This is the story of a guinea pig as the great connector.
I learned it from journalist Mary Louise Kelly, co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” who has written a gorgeous new book called “It. Goes. So. Fast: The Year of No Do-Overs.” The book is a memoir about her older son’s final year of high school and all the choices, the longing, the joys, the regrets and the big and small victories that punctuate the 18 or so years it takes to launch a child into the world.
It’s also about losing her dad. And her hearing. (She has severe to profound hearing loss.)
It’s about getting famously chewed out by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It’s about reporting from Pakistan on terrorism and rising nuclear threats. It’s about getting a call from the school nurse that her younger son was having trouble breathing and she should come get him immediately — except she was in Baghdad, wearing body armor and a helmet, on her way to board a Black Hawk helicopter.
It’s about moments that may be difficult to relate to, but emotions that live in our skin. All of our skin.
Which brings us to the guinea pig.
Kelly has covered the war in Ukraine extensively — the lead-up, the day to day, the fallout. In the course of her reporting, she met a woman named Hanna Hopko, a pro-democracy activist and former head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in Ukraine's parliament. During one of their interviews, Hopko revealed to Kelly that her daughter, 11, would like a pet guinea pig.
But that was early 2022, and the family didn’t know whether Russian troops were going to invade Ukraine. And if they did, Hopko wasn’t sure she wanted to evacuate a rodent and its cage and its food pellets, alongside her family and all their earthly belongings.
“She’s so stressed out by this — this woman who had literally led a revolution — that she started crying,” Kelly said. “Which made me cry.”
I had asked Kelly about Hopko because I found her story to be one of the most powerful in the book.
It illustrated so beautifully, I thought, the way motherhood informs Kelly’s — and Hopko’s — approach to her work. (Kelly and I were in conversation as part of her book tour stop in Chicago.)
“I am quite sure,” Kelly said, “that 25-year-old Mary Louise would have been sitting there in Ukraine and this woman would have started crying about getting her daughter a guinea pig and I would have been like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Sanctions. NATO. Let’s talk about the important stuff. Who cares about this rodent? Russia’s about to invade.'
“And the mom in me latched on and thought, ‘That’s the story.’” Kelly continued. “I’m trying to explain what the stakes are in Ukraine. And how ordinary people just like us are living through something unimaginable. How can I let you glimpse that and come into this country with me for a moment?”
Just about every parent on the planet, she said, can relate to a child begging for a pet.
“The stakes may not be as high as ‘I’m going to have to evacuate if Russian tanks roll in,’” she said. “But we all know, like, ‘Really? Is this a great thing for my family?’”
We all understand wanting our child to know joy. And unconditional love. We all understand wanting to be the bearer of those things and a protective force from their opposites. We all understand what’s in our control (very little) and what’s not (almost everything).
We all understand wanting to flip the ratio, especially when it comes to our kids.
“You can’t wrap your head around sanctions,” Kelly said. “But you can wrap your head around somebody struggling to get dinner on the table for their family that night.”
Hopko did buy her daughter a guinea pig. And Russian tanks did roll in. And the family did evacuate. Hopko had to go into hiding because she suspected she was on a Russian kill list. Kelly said listeners still contact her to ask about the guinea pig.
“It’s the human stories,” Kelly said. “It’s those little moments.”
I’ve thought about that story a dozen times since.
I thought about it, especially, when I was reading a Twitter thread from author and antiracist educator Ibram X. Kendi, responding to back-to-back horrendous incidents that maimed or killed more of our young people: Ralph Yarl, a teenager who was shot by a homeowner after ringing the wrong doorbell, and Kaylin Gillis, a 20-year-old shot to death after pulling in the wrong driveway.
“We need to build a fearless nation,” Kendi wrote. “An antiracist nation. Where we don’t fear groups of people, but we do recognize the actual dangers in our midst. Where people view assault rifles, poverty, racism, toxic masculinity, job deserts, book bans, climate change, poorly funded schools and hospitals, voter suppression, union busting and exploitation as dangerous.
“Not groups of people,” he continued, “not that person you don’t know. Not that person ringing your doorbell or coming onto your driveway. Not that person who looks differently, loves differently, worships differently, or thinks differently than you.”
I think we build that on a foundation of what connects us all. By understanding that what’s at stake in our own hearts and lives is very likely the same thing at stake in someone else’s. And it's on each of us to protect that for all of us.
“It’s the human stories.”
It’s the human story.
