Eighty

Lobsters grow all their lives, but their shells are hard so they have to do something called ecdysis, or, in more common language, shedding, quite frequently in the first two years, and then every year or so after that.  This is a very intricate and difficult procedure, involving hours or their lives, the shrinking of appendages by the loss of blood to them, then sucking in water to expand the shell so that it splits in the right place, then lying on its side to allow the shell to become loose, and then slowly peeling out of it.  At this point they apparently look like a toy black rubber lobster. For a while they can't do anything, can't support their weight.  All this is done in the privacy and safety of their burrows.

This is also the time when lobsters mate.  They have the most fascinating social lives, these little creatures that people boil alive.  The female chooses her mate and goes to his den where she releases pheromones.  He comes out to see what is going on, and if she puts her claws on his head he knows she is ready for him.  Then they go into his den.  Over the next several days they are naked and weak together, and mating takes place.  Swimmerets are involved, which is just about the most wonderful word associated with sex.  It actually means swimming legs.  The female incubates the eggs for about 9 to 11 months, which is a very long time for a little thing like that.  What do they talk about in the burrow for all those days?  How does it feel, I wonder?  

And sometimes the world is right there, you are as naked as a lobster during ecdysis. All your feelings sitting on your skin.  And for that brief time that you are soft and vulnerable, there is understanding, compassion for the child with the big eyes who can't sit still, who is incapable of concentrating for longer than 5 minutes, but who is making the most beautiful wire sculpture in your class.  And the child who is so homophobic, who irritated you so much with his"gay" jokes, you suddenly recognise where he is coming from, he is eleven years old, for goodness' sake.

I remember the moment when I realised that not everyone feels the same way, to the same depth.  It is a whole ocean, the world of feelings, and some float on top, others tread water, and still others go so deep that they sometimes almost drown from the weight of their sensibilities.

There was a magazine that I absently picked up in my brother's room when I was about ten or eleven, and while reading it I came across an article on how pâté de foie gras is made.  I read it with incredulity and a growing horror.  It is the most awful process, involving force-feeding of geese and ducks, called "gavage", invented by the french, and still takes place, and still fills me with the same terror I felt that day when I had to get out into air, and climbed out of my window on to the roof, my sanctuary, which is where my brother found me hours later, cold and sick to my soul, having lost my faith in humans in one fell swoop.  He tried to explain it all to me, how the world works, about cruelty, man's inhumanity, but it was so unbelievable, so terrible, and I was suddenly no longer a child. 

My brother and sister were the interpreters of many appalling words and incomprehensible events for me.   

And so I go through life with these times of nakedness, where I stand behind a resigned old man with sagging cheeks in the queue at the grocery store and weep to see his basket with enough food for one, but a bright wedding ring on the ring finger of his wrinkled crooked hand.
 Where I ache for the doomed spring leaves in the future of the cold trees as the winter moths lay their endless inevitable eggs.
Where tears spring to my eyes for a perfect dead skunk on the side of the road.
Where I cannot understand the terrible cruelty of every day.
Where I want to hug the little fat kid nobody wants to sit with, and so I make people sit with her.
Where I feel a magical connection with my children, so real I can almost see it shining.
Where I wish I could bring people who are dead back to life.
Where I check my garden bed for crocuses every day.
Where I am arrested by the presence of beauty, geese honking as they fly in their exquisite chevron lines from here to there.
Where my shell, even when it grows back, is never impermeable.