A World So Full of Love (with Grace Goble)
For TOO long this piece was titled "Heavy Petting." I had to change it. Sorry Grace. Happy Birthday.
I would first like to go on the record by saying that Grace Goble is the epitome of control. I know this because I have seen her out of control once, maybe twice, while in contrast I am about as temperate as a cyclone (but twice as fun!).
Grace Goble has, to borrow the words of Michelle Zauner, “tempered and tolerated the many bouts of both megalomania and utter despair” I have endured in the last four-ish years. She’s seen me pre Sports-Bar Club-Night Shift and post No AC Time Square Italian restaurant shift. She’s patted my head as I poked it out into the pre-show crowd as I suppressed the biggest of sobs before the first proper run of my college thesis. She’s let me lay prone in her room after every one of my break ups (covid one notwithstanding). And she has effortlessly shrugged off all of my (faux) benders.
She once went crazy over a miniature ceramic gnome we bought at a roadside crystal shop in Maine. For a full fifteen minutes she had this wild look in her eyes and spoke in terms of “we”--the “we” here being her and the gnome. All things considered, it was a pretty tame character departure.
It is an absolute wonder how we arrived here, to the status of best besties. Especially since Grace’s first memory of me is this gem from our college matriculation: someone leaned over to her, pointed me out, and said “she talks exactly the way I imagined.” To which Grace replied, “I don’t know who you are talking about.”
Which is more than fair for the first day of school.
These days we plan our mutual world domination and combined EGOT status. We make the other read any and everything we write. And I force her to come out to California once every business quarter.
During this visit I take Grace to do all the touristy things: shopping in Ameoba Records, riding the ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, picnicking in the flower fields, etc. And all the not so touristy things: taking pictures with Paul Mescal at a Samia concert, seeing a psychic in Malibu, and tracking down a kitten.
So it’s not incredibly surprising when Grace says,
Grace: I’ll talk about cats
Well, I guess this is maybe about animals in general… I just love them
And a look returned to her eyes that reminded me of Maine.
Today was a rare occasion where we both lost control–at the same time. It’s an absolute rarity but something must have been in the air. Beginning the day at a local cat cafe had spiraled out into driving to four shelters and phoning three more from my parked car. We had always planned on picking up a kitten that day, we just didn’t know that everyone else in Los Angeles had planned the same.
Four shelters and three phone calls and no collected kitten brought a fever over us. We sat there fuming and googling frantically.
“I’m going to call one more place and they will have a cat”
“They will and she will be perfect”
I dialed. They answered. One cat.
We find ourselves suddenly in a brand new shelter parking lot. And a couple is getting out of their car and approaching the door.
The rest is an absolute blur. I won’t confirm or deny whether Grace and I sprinted past the couple. Or if there was a lot of seething tension in the kitten viewing area. What’s important is we were together and slightly crazed and nothing was going to stop us.
Which brings us to the moment of this interview. We’re sprawled onto my couch completely exhausted. And beneath us is a perfect six-month old kitten, hiding. In 48 hours I’ll fret and worry over the kitten’s lack of interest in food, or water, or coming out from beneath the couch in general, and Grace will coax both of us out of our panic. She’ll find new and better ways to tell me things about myself I should already know (good pet mom, nice girl, etc) and sit in the bathroom cooing curiosity out of a frightened creature. But just this minute we are victorious, and discussing how lovely it is to have a pet.
McKayla: When did you first realize you loved animals?
Grace: Oh... all the time. I don’t think I ever like, didn’t.
Grace got her first dog when she was three. He was her best friend and let her rest her tiny toddler head on his miniature schnauzer body. Before him she remembers loving other people's animals and thinking how strange it was that her aunts and uncles and cousins didn’t have their own.
She’d spend summers catching frogs with a bucket from a little stream near her grandparents’ house. It would take ages for her to catch them, always nervous that she would hurt them in her pursuit, and then she would walk them a mile back to the front porch where inevitably she would be told to return them.
At her “weirdest ages,” (which she defines as six to ten or six to twelve or six to now) she’d spend the months leading up to Christmas begging for a pet. One year a chinchilla, the next a mouse, the next a hamster, and so on. Her yearly wishes only sort of came true in the form of a corresponding stuffed-version of the creature.
These days she sends me pictures of little lizards–she loves them so much she forgets they are the one thing I’m afraid of–and gets tattoos of bugs and ducks and other critters. And she is still very conscious of being gentle.
Grace: I love that they’re just like doing what they want. Looking out for themselves. But then they bring people so much joy and like so much love into people’s lives kinda without–like I don’t think they’re thinking about like, “Oh, I’m gonna make my owner happy by being cute” or…
They don’t think like “I’m gonna do this thing because that’s what a good cat does or a good dog does”
McKayla: No, they just are–and that’s enough
Grace: For people things always get sort of clouded. I don’t know if it’s like memory span or what but everything gets clouded and mixed up together. But generally animals take things as they are and as they come.
So much of Grace’s love of animals resembles all the things we’re supposed to learn in our BFA theater curriculum (laugh! ha!).They live moment to moment, by and for their impulses, they’re aware of everything and tied down by nothing.
And yet they are loved purely because they live parallel to us. They love, in return, with no restraint.
Animals, however domesticated they are, remind us (human people) of freedom. But the freedom associated with pets is specific. Here there is a gentle freedom. It’s freedom derived from companionship, and centered on cohabitation. The cat would perhaps be more free hunting birds in the undergrowth, the dog might be more free dashing through a thicket for rabbits, but the cost of that freedom would be immense. That freedom would consist of survival, of decimated bird populations, and of un-pet pups.
Instead, by virtue of being domesticated (which is a centuries long project and no one really knows how it happened so I’m not going to attempt to divulge the “how” of it all), cats get to sleep their days away. Dogs get to jump on couches. And birds get to…umm…do whatever it is bird people do with their birds. And the world seems to be much happier for it.
Pets teach us there is a freedom to being kept and kept well.
Part of the reason Grace and I were so dedicated to the cause of procuring myself a cat was because I needed one. I’m not alone in California by any means at all, but my family and bulk of my friends are out east. And however selfish it might feel to type out: I needed something to really truly love me.1
A huge post-grad side effect is loneliness. Four years of structure, rigidity, and embedded social time completely disappears. You’re left with your move out boxes, and your slips of paper (diplomas), and this immense feeling that you don’t know what you’re doing. And four years of passing people in halls and nodding knowingly–because you really did know how and where they were in their life–turns into guessing through social media. Four years on one big ocean liner cruise turns into everyone climbing into their individual life raft and floating off into that vast openness called life.
It’s isolating and you start to wonder if everyone hates you and if they always hated you and you’re not really sure why or how that thought begins. And it’s not a thought that can be willed away by carrying buckets of frogs to and from a stream (though wouldn’t that be something).
Since 2018 there have been several studies conducted to hold our lonesome little hands and say: actually, more people like you than you think. Which is a thought I prefer to the popular alternative: no one is even thinking about you. Because they are and they think on you fondly and I know this because I’m sitting in a cafe thinking about how much I adore my cat and Grace Goble. And there must be millions of others with someone they adore on their mind.
My cat certainly doesn’t think about whether or not I like her, or if my company likes her, or if the neighbors cat next door likes her. But I do and they do and we’ll see about that last one. She sits and she knows she is loved as if her life and well-being didn’t depend on it. And on the whole her life depends on being loved far more than mine does.
She does not sit and wonder if I have more friends than her (I do) or if people are talking about her behind her back (they are). She doesn’t even know that the state of the world is morphing into a hyper-individualistic dystopia–because her world is not. Her world is connected and interdependent and proof that we still know how to operate in the spirit of communion.
Her world is of a long tradition of loyalty and friendship, trust and love, new and tired cliches. Her world is of ancient Roman grave markers etched with sentiments like, “To Helena, foster child, soul without comparison and deserving of praise." Her world is of Mary Oliver’s “his four paws in the air…/Tell me you love me, he says./ Tell me again./ Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask it./ I get to tell.” Of Charles Bukowski’s “all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns.”
Her world is that of being loved for the rest of her life. And my world is loving her. And Grace loving her too–of course.
Grace’s parting words on the wonders of pets is as follows:
Grace: Just like if you got an animal you’re so lucky. So never forget that even if they poop on your bed.
Yours adoringly,
McKayla
But like in a chill way. Ya know?
I love you both <3 :’)
I love McKayla and animals <3