Don’T Use Toothbrush To Mark Boundaries
His meatloaf-shaped body hunches protectively over his pink food dish, his paws planted firmly on either side. He is hissing and hissing, and leaves his mouth menacingly open, post-hiss, for effect.
My fiance is duly impressed. And he suggests that from now on, I be the one to feed 22-pound Angelo, who as far as I know, has never acted like anything but, well, a pussycat.
Of course, I’ve never been a threat to his food. But I’d like to believe my fiance wasn’t either, and did not intend to abscond with Angelo’s less-active formula cat kibble, perhaps to be enjoyed later with a cold bottle of Michelob. But here’s the thing: Angelo’s giant brain perceived a threat to his stuff, his food, his bowl of “let’s eats,” and he was not going to let it pass without comment.
There’s a lesson here, and it’s this: Some sort of primal urge moves both four-legged and two-legged animals to jealously horde and guard our belongings. A similar urge tamed the Old West, or at least Old West TV dramas. My friend and her brother used to watch these westerns on the tube, then swagger over to kids who dared to walk on their lawn: “Get off our poperty,” they’d say, hands boldly on their bony hips, almost getting it right.
Remember the old lady who didn’t like it when your foot accidentally strayed from the sidewalk onto her driveway as you walked to school, and who shouted as much at you as you passed? Same urge, a kind of human marking behavior in the New West.
We used to play at this kind of marking as kids, oblivious, evidently, to the communal-minded lyrics, “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land,” sung at the top of our lungs in elementary school music class.
Once, on a camping trip to Bumping Lake with my friend’s family, we kids staked our territory early on. When another band of children from the campsite next to ours approached, we had our backs up immediately.
“This is our river,” said the youngest in our group, tentatively toeing the waters in the proprietary game.
“Well, this is our campground,” one of their tribe shot back.
There was a pause.
“Yeah, but this is our STATE,” I said, noting their camper’s Oregon plates.
We smugly spread our beach towels out on the giant flat rocks on the Naches River’s bank as the kids slunk away.
It’s the same for grown-ups, and it evolves over time. In college, I experimented with the “what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine, man” style, and failed miserably.
I was fixated, naturally, on the second clause of that equation, the “what’s yours is mine” part, one day when I found myself with nothing to wear. I reached into my roommate’s closet and unearthed an appealing little winter ensemble: red stretch snow pants, a white turtleneck and a thick black and red snowflake sweater. I donned we now our gay apparel and stylishly minced my way across campus to the sociology class my roommate was also taking. As class was about to start, I slid into the seat she’d saved for me. Her body was swiveled around, and she was talking to a girl in the next row back.
“Cuuuute outfit,” the girl said, checking out my borrowed duds. My roommate turned just as the prof signaled the room that class had begun.
“It would have been nice,” she said through gritted teeth, “if you’d let me wear it first.”
Did I mention that I cut the sales tags off before donning the apparel?
We quickly reverted back to ”don’t ask, don’t touch” instead of “help yourself” and regained a peaceable co-existence.
How soon we forget. In an early intimate relationship, there’s room for one more attempt at share and share alike. Until, of course, the ill-fated day you discover wet bristles on your toothbrush.
“You didn’t,” you say, waving it like a wand to ward off the mental images you’re conjuring.
“I did. Couldn’t find mine,” he says, nonchalantly.
You hurl the offending brush into the trash and send your beloved on a journey to the supermarket to buy two new ones.
And you vow, once and for all, to mark your poperty clearly and enforce your boundaries - with a hiss, if necessary.