The Cheetah

Last week Hadley went on a field trip to the zoo with her class.  For weeks, they had been researching an animal of their choosing; reading books, going to the computer lab, drawing pictures, all rather impressive things for Kindergartners to do, I’d say. Last week, they roamed the zoo to see the real, live thing. Hadley searched for the cheetah.

On the way to school, Hadley said, “I feel bad for the cheetah.”

“Why is that?” I asked, thinking she was going to tell me that it is an endangered animal, or that maybe its habitat is threatened because we use too much hairspray or drink too much coffee.

“I feel bad for researching it.”

“You feel bad researching the cheetah?”

“Yes. I feel like I’m taking something away from it.”

Here’s a picture of me and Celena on her wedding day.  We are in Vieques, Puerto Rico. I learned that evening from her father that Celena’s name means, “Gift from God.”  I didn’t know that literally, but I think from the day she introduced herself during a lunch recess at Percy Julian Junior High, I felt it.

Here’s a picture of me in the best coffee shop I’ve ever been in.  I’m sick I can’t go back and do all my reading and writing there.  On each of the tables is a bucket with pencils and loose leaf notebook paper to write and sketch on.  When you leave, you can drop your words and pictures into a bucket called “Offerings.” I would’ve left mine but I wanted to keep the ideas I wrote down: that one wall of this coffee shop is painted so it looks exactly like a piece of notebook paper, a red margin line, three holes, and blue lines for writing. That there was a wine bottle, emptied and decoupaged with poetry and flowers placed inside.  That another wall has large chalkboard squares on it, and “The Original Story of a Girl” titled above them.  Patrons can sketch part of the story and write a caption for it.  I sketched the chalkboard idea and wrote, “What about, ‘The Stories of Two Original Girls’ instead?” I wondered if I could duplicate this for Hadley and Harper’s room; my two original girls.  Oh, Starbucks, why can’t you be more like this coffee shop? The world would be a much better place, I think.

Here’s a picture of drawings of ships that Jesse and I found when we explored a fort in Old San Juan that was occupied from the 1600s until after World War II.  The room with these sketches was a dungeon where a captain was captured and waiting to be executed. The room was sweltering and small and there was one window as narrow as the width of my arm and so deep that I don’t think you could toss a small rock and get it to the world outside. And even if you could, it would plummet to the ocean below. Way below.

The sketches were protected by glass, otherwise that is all that was in the room. I wondered how the sailor got a pencil. Maybe he used a stone? Or a piece of charcoal? I wondered if the ships were messages to his crew, what to be aware of, or maybe where secret supplies were stored. Then I wondered if maybe drawing the ships comforted him in some way. That the movement of his hand on the rocky wall calmed him for what he knew was coming. That creating something helped him steady himself.  I wondered what I would draw or write about if I were in his situation.

When we got home from our little vacation, all this pink was gone, and Harper was so sad. “It’s just green leaves now,” she said. I told her the pink doesn’t last too long, but they’ll be back next year. “And I took a picture of it,” I told her.

“It’s not the same,” she said.

No, it’s not.  It’s not the same as being in the picture. It’s not the same as living it. And when you look at it again, I suppose a little bit of that moment is taken away.

Maybe Hadley’s right.

I don’t know, though. There seems to be a lot to learn about the cheetah. Maybe this summer the girls and I will take a trip to the zoo and stand in front of it and wonder about it. Maybe Hadley will tell us what she knows about the cheetah, and maybe Harper will have a question that Hadley can’t answer so we’ll stop by the library on the way home to check out books on the cheetah.  Maybe we’ll have to read the books at the frozen yogurt shop across the street. Hadley will read from the book and Harper will draw cheetahs on napkins using pens from my purse because I always have pens in my purse.

Except that time in the coffee shop in Old San Juan.  That time, though, they were waiting for me as I sat down with my espresso. Gifts at the perfect time I needed them.