The Soul of an Octopus/Sy Montgomery: reflections

Last week I went in and out of three city bookstores. I might as well have traveled the world.

In the glorious indie Penn Book Center, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Ashley and I talked about who was reading what and why (a favorite conversation) and (in the midst of it all) I asked for a copy of Sy Montgomery's National Book Award nominated The Soul of an Octopus. Sy and I met when I reviewed her glorious book about swimming with the pink dolphins years ago. I've read all of books (for adults) since (Sy is an award-winning natural-world storyteller for children, too). And once, it seems ages ago, Sy and her friend and my husband and I sat in a restaurant just off Pine Street in Philly talking about the worlds we love.

The Soul of an Octopus is Sy's best book yet—and that is saying something. It's Sy as Sy—the intrepid explorer with the gonzo heart in the petite and capable body. It's Sy spending Wonderful Wednesdays with her friends at the New England Aquarium as they get to know—and be known by—a succession of form-shifting, camouflage-bedazzling, big-one-minute-squeezing-through-a-two-inch-crevasse-the-next octopuses. Sy falls in love with the first octopus touch. She begins to live on octopus time. She scubas into seas to see the wild octopus up close. And then she returns to the barrels and tanks and public displays to watch Octavia and Kali and Karma conveyor-belt food up their suction cups toward their mouths, beat with three hearts, unlock puzzles, and demonstrate intelligence, compassion, and personality akin to any human being.

But let's also pause right there, with human beings. Because, while Sy has always taken the time to introduce us to the other explorers and animal-kingdom lovers that she encounters in her wild adventures, we have never met characters quite like these—young people, older people, expert people, diving people, people with diagnoses, people with broken hearts, appreciating people. Sy's communities of octopus lovers are immaculately drawn. So much so that kindness (about which I was just recently musing, here) is as integral to this story as Sy's desire to understand octopus consciousness. Indeed, I would say the two are inextricable.

We can't help but love (even more) the wise and personality-prone octopus as we read (and finish) this book. We also can't help but love Sy.

I leave you with an early passage:

Perhaps, as we stroked her in the water, we entered into Athena's experience of time—liquid, slippery, and ancient, flowing at a different pace than any clock. I could stay here forever, filling my senses with Athena's strangeness and beauty, talking with my new friends.

Congratulations, Sy.

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Birdology/Sy Montgomery: Reflections

I have been reading Birdology these past few days, a book written by my dear friend Sy Montgomery.  Sy and I met years ago (virtually), following a review I wrote of her magnificent Journey of the Pink Dolphins.  We met in person a few years later.  I've read every one of her fabulous books since—Search for the Golden Moon Bear, The Good Good Pig, among them—and counted myself lucky to know this permeable woman who floats among God's creatures—chameleon like, inspirited, sometimes barely breathing, always awed.  Sy swims with dolphins and dances with bears.  She sleeps on the belly of a pig.  She speaks of her border collie, Sally, as if Sally had written a few books of her own.  With Birdology, Sy dances with birds.  She might swim with them, too; I don't know.  I still have two chapters to go.

I am myself a great lover of birds, and so I am loving this book with particular fervor.  In it, we meet the famous Ladies, Sy's crew of intelligent chickens. We walk, with Sy, through a dusky Australian park, hoping for an encounter with the bone-headed cassowary (six feet tall, dagger-equipped, footprints akin to the Tyrannosaurus rex, but Sy's not afraid, so we're not either).  We urge two orphaned hummingbirds on toward life, and learn, in the process, more than a couple of things.  We learn, for example, that two baby hummingbird's together "weigh less than a bigger bird's single flight feather," and that "a person as active as a hummingbird would need 155,000 calories a day—and the human's body temperature would rise to 700 degrees Fahrenheit and ignite!"  We go on a bloody falconry adventure.  (Blood, with Sy, is a rather commonplace sight.  She may have a mass of great blond curls, and she may be fashionably svelte, but don't let that fool you:  this is one tough, bug-bitten, leech-proven traveler.)

I was about to read a chapter about parrots—squeeze it in between client calls—but I thought, Oh, no, why rush this?  So I'm going to take this book outside after my work is done and pick my feet up and hope a hummingbird will visit in the meantime.

(As for the photo, above:  I snapped this gorgeous creature a few years ago while on Hawk Mountain with my friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, her boys, and my own.)

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Gogol, The Overcoat, and the Connective Book Life

While waiting yesterday for a client call, I took The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol from its corner on my glass desk and read the final story, "The Overcoat." If it feels like "Bartleby the Scrivener" at first (with its particulate descriptions of the seemingly mundane), "The Overcoat" soon evolves into a smash-up of the horrifying and fantastic, as poor Akaky Akakievich, "a short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal" clerk who never wants for a thing, suddenly (and with good reason) wants for a new coat, which, after six months of near-joyous privation, he can afford to buy. Which, but of course, Akaky will soon lose.

"The Overcoat," written in the early 19th century, feels entirely post-modern, unconcerned with the traditional rules of storytelling, made eager and purposefully wild by its own tangents. It was the perfect thing to read during a wait-ful, clerky afternoon (though I'm going to hope my complexion never rose to the level of hemorrhoidal; I avoid mirrors; I wouldn't know), and as I read, I thought about how this story came to be in my hands in the first place. How the book itself was a gift from Ivy Goodman, a writer of surprising talents, whom I'd never have met had I not been asked to review her collection of short stories, A Chapter from Her Upbringing, eight years ago. She wrote a letter of thanks; we became enduring friends.

It has happened like that for me, many times. Being sent a book in the mail by, for example, Elizabeth Taylor at the Chicago Tribune, or John Prendergast at The Pennsylvania Gazette, or Kate Moses, formerly of Salon.com, and discovering, all of a sudden, an author who speaks to me so clearly from the page and emerges, one way or the other, as a lasting companion in this book life. Sy Montgomery and her pink dolphins (and tigers and bears and birds). Robb Forman Dew and her gorgeous, period novels. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, whose essays I read long in advance of meeting her, and who is here, every day, in my life.

Books connect us, and not always in foreseeable fashion. So that now, whenever I think of Gogol, I will think of Ivy, and when I think of Ivy, I will think of her own power as a writer and a friend. And I will be grateful for the knots and strings that are yet becoming my life.

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