It all started with eggs all over the place. My dad knew he wanted to be an architect when he was thirteen years old - at least, it seems that way to me. When my dad was thirteen, he painted a picture for art class called, "Eggs All Over the Place." The main feature of the painting is a white house with a wrap-around porch and a stout red chimney rising from the center of the roof. The house, surrounded by a great lawn with people in different positions all over it, sits against a light-blue sky, which is broken up only by the dozens of florescent colored eggs falling from a passing flock of birds. The eggs add an electrifying quirkiness - something along the lines of the frog scene in "Magnolia," albeit less biblical. The dreamy anyworld of the child's mind is unmissable. But the picture is a stand-out even without the eggs. It's the proportional, orderly house that wows, especially considering a thirteen-year-old drew it.
Even in high school I could appreciate the significance of that picture. At sixteen, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to be when I grew up. But when I imagine my thirteen-year-old dad polishing off that last shingle and thinking to himself, this is what I want to do, I imagine him meaning it. After all, he's been a practicing architect now for thirty-five years. Not that I think this makes what he does any better than what anybody else does. I just think it's cool. I think it's cool he knew. And I think it's cool he became.
I am a writer. I love to write. I wouldn't say writing keeps me sane, rather it keeps me necessarily indifferent to what sane is. I wrote my first story that excited me when I was around eleven, too. (It was not called "Eggs All Over the Place," but, man, I'd love to steal that title.) I can't say it was that moment that made me want to be a writer, though. It was more something that built slowly with encouragement over time. All I knew at the time was that I'd written some words that felt like they came partly from me and partly from some much more thrilling otherme. It helped that when my teacher handed it back, it had the word "daring" written on it - a word I can undaringly say has not often applied to me. I wanted to do it again. Not necessarily forever. Just again. Now I want to do it forever.
The only thing I can say I've known with absolute certainty since I was eleven is that I love animals. I don't mean in an I-always-bought-kitten-Trapper-Keepers way (though who would blame me if I did?), but in a way that made me absolutely sure no understood animals like I did; in a way that could keep me up at night just knowing they were in the house (or in the deepest hole in the ocean); in a way that made me first-love dizzy, and still does. Writing is surely my delight - my daring, my freedom. But animals are my architecture. I know I can't "be" animals when I grow up. If I could, I probably would. But I can be near them. I can be for them. Which is exactly what I hope to offer here - ways we can all be for animals.
As a recently converted vegetarian, as well as the owner of two cats and two dogs, I'm paying extra careful attention to the animal world these days. This blog is my way of sharing what I know and what I'm learning every day - from favorite animal-friendly sites to facts, tips, tricks, hints and products. The way I see it is simple: if I can give animals the same love and respect they've given me (and better yet, if I can help others do the same), then I'll be exactly whom I'm supposed to be when I grow up.
I wish I'd started this blog-I-said-I'd-never-have a long time ago. But I'm here now. Let's here it for eleven-year-old dreams. And, of course, eggs all over the place.
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