How long, O Lord, how long? Just asking

The Column: 10.22.21

I am still processing the news that a pig’s kidney was successfully attached to a human and that an animal whose bacon Americans have been using to kill themselves may now be an instrument of healing. Pigs have provided heart valves for people and now kidneys are a possibility and who knows? Maybe knees and hearts and brain tissue.

Donor pigs, of course, would need to be treated with deference. An animal who saves your life you don’t keep in a pigpen and feed slop out of a trough. Donor pigs would live in comfortable condos with clean mud baths and be served individual meals on plates and would be transported aboard buses, not in livestock trucks. This goes without saying. A pig whose kidney might wind up in your body, you wouldn’t feed it on garbage.

I wouldn’t feel odd about having a pig organ put in me, other than the snout or jowls; I’m okay with the idea that parts of us are interchangeable. I am an animal, I know it. Beneath our thin veneer of spirituality and intellect, we are beasts. I’ve been in crowds of humans that exhibited herd behavior not unlike pigs — I think of the crowd at the Metropolitan Opera, pushing through the turnstiles, shoving aside the elderly (me) in their eagerness to witness the heterophobic violence onstage. Nobody has pointed this out before but it’s always an opposite-sex lover who gets stabbed or poisoned, gay men seem to enjoy this, but never mind.

I, of course, know people who have close emotional relationships with dogs. They don’t talk to me about it because I’m not a dog person but I can see it. Some of them sleep with their dogs. I’m sure there are intimate conversations that take place in private. I also know people who imagine they have an emotional relationship with a cat but the cat knows better. I never formed those friendships because my dad was a farmboy and our dog Cappy was an outdoor dog whose job it was to keep foxes from eating the chickens and raccoons out of the sweet corn. He slept in the garage.

Dogs had jobs back then. Lassie rescued small children from quicksand. Rin Tin Tin was part of the war effort. My aunt had a little poodle, basically a pillow who pooped, and Dad knew that she slept with the dog and to him this was a shameful thing, not to be spoken of.

Cappy guarded the garden against raccoons, but now there are leash laws passed so kids won’t be scared of dogs. In my day, a kid learned to handle a strange dog by making eye contact and keeping a hand in your pocket as if you might be armed, but now, thanks to leash laws, raccoons feast on backyard gardens and we buy tomatoes from Yucatán for a dollar apiece that are two weeks old and we’ve lost the pleasure of the homegrown tomato, which, to me as a boy, was evidence of a loving God, but never mind.

The pig research, and other medical advances, are motivated by the urge toward longevity that my generation feels keenly, a desire to venture into the 90s. My grandfathers died at age 73, which probably seemed long enough to them, life being less of a picnic in the early 20th, but my confreres, whom I saw at a class reunion in September, seem rather immature compared to how old people used to be and are eager to see more of the world and if some pig parts would facilitate that, my friends would be agreeable. And the way they shoved into the food line makes me wonder if they’ve had some kidney work done.

To me, the 90s are foreign territory, like going to Eritrea. I never met an Eritrean, I know nothing about the place. My cousin Stanley has just turned 90 and he left a message on voice mail the other day and sounded cheerful and in possession of his faculties and said he and Gloria have been out and about, so I’m considering longevity but I don’t care to be a burden and if I get old and cranky and start repeating myself, I will take the Long Walk Across the Frozen Wastes to disappear in the Aurora Borealis if I should start repeating myself unlike my cousin Stanley. He has turned 90. He left me a voice mail message the other day. He and Gloria are fine.

FROM THE ARCHIVE