My Post Office Box 205 was full today, it was good to get a bigger size, there were letters from all over the country, and I have a new bedtime ritual, I make myself some tea and sit quietly in the living room and read as many as I can. I will pick out several and write about them tomorrow. I keep having this sense of a Lost World, of forgotten people expressing themselves in a personal and comfortable way, taking more than a few seconds to compose and send their messages to me. It is now clear I will not be able to answer all of them, but I am reading all of them and will answer as many as I can.
The first one was from Janis is Sioux City, Iowa, she is in palliative care for ovarian cancer, her handwriting was rough and labored, the lines uneven. “I do not have that long to go,” she said, “I am at peace with death, I have come to terms with it, I am surrounded by family and friends.”
“I wanted to write you, Jon, I have been following your blog for some years, and your life and your books before that and somehow the stories and words have settled me and grounded me and are as sweet a part of the morning as my coffee, which I love. I am on Facebook and sometimes enjoy it, but I am a letter writer, I have not had a dog for many years or a cat, I have just been too busy for either. Your daily journaling is a valuable thing to many of us, perhaps more than you know. You don’t seem to be conscious of it. You and I share the idea that life is a wheel that keeps turning. Mine is turning now.”
She said she was tired, and could not write anymore but she wanted to say “thank you and goodbye, and continue to grow and be happy.” She thanked me for never giving up on love, it was the breathe of life. She said she admires the idea of Red and Simon and she said to say hello to Maria, whose writing and art she loves. Her daughter, she said, hopes to send a sweater and some hankies to Maria, perhaps to make a quilt. Her writing grew less legible, and so she said goodbye.
I thank you Janis, and wish you the sweetest and most peaceful journey to the other side.
I am grateful to my magical post office box for sending me a letter like that, it will surely make me think and feel. Good night from Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.
Note: Please consider buying this book from Battenkill Books, my local bookstore and a great independent store or your local bookstore. You can visit their website or you can e-mail them ([email protected]) or you can call them at 518 677-7136. Buying local is our best hope for individuality and the preservation of creativity.
In The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos And The Age Of Amazon, an important and surprisingly readable, even riveting book (Little Brown, $28), author Brad Stone quotes Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, as saying Amazon did not change the world of publishing, the future changed the world of publishing.
As I read this book – one of those books that will help you understand the world you live in, not the one you used to live in – I kept thinking of how similar Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs are in the ways they worked and their astonishing impact on the world. Both men are in the great American tradition of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, two anti-corporate free thinkers who saw the new world and never wavered in their pursuit of it. Jobs and Bezos are personally different, Jobs was much hipper and more culturally in tune than Bezos, but both slugged their way through incredible setbacks, defied every conventional corporate wisdom, were ruthless and cruel to their colleagues and subordinates and changed the lives of much of the world.
If Jobs redefined culture, Bezos has redefined business as well as publishing. Both men were ferocious advocates for their consumers, they worshipped the notion of customer service. Bezos, like Jobs, does not come through this book as a nice or generous or forgiving man. He ridiculed employees he thought were slow or obtuse, turned suddenly on colleagues and friends, he charged workers for parking their cars in the Amazon lot and rejected the lavish perks that were common in the tech world in places like Apple, Google and Facebook.
Bezos is best known for setting the elitist and arthritic publishing world on it’s ear, he understood that writers and publishers and bookstores did not worry much about readers – who they were, how much money they had, what they wanted. Bezos worried only about readers, and as a result, he brought cheaper books to vast new audiences and pioneered the digital reading device, thus reinventing the very idea of the book. He opened his site to negative reviews, bludgeoned retailers into submitting to his drive for lower prices.
Brad Stone’s book appears balanced and carefully researched, this is no loving tribute, it is unsparing in it’s portrayal of Bezos and his cruel and obsessive nature, along with many colossal mistakes, most of which would have sunk the biggest companies, but which Bezos was always able to battle his way through. Bezos, like Jobs, was ultimately indestructible, he never weakened or wavered. It is mesmerizing to track the way Amazon has grown from an online book store to a store that has a global network of vast distribution centers and is now selling almost everything that can be sold, from custom made knives to videos to fresh food delivered overnight in major urban areas. Besides retailing, Amazon has also become a powerhouse technology company, selling web and computing services to software developers and corporations and computing space to individuals.
Bezos will do anything, Stone reports, to give Amazon’s customers fast and inexpensive service at the lowest prices imaginable, Amazon’s computer bots scour the earth to check prices and make certain Amazon’s are lower and to get products to people quickly. His vast distribution centers – he calls them “fulfillment centers”- are technological marvels on a scale of the Great Pyramids. They are also, as Stone points out, brutal places to work staffed mostly by low-paid and temporary workers with rough quotas of packages per hour to fill. Bezos is not one of those generous employers who likes to give back to his employees.
Staff meetings at Amazon are terrifying experiences at Amazon, Bezos often blows his top in vein-popping outbursts – called “nutters” – ridiculing ideas he doesn’t like as dense or stupid. People who lie to him or disagree or drag their heels vanish quickly. Bezos may care about consumers, but not much about the humans working in his many facilities. Jobs and Bezos were both bullies, and in the corporate world, bullies often win.
Both Jobs and Bezos were determined to use technology to make life as easy as possible for beleaguered people trying to master new technologies. Neither ever stopped fighting for the person on the other end of the system – the buyer. One company after another dreamed of creating digital reading devices, they were all clunky and expensive failures – until Bezos obsessed on the making the Kindle simple and inexpensive. Publishing was never the same after that.
In one chapter, Stone describes the brief battle between editorial writers and software programs competing to see which was more effective at getting people to buy books. The software program won, and that is, in so many ways, the story of Amazon.
Bezos is now a multi-billionnaire, Amazon is now one of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the world. You also get the sense reading this well-balanced and surprisingly gripping book that Amazon is just getting rolling, and that companies like this are just too big – for their sake, for our sake. Amazon’s competitors litter the corporate landscape – undermined, driven out of business, bought or otherwise devoured. You cannot help but admire Bezos for what he has done, you cannot help fearing him for what he has done and might do. In the history of the earth, there have never been companies as ruthless and powerful and just plain big – as Amazon is getting to be. Not even Wal-Mart can stand up to Bezos or figure out how to keep up with him.
I wonder if anyone anywhere really considers the impact on our economy and lifestyle of a commercial entity that sells every single thing cheaper than anyone else can sell it and puts pressure on the very idea of the real-world business with real buildings and people. What kind of world will that be? This is not something Bezos or anybody else seems to think much about.
Stone did a wonderful job with this book, which could have just been another tech or business tome. He never loses track of Bezos, he is the narrative around which the book is drawn. Stone even discovers that Bezos was adopted and he tracks down his biological father, an elderly bicycle repair shop owner in Arizona who has never heard of Bezos. Bezos’s response to learning who his father is a vivid human touch in the book – I won’t give that away here.
I highly recommend The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos And The Age of Amazon to anyone who wants or needs to know how the world we live in really works. It is sometimes disturbing, sometimes inspiring, relentlessly fascinating. The modern corporation is nearly paralyzed by risk-averse lawyers, stockholders and board members, none of whom dare to take expensive risks. That seems to be the province of obsessed outsiders and loners like Jobs and Bezos, they are so fundamentally and uniquely American, both great and awful men at the very same time. Amazon touches just about every person alive in this country, it was fascinating for me to learn how it really works and was put together.
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To order this book from Battenkill Books, go to their website or call 518 677-2515.
It has been wonderful to help heal Minnie and to watch Maria bring her back from a place of pain and disorientation. In the evening, the two of them snuggle on the couch, they both love it, I love to see it, images like this suggest this should be Minnie’s permanent fate, Maria and I have become quite attached to her in the last couple of weeks.
The attack on Minnie and the resulting amputation of her right leg (we think it was a raccoon or possum by the wounds and the fact she is alive) has been challenging, fascinating, difficult. It is a metaphor, of course, it raises questions about life, money, perspective and compassion that go beyond the fate of a single barn cat. I have long ago learned that suffering is a gift, it always leaves lessons and feelings it’s wake, there are always things to learn, ways to grow, it always changes me.
One thing I am learning about is how to use the resources of this community for good, how to ask for advice, how to take it, this has always been a complex issue for me, I am making headway. First off, there is a vast difference between sought advance and unwanted advice. The first is better, wiser and more helpful. The second is most often intrusive and presumptuous. I do not give advice unless asked, and then, I don’t always give it then. Smart people often don’t need advice, fools will not take it.
Then, there is further sorting about advice. Even solicited advice can be patronizing:
– Some people lecture me about what cats are like as if I have not lived with cats and other animals for at least 15 years and beyond and written books about them. People tend to think there is only one solution to complex issues, never two or three. Advice often comes in black and white, yet our world is mostly gray.
– Some people assume that men are not as empathetic as women, and cannot really be trusted to make decisions. This is a kind of inverse and endemic sexism, I see it all the time. Many people say I should trust Maria, they are not sure they can trust me. There are many gender currents in our lives with animals, and surely in the Minnie decisions. Men – fathers – tend to push the creatures in their care to go out and learn to live in the world, women are more cautious about the world and it’s dangers, more patient perhaps and more nurturing. In a sense, both are right. Children and animals must make their way in the world, they cannot be spared all of the dangers of life. It is wonderful if this can happen deliberately and with love and safety.
– The best advice is simply experiential and thoughtful, it comes from experience and common sense, it is not angry or dismissive or presumptive, and I have gotten a lot of good advice about Minnie and it has been helpful to me.
Minnie is precisely in this situation I described above – can she go out into the world or not – and so are Maria and I, yet the gender assumptions should not be taken too far. Maria and I have not disagreed on one single thing regarding Minnie’s care. We both decided instantly against euthanizing here, we were both uncomfortable about the cost, we have both been going back and forth about when and how – or whether – Minnie should be returned to her life as a barn cat. I do not see either of us as being more knowledgeable or instinctive than the other, our perspectives are always heard and respected by one another. We change our minds often, as thinking people do. I respect Maria and her instincts, she respects mine.
Although we are, as always, pretty much on the same page, we differ only in degrees. The great percentage of people giving advice – I did ask for it and I do want it – have urged us not to let Minnie go back outside, they fear for her safety with three legs, they like to think of her as safe and cozy in Maria’s lap, as shown above, they do not care to think of her returned to the life of the barn cat. They cannot imagine that life being anything but cold and hard and dangerous.
I have to part company with that point of view, and so does Maria, although she can speak for herself. Minnie has never been a pet, it is not the life we wish for her, and unlike others, I have no idea what Minnie wants, although it is very clear she is struggling to get outside, she is never quite at ease in our house, it is not, in my view her natural or instinctive life. Humans always project their own notions of comfort and safety onto animals, I believe there would be no greater or more humane life for Minnie than to give her the freedom and natural life of a barn cat, which she is and has been all of her life.
I do not believe in a no-kill life for a barn cat, there are always risks in that life, there always have been and always will be, just as there are in nature, in the real life of real animals. Love is about many things, and the love of animals is not about what makes us feel good, but what is natural and instinctive for them. The two are often quite different. I can’t think of a more loving thing to do for Minnie than to let her return to her life.
The advice did change some of my thinking though, much of it was quite persuasive and helpful, this transition does not have to be sudden or total. Tomorrow, we will let Minnie out in the morning, and although she might go and hide for a bit, she will show herself to us at feeding time and we will bring her in at night, for now, and for the foreseeable future. Perhaps that will be her permanent life, free to roam and hunt and hide in the daylight, free to come in at night. I think a three-legged creature deserves that, if she wants it. I am comfortable with that, so is Maria, we will make that decision and leave some of it to Minnie.
So tomorrow, Minnie begins the first step in her return to life, she will go outside in the morning, come in during the afternoon or at night. I believe this is also the best way for her to learn how to use her three legs, how to learn to jump up and strengthen her remaining leg and muscles. She is not learning much inside, I can see that. When we let them, animals can teach us a lot about ourselves, and Minnie has been a very good teacher for me.
Learning means observing, learning also means listening. On the Internet, there is so much noise and advice it is often difficult to know what to listen to. I am learning how to do it.
We went to the Dollar Store outside of town today, looking for some toys Minnie might play with so she could get some exercise. Maria and I have begun a discussion about when and whether Minnie ought to return outside. The vets would all like her to stay inside for a week or so, they argue that she isn’t agile enough yet to protect herself from predators, she might not be able to climb high or run quickly. Maria agrees. I am not so sure.
It seems to me that stuck inside the house, Minnie isn’t really getting the opportunity to use her muscles, increase her agility, figure out how to live. Her stitches are out, she has to face her life in the barn sooner or later.. As with humans recovering from surgery, the best advice seems to be to get up and get moving as quickly as possible, why wouldn’t this apply to cats?
I am thinking she needs to get outside, get moving, find her hiding spots, exercise her muscles in the new way, find her balance. She is a smart barn cat, she has survived on her own for years, I think she needs to back to her life. Her stitches are out, her wound has healed, I think she will heal quickly outside, inside she is gaining wait and getting slugging.
Our farm is pretty secure, things can always happen, but the barn is close to the house and the donkeys discourage most predator attacks. Nothing can really keep out a nasty tomcat or a raccoon or possum, a barn cat’s life has risks. As you know, I am not seeking advice, I would be interesting in reading your thoughts about Minnie, they can be posted on my Facebook page. I always learn something from these discussions, even if I don’t always do what people tell me.
I think it’s time for Minnie to go outside, at least in the daytime. Maria and I are talking about it. She’d like to wait a day or so, and I will defer to her.
This afternoon we went to the Dollar Store to get Minnie some toys to play with, it was my first time in a dollar store, I was not impressed. The prices were low, the atmosphere dingy and dispiriting. I understand the importance of low prices, but places like this grind down the soul, all of my decisions in life can’t be based on the as absolute lowest prices. We are living in a Wal-Mart world and it is cheap and de-humanizing.
I went out to take a photo of Frieda, the Grand Old Lady of Bedlam Farm, sitting in the sun in front of the doghouse, and I didn’t notice at first that Red was waiting by the pasture gate, hoping to get to sheep, and then popped his head around the corner. Yin and Yan, two dogs on different ends of the doghouse.
