Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [27]
My mother, stunned, gave her another chance, “You do, Patti?”
Patti reiterated her position, “I really do, Mom. I hate horses!”
At this point, my parents took Patti back to the hotel and my father placed her in a cold shower with all her clothes on. Then they locked her in her room. Pretty tough stuff for a fourteen-year-old, but what else are you going to do with your drunk daughter who so adamantly dislikes horses?
Patti always resented me because as the youngest of four, I benefited from laissez-faire parenting. Compared to the treatment she received from my parents, it seemed as if I had no rules whatsoever. It was as though by the time I had come around, my parents thought, this whole parenting thing kind of does itself. On one occasion, my parents told her she couldn’t go to an overnight party at her friend’s boyfriend’s house and she started crying. She pointed at me, and shouted, “When he’s fourteen you’re gonna let him do anything he wants!” Six years old and completely confused, I sat there like collateral damage. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I could feel the hostility. She was older than me, smarter than me, and seemingly hated me. So I tried to keep my distance.
She did too. Not just from me, but from the entire family. When Patti graduated from high school, she chose the college she’d gotten into that was the farthest away—upstate New York. After college, she moved farther away—Breckenridge, Colorado. This was her final, masterful escape from the oppressive Birbiglia family. She became a ski instructor, a subtle but athletic blow-off to the parents who had put her through college as a classics major. It was during Patti’s exile in Colorado that she and I started to connect. One night, while talking with her on the phone, I discovered she had a fascination with bears.
I should point out that I’ve always had a fascination with bears. An obsession really. And Patti is a part of that.
At age eight, I started to have this recurring dream that there was a bear walking in the front door of my house. Literally opening the front door—which is the scariest part: a bear with opposable thumbs. If a bear can open a door, sky’s the limit! I don’t have a plan for that one. My plan was the door.
In the dream, I hide in the kitchen cupboard with Patti, and it’s pitch-black. Scared to death, I open the door a crack to bring in some light and look next to me. Patti is gone and she’s been replaced by the bear. And he doesn’t kill me but he gives me this coy, Jack Nicholsony look, like, “Will I kill you?” And that’s when I’d wake up. I had that dream for years.
One of the things that drew Patti to Colorado was her love of nature and animals, though not horses. Coincidentally, she started to have a recurring bear dream where a bear would approach her in the woods. I shared with her my childhood bear dream and we forged a bond.
In college I took my bear interest a step further by watching Discovery Channel documentaries about bears in all of my free time. I could watch these things endlessly. Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you. I always feel bad for the smaller animals in these documentaries because I know more than they do about the situation. It’s like I’m at a bank heist and I’m the guy in the van watching on the monitor and the narrator says, “The arctic fox has only one known predator: the polar bear.” And I’m on my headset yelling, “Arctic fox, it’s a setup. Get outta there. Tinkles to arctic fox! Tinkles to arctic fox! Put down the salmon and walk out of the building!”
I was talking about my bear fascination with Patti in a phone conversation, and to my surprise, Patti was quick to point out some additional factoids about bears.
“Polar bears can smell their prey thirty miles away.”
“Yes, that’s true. But black bears are the most ferocious. They’re nine feet tall and their claws are as sharp as razor blades.”
“Yes, and grizzly bears weigh around 900 pounds and can run up to 40 miles per