Last weekend, I was at the home of friends with a group of friends. We had brought our knapsacks and were preparing to hike from their house down into the nature reserve for a picnic, and while we were awaiting the last arrivals and, in fact, petting the host family's dog while chatting about our own dogs at home, the man of the house exclaimed: "What's that?!"
A big brown heap of something, not obviously alive, lay on the lawn outside the picture window. It had not been there a moment ago.
It turned out to be a dying dog, a mixed breed of chestnut brown. A smoke-colored stripe scorched into the fur across his throat indicated that he had spent his life roped. He was all spine and ribs, as if you were looking at the skeleton of an upturned hull in a shipyard. One hind leg was badly injured. One eye was clouded over. The other eye was clear, dark brown, and responsive to human attention, but the socket was bloody.
Although usually I conceive of God as a source of compassionate energy that can be tapped, and not as a micromanager, in this case I could imagine God's having carried this creature in the palm of his hand and gently deposited him on this particular patch of grass in front of this particular gathering of people, as if to say: "Now, what will you do about it?"
For obviously the animal, which must have dragged himself up from the valley before collapsing in my friends' yard, was possessed of a powerful will to live. He was brought some kibble, and although he could barely raise his large, sculpted head, he ate. He was brought three bowls of water, one after the other after the other, and drank. He made no overtures, he didn't beg, but he took food and drink and was calmly responsive to kindly attention. I would even say that he had dignity.
I am used to petting the top of my dog's head. In fact, the professional who helped me to train her told me that dogs understand this gesture as praise. Leaving aside how he came to that psychological insight, or why it works, when it was my turn to make the dog's acquaintance, I patted and stroked the top of his head. His one clear eye looked up at me unafraid. "Oh," I crooned, "who is a beautiful boy, who is a good boy, who is a good and sweet and lovely dog?"
We did not go on the planned hike and picnic, but instead made phone calls to vets, and when one of them agreed to open his clinic for us, two of the men in the group carried the dog, large and unresisting, into a car and drove him there. The men came back with the following report: hospitalization and feeding, care for the dog's infected eyes and an operation on the dog's abscessed hind leg could come to a thousand dollars and even more, although past the thousand-dollar mark, the vet would absorb the cost.
The group put the issue to a debate and then a vote (which was not unanimous) – would we work with the vet to try to save the dog, and divide the cost of his care and feeding among ourselves, or would we choose to euthanize? One of the couples in the group volunteered to act as the dog's foster family until an adoptive family might be found for what might, after all, end up to be a three-legged, one-eyed dog.
I haven't stopped thinking about that dog ever since last weekend and, given that his new name has become the subject line of a growing e-mail thread among us, apparently the others haven't either. At some point this week, I realized that I am falling asleep every night with the image of the dog's handsome head in my mind.
None of us in the group has a lot of money. I for one owe the bank and the grocer and the pharmacist and! and! and! Yet when I marched to the money machine and withdrew my share of the dog's whopping, approximate hospitalization costs, I felt an additional surge of affection for him.
Yesterday, I went to visit the dog, who lay prone in a hospital cage on a clean blanket with his food bowl licked clean and his water bowl licked empty. He raised his heavy head to my fingers, which I could poke about a third of the way through the grating, and let me stroke the top of his head. The crooning started: "Oh, who is a good boy, who is a beautiful boy, who is a loved, loved dog?"
I put my fingertips to his soft muzzle and warm nose, and he licked them, once. His tail didn't have the strength to wag and, I realized, it will probably be a long time before he rediscovers his bark. But the vet says that he is eating seven or eight times a day and that his will to live is huge.
I blurted out to the vet, who is a stranger, about the dog, who is a stranger, "I love the dog!"
Afterwards, I thought about what that might mean. Because while sweet-talking the dog, and despite seeing his skeletal body and the sores distributed on it, by some trick of selective vision, I don't really see them at all. His beauty registers and not what mars it. When I see that dog, or imagine him and wish for his well-being, apparently I access distilled essence of dog, which is wholly beautiful. Which must mean that this dog has something to teach me about the nature of love.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Saturday, November 25, 2006
November 22nd
Although my gut feeling is that the nations in their long histories have accumulated too many memorial days, that is because there have been too many unnatural deaths, and that is because humans are a flawed species and hurt each other.
I have been thinking about this because at some point last Wednesday, I realized that it was November 22nd, which for anyone above a certain age is shorthand for an earthshaking human event. For my generation, it was a formative event.
On that day 43 years ago, the 4th grade girls at my school had spent recess in a secluded corner of the playground rehearsing the role of the Chinese Dolls in the Nutcracker Suite. This had been assigned to us by the school's new music teacher, who had galvanized the children with her ambitions for the winter holiday pageant.
The Chinese Dolls had just received our costumes – embroidered turquoise jackets and black trousers packaged in crackly plastic wrapping that was not to be opened yet, and I was immensely excited by the idea of wearing this costume, and this is what I was thinking about on the morning of November 22, 1963.
We reentered the schoolroom after recess to find our classroom teacher slumped at her desk with her head cradled in the crook of her arm. I remember the part in her hair at the top of her head, but not her hair color or her face or even her name. She lifted her head at our entrance, and her eyes were wet. I had never seen an adult cry before and, in fact, I thought adults couldn't. That when you grew breasts, your tear ducts dried up or something.
This is what I remember of the year 1963: the delicious smell of playground asphalt baking in the sun, the dazzling Chinese pajama costume folded in its plastic wrapping, and JFK's assassination.
When the teacher told us that the President of the United States and Governor of Texas had been shot while riding in an open motorcade in Dallas, I imagined Caroline's father (for at the time, that is how I thought of my country's President) and another man sitting side by side, legs dangling, on the open tailgate of a Ford station wagon (the kind of car my father drove). They were dressed identically in Stetson hats, checked shirts, blue jeans and cowboy boots. The vehicle was jolting, its wheels raising puffs of dust from the desert floor, when suddenly out of nowhere, an Indian galloped up on a pony, whipped out a pistol rather than the expected bow and arrow, shot both men and galloped away.
I didn't know that Texas even had cities or highways, and was incapable of comprehending the teacher's words another way until I had reached home. There, the television set, bought by my parents in order to follow the Cuban Missile Crisis, corrected my understanding.
During my school years, after JFK there was Bobby and then Martin Luther King. At the time of their murders, I mourned these men as the dead fathers of children. When I married, I came to understand them as the dead husbands of wives left alone to fend for themselves and their children. Only much, much later, as I have lived in the world, have I come to understand that everything that is potentially best in people, and everything tender and hopeful that can be made of human society, is jeopardized when little men with cramped imaginations murder visionary leaders.
I have been thinking about this because at some point last Wednesday, I realized that it was November 22nd, which for anyone above a certain age is shorthand for an earthshaking human event. For my generation, it was a formative event.
On that day 43 years ago, the 4th grade girls at my school had spent recess in a secluded corner of the playground rehearsing the role of the Chinese Dolls in the Nutcracker Suite. This had been assigned to us by the school's new music teacher, who had galvanized the children with her ambitions for the winter holiday pageant.
The Chinese Dolls had just received our costumes – embroidered turquoise jackets and black trousers packaged in crackly plastic wrapping that was not to be opened yet, and I was immensely excited by the idea of wearing this costume, and this is what I was thinking about on the morning of November 22, 1963.
We reentered the schoolroom after recess to find our classroom teacher slumped at her desk with her head cradled in the crook of her arm. I remember the part in her hair at the top of her head, but not her hair color or her face or even her name. She lifted her head at our entrance, and her eyes were wet. I had never seen an adult cry before and, in fact, I thought adults couldn't. That when you grew breasts, your tear ducts dried up or something.
This is what I remember of the year 1963: the delicious smell of playground asphalt baking in the sun, the dazzling Chinese pajama costume folded in its plastic wrapping, and JFK's assassination.
When the teacher told us that the President of the United States and Governor of Texas had been shot while riding in an open motorcade in Dallas, I imagined Caroline's father (for at the time, that is how I thought of my country's President) and another man sitting side by side, legs dangling, on the open tailgate of a Ford station wagon (the kind of car my father drove). They were dressed identically in Stetson hats, checked shirts, blue jeans and cowboy boots. The vehicle was jolting, its wheels raising puffs of dust from the desert floor, when suddenly out of nowhere, an Indian galloped up on a pony, whipped out a pistol rather than the expected bow and arrow, shot both men and galloped away.
I didn't know that Texas even had cities or highways, and was incapable of comprehending the teacher's words another way until I had reached home. There, the television set, bought by my parents in order to follow the Cuban Missile Crisis, corrected my understanding.
During my school years, after JFK there was Bobby and then Martin Luther King. At the time of their murders, I mourned these men as the dead fathers of children. When I married, I came to understand them as the dead husbands of wives left alone to fend for themselves and their children. Only much, much later, as I have lived in the world, have I come to understand that everything that is potentially best in people, and everything tender and hopeful that can be made of human society, is jeopardized when little men with cramped imaginations murder visionary leaders.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Green Suede Boots
They are showing women's boots in all the lighted shop windows that I pass on my way home from work. No, that is inaccurate, excuse me. For all my adult life, on winter evenings, lighted display windows with women's boots for sale are the only shop windows that attract my notice.
Some of the pairs of boots in those windows I would like to buy. The high-heeled ones with exaggerated, long, pointy toes suitable for pushing off the ground while astride one's broomstick I would not buy. Ditto for platforms. But the flat-heeled ones with snub toes such as self-confident college girls in my day wore? Mmm. This year, they are also showing boots trimmed with shaggy fake fur. Maybe this is supposed to suggest cave women, and although I can recognize the element of kitsch there, also Mmmm.
Now, look, I don't have a shoe fetish or own, like some notorious dictators' notorious wives, closets full of shoes. I own a pair of sandals, two pair of dirty sneakers, a pair of black pumps, and a pair of comfortable black boots that cost about twelve dollars when I bought them a few years ago, but because they are imitation leather and do not breathe, stink on the inside. I also own a pair of real leather boots of a pearly gray shade embroidered with thick, bronze-colored thread, but these apparently were a bad investment as their stacked heel has proved too high and turns my normally flowing stride into an off-kilter, Tiggerish bounce.
In the past millennium, for fifteen consecutive years, I owned two pair of soft Italian leather boots, one pair the color of dark chocolate and the other pair a creamy caramel hue. I was used to pulling one or the other pair off and tossing them in the corner of the hall as I entered the house and went upstairs (I was mistress of a big house then with an upstairs and a downstairs). I actually liked to see those darling boots carelessly flung in their corner all soft and crumpled and familiar with wear. One day, though, our new puppy ate them. I came downstairs from my nap to find shredded strips of leather beside intact heels and soles, and the beautiful puppy, with her floppy ears and round puppy face, curled up sated and asleep on her blanket. She had thought they were chew toys. And rightly so. It is doggie psychology to think that anything on the floor belongs to the dog. Besides, those boots' matte leather had become so supple and buffed with time and good care that you really could understand how someone would want to eat them.
When I was a little girl, low-heeled, mid-calf boots of radiant white matte leather were the fashion. The leather did not slump when you took them off; those boots could stand up on their own. Go-go boots I believe they were called in the corny lingo of the times, but I am not sure. Love would not be too strong a word for how I felt about the pair I owned. Now, of course, I would only go as far as affection because love is for channeling into children and dogs and women friends and, if one could get past the fear of men's bullying, into men.
Unlike the rest of us, one of our classmates owned a pair of jade-green suede boots. Although they were the same exact style as everyone else's boots, the color and texture made all the difference. I never saw anything like them displayed in the store windows of our neighborhood. It never occurred to me at the time that this girl must have had a remarkable mother with access to a world unlike, and well beyond, the suburbs in order to give her daughter a pair of boots like that.
My classmate wore those boots day in and day out for the entire last two years of primary school, fall and winter and spring, until they had acquired the peculiarly beautiful sheen of slightly soiled suede or buckskin. She was not among my friends and, as I recall, we had no particular reason ever to converse. Nevertheless, I remember that girl's name and face vividly because not a school day of those two years went by when I did not wait for the bell that released us to the playground so that I might secretly admire her green suede boots.
It occurs to me as I write this that in a casual way, I have remained on the lookout for a pair of green suede boots like those owned by my childhood classmate. If ever I were to glimpse on display in a lighted store window boots like hers, I would go in and purchase them. Even if, by then, I am a hundred. Even if I am no longer showing my kneecaps to the world. And when I pull those boots on, even if by then I am a hundred, I will feel beautiful.
Some of the pairs of boots in those windows I would like to buy. The high-heeled ones with exaggerated, long, pointy toes suitable for pushing off the ground while astride one's broomstick I would not buy. Ditto for platforms. But the flat-heeled ones with snub toes such as self-confident college girls in my day wore? Mmm. This year, they are also showing boots trimmed with shaggy fake fur. Maybe this is supposed to suggest cave women, and although I can recognize the element of kitsch there, also Mmmm.
Now, look, I don't have a shoe fetish or own, like some notorious dictators' notorious wives, closets full of shoes. I own a pair of sandals, two pair of dirty sneakers, a pair of black pumps, and a pair of comfortable black boots that cost about twelve dollars when I bought them a few years ago, but because they are imitation leather and do not breathe, stink on the inside. I also own a pair of real leather boots of a pearly gray shade embroidered with thick, bronze-colored thread, but these apparently were a bad investment as their stacked heel has proved too high and turns my normally flowing stride into an off-kilter, Tiggerish bounce.
In the past millennium, for fifteen consecutive years, I owned two pair of soft Italian leather boots, one pair the color of dark chocolate and the other pair a creamy caramel hue. I was used to pulling one or the other pair off and tossing them in the corner of the hall as I entered the house and went upstairs (I was mistress of a big house then with an upstairs and a downstairs). I actually liked to see those darling boots carelessly flung in their corner all soft and crumpled and familiar with wear. One day, though, our new puppy ate them. I came downstairs from my nap to find shredded strips of leather beside intact heels and soles, and the beautiful puppy, with her floppy ears and round puppy face, curled up sated and asleep on her blanket. She had thought they were chew toys. And rightly so. It is doggie psychology to think that anything on the floor belongs to the dog. Besides, those boots' matte leather had become so supple and buffed with time and good care that you really could understand how someone would want to eat them.
When I was a little girl, low-heeled, mid-calf boots of radiant white matte leather were the fashion. The leather did not slump when you took them off; those boots could stand up on their own. Go-go boots I believe they were called in the corny lingo of the times, but I am not sure. Love would not be too strong a word for how I felt about the pair I owned. Now, of course, I would only go as far as affection because love is for channeling into children and dogs and women friends and, if one could get past the fear of men's bullying, into men.
Unlike the rest of us, one of our classmates owned a pair of jade-green suede boots. Although they were the same exact style as everyone else's boots, the color and texture made all the difference. I never saw anything like them displayed in the store windows of our neighborhood. It never occurred to me at the time that this girl must have had a remarkable mother with access to a world unlike, and well beyond, the suburbs in order to give her daughter a pair of boots like that.
My classmate wore those boots day in and day out for the entire last two years of primary school, fall and winter and spring, until they had acquired the peculiarly beautiful sheen of slightly soiled suede or buckskin. She was not among my friends and, as I recall, we had no particular reason ever to converse. Nevertheless, I remember that girl's name and face vividly because not a school day of those two years went by when I did not wait for the bell that released us to the playground so that I might secretly admire her green suede boots.
It occurs to me as I write this that in a casual way, I have remained on the lookout for a pair of green suede boots like those owned by my childhood classmate. If ever I were to glimpse on display in a lighted store window boots like hers, I would go in and purchase them. Even if, by then, I am a hundred. Even if I am no longer showing my kneecaps to the world. And when I pull those boots on, even if by then I am a hundred, I will feel beautiful.
Monday, November 20, 2006
The Fourth Tooth
I have an ideal self and a real self. The ideal self is always calm, always competent and faces life unafraid. The real self has a messy, embarrassing life and easily disintegrates into tears and despair. Or maybe I have a sunlit self and a haunted self.
Today, I lived in the sunlit world and have been able to sustain that feeling into the evening. And that is because I worked in the city. Even the hole in my gum where the tooth had been until last week hurts less, and while I was working, I hardly felt it throbbing.
It is the fourth tooth that I have lost in three years, and I blame it on having been under rocket bombardment followed by having been out of work, just as I blame the first three teeth on divorce. The stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol flood the body under prolonged assault, and the result is physical and spiritual illness and strong teeth that rot.
The first time this happened was in the midst of my virtuously flossing, no less. A piece of tooth broke away as if it were a bit of cliff shearing under the forces of natural erosion. This happened the morning of a court hearing, which I attended with a jagged half tooth in my mouth that the tip of my tongue kept stealthily touching. I carried the shard to the courthouse in my wallet, and later that day to the dentist in my hand.
And now, a fourth tooth has gone. It began stabbing me in the jawbone two Friday nights ago and within forty-eight hours, the dentist pulled it -- a well-shaped, apparently otherwise strong molar whose twisted, bloodied and decaying root the dentist seemed to take satisfaction in having me take a good look at as the tooth lay on white, absorbent paper upon his metal tray.
But I was talking about my own work. Waiting for the bus this morning, I saw my neighbor's copper-colored hound leaping on her over and over again in joy at the start of their walk. Then, as I rode the bus toward the city, the winter sun shone through the window and warmed the back of my neck and shoulders. I took the joyful, leaping dog and solicitous sun as good omens.
It is good to have a workplace to go to and come home from, to remember what it is to be competent, and to imagine that maybe I am or can be of some social use. Riding home on the bus and walking home from the bus stop tonight, I savored my exhaustion as if it were a particularly satisfying meal that I had eaten slowly.
I resisted stopping for hot chocolate at the coffee house on the way home because I knew my dog was waiting for me. I walked her in silent companionship, too tired to coax or give praise. Her nails rhythmically tapped the asphalt and cobbles and her shoulder blades worked under her fur as she trotted.
Today, I lived in the sunlit world and have been able to sustain that feeling into the evening. And that is because I worked in the city. Even the hole in my gum where the tooth had been until last week hurts less, and while I was working, I hardly felt it throbbing.
It is the fourth tooth that I have lost in three years, and I blame it on having been under rocket bombardment followed by having been out of work, just as I blame the first three teeth on divorce. The stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol flood the body under prolonged assault, and the result is physical and spiritual illness and strong teeth that rot.
The first time this happened was in the midst of my virtuously flossing, no less. A piece of tooth broke away as if it were a bit of cliff shearing under the forces of natural erosion. This happened the morning of a court hearing, which I attended with a jagged half tooth in my mouth that the tip of my tongue kept stealthily touching. I carried the shard to the courthouse in my wallet, and later that day to the dentist in my hand.
And now, a fourth tooth has gone. It began stabbing me in the jawbone two Friday nights ago and within forty-eight hours, the dentist pulled it -- a well-shaped, apparently otherwise strong molar whose twisted, bloodied and decaying root the dentist seemed to take satisfaction in having me take a good look at as the tooth lay on white, absorbent paper upon his metal tray.
But I was talking about my own work. Waiting for the bus this morning, I saw my neighbor's copper-colored hound leaping on her over and over again in joy at the start of their walk. Then, as I rode the bus toward the city, the winter sun shone through the window and warmed the back of my neck and shoulders. I took the joyful, leaping dog and solicitous sun as good omens.
It is good to have a workplace to go to and come home from, to remember what it is to be competent, and to imagine that maybe I am or can be of some social use. Riding home on the bus and walking home from the bus stop tonight, I savored my exhaustion as if it were a particularly satisfying meal that I had eaten slowly.
I resisted stopping for hot chocolate at the coffee house on the way home because I knew my dog was waiting for me. I walked her in silent companionship, too tired to coax or give praise. Her nails rhythmically tapped the asphalt and cobbles and her shoulder blades worked under her fur as she trotted.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Introduction
INTRODUCTION
I am starting this blog because I am physically and spiritually ill. Years of abuse, powerlessness, social invisibility and voicelessness have brought me to this place. The fact of having been serially hurt cannot be changed; apparently, I can do nothing or little about my individual social marginality; but I wish to be, at least, no longer voiceless.
I know too much about realities of which I wish I knew nothing. To live in this manner is to live unprotected and exposed to further injury. I will write about what I know because I wish, if possible, to heal myself and stay alive.
In these pages, through the great democratic instrument of the Internet, I intend to tell what I know about domestic and legal abuse; the loss of home and savings; unemployment and slim earnings and hunger; depression and addiction to painkillers; war.
I will tell also about saving acts of friendship, oases of spiritual rest, manifestations of ordinary beauty -- discoveries and surprises that I might not have been awake to if not for the pain.
I write as an aging woman and a civilian. The rest you will discover later, and presumably I, too, will discover much.
I am starting this blog because I am physically and spiritually ill. Years of abuse, powerlessness, social invisibility and voicelessness have brought me to this place. The fact of having been serially hurt cannot be changed; apparently, I can do nothing or little about my individual social marginality; but I wish to be, at least, no longer voiceless.
I know too much about realities of which I wish I knew nothing. To live in this manner is to live unprotected and exposed to further injury. I will write about what I know because I wish, if possible, to heal myself and stay alive.
In these pages, through the great democratic instrument of the Internet, I intend to tell what I know about domestic and legal abuse; the loss of home and savings; unemployment and slim earnings and hunger; depression and addiction to painkillers; war.
I will tell also about saving acts of friendship, oases of spiritual rest, manifestations of ordinary beauty -- discoveries and surprises that I might not have been awake to if not for the pain.
I write as an aging woman and a civilian. The rest you will discover later, and presumably I, too, will discover much.
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