What Does a Titi Monkey Have to Do with van Gogh?

December flew by and we are already in 2019. In the holiday scurry, with Hannukah ovelapping Christmas, the Winter Solstice thrown in, and the first day of Kwanzaa, I seemed to have overlooked a peculiar anniversary: 130 years ago, on December 23rd 1888, Vincent van Gogh sliced his left ear off (or part of it) and brought it as a gift to a call girl. “Last Sunday, at half past eleven in the evening, one Vincent van Gogh, a painter and native of Holland, presented himself at brothel no. 1, asked for one Rachel, and handed her . . . his ear, telling her: “Keep this object carefully,” read the local newspaper in Arles, France, where van Gogh was living.

This was neither an accident nor a happy one. It ended his friendship with fellow artist Paul Gauguin (he was there that night, but staying at a nearby hotel, perhaps fearing the inevitable) and became the tragic prelude to his suicide two years later.

I found this anniversary reminder in the Farmer’s Almanac—perhaps an editor included it thinking of van Gogh’s frantically painted fields of wheat and sunflowers. What I consider a happy accident is that this fact, in tiny 7 point type, was nested between the anniversary of writer, illustrator, and botanist Beatrix Potter’s death (December 22nd, 1943) and the birthday of Pepper, a Bolivian gray titi monkey, at the Philadelphia Zoo (December 24th, 2012). While both Beatrix and Vincent are chatting (or ignoring each other) in Heaven, six-year-old Pepper lives comfortably in Philly with Bellini, his 12-year-old predecessor, and Cooper, a four-year-old recent arrival.

—Raúl Rodriguez, NYC, 1.8.2019