Born to Bark (9 page)

Caught up in all of these advances, I began doing research in two areas: how animals perceive the world and the nature of curiosity in animals. Much of this work had to be done at odd hours, since I still was working at two part-time jobs that I needed to provide me with enough money to pay for my books, laboratory fees, and other necessities. However, several faculty members gave me keys and access to the labs and I would often be found testing animals at 6
A.M.,
well before my classes started for the day. I had already sent in my applications to several of the top graduate programs in
psychology and was awaiting their responses.

The future of my personal life was also becoming clearer. In their usual manner, my parents and grandfather had already decided who I was to marry and had been applying pressure for a number of years. I had had dates and pleasant evenings with a number of girls over the years, but nothing that seemed destined to turn into a lasting relationship.

Then there was Marcia—the chosen one—whom I always called Mossy, although I have no memory of why. Her family lived only about three city blocks from one of my childhood homes in West Philadelphia. Her mother and father (Goldie and Denny) were very pleasant, and my maternal grandfather, Jake, knew Denny quite well. Mossy’s family was pretty much at the same financial and social level as my own, and coming from the same neighborhood we shared a number of common views and attitudes.

A year younger than I was, Mossy and I began to spend
more time together during our years at West Philadelphia High School, which both our families encouraged. After my stint in the army, and Mossy’s completion of her training as an X-ray technologist, I continued to see her, and we dated while I was doing my undergraduate work at Penn.

Although this seems as close to an arranged marriage as one gets in the modern Western world, it was not a matter of compulsion. It involved a lot of subtle pressures, such as conversations that began “When you and Marcia get married …” or suggestions like “If you will be working for your doctoral degree in a university that is outside of the city, you and Marcia should probably get married in June at the end of your senior year,” or questions like “Have you and Marcia decided how long you will wait before making us grandparents?”

I did like Mossy. Everyone liked her. She was verbal, intelligent, had a good sense of humor, and was a great and enthusiastic dancer. She was also a wicked card player, a good observer of people, and she told interesting stories. Her behaviors and moods were predictable and never much cause for stress. We were comfortable with each other and had both accepted our parents’ presumption that we would get married. The problem, for me, was that there was simply no passion in our relationship. To me, it was more like a longtime friendship.

I talked this over with Penny, who was lying on her pillow in my bedroom, and explained my doubts.

“I don’t know if I should go through with this marriage thing with Mossy,” I said to my brown-eyed dog. “Everyone says that you should get married because of love—that there should be lots of fire and excitement and all of that.”

The Goofy voice answered,
“So who do you know who kindles that kind of fire in you?”

“No one, right now.”

“Do you want to start looking for some ‘passion pet’ now?”

“Come on, I’ve got too much going on, what with the two
jobs, the research, my studies, and all of that. Where would I find the time or the energy?”

“Do you like her?”

“Of course I do.”

“If you’ve got to go away, say to California, for graduate work, would you rather go alone or with her?”

That was really the crucial question. “I suppose that I would like her company. We do get along together, and I don’t like the thought of starting a new life in a different place alone.”

I sat on the floor stroking my dog and thinking my life was not a random stroll through some garden, where I could change my path any time I wanted to look at interesting flowers or plants. Rather, my life was a railroad train, and it was taking me in the only direction that the tracks led. At the time, I probably did not require much passion in my personal life, since I was pouring virtually all my emotional reserves into research and studies. Although I had abandoned physics as my major I was still working for the physics department, liquefying helium for use by the cryogenics gr
oup. Cryogenics is the study of things that happen at very cold temperatures, and many research projects use liquid helium as a refrigerant, since it remains liquid at temperatures less than 1 degree above absolute zero (theoretically the lowest temperature obtainable is -459°F).

The cryogenics research group met once each week to discuss its ongoing work. Kenneth Atkins, the director of the group, invited me to attend, since I was treated as one of the regular departmental staff. Listening to these brilliant scientists wrestling with complex problems gave me an insight as to how research was conducted and how creative thinking could be applied to problems. I could not have gotten this kind of education any other way. It taught me how to turn questions into concrete tests, how to simplify complicated descriptions in a way that left only the vital elements.
During these think-tank sessions I even began to learn how to present complex theories
and ideas in a basic manner that any layperson can understand. Watching these scientists wrestle with concepts at the far limits of our knowledge made me want to test my own creative abilities by applying these same mental skills to psychological and behavioral problems.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that research had clearly become my passion. It was addictive, and I was spending the majority of what free time I had gathering data, writing, analyzing—lost in my own intellectual world. I had become that clichéd Hollywood version of a scientist, immersed in his work while forgetting or neglecting his family and other relationships. I finished my undergraduate studies with four published research articles, including a study in one of the most important research journals in the world,
Science
. That publication, as much as my grades a
nd other qualifications, led to my being accepted by Stanford University for doctoral studies in psychology.

I graduated from Penn in the beginning of June 1964, and less than two weeks later Mossy and I were married, making two sets of parents and my grandfather very happy, and convincing them that all was right with the world. Later that summer, Mossy and I loaded everything that we owned (which wasn’t all that much) into the almost-new blue station wagon that my grandfather had given me for our cross-country trek to California.

The last thing I did before climbing into the car to begin the journey was to bend down to say good-bye to Penny. I held her big square head in my hands, looked into her deep brown eyes, and quietly told her, “I love you, girl.”

Normally the Goofy voice would have answered me with some snarky comment, but there were people around and I didn’t want them to think that I had gone mad. So the Goofy voice was silent this time.

“Wait for me, Glock. I’ll be back for you.”

It would be two years before I could return to my parents’ home in Philadelphia, and Penny could not wait. I never saw those brown eyes again and never again heard that Goofy voice.

Because I had served in the military, when Mossy and I arrived at Stanford University we were eligible for subsidized married student housing. These accommodations were in a place called Stanford Village, which made it sound like some idyllic, tree-lined setting. It actually was a set of narrow, one-story wooden army barracks located behind Stanford Research Institute. These buildings had been used as a military hospital during World War II, but now had been converted to apartment units by building thin walls to subdivide the area into apartments. Each housing unit was composed of
a small bedroom, a living room, a tiny kitchen, and a walk-in-closet-sized bathroom with no bathtub and only a metal shower stall. The walls had been hastily and cheaply put up with no sound insulation between units, and in some places there were gaps of around a half inch between the top of the wall and the ceiling. This gave us little privacy but lots of information about our neighbors’ private lives, since even whispers freely drifted through the walls and gaps into our apartment. Nonetheless, it was a place to live and it was very inexpensive.

At that time, Stanford had one of the most respected psychology departments in the world. It could boast more winners of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Psychologist Award (psychology’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize) than any other department in existence. I was going to work with one of their superstars, Leon Festinger, who is best known for his
theory of cognitive dissonance
, which explains the ways that people form and change their attitudes, but who also made
significant contributions to social psychology, learning, perception, statistics, and even paleopsychology (which is the attempt to reconstruct social and other everyday behaviors from the kinds of things that archeologists and paleontologists turn up when exploring the caves and primitive settlements where primitive humans lived tens of thousands of years ago).

One of the most brilliant people that I have ever met, Leon could shed new insights on any problem to which he turned his attention. His analytic abilities were astonishing. In his weekly research meetings with his students and a few colleagues, he was a delight to watch as his mind worked behind the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke. He would tease apart theoretical notions and then reassemble them in new forms. He had a talent for extracting the essence of a theory and then creating a very simple experimental procedure to test it.

In spite of my admiration of him, Leon and I clashed several times during my first year at Stanford because I did not want to be a technician simply carrying out a principal researcher’s instructions, no matter how much of a genius he was. I had my own research ideas and my own interests, and Leon admitted that some were very interesting. Ultimately, he offered me a compromise. He gave me a large room as a laboratory and told me that as long as I completed the various research projects that we were doing collaboratively, I could do any other research that I wanted to do on my o
wn and he would support it financially. This worked for both of us, and I always had three or four experiments going at the same time, each set up in a different corner of my big lab space.

I was yearning for a dog, but pets were not permitted in our housing complex. So although cats are really not my cup of fur, I allowed myself to get involved in a research project that
involved a cat. Socializing with a cat is certainly better than having no animal companion. She was a purebred Siamese with the registered name of Shen Wa’s Just Fu Too, but I just called her Fu. She had been selected because she was extremely cross-eyed and because of the odd way that the visual system of Siamese cats is wired to their brains. If we could, in essence, get her to tell us what she was actually seeing by teaching her to respond to some special types of visual displays, it might shed light on a newly developed theory about how humans see their world.