The new Curiosity Center at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where Rich and I visted old friends including Happy, the 70-foot Haplocanthosaurus delfsi dinosaur, and Balto, once America‘s most famous dog.
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed. “What’s happened to Balto?”
I was staring, slackjawed, at the sled dog that had earned worldwide acclaim in the winter of 1925 for carrying urgently needed serum to Nome, Alaska, saving countless lives during a diphtheria outbreak. Was this really the same animal?
I first met Balto in the 1980s, when I was a newlywed who’d just moved to Cleveland, and he was a dull-coated Siberian husky corpse standing stiffly in a plain glass box in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
How did he get from Alaska to Cleveland, you ask? I was curious about that, too.
It turns out that after delivering the serum to Nome, Balto and his team were paraded across America’s vaudeville stages as symbols of courage and endurance. But like so many celebrities, they soon discovered how fleeting fame can be. Within a year they were sold to a traveling circus, then sold on again to a squalid LA museum. A visiting Clevelander, appalled at the mistreatment of the noble animals, appealed to his neighbors and within two weeks raised the $1500 needed to buy the team.
In 1927 Cleveland gave a heroes’ welcome to Balto, Fox, Billy, Tillie, Sye, Old Moctoc, and Alaska Slim, who lived out their days being pampered by the staff at the Cleveland Zoo. In 1933, when Balto crossed the snow-covered rainbow bridge at age 14, his remains were stuffed and put on display in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Every schoolchild in the area is taken to see him and hear his tale of glory. When I visited the city this week I couldn’t resist dropping in to see my old friend.
I barely recognized him. As part of the museum’s recent renovation, once-scruffy Balto now poses proudly, eyes bright, coat so glossy I longed to run my hand along the satiny fur. “Nice makeover, kid!” I told him.
Lots of Cleveland landmarks are getting glamorous makeovers these days, and Rich and I drove around to see an impressive number of them, from the new downtown riverfront boathouse to trendy apartments in repurposed warehouses to meticulously restored West Side cottages dating back to Balto’s puppyhood.
Of course, the city hasn’t completely lost its gritty side, as I discovered parking in this underground garage at a downtown bank. I hadn’t seen this level of grunge since I watched Escape from New York.
Rich and I were in Cleveland visiting friends who once lived around the corner from us. We continue to gather on a regular basis to celebrate joys, swap life stories, and comfort one another during our sorrows. Rich refuses to call them former neighbors, because we feel as close to them now as when we lived minutes apart.
It felt great seeing them, and to be traveling again. “It’s amazing,” Rich always remarks when we set out on such journeys, “how the minute you walk out the door, you feel that sense of freedom. Ordinary concerns just drop away.”
So true! It goes beyond the simple pleasure of not having to worry about groceries, laundry, and the endless stream of maddening home repairs that have cropped up this summer at our house. On the road, the world feels different: wider, fresher, more surprising. More filled with adventures and discoveries.
Of course, not all the discoveries are welcome ones. All too often the years have not been kind: beloved pubs have closed, farms have been converted into strip malls, and old pals have moved away, passed away, or found themselves wrestling with troubling physical, mental, and/or spiritual challenges. As Kurt Vonnegut repeated a Zen-like 106 times in Slaughterhouse-Five, “So it goes.”
It’s never easy to accept the down side of life. Joseph Cambell urged us to embrace the idea of “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” How? I’m still working on it.
The poet David Whyte wrote about the Asian tradition of placing fierce, seemingly demonic guardians at the thresholds of temples; he explained they’re intended to make sure we step through into the sacred space with our whole being, not just the safe, shiny, respectable side of ourselves we prefer to show the world.
Nowadays I take these writers’ words as a bracing warning to be ready for anything — and as a comforting reminder that we really can do hard things and transform our lives in unexpected ways.
From Cleveland, Rich and I headed east to New Jersey and Connecticut where we visited three generations of his relatives, the oldest now in their 90s. These are hardy, enduring folk. The prize for longest-lived relative in anyone’s memory goes to his Aunt Mary in Texas. I met her in 2008 when she was still bright-eyed and vibrant at 102 years young. She regaled me with stories of her youth in New York City back when transportation mainly involved horses. I asked what she attributed her longevity to, and she held up a glass of Irish whiskey. “I drink one of these every day.”
“Rich, we have some catching up to do!” I said.
Somehow we’ve never managed to incorporate daily whiskey into our lifestyle, but we regularly take in an intoxicating amount of lively stories. Making the rounds this week, lingering on pillow-strewn couches in family rooms and the wicker seats of sun porches, we spent many hours laughing over old photos and oft-told tales from bygone days.
Someone always brings up Jane’s poor grades when she was eight. This was in the era when paper report cards were sent home to be signed by parents as proof they’d been reviewed, and Jane didn’t want to get into trouble, so she forged a signature. Unfortunately, she wrote “Mother,” tipping off the teacher, who phoned her parents, sparking an enormous uproar.
Then there was the time fourteen-year-old Rich, who was living with his older sister Catherine, dug in his heels and absolutely refused to cancel a hot date just because he’d come down with German measles. Luckily for everyone he lost that fight.
Rich and Charlie always talk about going to Ireland in the 1960s with their dad, who turned out to be an epic snorer. “In the middle of the night, we were both sitting up on the side of our beds,” one begins, and the other finishes, “And I said, ‘Do you want to kill him or shall I?’ After that, we got him a separate room.”
This year I heard a new one about the family dog, a Dachshund mix called Jet, who once ate an entire bag of tacks. Incredibly, the dog suffered no ill effects, but it was an alarming time for everyone else in the family.
These are the stories that bind us together. Often they’re not particularly remarkable or Instagram-worthy. They won’t make worldwide headlines, go viral on social media, or save lives in Nome. But year after year, generation after generation, they get passed on, giving youngsters a richer context for understanding their heritage, and reminding oldsters that it’s fun to be alive.
Curious to know more about Balto?
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