention that college was decades ago and I had stopped playing the harp in 1991. But they took me anyway.

There’s only one explanation.

They wuz desperate.

In March, the choir began rehearsing for the May production. At my first practice, which was billed as “coaching,” not rehearsal, one other woman showed up. The coach, or pianist, or whoever she was, played a few notes on the portable keyboard. My co-conspirator tried, she really tried. She searched for the correct note in the way a giraffe searches for a smear of peanut butter at the bottom of a tall jar. I did a little better. I could sing the note, but (with the glorious tones of Renee Fleming and Natalie Dessay resonating in my memory) with a mediocre sound modestly better than a squeak. You would ask for my singing the way travelers ask for directions, just to get a vague idea so you can hurry on to your destination.

This went on for an hour.

Later that day a real rehearsal was held and four other women showed up. (The giraffe lady was never seen again). Three of them are young ladies with real voices, whom I admire and envy. The other woman is nearly my age and comes equipped with a heavy Australian accent, a pleasant mezzo-soprano voice, and a dogged determination to find the correct note.

For a month we practiced once a week, with a succession of accompanists. Maybe we drove them away. Never mind, I thought to myself, this is a tiny community production and no one will know what a struggle I’m having. Despite my musical background and love of the Italian language, I had difficulty getting these phrases to stick in my mind. Above all, I couldn’t find my note. The chorus in Butterfly consists of her friends who come to her wedding carrying their parasols and fans, all dressed up to admire and gossip.*

* I never realized before how nasty some of these friends are. I was required to learn lines like, “Oh, this will never last. She’ll be divorced soon. I sure hope so” and, “She’s already over the hill” (Butterfly is 15 years old). Other members of the chorus, giving the bridegroom the once-over, are saying to each other, “The matchmaker offered him to ME first, and of course I said NO!”

Our first accompanist tried to convince me I’m a soprano. I nearly laughed out loud. When not anxious about public appearances, I’m rather proud of my deep, tenor-like tones and think I could creditably belt out the bottom line in an all-girl barbershop quartet. My upper register (ahem) sounds like a deflating balloon being held at gunpoint. Trust me, you would cross the street rather than hear me try to sing Un Bel Di, though I can do a nice singalong with Linda Ronstadt’s torch songs when I’m in the garage repairing a doorknob.

My friend Michael politely declined to give me a lesson but sent me to his voice teacher, who ALSO asserted that I am a soprano. Yes, and the national debt is shrinking. But both teachers showed me intriguing things about breathing and throat management. I hadn’t realized that great singers are born (as well as made by decades of hard work), partly because of the shape of their sinuses! I almost wish I didn’t know that about opera singing — it does take away some of the glamour ….

But it does give me a new excuse. Of course I’m a modest singer — I’m not genetically programmed to have good sinus resonance.

My friend Alan was talking about his brother. Vance, at 40, is a year younger than Alan and still lives with their parents, but he isn’t grateful for the shelter. On the contrary, he constantly criticizes and blames them: If it weren’t for them, he could have become a champion chess player. If they had only done what he asked when he was fifteen, he would be a success now…
His parents absorb the vilification and try one scheme after another to help him get started in life: paying tuition at various schools, giving him start-up funds for unlikely businesses. For a while they paid his rent in a nearby apartment, but Vance was so miserable they invited him back home. He returned and resumed his blaming. “People get ahead in life through their connections. I’m a failure because you didn’t put me in touch with people who have power. What’s wrong with you, anyway?”
The parents, far from protesting this mistreatment, make excuses for him. His father insists, “Vance just can’t make it on his own.” When Alan remonstrates, their father says, “We need to help him just one more year.” Alan has heard all these excuses many times. Disgusted with the drama, he calls these self-deceiving handouts “lessons in being an emotional cripple.”

This recital opened my eyes. I have a relative who operates the same way. On learning that my relative was not unique, I began to tell other therapists about this pattern at conferences, case groups, and marketing visits. Often another therapist would say, “I know someone like that,” “I have a client whose sister is like that,” or, poignantly, “My brother is like that.”

What’s going on here? Are these just a few ne’er-do-wells that I encountered by strange coincidence? In fact, I found them everywhere: in the professional practices of therapist colleagues –or in their families; in stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and O. Henry; in the literature of alcoholism; and in the news headlines. I found there were several kinds of dependent children: some were angry, some were passive, some were self-destructive. All of them found family members willing to go along with their scripts.
In this country, we expect young people to grow up, learn to take care of themselves, leave the family nest, and create a home of their own. They might go to work for Dad or Mom, but they pull their weight. By contrast, the people I’m studying can’t-or won’t–make it on their own. They become the family passengers.

The refusal to grow up is not a charming Peter Pan story, nor does it take place in a vacuum. Take Joe, 28. His best friends are cocaine and gin, and he drifts from one situation in life to another, blaming his mother Phyllis for his troubles. He amasses huge medical and psychiatric bills, which she pays. Phyllis is worried, and seeks the opinions of friends, brokers, and therapists, but she doesn’t take their advice about setting limits with Joe. A gullible person, she is exploited by contractors and merchants. Her stock-broker makes frequent purchases and sales in order to generate commissions for himself. Her son is just one of many who bend her to their will. Until she gains some backbone, he will continue to have a free ride.
Another passenger, Al, was born with a small neurological disability and was always given extra help. Though his disability responded well to treatment, his mother, Joanne, recalls: “I wasn’t sure he could make it on his own, so I tried to compensate for his difficulty. I was always trying to fix it.” It’s as if the memory of his early impairment made his parents continue seeing him as unable. Then their marriage fell apart and Al became the battleground, in the way family therapists know too well. He threatened suicide at 14 when his mother remarried a man he didn’t like, and he sought refuge in drugs and alcohol during high school. A stint in the military seemed to signal a turning point, but since discharge he has not taken any steps to create a life. He lives with his sister, sitting on the sofa drinking and watching television. This precipitates arguments between this tolerant sister and her husband. Al doesn’t know how to budget money, and doesn’t contribute to household expenses. Joanne has finally seen the situation clearly, and comments, “Al always has a thousand excuses why he shouldn’t grow up.”

Joe and Al are versions of the family passenger. They live off the people around them and never get started with their own lives. They do not have serious physical disabilities which would justify such extended assistance, nor are they in a momentary crisis, returning home temporarily after a divorce or during an economic downturn. And I’m not referring to subcultures with a strong clan identity, in which family members work and live closely together with more or less healthy interdependence. I am referring to children of normal capabilities, who, for reasons of their own, do not develop into mature autonomy. These adult dependents receive unending financial and emotional support- money, cars, tuition, clothes, housing–everything you give children or teenagers, except they are “on an allowance” until they are in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Their styles range from simple passivity, to insistent demands and persuasive pleas, through ruthless manipulation and deceit. In my family’s case it includes lies, a religious cult, alcohol, and lawsuits. Some other cases include child abuse, drugs, and crime. In many instances huge sums of money are involved. There are thousands of these families.

Family therapist Jay Haley identified two types of passenger, the apathetic and the troublemaker, and proposed strict behavioral-systemic treatment. Ten years later Stockman and Graves identified three kinds of parent that contribute to this problem:

* the authoritarian parent, whose child becomes submissive or who rebels against the excessive expectations by failing;
* the overprotective parent , whose continual rescue missions prevent the child from facing the consequences of his or her actions;
* the permissive-insecure parent , who is terrified of losing the child’s love.

This problem can go on indefinitely – for decades, even a lifetime. Haley remarked, “The therapist must be willing to go to the mat with a family until either the offspring is functioning normally or the therapist is eighty-five years old, whichever comes first.”
If you have someone like this in your family and would like advice, check out Stockman and Graves , Adult children who won’t grow up (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1990). I have studied quite a few families with this pattern and would love to hear from you.

 Cults and the Closed Mind

            What do you make of the following?

    * Preacher Jim Bakker, arrested for embezzling his followers’ donations, claimed that he had been sincerely creating a devout community of the faithful, but a diabolical enemy had destroyed it: “Something so beautiful was being built, the devil got mad.” The very holiness of Bakker’s intentions, in this light, provoked his downfall.

     * Self-proclaimed messiah David Koresh had a similar excuse: when confronted with his misdeeds, he said that he was the perfect savior, but he had to partake of sinful human nature in order to be on earth at all.

    * Hobart E. Freeman preached faith healing even though he himself limped from childhood polio. This discrepancy was dismissed by his followers: “He has been healed,” said one member, “but God has just not chosen to manifest that healing yet.”

    *  Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh taught love and compassion, but his religious community in  Oregon was violent and paranoid, equipped with watch towers and a 150-member police force armed with semi-automatic weapons. Followers told themselves these were intended by Rajneesh to make them aware of their aggressive impulses and show them what could happen if they didn’t follow his advice.

            In short, everything is a teaching, and the master is never wrong.

            To people with closed minds, it’s impossible to disprove their cherished theory – no evidence is good enough or ever will be, because they can cleverly turn any evidence around to prove their original belief. The closed mind means never having to say you’re wrong!

            This can be rather hilarious when someone has predicted the end of the world on a certain date. Next morning dawns…. what do the believers say NOW ?

            “Our clock was wrong.”

            “God was just testing us.”

            “God changed His mind because our group is so holy.”

The appropriately-named ARF (Animal Rescue Foundation) dates its existence to the day a cat got onto a baseball field just as a major league baseball game was being played. The cat was captured and randomly handed over to Coach Tony La Russa. That opened his eyes to the plight of homeless animals and the result is ARF, located in  Walnut Creek, California (about an hour east of San Francisco). ARF rescues cats and dogs from county shelters and finds homes for them. Sound easy? You should see the place – it’s the Lexus of animal help. The cats and dogs live in small rooms furnished with toys, furniture, brushes, and more. People are carefully matched with the animal whose personality fits the humans’ lifestyle. Many happy adoptions have occurred, and animals saved from death.

Because ARF doesn’t know the history of most of the animals, they assume they might have been feral (wild) or abused – who knows what? So volunteers are asked to visit the animals. After a little training in technique (I passed my cat-patting test with my first A+ since high school), the “socializers” enter each little room, sit down, and offer simple human kindness — brushing, playing, talking. Shy animals are left alone, but we’re allowed to stay in the room with them just to show we’re harmless. What to do while looking harmless….. Someone came up with the idea of the bedtime story, so now there are books in each room. The socializer can simply pick up a book and read aloud in a soothing tone. Now here’s the fun part: Each socializer/reader is asked to mark where he or she left off, so the next visiting socializer can start at that place. I know, I couldn’t believe that either.

Your community has homeless animals and shelters needing volunteers. Try it!

To preserve the glorious diversity of life on earth, humans will have to change almost everything we do – what we eat, what we drive, how many children we have, where we travel – everything. Fortunately, there’s an amazing outpouring of creativity from people all around the world. Here are a few ideas I’d like to see catch on:

            The green goodbye. Traditional embalming and burial are shockingly destructive. Powerful chemicals embalm the body, hundreds of pounds of wood, fabric, metal, and cement enclose it, and herbicides and pesticides are dumped all over the grassy cemetery. Here are some statistics I got from wikipedia.

Each year, 22,500 cemeteries across the  United States bury approximately:

30 million board feet of hardwood (caskets)

90,272 tons of steel (caskets)

14,000 tons of steel (vaults)

  2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets)

1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults)

827,060 gallons of embalming fluid ( commonly includes formaldehyde) .

(Compiled from statistics by Casket and Funeral Association of America,                        Cremation Association of North America, Doric Inc., The Rainforest Action Network,               and Mary Woodsen,  Pre-Posthumous Society)

 How many hundreds of years will it take for land full of chemical-drenched bodies buried in caskets surrounded by cement containers to be restored? That’s anti-recycling with a vengeance! Cremation requires enormous amounts of energy to burn the remains. I don’t really want the last chapter of my body to contribute to killing the earth – do you? Happily, solutions are available.  There are actually green cemeteries. Even better is the no-funeral-at-all option. I plan to donate my body to a medical school or research facility – no chemical or fossil fuel abuse at all! There’s also Body Worlds, the traveling exhibit of real human bodies that have been dissected and displayed in astounding educational ways. Some people find the idea of this exhibit upsetting, but I’ve seen it and, like most visitors, come away with renewed admiration and respect for our magic biological bodies.

            You can also donate your organs, saving the lives or eyesight of numerous other people. Hmmmm, how can we make this help the earth? Answer: by donating organs with strings attached. It would work like this: you sign an organ donation card and tell the agency that serves as the intermediary that your organs may ONLY be given to someone who does one of the following:

            * Gives $10,000 to an environmental charity.

            * Gets a dozen friends together to collectively donate 500 hours to help the

                        earth or animals. There are plenty of organizations needing volunteers!

            * Makes some other creative contribution in exchange for the gift of life.

I wish someone (you?) would set up a foundation that did this. I’ll sign up right away.

            Ok, so these two could be seen as a bit gloomy. Other options are cheerier. You could teach your cat to use the toilet, saving hundreds of pounds of cat litter over its lifetime. Do this ONLY if your cat never goes outside – free-roaming animals can pick up toxoplasmosis from rodents they come into contact with. The oocysts (eggs) of this bacterium, once flushed down the toilet, can survive water treatment procedures. When the waste water reaches the oceans, otters can pick them up through the food chain. Why does this matter? Toxoplasmosis is deadly to sea otters. For the same reason, DON ’T flush cat litter down the toilet if your cat goes outside. 

            Like a lot of things, doing the right thing for the earth and for animals requires thinking through some complicated causal chains and weighing the tradeoffs.

            What can you think of to help the earth that hasn’t been invented yet?

Lindsay Wildlife Museum (Walnut Creek, California) is a five-minute drive from my home. Every year, thousands of injured or orphaned birds, raccoons, possums, deer, and even snakes are brought in by caring citizens. I volunteer in the wildlife hospital there three hours a week, doing mostly unglamorous tasks: cleaning cages, doing laundry, cutting up fruit. Occasionally I get to do more interesting things, such as holding a bird that is having blood drawn for a diagnostic test. The animals are treated and most of them are eventually released back into nature.

Taking care of mice. The mice are being raised as food for the raptors (mostly hawks) that we are rescuing. There’s no way to rescue carnivorous animals without giving them flesh to eat. One has to choose. So though I’m a vegetarian, I take part in a tiny meat industry, raising and feeding generations of little white mice. Once a day, mouse enclosures have to be cleaned out, supplied with new sawdust, and provided with fresh food and water.

Baby mice are called “pinkies” because they are pink and miniscule when first born, about half the size of your smallest finger. Their limbs are almost invisible. Their skin is almost transparent; after they’ve had their milk, you can see the brilliant white blob inside their stomachs. Today I noticed that you can also see through the skin on the tops of their heads – the skull bones are not fused and the fissures are plainly visible, like teensy pink boundary lines on a map.

By the time they are toddlers, mice have grown a fine coating of fur, and before long they’re as white as their parents and the other mice in their enclosures. I haven’t found out yet – do some adult mice forego parenthood in order to help the pack reproduce? This is what some canids and felids do in the wild. It baffled sociobiologists for a while, for it seemed to fly in the face of their “selfish gene” theory. Pregnant mice, in the later stages, seem to be as wide as they are long. No wonder – they’re carrying as many as a dozen babies inside.

We handle the mice to clean their cages. There’s something very endearing about the tiny feet clinging to one’s gloved hand, the white whiskers. I don’t participate in killing the mice. A painless dose of carbon dioxide knocks them out. Sadly, a few are chosen to be the prey that the young raptors (birds of prey) must practice killing before they can be released. This is one thing that churns my stomach about nature: though animals aren’t recreationally aggressive like humans, there is killing involved in feeding. The living feed on other living things, and predator mothers must teach their young how to kill in order to live. A cheetah will bring home a living warthog baby, for instance, and let her cubs chase it. I feel so sorry for the little creature that keeps trying to escape, and almost making it, and suffering in fear for so long before it is dispatched.

Birds. LWM receives thousands of birds every year. In the spring, the bird room is loud with the racket of chickadees, cedar waxwings, house finches, doves, and robins chirping and flapping. In mid-summer the bird room was fully occupied. Every cage, three shelves high, was tenanted by one or more birds, some of them tiny babies. We are kept busy feeding every bird with mash which we poked into their mouths from plastic syringes. Some birds flee from our hands as we reached into the cages to deliver the goods, but a few cocky ones get right in line for their lunch. Rarely one sits on your hand or the syringe itself. Reaching into the cage is usually easy, since a small flap of mesh hangs over the door. When one does manage to escape, the procedure is to call, “Bird out!” and turn out the lights. There are nets on handles to catch them. The bird room is small, so this is not usually difficult.

One day a bird escaped and fluttered about near the ceiling. The tallest of the volunteers simply reached up and with one hand caught the bird right out of the air. I was astounded; it was as if the laws of nature had been repealed. Pulling a bird out of the air! The following week another bird escaped and flew up to the ceiling, and the second tallest person in the room… reached up and caught it. Darn, I thought. I’ll never be able to do that. I’m too short. The week after that, I was standing on a stepstool to feed the youngest birds on the highest shelf of cages when, surprise, a bird escaped. I was ready… reached out… and caught it.

A wildlife hospital kitchen. In one refrigerator, there is meat for the rescues (our temporary guests) and for the “animal ambassadors” upstairs that are unreleasable (and therefore permanent residents). Imagine opening a fridge door and finding a vat full of dead rats, complete with tails. Or would you prefer half-rats? Moistened mashed dog food. Half carcasses of birds. Plastic packages with dozens of mice. The other fridge looks more familiar, with piles of fresh fruits and vegetables and cans of infant milk substitute. In the adjacent room are large vats on wheels, labeled “dove seed” “rodent block” and “crickets.” On the counter sit two bins full of sawdust in which mealworms crawl around.

The walk-in freezer scares me. I’ve heard of too many tales of people locked inside dungeon-like industrial facilities. Even the reassurance that there’s a knob inside doesn’t eliminate the fear of being caught up in a Hitchcock-like terror scene.

Speaking of volunteering, where are all the men when it’s time to save the earth? I have never been to an environmental or animal event where women didn’t outnumber men by about six to one. What do men do all night and weekend, when women are volunteering, organizing, doing local politics, educating their communities, saving animals, and making the world a better place? Ok, playing basketball with the boys is healthy exercise and anything that burns off the male hormones is good, but what about the rest of their non-work time? …………. I’m waiting for an answer.

One night I learned how to handle raptors (kestrels, owls, hawks). The hospital hopes to keep handling to a minimum since it’s stressful for the birds, but at admission they have to be weighed, given medical treatment, banded, and then put into a cage. Depending on how injured they are and how long their stay, they may also have to be brought out for more treatment or blood draws, and eventually (happy day) they are transferred to a portable carrier, taken to a release site, and let go. So along with twenty other volunteers, I watched a demonstration on how to catch, hold, and transfer the bird. Then the whole class got to practice. Fortunately, some sweet tame chickens were on hand. We put on heavy leather gloves, ascertained the position of the chicken in the carrier, opened the carrier while making sure the chicken could not escape, reached in and gently but firmly pinned the bird to the floor of the carrier, reached underneath to grasp the feet, and triumphantly lifted our prize. The primary skill, I think, is balancing caution and confidence (true in most areas of life).

Not having seen live chickens at the hospital in the year I’ve been volunteering, I asked whether these had been brought in for our edification. Yes, but…. they were also intended as food for the unreleasable mountain lion that lives upstairs. I looked sadly at these patient birds, who had let us clumsy beginners take them in and out of the carriers repeatedly for half an hour. Of course there’s no life without death, no carnivore without prey, no beautiful big cat without its food, but it’s still hard to know this feathered creature I’ve held is condemned to die in a few minutes. Quickly and painlessly, but still…. The Buddhist philosophy of acceptance and detachment (not the same as indifference) is admirable and profound, but I find it hard to remember when an animal dies.