The Tale of Sparky and Lola

A story of love found, love lost, and floppy blue teddy bears, from our star guest contributor, Violet.


The tragic tale of how Sparky met the sad love of his life

The first time Sparky saw Lola, he knew he was in love. Sparky was a handsome cat with orange and white fur. Lola was a cheap stuffed animal blue floppy teddy bear with a blue ribbon around her neck. Sparky, however, thought that Lola was a simply lovely lady cat, and wanted to marry her immediately and have an amazing cat wedding.

He dragged Lola around, showing her to everybody. He was very proud of her. At one point he got tired of that and started leaving her in random places. Sparky assumed that Lola would just have a little cat nap. Then he dragged her to his cat bed and Sparky, who was tired from his day filled with cat naps, fell asleep.

They were very sweet together, and Sparky knew that Lola loved him a lot. It was in the way she always smiled at him. (She was a teddy bear and the smile had been sewed on her face). After a day or two though, Sparky started to notice that Lola never moved unless somebody moved her themselves. At first he thought that maybe she had a medical condition, but wouldn’t she have told him that?

Later he realized that Lola was dead. (He didn’t figure out that she had never been alive at all). And Sparky was heartbroken. Would such a beautiful, fluffy, blue cat with a bow tie ever come around again? He didn’t think so. He gave her a couple more last licks and mewed goodbye, and then he forgot about her completely and started fighting with his brother, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones Kuner.

Thank you for listening to the sad tale of Sparky and Lola.

Signposts

In 1992, the great short story writer and novelist John Cheever lent his name to an episode of Seinfeld. “The Cheever Letters” was about … well, it’s difficult to explain. But, after conceding this point, Blake Bailey, in his monumental biography of John Cheever (Cheever: A Life), gives it a try:

George Costanza is meeting his girlfriend Susan’s family for the first time. Susan’s crotchety father, meanwhile, has sent George a box of Cuban cigars (“made special for Castro”), which George has dumped on his friend Kramer, who in turn has smoked them in a cabin belonging to Susan’s father and burned the place down. When George breaks the news to the father, the man is devastated and takes to his bed. The next day, Jerry and George visit the apartment where Susan’s family is gathered, and a doorman appears bearing a charred strongbox: “The only thing left from the remains of the fire,” he says. Susan opens the box in front of Jerry, George, and the family (but not her father, who remains in bed): “Letters … from John Cheever!” she brightly announces, then reads one aloud:

Dear Henry [Susan’s father],

Last night with you was bliss. I fear my orgasm has left me a cripple. I don’t know how I shall ever get back to work.

I love you madly,
John

Amid general consternation, Susan’s father shambles in from the bedroom. “The box! My letters! Give me that! Who told you to open this?” The man’s grown son, bewildered and almost terrified, exclaims, “Dad! You and John Cheever?” “Yes!” the man says defiantly. “Yes! He was the most wonderful person I’ve ever known! And I loved him deeply” -- he turns to his wife (a Waspy, sarcastic ice queen) -- “in a way you could never understand!”

The Seinfeld episode aired a year after the posthumous publication of Cheever’s private journals, which revealed to the world a fact known to some, suspected by more in his circle of friends and literary acquaintances, but unknown to most -- that Cheever throughout his life had carried on many affairs with men, even as he continued to love women and extol the virtues of family life.

When Bailey asked Larry David, Seinfeld’s writer, why he chose Cheever for this episode, David replied that it was because Cheever “was a well-known writer who was gay.” Bailey writes, “One can only imagine how Cheever would have felt about being primarily known as ‘a writer who was gay‘, but there it is.” And, yes, while Cheever endured a lifelong struggle with his sexual identity and “the inconstancy of the flesh,” this certainly only tells part of his story, which has, more than anything, to do with “How lonely and unnatural man is and how deep and well-concealed are his confusions." Cheever’s “confusions,” and the confusions of the characters in his stories, are moral, spiritual, emotional confusions that everyone can recognize as essentially human.

Cheever’s own loneliness gave him sympathy for the individual and the constant tension our desires exert on our need for stability and respectability; he was too familiar with his own foibles to be too harsh to those subject to them. He knew, as well as anyone, that in everyone's life there are longings that are never realized, impulses never acted upon, deep-seated loves and fears never expressed, and secrets that are never told. This is what Cheever's stories, at their best, uncover – the hidden life that goes on behind the face each individual presents to the world.

In Bailey's biography, Cheever is quoted as saying, "I write to make sense of my life." If that is one of the purposes of writing, maybe that is what the reader is looking for, too -- a story that in some way helps him make sense of his own story. The best of Cheever's stories read like the journals of a traveler. You encounter, while wandering through a life that -- despite its moments of beauty and transcendence -- is fraught with struggle and sorrow, a signpost left by one who has gone on ahead of you. You may not follow the path he has gone, but you are heartened by the evidence of a human presence, and recognize that the signpost was left by someone who wanted to mark a trail. You feel less alone. And you are grateful.

Poem looking for a title

This time, composed by Violet using refrigerator magnets:

"It is storming," she whispered.
"And the wind is blowing. I dream of music,
sweet and smooth like chocolate.
It is an enormous, delicate, gorgeous
picture of a lake."

I was wet from rain and sweat.
One man screamed.

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