I Do Believe in Kangaroos in New Hampshire

I can't stand cynicism.

While I have had moments of being bitter and cynical myself, I still can't stand it.  There is so much in the world that is noble and fine, interesting and thought-provoking, funny and even a little bit magical.

I got thinking about this today on the way home from picking Belle up.

As usual, she was gabbing away a mile a minute (and nope, I have no idea where she gets that from :-p).  She plowed through what she did at school today (drew an illustration for the children's book adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera that she read in music class), her proposed attire for tomorrow (it's red white and blue day ... she wants to wear a sundress ... sigh), and why the tortilla chips at her afterschool program are superior to the ones we have at home before she got down to the real business at hand.

Halloween, of course.

She's going trick or treating with her friend on the next street over.  Addie and her best friend are taking the little girls door to door as a sort of farewell to another childhood ritual, and Belle started telling me how relieved she is that "the big girls" are coming since they have to walk on a path where there might be wild animals.

Okay, I wasn't paying 100% attention until she got to the wild animals.

ME: Wild animals?  What sort of wild animals?
BELLE: You know, tigers, bears, lions.
ME: Oh my.
BELLE: You're so funny, Mommy.
ME: There aren't any lions or tigers here.
BELLE: There could be bears, though.
ME: True, I guess there could be.
BELLE: Probably not, though.
ME: Nope, probably not.
BELLE: Maybe gorillas.  Or toucans.  Or flying monkeys.
ME: You never know.
BELLE: Kangaroos? Wild turkeys? Boa constrictors?
ME: I love your vivid imagination, sweetheart.
BELLE: There really might be bears, though.
ME: Yes, baby, I know.

Believe it or not, the word that most resonated with me from this entire exchange was "kangaroo".

Yes, I'll explain myself ...

Last fall, I was driving Addie to school one morning when an animal jumped out in front of my car.  Addie and I separately thought it was a kangaroo, although neither one of us was willing to state it aloud for a couple of minutes.  It jumped on large legs, the size was right, and ... well, it just looked like a kangaroo.

I never really publicized my, "I saw a kangaroo on a highway in New Hampshire" experience because, really, who would believe it?  It seemed like an interesting little event to break up the monotony on that long-ago day, not something I would ever really talk about and certainly not an encounter that would impact my thought process a year later.

But when I heard "kangaroo" this afternoon, I remembered that day.  I remembered how hard Addie and I laughed over the absurdity of the situation.

And I remembered that damn kangaroo.

Here's the thing--I would not have said a year ago that I saw a kangaroo.  I might have said, "I think I might have seen a kangaroo, but ... it MUST have been something else.  I mean, a kangaroo in New Hampshire?  No way!", but I wouldn't have gone any further than that.

I would have doubted what I saw, tried to force my mind to bend into logical and rational ways that it doesn't naturally go in, and in general convinced myself that it must have been a rabbit, a dog, something other than a kangaroo.

Today, I am stating with certainty that I saw a kangaroo hopping across Route 101 a year ago.  I don't know how it got there.  I don't know why it decided to jump into my life for a matter of seconds.  I don't know where it ended up.

I do know, however, that the mindset allowing me to believe--and believe fully, at that--in the possibility of the impossible is a magical thing, a freeing feeling, a general impression that keeping your eyes and heart and mind ever open for the remarkable will be the only thing that allows the remarkable to come to you.

When something bizarre and, on the surface, utterly ridiculous comes up, consider giving yourself a moment of contemplation ...

You might be surprised what an existential experience it can be (even a year after the fact).

I'm Sorry, Kermit!

When I was seventeen, I hit a chipmunk on my way to work. It was the first time I'd ever killed anything in my life (I'm one of those people that catches a spider or bumblebee then releases them outside--the only exception is mosquitos), and I was distraught. I was such a mess, in fact, that I actually got sent home from work because I couldn't stop crying.

I've had other roadkill incidents since then, and while I always feel badly about it, I no longer go into hysterics. I mean, sometimes those squirrels just run right out in front of you. I always try to dodge them if possible, but sometimes there's just nothing you can do.

Something happened one night last week that reminded me of my utter devastation over the first chipmunk I hit, and it got me pondering the proverbial food chain and the equity (or inequity, I guess you'd say) of the animals, big and small, that are killed incidentally by human beings.

I live very close to the ocean, and there is a lot of marshland surrounding the roads near my house. Sometimes at night, you can hear the frogs singing, a beautiful choir that's obviously not planned but somehow sounds intentional anyway.

One night last week, I was coming home from dinner in Massachusetts with a friend. It was pretty late--bordering on midnight--and it had been raining all day and most of the night. All of a sudden, with no warning at all, the boggy road I was on was covered with frogs. Covered.

I felt a twinge of the girl I was at seventeen rise up inside as I realized that I was driving over frogs. Like, multitudes of frogs. We're talking froggie family reunion here.

I considered reversing up the road, changing direction, getting back on the highway, and going home in a way that would have allowed me to circumvent the avenue of amphibians. If I'd been seventeen, I would without question have done it. There were two things that stopped me:

1) I could see in my rear view mirror that the frogs that had escaped certain death under the deadly wheels of my car were hopping over their dead and injured brethren, bound for the relative safety of the moonlit marshes on either side of the road. They had avoided the wheel of fortune's death knell once, and it seemed cruel on a whole bunch of levels to reverse over them--I don't know much, but I do know that fate only goes your way so many times, and they'd already been scared and shaken.

2) It was very late, I was exhausted, and I wanted to be home as quickly as possible.

And so I plowed ahead, flattening countless frogs in the process because they were so prolific that attempting to dodge them was futile. For nearly a mile, though, I weaved my little sedan slowly around the larger gathering spots, avoiding sitting water because they really seemed to conglomerate in and around puddles on the road.

And I cried, not with the sharp and sudden agony of knowing that I'd killed a little chipmunk dashing across the street but with a longer, stronger awareness that the road was basically paved with frogs, that I did not want to hurt them and wished that they would hop off to froggie endeavors that would have kept them off the road, and that, ultimately, there was absolutely nothing I could do to change my undesired mass murder of dozens, maybe hundreds of frogs.

It occurred to me as I drove, trying to ignore the fact that the normally smooth road was characterized by scores of small but frequent bumps, that there were many metaphors to be drawn here ... and that none of them were happy.