My Girl, Fiona: A Collection of Essays

By Denise Gwen

What does a cute little hippo at the Cincinnati Zoo have to do with life, liberty, and the pursuit of joy?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Denise Gwen
• Release date: Jul 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005582654

Denise Gwen

Denise Gwen writes!!!

Book preview

ONE

MY GIRL, FIONA

My Girl, Fiona

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She arrived six weeks early, in the wee hours of morning, on January the twenty-fourth. Initially, only two members of the zoo-keeper staff were aware of her birth. It was kind of gross, actually, to see a tiny sliver of gray slip out of the mother, Beebe, and the calf just lay there for a good long while, in a puddle of her afterbirth. When it became clear to the staff that Beebe wasn’t interested in her calf, they interceded.

As the video measures out time in agonizing minutes, we see zoo staffers gingerly approaching the enclosure and stepping into the pen, careful so as not to annoy the mother, who is, after all, an enormous hippo, and they take hold of the baby hippo and check her vitals. She was warm at birth, but as the hours passed, her temperature dropped, and the vet was called.

What followed was one of those gushy, sentimental, stories that we love to read; a vulnerable creature in danger, the overcoming of adversity, the strength of the human spirit, the triumph of the ages, blah, blah, blah, all accompanied by constant video feeds set to the sound of inspirational music. It could’ve turned to schmaltz, but amazingly, it didn’t.

Fiona nearly died. She failed to thrive, her weight dropped, and the staff called upon Cincinnati Childrens Hospital for help. A team of neonatal nurses arrived with a special machine, designed to find the deep veins in a premature infant’s body, and with this miracle of science, they located the deep veins and filled up her tiny body with life-sustaining nutrients.

That was the first of many moments in Fiona’s recovery that brought tears to my eyes, the photo of the neonatal nurses seated on the floor in a treatment room. One nurse cradles the swaddled calf on her lap, the other nurses gaze raptly at the monitor; the tension is palpable.

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Fiona is also the name of my youngest sister.

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The name Fiona is aptly fitting, both for my sister, and for this sweet little calf. The name is Gaelic, evoking images of Irish fairies and green-flecked lands, and yet it also contains a hint of mystery. There’s strength in the letters. No ethereal Galadriel or Gwendolyn, no softly sinuous G, but rather, the firmer, and harder, F. Fiona the hippo is our unconventional heroine, and my youngest sister is unconventional as well. Married to her partner, and a mother to a darling little girl, it appears as if the Fionas of the world are destined to be different.

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Unconventional. Different. But cute.

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To our pleasant surprise in the first of the Shrek films, the true Fiona is the zaftig, green-tinted creature voiced by Cameron Diaz, not the slender, porcelain-complected girl whom Shrek first encounters, and whom we are kind of expected to assume she will remain, but as the story progresses, we come to realize that the real Fiona embodies a physical form far different from the expected ideas of feminine beauty.

We like it when our heroines are pretty and slender and—let’s be honest here, shall we—white. It’s a surprise to see her turn green, and yet, we realize that this is just right. Fiona is meant to be green. And it isn’t at all an accident, that, in the final scene, when Fiona transforms into her true self, the transformation moment is done, frame-by-frame, identically to the transformation moment in Beauty and the Beast, when the beast transforms into the beautiful man.

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I kind of preferred him in ursine form, to be honest.

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The Fionas of the world are unconventional beauties.

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My youngest sister has never thought of herself as a gorgeous femme fatale; rather, she has fought her whole life against the imagery of women being subjugated by men and has long been a feminist.

Who, then, better to represent this depiction of female beauty, than a sweet little hippo?

Fiona thrived and grew. She reached a milestone when she grew too heavy to lift in and out of the baby pool, so they installed a ramp, and the video of the tiny hippo, being encouraged to try this new and terrifying plank, brought tears to my eyes.

She was so darn cute!

Everything she did was so cute.

She loved water—duh!—she’s a hippo, natch, and so do I. As a post-menopausal woman, I love to climb into my above-ground pool at the end of each day and soak in the cool, refreshing water. Just as Fiona must enjoy doing, I imagine.

There’s a darling video of the zookeepers pointing a garden hose at her, and as the water sprays her face, she scrunches up her front lip like a Muppet and curls it upwards, catching the water stream. Oh, it’s so cute.

Slowly, they introduced her to her mother, and then to her father, Henry, who’d sired a great many little hippos in his time, and Fiona would turn out to be his last; for a year later, poor Henry had to be put down. Henry was an enormous, magnificent creature, and it’s odd to think of a hippo getting frail, but on the inside, his great body was failing him, and so one morning, he was humanely put down, and then it was just Fiona and her mother.

The staff admitted to being a little apprehensive when they saw the still-tiny Fiona walking into her mother’s wide-open mouth. The calf just stood there, on her mother’s tongue, and her mother lifted her gigantic jaws wide open to let her daughter inspect her throat. Beebe could easily have snapped her jaws closed and killed the little hippo, but no, she kept her mouth wide open and Fiona stood on