Last week, I awoke from a dream in which I was the owner of a brown Pomeranian. In the half wake of early morning, I remembered the dream and reviewed it so that I could tell Randall in the morning. Now, I cannot remember it at all because I was instead caught up in the particular brown of the dog, a caramel color with streaks of blonde. A very specific shade.
There are so many details to remember in a single day.
Humphrey is the tentative name of my new car, though it doesn’t feel exactly right. Carlos was my car before, and he is gone, traded for a larger car that is probably a much better fit. I wanted something new and shiny, a bit of car vanity getting the best of me during a liquidation (a deal!) sale at a local outlet mall.
I know that it is silly to feel sentimental about a car. And yet. And yet, Carlos moved me to the side of the road to leave the frame of a chair that was obstructing my view as I cried and cried after a difficult move. Carlos traveled to Tucson, a city I had never seen, so that I could begin graduate school and leave it for a summer and come back to it and leave it again. Carlos moved me.
Carlos is a car. It is in his name. I know this.
I need Carlos to stand in for things that are harder to access. I need a beat up white four door to perfectly encapsulate the kinds of literal journeys I have taken in the past five years of our relationship with one another because it is easy and we like easy. With a light heart, I can say that yes, I am sometimes nostalgic for the decorative strip that flapped off the front door, but yes, I am happy with Humphrey.
If there is something that more accurately moves with a person through time, through life, then I can’t name it.
Cecil the lion is very much the color of the dream dog and now he is dead. Like Carlos, Cecil is a thing that exists outside the scope of the human mind, at least in theory. Like Carlos, we’ve given Cecil a name and a backstory, and a set of human characteristics. It is perhaps unfair to him. It is certainly unfair to other lions.
People everywhere are calling for his life to matter. What we’re probably trying to say in our social media way is that we need to regulate trophy hunting to prevent majestic animals from being lured out of the protected spaces where they reside. What we’re actually saying is that a dentist with too much money shot this lion, Cecil, beloved hero across the globe.
It is a perfect distraction.
Police in the United States shot and killed 31 people during the first week in July, though they’re also being killed at a rate 130 times that of the UK, where there are significantly less police officers. Mass shootings. Often racially motivated encounters turn shootings and we’re still protesting the removal of the confederate flag and denying the politics of race. We’re more interested in protecting gun ownership (an intangible thing) than in protecting human lives. I’m not interested in the argument. This is not a debate.
And so we rally around an animal, the bipartisan lion we’ve been waiting for. He is both a distraction and a symbol and if both of things are true, than what does it mean that he is dead?
I took a photograph of Carlos as I drove Humphrey behind him to the dealership where we would say goodbye, a perspective I don’t think I’ve ever been offered because of the precise nature of my relationship to the car. Metaphors abound.
The Hamilton Post 