Something unexpected in a usual place

more thoughts on raccoons and boundary-crossing

My grandmother Tsilya was firmly convinced that all animals were dirty and dangerous. To prove her point, she invariably brought up What Happened to Your Uncle Boris When He Was a Baby. What happened was that my grandmother left baby Boris in his bassinet for half a minute to get something from another room and when she returned, he was red-faced and struggling to breathe.

“I left a healthy child, sound asleep, and came back to this—” she would say, and gesture broadly to indicate the catastrophic, bewildering magnitude of “this.” The mystery was solved when she pulled back baby Boris’ blanket and discovered a big black cat curled up on his chest. Somehow, the cat had managed to sneak in through an open window, slither under the baby blanket, and remain entirely invisible until the moment of dramatic discovery.

Whenever she told this story, her sister-in-law, my great-aunt Klara, would say, “Tsilya, you are not a friend of animals,” and my grandmother would look at her like I know what…