LESSON #4: Sometimes What You BELIEVE to be Impossible is Simply Just Undiscovered

Shekinah with Midnight the black swan

It was clear when my sister Shekinah was born that five children was the maximum allowance for our family. Aside from any financial, emotional or physical strain an extra child might cause, two adults and five growing children were all that could fit in the Aucoin family Tarago. And we were not going to be one of those freakishly large families who travelled in a bus, or worse, in convoy. No siree. It was classier to just stop having children.

 

Growing up the eldest, I had heard stories of families who spoil the youngest. I made sure that wasn’t going to be the way our family worked. Instead, being the youngest Aucoin child was an experience akin to boot-camp… but not the fun exercisy type that’s trendy nowadays. It was more like a hard-core military training ground for becoming an effective older brother/sister. Not only were you expected to obey every command of those above you, but you were also blamed for any of their transgressions. It was a perfect system if you had younger, trusting siblings. I never imagined it was possible to be the youngest forever – none of us did. Even Ryan, the youngest for 6 whole years, had moved up the ranks to Lieutenant Commander, residing over his new Cadet sister. But that was all before my dad bought the Tarago.

When the permanency of her baby status became evident, begging my parents for a patsy dog became Shekinah's sole focus... after all, it seemed reasonable to believe that having something living to boss around would certainly elevate her to sibling equality. Unfortunately for her, it wasn't exactly an original game plan. In fact, each of my brothers had the exact same idea when they were family baby (my parents’ must have wondered if wanting a puppy was imprinted in our DNA, it was that common a tactic for their youngest child). It was a strategy that failed time and time again... not becuase my parents were completely anti-animal, just... well, "non-committal". Smart enough to realize that buying a puppy for a toddler is a serious commitment for the parent, they consistently steered us towards low-maintenance pets. You know, the kind that don’t need daily walks and cost almost nothing to feed… like goldfish, rabbits, budgies and hamsters.

We all took turns over the years trying to talk my parents into buying a dog… but they seemed immune to the power of our begging. After a near mutiny during a trip to the pet store to choose a hamster when I was six, all talk about dogs and puppies were strictly forbidden... 

... until my father decided to upgrade our home security by purchasing a security guard dog aptly named ‘Lucifer’. Suddenly, our dog prohibition was lifted.

Since “pet” is a term usually reserved for something you could at least touch, Lucifer was never regarded as our pet. After all, there are mercenaries more approachable than this dog. No - this was a muscular working dog with a loud, wet bark and a slick black coat who's daily demands included a 5 mile run and 2 pounds of a-grade steak. Though my father warned us right off the bat that Lucifer’s wasn’t “the cuddly type” of dog, I don’t think he ever imagined for a second that Lucifer’s lack of people skills would bleed into a severe intolerance for children. All children. With a name like that, why would you? Lucifer lasted less than a week before my father demanded a refund. And just as like that, our prohibition was reinstated. 

Lucifer came and went over 5 years BEFORE Shekinah's birth. So it's no surprise that, by the time Shekinah asked for a puppy, my parents’ resolve was long set. No dogs. In fact, no pet of any kind. Instead, she was given a stuffed animal and was told to make it look lively.

But Shekinah was determined. With her standards set far lower than my parents had imagined, she took to the garden to look for a pet: lizards, butterflies, moths, stick insects, bees… anything bigger than an ant and cuter than a cockroach was deemed a plausible pet in her mind. Desperate to become a self-made pet owner, I once watched my sister try to trap a bee with her bare hands. As she quietly tiptoed towards her unsuspecting pet, it became apparent to me she had no idea that the pretty black-and-yellow flying thing also had a not-so-pretty stinger. But I didn’t try to stop her. It was her only attempt to domesticate a bee.

After the bee incident, Shekinah shied away from insects altogether. She soon started to favour the easier-to-trap skink lizards, which infested our backyard. At their first meeting, Shekinah would name the lizard… Frank, Josie, Bert, Sam… in her mind, she knew them all individually. At their second meeting, she’d lure the small docile reptile with her undying love, soak them in her undivided attention and, when the timing was right, trap them in a jar with holes. Their return to her was kismet. This was how pets were made.

“Tara! Frank’s back!” she’d squeal with delight while trapping the Frank lookalike in her jar.

Her jar was as comforting as a coffin. Though her heart was in the right place, Shekinah didn’t actually know how to care for her brood of reptiles. As a novice pet owner, she simply assumed she should care for her pets, the same way our neighbors cared for their dogs.

“What are you doing?” I’d ask as she’d drown Frank in a large glass of water.

“He’s thirsty!”

With that amount of water, Frank was either extra-thirsty or extra-dead.  When his body floated to the surface, she began to consider that, maybe, she had gone overboard with the water.

Refusing to accept a drowning by her own hand, she quickly tipped Frank out of the glass and onto the pavement. “He’s not dead… look…I trained him. Watch. Stay!” And “stay” he did. No argument there. 

Shekinah happily introduced the family to a new skink every other day for almost a year. Irrespective of my sister’s scandalous track record, my parents never tried to stop – or even curve – her obsession with the backyard skink. I presume they were trying to save costs on pest control. If only her interests migrated towards cockroaches, my parents could of saved on extermination costs altogether.

Once she annihilated the local skink population, Shekinah focused all her attention on other small animals, but with little success. She tried desperately for months to domesticate one of the lorikeets that danced around our trees, or one of magpies who’d swoop at our hot chips if we ate outside... but they were always too quick for her to catch with her jar. (Though I suspect they had friends in the lizard community.)

When my parents decided to move the family to a new, bigger home with waterfront views, Shekinah was presented with a whole new eco-system of possible pets.

Armed with a loaf of day-old bread, she soon made friends with a local flock of black swans that frequented the canals we now lived on. She named every single one of them, of course, but it was the biggest of the birds than soon became her favourite. A black swan she called Midnight.

Day-old bread soon became day-of bread, until my father was forced to start buying Midnight-specific bread. “She better not be giving that darn bird the good bread” my father would miff, watching Shekinah dance around Midnight in the sun. With three teenage boys in the house, my father was already buying two loaves a day just to make enough school sandwiches, and he wasn’t too pleased with having to buy an extra loaf just to feed a derelict, free-loading bird.

Having a swan as a pet proved to be quite the responsibility, but one Shekinah wore with pride. Every morning, she would spring out of bed and excitedly run down the stairs towards the back verandah – the one opening onto the canal – and draw the curtains open. There would stand Midnight, waiting for her breakfast. Midnight’s hungry gawking and Shekinah’s excited shrieking was so on-schedule, I never had to set an alarm. No one did. It was 6am and the entire house was awake.

The more Midnight came to visit, the more bread she was rewarded with. To this day, I’m unsure who was the boss of who… my little sister who somehow managed to schedule regular visiting time with a wild swan; or Midnight who, one way or another, managed to work herself up to an entire loaf of good bread in one sitting?

“Midnight likes to come and see me, doesn’t she?”

“Oh yes. But remember to throw the bread AWAY from the house, OK?” my mother would tell her. Swans were best appreciated from a distance, in her opinion. (Something about those beady little eyes never sat well with her...)

When winter came and the weather changed, Midnight flew away. At least, we all assumed she did. I guess in retrospect, it is equally likely she perished all alone on the other side of the canal, her carb-loaded weight thwarting any ability to get airborne. Soon after, the family moved again, my father favouring a house with a swimmable pool over an un-swimmable canal. Forced to fill the void left by Midnight’s absence, my parents caved and bought Shekinah an actual pet: a puppy she named Chanel.

I was surprised to recently learn that the black swan was assumed to be a fictitious creature in 16^th Century London. Since all scientific and historical records in Europe during the time indicated that all swans had white feathers, a black swan was simply assumed to be non-existent. Black Swan? Impossible. Mythical. 

The black swan sometimes appeared in fairytales, of course, but any logical thinking person would quickly dismiss its actuality. English society continued to do so until the Dutch Explorer Willem de Vlamingh happened across one during an expedition to Western Australia in 1697. The black swan’s status instantly changed from ‘an impossible occurrence’ to ‘always existed’. Its find changed the way we looked at the world. The impossible became possible… just like that!

The black swan has since inspired a philosophical school of thought, known as the Black Swan Theory. Scientists employ Black Swan Theory to argue that anything we currently believe to be impossible may someday be proven to be possible (eg electricity, flight, the ability to clone a sheep). Inventors use Black Swan Theory to suggest that an unforeseen invention may alter the way we interact, not only with each other, but with the world around us (eg internet, smart phones, cronuts). Anthropologist believe that Black Swan Theory warns us that a single event can hold the power to alter the course of human kind itself (World War I, September 11, Miley Cyrus’s performance at the 2013 VMAs).

But to me, the black swan has a more personal, introspective association.

Whenever I feel over or underwhelmed by my own life’s circumstances, I sometimes wonder about those people in 16^th Century England; my thoughts turning to those Londoners who believed that only white swans existed. I wonder how amazed they might have been to learn that, on the other side of the world, in a land yet to be discovered, black swans not only existed, but would one day be cared for as a pet by a little girl who never accepted her lot as a non-pet owner.