The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance.
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
I met Ursa Major in college when I stumbled upon the poem “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me” by Delmore Schwartz. For me it was an epiphany like that recounted by Keats in “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer“; I looked at him with a wild surmise, because–and I apologize for packing three highbrow literary allusions into a single paragraph–I recognized myself in him, just as Schwartz had, in the same way Gustave Flaubert said “Madame Bovary–c’est moi!”
Ursa and I became good pals, so much so that I invoked him in my senior oral exam in aesthetic philosophy to prove (or at least assert) that a metaphor needn’t resemble the object to which it refers. If that were the case, how could both Schwartz and Paul “Bear” Bryant be equated with the same carnivoran mammal of the Ursidae family–when they didn’t look at all like each other? I hesitate to compare myself to my mentor, Ted Cohen, but in my more egotistical moments I liked to think that this little apercuapproached his seminal insight that a metaphor didn’t have to be literally false, as is most commonly the case, e.g., Shakespeare’s “Juliet is the sun.” Hitler is, after all, both figuratively and literally an animal.
After college we made our way east to Worcester, Mass., where we settled into a post-baccalaureate funk, sitting around listening to music, drinking too much beer while we tried to figure out what we were going to do next in our miserable young lives.
“Do you think you’ll go back to school?” he asked one afternoon as we sat on our front deck, smoking a joint and looking off into the sunset over the triple-deckers.
“I have in fact signed up to take the LSAT.”
“Is that a drug, or a World War II landing craft?”
“It’s the law school aptitude test, not LSD, an LST or an LCT.”
“You’ll probably make a good lawyer,” he said as he passed the doobie to me.
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re so freaking boring.”
I never argue with a bear, so I just laughed rather than take offense. “Don’t worry, you can come along with me wherever I end up.”
He looked off into the distance and inhaled–without the joint in his mouth. “Thanks,” he said after a few moments, “but I think I’ll pass.”
I was, to put it mildly, surprised. “I thought we were best buds.”
“We are, or were, but you’re moving on. Pretty soon you’re going to ditch your blue jeans for chinos . . .”
“I already bought a pair.”
“You’re such a dork. So no more nature hikes with me?”
“I didn’t say that. Besides, they have bears in Boston.”
“They do–where?”
“Boston Garden. Haven’t you ever heard of the Bruins?”
“Who are they?”
“A hockey team.”
“You know I don’t read the sports pages.”
“Okay, well, we can still take walks in the woods.”
“You’re not going to have time. You’re going to be constantly studying, learning the Rule in Dumphor’s Case, the Noerr-Pennington Doctrine, the Robinson-Patman Act.”
Time for another wild surmise. “Where’d you learn all that legal stuff?”
He took a sip from his bottle; a Pickwick Ale, known as the “Poor Man’s Gin” during the Great Depression because it had an extra kick of unknown derivation over regular beer. “When I hibernate I keep myself occupied by doing a lot of reading–and I haven’t ruled out becoming a lawyer myself.”
“But–why?”
“Well, if this bear thing doesn’t work out, I want to have something to fall back on.”
“But you couldn’t afford to go to law school.”
“You don’t need to go to law school to become a lawyer.”
“You don’t?”
“You don’t?” he said in a mocking, sing-song voice. “Not in Vermont. I’d just have you drop me off at the border, apprentice for four years, and I’d be good to go.”
All of a sudden, the expensive plans I’d made for the next three years–high-priced apartment in a Boston suburb and tuition–didn’t seem like such a good idea.
“Who’s going to hire a bear as a lawyer?”
“Other bears, you dope. There’s a lot of trespassing cases, as well as homicide. Stupid people who get too close to a mamma bear and her cubs have a high mortality rate.”
“But what are other bears going to pay you with?”
“Nuts and berries. And I really like bird feeders in the convenient grab-and-go Pringles-style package.”
So it seemed Ursa was all set for life without me, which was probably just as well. I’d lined up a room in an owner-occupied apartment in Watertown that I intended to share with my girlfriend. Adding a bear to the mix would have been a menage-a-trois for the ages.
“Well, that’s great. I’m really happy for you,” I said and I have to admit–I had a lump in my throat.
“We should do something to celebrate,” Ursa said, quickly paving over the slight bump in the smooth, normally emotionless road of male friendship.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know–we could go out dancing.”