A Small Green Cow

By Lisa Kirkpatrick

There is a small green cow that stands atop my piano. No bigger than a thumbnail, no heavier than 27 cents in change, he has been my constant companion since 1987, the fated year I dropped a quarter into a vending machine at a Stuckey's in upper East Tennessee and got him, my small green cow, as a reward.

These days he is surrounded by a veritable menagerie of inanimate animals: a curious plastic penguin, a solemn stuffed mouse, an eager anteater with expectant snout pressed hard to the burnished wood, others too numerous to catalog. But there was a time when he stood alone, proud, head held high in a moment of serene digestion, having grazed the pianotop closely and not yet ready for more.

He has been with me for 10 years now. He has seen me through 13 moves and nine job changes, lived with me in four states and three time zones. He has watched, without jealousy, a dog, two cats, 15 fish, and a whole herd of plastic animals enter my life, and has mourned, without satisfaction, the passing of one of the cats and 12 of the fish. He has witnessed my countless romantic missteps (short aberrations in those years of lousy bachelorhood), and he was there as I danced, blushed, kissed, and then fell madly in love, and has watched, approvingly I think, as that love matured and grew strong and turned to engagement, marriage, and domestic bliss. He has seen the fall of apartheid, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, and the end of welfare as he knows it. He has grown and changed and yet remained forever, a cow; he is the most lasting thing I know.

I have not named him, in all these years, despite Moses' injunction. He is, somehow, beyond naming. Although I can think of several nice names for a small green cow: Thomas, Adrian, Gabe.

For the first five years of our partnership he rode in a small pouch in my backpack, keeping company with orphaned pennies, spare washers, and a nail, believe it or not, from Muddy Waters' childhood home. Those were fast and heady times for a coin-bought cow, and in that span he saw much of what he now knows of this world: from Alabama barbecue shacks to Connecticut reading rooms to Carolina airplane hangars. He emerged from these years with a wisdom and silent grace that could only be called "bovine." But in time, he grew weary, tired of the constant travel, and I could not fail to notice that his trademark pluck was waning. I had no choice but to retire him: first to a bookshelf, then another, and another, and a fishtank and a clock and a piano, all suitable homes for a cow of his disposition, which, have I mentioned, is jocose and serene.

I wonder, sometimes, what he thinks about on that pianotop, what tricks of the imagination he uses to keep himself amused, for he is not now and has never been a dull cow. Does he think back on his youth with a sodden regret, and fancy himself instead a 4-H champion in Cedar Rapids or a sought-after stud on the Argentinean pampas?

Does he pine for the future, imagining life as a famous movie star or, dare I say it, the first little green cow to colonize Mars? (What would he eat?) I don't think so. I think, like all cows, he knows how to live in the moment. If he permits himself any fantasies at all, I suspect that they are modest and circumspect, pondering what life would be like on other pieces of furniture, say, or, in moments of lesser inhibition, on top of the fridge or toaster oven. (He'd surely melt.)

I wonder also if he longs for love, if after a wild and reckless youth in which he did not know the meaning of commitment, he wants now only to settle down and seek what comfort he can in the knowing hooves of another. Every time I bring home another 10 cent prefabricated animal -- from the toy stores that traffic in such a dubious trade -- do his stomachs flutter in anticipation? Does an incipient "moo" catch deep in his throat as he wonders if maybe, perhaps, just this once I've brought a small green heifer to be his lifemate? Or, what the heck, he's not too picky, a yellow one? Perhaps I owe him this much as my own life heads toward a long-sought equilibrium.

But mate or no mate, I know my cow well, and I think he is happy on the pianotop, as honorary captain to the sprawling herd. He is comforted, I believe, as he watches the family grow around him -- a horse now, a hippo, a burly-backed hog -- and he knows, somehow, that as the menagerie grows it is not without a meaning of its own. And that meaning (and this too I'm sure he understands) has something to do with place, and permanence, and a deeper set of roots than he or I have known. So as the hours pass on that vast expanse of wood, and the days grow long, one into another, and another, and with each he finds himself still standing, proud, composed, no longer alone ... at those moments I'm sure he is thinking, quietly, to himself, and this is what he is thinking: "Moo. Moo, moo, by all means moo."