Tag Archives: Isak Dinesen

Happy Place

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“Think of a place that’s really perfect.

Your own happy place.

Go there, and all your anger will just disappear.

Then putt.”        Happy Gilmore, 1996

I don’t know if I have ever heard my radiation therapists say this to a patient, anxious on the treatment table, “Go to your happy place.”  I think I may have imagined that they say this, because I remember thinking it might help, and also remember thinking to myself, at various times in the past, “I don’t have a happy place.”  And I didn’t, until a year ago when I finally took the trip to Africa that I had wanted to take my whole life.

I was a child obsessed with animals—all animals, but especially elephants and lions. I learned in school that elephants were like us–they lived long, they loved, and they mourned their dead.  By the time I was ten I had seen the movie HATARI! (Swahili for “DANGER!”) five times, and the only song I ever learned on the piano that I can still play, besides the ubiquitous Fur Elise stamped in the far recesses of my brain, is the Baby Elephant Walk. Born Free came a few years later, and I wept with joy over the story of Elsa. By the time I got to college, I had read Beryl Markham’s biography, West With The Wind, George Schaller’s The Serengeti Lion and after that came Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, and all of Hemingway.  In 1984 I was swept off my feet by the Robert Redford/Meryl Streep movie version of Dinesen’s book, and in 1993, imagining myself to be a latter day Beryl Markham, I gave myself a flying lesson for my fortieth birthday.  Unfortunately I chose to do this in gusty winds in Aspen Colorado in the middle of the winter—needless to say it was my first and last attempt at becoming an aviatrix.

We all have our romantic notions of where and who and what we want to be when we grow up, but life gets in the way.  In my case, “life” was three kids and a highly specialized career which did not lend itself to the African bush. But just over a year ago, fortune smiled on me and the constellation of circumstances necessary to make a trip to Tanzania suddenly came together—the time off work, the housesitter (my daughter) for my dogs, cat and horses, and the delusion that I could sell my Corvette, purchased by me for my own fiftieth birthday nine years prior, in the middle of a recession to make the trip affordable.  Armed with binoculars, a new camera, sun proof clothing, DEET 30% and malaria pills, off we went.

I think that it is a rare thing in life when one’s expectations are not only met, but exceeded.  This was my experience in Tanzania, from New Year’s Eve spent looking out over the Great Rift Valley, to seeing the famous “tree lions” in Lake Manyara National Park, to the early morning game drives as the sun rose over the Serengeti plain, to the old bull elephant, long tusks still intact and unharmed for over sixty years, lumbering across the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater.  We had a full moon rising over Mt. Kilimanjaro on our last night in Arusha, temporarily blotting out the light from the Southern Cross.  The air was clear and smelled of hibiscus and I knew, unequivocally, that this was my happy place.

I am pretty certain that with my family history, one day I will find myself lying on the treatment table awaiting my radiation, nervous despite my years of experience on the giving and not the receiving end of this specialty.  If my therapist smiles and says, “Relax, go to your happy place—this will be over in just a few minutes”, I will know exactly where to spend the next 15 minutes, among the zebra and the wildebeest kneeling beside the crater lake, the song of a thousand flamingos softly taking wing ringing in my ear. And if that fails me, there is still a shiny red Corvette to drive home.  Happy places, indeed.

My Funny Valentine

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I was watching Saturday Night Live tonight and Paul McCartney was singing.  For several years I have had to suppress a cringe when he comes on stage and sings live—there is something a little bit unseemly about a 70 year old man who’s had a face lift or two singing “Hey Jude.”  But there he was, singing “My Valentine”, a song most undoubtedly to his lost love Linda.  It goes “What if it rained?  We didn’t care.  She said that someday soon, the sun was gonna shine, and she was right, This love of mine, My Valentine.”  This song is beautiful.  It took me right back thirty years.

In 1980, I read Out of Africa, by Karen Blixen, who used the pen name Isak Dinesen.  The opening line was “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”  For me, it was the equivalent of “You had me at hello!” I was transported.  Karen Blixen, known affectionately as “Tania”, was a Danish woman who moved to Africa in 1913, married her second cousin Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and started a coffee farm in the British colony of Kenya.  In her book, Dinesen details a story in which her deerhound Dusk plays a major role.  Coming home one night, Dusk stops his mistress with furious barking at a tree.  Thinking that there is a leopard lying in wait, Dinesen takes aim with her rifle. Just as she is about to kill the animal in the tree, she realizes with a start that it is her own house cat.  The cat is safely retrieved, but every evening walk after that is punctuated by Dusk stopping at the same tree, barking and then looking back at Dinesen while baring his teeth in what can only be described as a big deerhound grin. Dinesen commented that if ever there was a dog with a keen sense of humor, it was this deerhound.  I was enchanted.

Over thirty years later, I am still besotted by deerhound humor.  The females are the funniest—they are sly; they are bad girls, and they love to make fun of human beings.  Valentine, aka Ch. Gayleward’s Valentine, was one of the best.  Her particular joke was to lie on her bed, beseeching us, or our guests, to pet her.  Ear rubs were the greatest—she would moan and groan in the most embarrassing and yet self-reinforcing way.  But woe to the person who would pet her, and then stop.  Val’s head would pop up and she would give a hearty deep throated and very frightening bark, while “smiling”, with teeth bared and lips curled back.  To the uninitiated, it was terrifying.  The late, great Vicki Hearne wrote an essay about a deerhound called “A Distinct Impression of Diamonds.”  With Valentine, it was more of a distinct impression of a whoopee cushion.

Valentine passed away peacefully at nearly twelve years old in 2006.  Our current comedienne is Queen, otherwise known as Grand Champion Jaraluv Queen, or sometimes QueeQuee or Quigley.  Quee has  a peculiar way of showing her affection—she pokes her head between your legs, then comes out the other side.  I will never forget the first time I handed her off to a professional handler at a dog show.  She performed like the trooper that she is.  When the handler brought her back to me, Queen surprised us both.  Slipping her lead entirely, she dove between my legs, wheeled around and approached with another nose dive from behind. And then back again, from the front.  And again from the back, then coming up for air and placing her nose across from mine, she laughed and  clearly stated, “Am I not the funniest girl ever?”  We call this “going through.”  She now does it on command.

One day I will go to Kenya.   I will visit Karen, Dinesen’s house which has been preserved for posterity.  And I will thank Tania, forever young and hopeful and beautiful, for the inspiration which led to our own funny Valentine.