West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened. —Anatole France, Nobel Laureate, 1921

A century and a nickel.

And when you’re older than dirt, you can get lost in time, in memory, even in space.

whenever I locked eyes with an animal I felt something more soulful than I ever felt from the humans I knew, and what I saw in that sprawled giraffe’s eye made me ache to the bone.

When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, that’s all life is—you’re nothing but a feral thing chasing your hunger every minute of the day.

There’s nothing more pitiful than a wandering creature who was never meant to be wild.

I was barely human after the first wretched few days, and as time went on I cared less about being so. When your shriveled stomach’s aching with hunger, you forget all about your hungry heart. And you keep on forgetting it a little each day until a stray dog has more heart or soul than you.

Memories stick to things. Out of nowhere, something finds your nose, ears, or eyes and you’re on the other side of the country or world or in a whole other decade, being kissed by a doe-eyed beauty or punched by a drunken pal. You’ve got no control over it, none at all.

my heart swelling full and warm and pure and kind in a way I’d clean forgotten it could. I was lost in it, its surging tenderheartedness taking my breath clean away.

I once knew a man who didn’t know his own birthday. He was a lucky man. He lived his life each day like any other, never quite knowing his age, therefore never knowing a birth date’s yearly tyranny.

“Home’s not the place you’re from, Woody. Home’s the place you want to be.”

“That’s your first story, but it doesn’t have to be your only story. That’s up to you.”

There are times in life when everything shifts so fiercely you can only hold on,

There are other times, though, when you feel a shift down deep in your bones. Quiet, clean, pure.

I’d felt free of the fury long enough to know I wanted to stay that way.

Like the jolting joy of giraffes amid the traveling bird wave, its peace passed any understanding, any attempt at words. You only get a few of those in your whole life if you’re lucky, and some only get one. If that be true, this was my one. When I remember it, I’m not eighteen in the memory. I am whatever age its comfort came to me, be it 33 or 103, and I am driving us all, through the timeless red desert, headed nowhere in particular, just someplace good. Together.

I wanted to run back and tell you. Your ma did have an adventure—a proper one that made her heart sing for a time even if it couldn’t make her heart strong. Along the way, she did see Africa—in the back of a truck, in the eyes of the giraffes, down the road going west—and she was as daring and brave as could be. I ached for you to know. The War had made me an honorable man, though, if it did nothing else. I was asked to leave you alone, so I did. You being their daughter, I had no rights in the matter, despite my deep feelings for Red. Truth is, I’m not sure what your ma was to me, even now. Nothing I come up with rings true. I didn’t know her long enough to say she was the love of my life, although it can deeply feel that way here and now as I write. But if a man leads a handful of lives inside a long life like mine, I can say she was the love of my first life.

It’s a strange thing how you can spend years with some folks and never know them, yet, with others, you only need a handful of days to know them far beyond years.

As the years went by, life slowly became the ordinary thing it was always meant to be. I tried to be a good man, which surely would have surprised the piss out of the boy I was back at Cuz’s. I never passed up the chance to feed a stray dog or cat or stray anything that passed my way, and I never trusted a soul who didn’t like animals. I loved some respectable women and some not so much. I married three, all redheads, you might not be surprised to hear, and I outlived them all. The closest I had to a child of my own was a grown stepdaughter, gone now, too, who once gave me a plaque that said “Time spent with animals is added to your life,”

Time heals all wounds, they say. I’m here to tell you that time can wound you all on its own. In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you’ll ever make. That’s the moment your truest stories—the ones that made you the you that you became—are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best.

Time plays its cruelest trick without you knowing it. Even the memories a body holds most dear become like scratchy old phonograph records played too long, fading in and out, with little sound and even less fury. Until you’re only another old man sitting in a wheelchair in a crowded VA room with other old men staring at a parade of TV pictures and stories not your own.