I can’t sleep.
3. I’ll be fine, school is easy.
4. Yes.
5. Yes.
But all I ended up saying was, ‘I can’t sleep because I’m worried about Cuddles’ – which I guess answers two of her questions at once.
She said, ‘Phin, for the love of God, Cuddles will be fine. He’s safe in his aquarium.’
I said, ‘The being-in-the-aquarium part is the part that worries me. And I think he might be in pain because of it.’
She said, ‘Phin, he’s a frog! A frog! He doesn’t even know where he is.’
I said, ‘How do you know that? How does anyone know that?’
She said, ‘Phin, you have to stop anthropomorphizing. Do you know what that means?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why is that wrong? Why the heck do you think animals don’t have pain and feel scared? They do, you know. The Green Channel has lots of shows about that.’
‘Phin, please – it’s late. Just go back to your bed and try to think nice thoughts.’
I said, ‘I’m all out. And I can’t sleep. I know this is one of those nights that I won’t be able to sleep – not even a little bit.’ Then I had a sudden thought and ran to Fiddledee’s litter box and checked for red poop because I hadn’t checked it for two days. I lifted some of it with the scoop and looked really carefully. It looked mostly black, which was a relief.
My mom said, ‘For the love of God, Phin, get up those stairs to bed.’ I ran up fast in front of her because she didn’t look happy and I thought maybe her brain cells might go all wonky and she might pounce on me or something. But then she sighed and said, ‘Let’s go to bed and get some sleep.’ She let me climb into her bed, which is very big, a king’s bed.
I said, ‘I love you, Mom.’
She said, ‘I love you too, Phin. Now go to sleep.’
I didn’t say anything else after that because I wanted her to not be mad at me and I wanted her to be happy and I thought maybe this was as good as I was going to get tonight. I snuggled close to her and she put her arm around me and kissed the back of my neck.
But do you know what I think? I think that some people can’t stand to think that animals feel a lot like human beings. I think it’s hard enough for people like my mom to write and hear about what’s happening to other human beings around the world – let alone other animals too. Knowing that so many more of the earth’s animals feel sadness and pain is just way too much hurt for their minds to let them see.
My mother woke me up this morning saying, ‘Good morning, sleeping beauty.’ She kissed my cheek and I opened my eyes. She had a pad and a pencil and said, ‘What can I get you this morning, sir?’
I said, ‘How about toast and peanut butter?’ I must have been still sleepy because then I remembered I’d decided not to eat peanut butter. Last night I checked the ingredients on the jar and it contains palm oil. I told my mother to forget the toast and peanut butter because of the palm oil.
She said, ‘But you’re not allergic to palm oil.’
I said, ‘Don’t you even care about the orangutans?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked my mother. I told her that the peanut butter we have is made with palm oil and that palm oil comes from palm-tree plantations that have been built where the orangutans used to live. Now those orangutans are endangered because so much of their habitat has been destroyed.
‘But, Phin,’ she said, ‘we already have the peanut butter and so we’re not going to help the monkeys by not eating it.’
‘They’re not monkeys,’ I said, ‘they’re primates. And it’s the principle of the matter.’
My mother sighed and said, ‘Okay, Phin, if you don’t want peanut butter, what do you want?’ But then she remembered she was pretending to be a waitress and her voice got nice again. She said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, we’re out of orangutan-free peanut butter this morning, is there something else that you might like?’
I said, ‘Mom, the peanut butter doesn’t have orangutans in it – it’s made with palm oil that comes from plantations that are being built on orangutan territory and making them go extinct!’
My mother slammed closed her notepad and said that her sanity was going extinct. She said, ‘I’ll get you some orangutan-free Shreddies. They’ll be on the table waiting for you.’ Then she left the room.
My mother doesn’t understand and I don’t know why. Actually, I think I do know why: I think it’s because she’s too busy. She’s always hurrying around. I’m not too busy so I know there are almost 400 species in the order Primate and one third of them are vulnerable or endangered or critically endangered on the Red List of Threatened Species. All of the orangutans are endangered or critically endangered. In fact, all the individual remaining primates in the twenty-five most-endangered species could fit in one single football field.
I know something else too. I know Cuddles is in trouble. And I know I have to do something about it.
Today at school, I carefully checked Cuddles for any signs of sickness. Frogs can get fungus diseases that make them dry out and lose weight. I’m really worried about him in there but I don’t think he’s losing any weight. In fact, to me he looks like he’s getting heavier, but that might be because he’s sitting on a white sheet today whereas a few days ago he was sitting on a black one.
I learned that trick about black and white from my mother. Once she was trying on pants at the mall and one pair was white and she asked me if she looked bigger or smaller in the white pants. She definitely looked bigger in the white ones, and so I told her that I thought she looked the best in those. My mother always trusts my opinions on fashion because she says I’m only nine and practically incapable of telling white lies.
Later I asked her why it was that she looked bigger in the white pants and she said, ‘What do you mean I look bigger? I thought you said I looked best in the white ones.’
‘You do look best in the white ones.’
‘But do I look bigger in them?’
‘Yes.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘You look better when you look bigger.’
‘Phin,’ she said, ‘women don’t want to look bigger, they want to look thin.’
My mother told me that people in our culture think thinner women look younger and better-looking and that she was trying to buy an outfit to make her look young and pretty.
I told my mother that in the animal kingdom, animals are always trying to look bigger because the bigger they are, the less likely they are to be attacked by predators. For example, the bull-frog blows itself up to look bigger and fiercer, and so does the puffer.
My mother sighed and said, ‘Well, that’s good – at least I won’t be eaten today.’
Mrs.
