Manifesting

Observe: the dog. It is T-minus fifteen and counting. (Dinnertime.) She moves closer to the launching pad, i.e., refrigerator. She plasters herself in a down to the kitchen rug, and if she were any more flat she would be made out of cotton rag. She has put her chin down, too. And stares, quietly intent (the only time this particular dog ever is quiet; did I mention she's a screamer?).

I think she believes--and what, really, is a dog's "belief system"? interesting question, though I think it's essentially the same as ours, without the incense and robes--that putting her head on the ground and piercing me with her eyes actually makes the food come into existence.

This is the legacy of, get this, one five-minute training episode that occurred two years ago. It was at ClickerExpo in Cleveland, and we were sitting in the lobby of the Hyatt, which with its carefully anonymous furnishings (analogous to the politician's speech in election year) you couldn't tell from any other of a thousand Hyatts, or Radissons, or the rapidly proliferating spawn of a half-dozen other chains.

Ou sont les Quality Courts d'antan?

The only thing to differentiate this hotel was the fact that nearly everybody walking through it was attached by leash to a dog. This is a splendid thing, by the way. A couple hundred hounds taking elevators, waiting for room service, peeing on the bushes outside--ah, life as it should be. To have a dog here marked you as an insider, and it made me cozy in exactly the same way as riding a motorcycle into the arms of a rally did: you could instantly see who was inside the cordon and who was not. (Helmet, yes; no helmet, no.) We are a species--very much like the dog--to whom belonging is so needed it marks us in every way, inside and out: a primitive song sung by our cells, and evident in the way we are absolutely driven to pair, and to form our packs.

This night in Cleveland, I was blissful in the sense of belonging. I was one of this little multitude who believed that you did not need to coerce or intimidate your dog, bruise his trachea while pretending it wasn't happening, shock or yell or deride or "show who's boss." (Who is boss?) We were suffused with the sense that it really was possible to change the world, with only a clicker and a bag full of dog treats.

It is an ethical decision, and a practical one. The obviously happy dogs all around us were proof of both. (And, see, if it can yield happy, smart dogs, why not happy, smart children? And happy, smart citizens? Oh, B.F. Skinner, you gave us the means, but our imaginations have failed us.) Many of these dogs were "difficult"--abused, unsocialized, shy, fear biters. Their people had been driven, through love, to find a way to work with them that worked, because otherwise they would be dead. The way was positive reinforcement.

So that night we sat in faux petit-point-embroidered wing chairs in the Hyatt lobby. Nelly looked perky--her specialty--and said, Well, what the heck are we doing here, anyway? And Jolanta, gripped with training fever (for it can be a sort of intoxicant, reinforcing the trainer as it reinforces the learner), started free-shaping with Nelly.

I really wasn't one of them, the brilliant trainers here: my timing was terrible, for one thing. Jolanta's is great, and as they say, timing is everything. The clicks were coming rapid-fire, and Nelly's attempts to get them even faster were rapid-fire, too. (She's a quick dog.) When Jolanta started to see a little pattern--Nelly was trying to figure out if the act of dipping her chin to the floor is what was making those beef tidbits fall from the sky--she withheld clicks for any other movements but those toward this. And in a minute, Nelly was putting her head down on the marble, reliably, again and again. Eureka. This is what they want, she thought. And she was right.

Now, every night, as I am a typical slow human, and taking so, so long to get the dinner bowl ready, Nelly figures she needs to do something to get that food already. Well, it worked before. Down goes her head. I am still not as quick as Jolanta. But eventually dinner materializes. And Nelly, in her infinite wisdom, knows she had something to do with it.

Co-existence

If we didn't have the beach, the last place in America where people do not primarily function as ports for their electronic equipment, the publishing industry might be dead. But here, at Coast Guard Beach at the Cape Cod National Seashore, all around me, people are reading. Maybe they're foreigners? No, they're reading books in English--classics, trade paperbacks, hardcovers, nonfiction and mysteries, YA and magazines. The rest of the people stare off at boats slipping along the horizon, or eat sandwiches, or fly kites, or play Kadima, or sleep. Even more varied than their occupations are their bodies. Infinite are the ways in which we sag, bulge, ripple, mottle, swell, discolor, bend. To the gulls who patrol alertly for those sandwiches, stepping among the beach towels, eyes darting this way and that, or glide sideways through the air to stop, unflapping and unblinking, on a current three feet above your head (watch out), we look all the same. We too don't see their infinite variations, in the size and placement of that red spot on the beak, the width of tail feathers, a million other aspects of differentiation that make one gull go, Ooh-la-la! and other say, Wow--weird!

We are in the human world here, nature but a preserved strand along a central corridor of purveyors of fried fish (that's what we think of nature: Good, but better with tartar sauce), t-shirts and boogie boards, "art" work, and, yes, books. (But more ice cream than books, by a ratio of six to one.) Don't get me wrong--I love it. We're having fun. Yet I wish it weren't quite so relentlessly human--Cape Cod as all the proof you need that overpopulation will kill us. And I wish I didn't have to leave Nelly behind, due to vacationland's human bent, though she is having the equivalent of a resort vacation herself with "Aunt" Janet and her beau Willy. She is also very probably eating more ice cream than I am.

But I am filled with longing. For the depopulated beaches of the past. To re-unite these halves of my life. To not always feel such longing.

At least it reminds me that I am alive, and that I have been. I watch my son in the surf--he declares it the best fun he's ever had, to be smashed face-first down onto the pebbles of the seabed--and know he is laying the groundwork for his own future longing.

But, I hope, no other kinds of irredeemable pain. Yet I fear it is so, especially after reading a book I found in the beach house we rented, which was clearly put there expressly for me. To make me feel almost overwhelming despair. (What bad angel wanted that?) It is about the largest study ever done on post-divorce families. And it is called Second Chances, only because it's clear the publisher told the author, "I know--but no one will buy it if we title it It All Sucks!"

The gist of it is, If you care about your children, move heaven and earth to avoid breaking up their world. (We like to repeat common wisdoms, such as "An unhappy marriage is bad for children," but the psychologists found, except in a few extreme cases, that divorce was always worse.) The news does suck hugely for these poor kids: far higher rates of depression, low self-esteem, suicide, delinquency, alcoholism, and lower educational attainment than their parents. (The psychologists could explain almost everything else, but never understood why almost all of the men in the study, no matter how supportive or involved in their children's lives until then, basically stopped giving a shit when their offspring turned eighteen. College became a daunting and debilitating struggle for a great number of the kids, and not one father cared, even the wealthy. My theory--because you knew I had to have one--is biologically, not behaviorally, based: At eighteen, your child becomes your competition. Overall, this study makes naked so much that is obviously biological, no matter how much we try to retroactively dress it in rationalizing costume.)

The news, according to the study, sucks for me too, but I can assure you I really don't care, not in the face of what my child will be going through. I'm also perverse enough that, when told I now belong to a 98 percent group of anything, to do anything to snub that membership and get myself into the 2 percent camp instead. Conventionality is a bore.

Nonetheless, I wept about what I'd learned from this book, until a friend I was sitting with on the beach told me gently it was not something for me to read now; it was maybe something couples contemplating divorce should read, but not much you could do after.

Ah, yes, so. Regrets. I obviously missed the sign they posted over the Bourne Bridge: Intact Families Only Beyond This Point. From every corner I hear, "Now, wait here for Daddy"; "Mommy's gone to get the towels." This was my past, too. Now I am different. But aren't we all? Just look around you here, on this bright beach.

Gratitudes IV

It's time once again to feel grateful. This is something that sometimes occurs to me spontaneously: an almost electrical sensation, energetic and soothing at once, and I ask myself, What was that? Just as quickly the answer, almost bemused, occurs: Why, that's happiness you're feeling!

More often, though, the totting-up must be conscious.

Talking to my mother on the phone recently, I heard myself exclaim, "Do you realize how damn lucky I am, Mother? My life is so incredibly good, with work that I love, more than enough food to eat, a child I am so proud of I could burst, and a dog whose sweet face I want to kiss. Plus, I live in a place that is so beautiful--that they haven't managed to totally wreck yet, if at all--that sometimes it makes me breathless and I stop the car and stare. How lucky can one person be?" She was quiet for a minute. "My, you have learned a lot recently."

This exercise, while of great psychic value to all, also makes for the perfect post before vacation, when your mind is taken up with packing lists and traffic fears so that it couldn't really come up with anything else cogent; sort of E*Z Blog (TM). And it may have to hold till the car is unpacked, too, sometime next week.

I am so happy . . .

* That I didn't have to be the copyeditor on The Chicago Manual of Style.

* Thelonious Monk's middle name was "Sphere"

* The woods right now are filled with baby spotted salamanders

* For the smell of deep-fried food in the air on a particularly hot August day

* That a friend brought and left at my house this especially tasty Grenache Shiraz

* That someone has considerately thought to station blackberry canes along the trail's edge, so that you may refresh yourself during the more arduous parts of your hike

* For peanut butter and jelly (but not just any PBJ: wild blueberry jam--oh, all right, ginger marmalade works too; soft multigrain bread, sorta like Wonder Bread you can feel good about; and chunky natural): the food of the gods

* That at the time we chanced to stop, the soft custard flavor of the day at the Jolly Cow was banana

* That I have a dog who still, and very cutely, chases butterflies. A goddamn living postcard. And a dog who has not gone AWOL on a hike in a very long time (though the collection of small burrs in a long coat has been record-setting of late, perhaps in offset)

* That I have finally learned my lesson: You don't buy your tin foil at the dollar store. (Nor do you get your matches there, either. Just a word to the wise)

* That I can still afford to drive to Mohonk for a hike, and revel in the Million Dollar View, an ohboy sight if there ever was one--but which a European tourist might now pick up for the equivalent of about ten grand

* For the joy on a young boy's face on going to the fair: $75, but priceless, as they say

The Same Path Twice

I dreamed about Kurt Cobain. This was a while ago. I should not perhaps admit that I wrote a poem about this dream; it was vibrant to me, one of those you don't shake it was that physical and strange. This puts me in number of most females in the western world, of course. (But I'm different, I whine.) But it wasn't what you think. We were trying to communicate; we had things to say, but we were caught on separate floors of some echoing ruin on the edge of something devastated.

He came back into my mind today, so I played the great Nevermind again. And was struck again, forcefully (um, Nirvana was never exactly quiet, though it was subtle), by its genius. "Grunge rock" did not begin to capture anything central about this group; somehow, though, "human condition rock" does not quite cut it. But funny to think how this man--now dead, a suicide and a terrible cosmic mistake--captured so much that is scarily essential: how rage is the only appropriate response, and how clean it can be, paradoxically, when expressed head-on. And how almost achingly sentimental. The driving insistence of the tempo and the beat, the yelling of the guitar, combine with humor about sadness, and it all equals pretty much anything the best poets have been able to say about how sucky life is, how much it hurts to be with others, and our beautiful helplessness in the face of it. If music can be compared to water (and it can), Nirvana was the cenote of rock: clear, profound, and bracing.

("What the hell am I trying to say?")

He said everything about the impossibility of living. And since he was so allied with what he made, there he went. He couldn't do it the denial/suppression way, like the rest of us. That spared him coming to this mid-life point, where all around you people's lives start imploding: friendships, marriages, how much drink can be stood, mental equilibrium, all blown sky-high and falling to earth in bits, because people can't hold it together anymore with the chewing gum and twine they'd been using for the first fifty years--not when mortality starts pushing on the whole fragile construction, too. I can't tell you how much emotional destruction is going on now around me.

Why is it that I see something new on the path after I've turned around on it, now coming home? I missed that piece of fluorescent pink surveyor's tape lying in the middle of the road through the woods, but how? I missed the bright red cardinal flower--impossible--on the rail trail. Why did I not see that joe pye weed over there, magisterial as it is, the first time? Of course, that unearthly orange fungus wasn't there on the way out. Just in the past five minutes. (It's been raining a lot.)

Is it a metaphor for what we do in life? Or is it just that I'm a witless person, inclined to visual stupidity?

Probably. Then again, to a horse, say, it is a completely new path: the evil-bad mailbox has jumped to the other side and crouches, cunning, malevolent. Better run! Just like you did from that other scary mailbox a mile ago!

Maybe to us too it is actually a completely different path after all. It's different even when it is the same. Kurt missed something he was telling the rest of us. But the ironies had too sharp an edge. It's never the same path twice, but he didn't give himself the chance to turn around and see what it looked like on the way back.

Lucky

Nelly is finished with her dinner. She comes out to stand on the deck as I sit, trying to find the part in the Times Magazine piece from a few weeks ago about how we are now doing to our pets what we've done to ourselves (and our children as well, for shame): give the pharmaceutical companies a grand new sendoff toward world domination by refusing to deal with the situational causes of our pathologies. Which is as much as to say "deny us a chance to live honest lives" by medicating the chemical byproducts of them. No chance (or opportunity) to address the cause.

At least the article gave Dr. Ian Dunbar a chance to speak, and he acquitted himself well. (He might not be as thoroughly behaviorist as one might like, but his "Sirius Puppy Training" has saved a whole mess of dogs from the gas chamber, I'll wager: and I feel tenderly toward him as I do toward everything associated with the tender years of our tender Mercy: a friend, lucky us, gave us Dunbar's video and it was the first exposure to training that us woebegotten, ignorant new dog owners got. Lucky Mercy.) In the article, his was the voice of reason and truth: Drugs are unnecessary, he said, "if you know some of the simplest things about dog training." And those things are? The basis of positive reinforcement: "Ignore unwanted behaviors and reward desired ones."

It's simple. It's Occam's razor, in training terms. And instead of being prevalent, it is ridiculously hard to find trainers who practice it. Instead, we put into play essential cruelty, a form of denial, our favorite mode of living when it comes to ourselves, too. (You know what, moms? I suddenly realize I've had it with the "time out" punishment for kids, too. I think it's a way of smacking your child without the physical contact that would make you look bad, but it performs the same function as a beating: it's mainly a steam valve for a parent who can't control her anger, and results in confused, hurt, resentful children who learn nothing from the experience except that they can be pushed around by people who are bigger than they but who excuse it with the words "It's for your own good." Thus begins a spiral of hidden truth, projection, and fractured reality that will, guaranteed, be passed to the next generation in turn.)

The other morning I watched my neighbor walking his new standard poodle puppy. On a choke chain. The dog, naturally, alerted at the sight of Nelly. But his owner didn't want that, for some reason. He wanted him to sit. How do you make that happen? Why, choke the dog, obviously. Yank. Yank. Yank harder. The dog's expression was full of incomprehension. He had no idea what he was being asked--because he had not yet been taught, no matter that his owner thought he had--and his brain was sloshing in his skull with every jerk. Finally his owner reached over and pushed his hind end to the ground. What did he teach his dog? Not much. Except a few things he would be surprised to know he had.

But give him a reward for sitting? Never! It's immoral!

Nelly stands next to me, her white front paws stained pink by the blood of her beef chuck neckbone. (I am sorry, dear cow.) At least she wears her violence honestly, on the surface.

Yesterday she used up another of the karmic lives she's been granted: how many have there been, now? Let me get out the calculator.

As usual, I put too many things on the docket, hence I was stressed and rushing, late, to all of them. After the car inspection, and the wine store, there was a walk in Woodstock. Already twenty minutes late, and so rude to make my friends wait. The light on Ulster Avenue--oh, what a bore. Please change. We roll to a halt behind a line of cars on the four-lane street. The first lucky thing is that we have to make a right turn, placing us next to the curb. Just chance. Because when the thunder boomed--all so fast--I see a streak of white from the corner of my eye, and I know without having to look. Nelly has squeezed herself out of four inches of open window and is now racing toward the front steps of the house we're stopped in front of. That was the second lucky thing: a house. With a driveway. And the traffic starting to inch forward. The light had changed. Permitting me to pull in the drive; a few minutes later, I was able to think, "How strange, Melissa. You actually put the car in park, and turned off the engine." I had no recollection of it. Because everything was moving faster than the storm that was stirring in the sky, apocalyptic, black and full of bursting fury. That's when Nelly suddenly turned and started racing, full out run, now toward the street. With its four lanes of thick and fast-flowing, unheeding hunks of metal. I opened the door and screamed her name. I screamed. When I heard the sound, I was confused: Where had that come from? The sound of pure, panicked fear.

Then she turned. Ran toward me now. "Get in your car!" I say with happy voice, as I have, thank my lucky stars (and they are: I was born under lucky skies indeed) a hundred times before. Each time, paired with a treat. And that's what saved Nelly's life yesterday. Chicken jerky.

I believe everything happens for a good reason. Or else you postdate a reason in order to explain what's happened: well, hey, that's a good reason, too. Even though I also believe there is nothing in the universe that could postulate a reason. This is a conundrum I'll never solve, and don't want to. Beautiful mysteries.

Is it unlucky to speak of how lucky you feel? Then, uh-oh.

This morning, on a leash-walk along the road here, I saw something glittering in the ditch among the Queen Anne's lace and cornflowers. It was a mouth-blown pot pipe, a spiral of hallucinogenic colors. Someone else's bad luck--Ditch the pipe, quick!--became my good luck. I took this as a sign, as I take everything these days. But what was it telling me? What did the universe have to say about my condition with this chance find?

Get high. And pass the luck around. It's the only thing for the madness. That's my story, anyway.

Downward Dog

High mid-summer; high church. Cicadas the choir, a synaesthesia of the sensation of heat melded with the look of white sun and the sound of buzzing. Together, and forever, they have meant "summer." When I was a child, I wanted to lay eyes on the source of this noise, but I never succeeded in finding them. So I decided that it was simply the sound the summer day made.

I can be back in Ohio, lying on the grass of the lawn, staring up at the slowly moving sky--the sudden erasure of an intervening lifetime--at the sound now of cicadas, starting up, crescendoing, chk-chk-chking to a close.

Right now, the most vibrant thing about the present is the past.

For some reason, as I sit on this bed in Ulster County in a late-July 2008 room, memory is pulling at me, practically gnawing my flesh. An ache of nostalgia has descended on me, and I don't know why, and I can't stop it, any more than I could stop a broken bone from hurting. In a way, the grip of memory is a broken bone in the body--you are imprinted physically by the past, knocked heavily into by the years.

Today, I ache for New York City. I am on a street, the Lower East Side, and I see a certain cast of light. Pictures are coming to me, and I don't know if I lived them, or I'm viewing them from collective memory, just as powerful; I don't know if they're specific (I was there: March 19, 1983), or if they're an amalgam, like pressed leaves, of all the days and months I spent wandering there. Lafayette Street in a late dusk, streetlights to the vanishing point. The ancient gray wooden floor of a shop in Chinatown.

These memories, coming unbidden, are almost a sickness that has come over me. But why? Why is a whole slide show of this meaning-laden place forcing itself on my inner eye, without telling me why it has chosen now to press on my chest with such insistence?

Have you ever had memories so old you cannot place them come back to life, so they are before you, both young and old in the same instant?

The first yoga class I ever went to, maybe ten years ago now, I used to go with a neighbor whom I didn't know very well. Yet it was immediately apparent that she carried a heavy weight of sadness wherever she went. After a while, she stopped going to the class. I saw her on the road one day and asked her why. "I don't know what it is," she said, "but at some point in every class, I'm suddenly taken with the urge to cry, and it hurts too much."

I know what she means. In some mysterious way, yoga knocks something away from you, some armature that's holding up a careful construction. Bang, the supporting pillar goes, and suddenly you feel pure grief wash over you. Is there a hidden spring of it always inside, always bubbling up from underground? Sometimes, doing yoga, a little clot of memory is knocked loose, and you just can't stop thinking about one thing.

For the past couple of years, I can be doing a spinal twist and the next thing I know, I am washing in an image of the Diamond Grille, West Market Street, downtown Akron. I see its blonde wood interior, the booths, the warm circle of its glowing lights. It's a marvelous place, unchanged since the forties, very conducive to memory-dream.

The funny thing is that I never went there very much, and never as a child. Only a couple of times, fairly late in life.

To a Skinnerian, yoga class was accidentally connected to an idle thought I had there once--hmmm, maybe we should make a date to go to the Diamond Grille when we go back to Ohio on our next visit--and now it's a conditioned response to being in yoga class. A well-rehearsed one.

But maybe there's something more than just that. (Yes, I think Skinner was one hundred percent right; but Freud was about eighty percent right, and both can fit into the same world of experience.) Yesterday, my therapist and I were discussing various schools of thought. I want to know how and why--though certain of my friends are clearly disapproving of this quest. They think it mires me in the past; I think it is the way out of it.

So I persist. A book the shrink recommends, for some nuggets of interesting information, is I'm OK--You're OK. Well, if you say so. (Wasn't this pop balderdash? Perhaps so, but I'm now less inclined to dismiss everything on the basis of appearances.)

Chances are the library wouldn't have this old and disparaged book on its shelves anymore, so I'd probably have to get it from interlibrary loan. I open the door to the library's foyer. And my eye falls on a large stack of books that have just been placed in the giveaway bin. On the top book. I'm OK--You're OK.

What does this mean? That the universe wanted to me to learn about Transactional Analysis? Or that there are just too many damn copies floating around of a former bestseller that no one wants anymore?

In it was part of the answer I'd been seeking. Everything we experience is stored inside, printed on us because we are made of such light-sensitive emulsions. All there, laid down in order. Some unprocessed, from the time when we were unable to do anything but take in events, feel what they made us feel.

Now I just have to figure out why New York City, why now, in midsummer. Why the summer cicadas of this fateful time, a one-year anniversary, are calling forth these memories of a time that was filled with hope and expectation and sensation. And longing. Deep, aching longing for something I did not have. The desire combined with the sights of a beautiful city that itself expresses hope and longing in every vista down every street. Downtown New York. Why haunt me, you city, you ghost?

Good vs. Evil

I am glad I have the dog I do. But sometimes I look at other people's placid labs and shepherds, plodding along next to them as if that human were the only interesting thing on earth, or lying quietly in another room during dinner, and I go, Damn!

I've ended up with a flying monkey out of Wizard of Oz. She is one place one second, an entirely different (and unpredictable) one the next. She launches herself out of the house into cars, out of cars into parking lots, out of windows into whatever is on the other side, and onto picnic tables and you know why. Other people shake their heads at me: This person does not know what she's doing.

May I get a small dispensation for having a "difficult dog"? This would be the kind Kim the Trainer (I'll be back soon, Kim, I hope . . . Phase II of life is to begin soon!) calls "the dog you need." It's mysterious, indeed. Did I need this difficulty? Apparently so, apparently so. You're supposed to think about it for a while, deeply, and then you'll uncover the reason.

Jolanta tells the story of how, when she got her first dog, the incomparable Izzy, she congratulated herself on being an incredibly good trainer: Izzy was so well-mannered! Then Jolanta ended up with Juni, too, and that's when she realized (as she will tell you) she knew absolutely nothing about dog training. Izzy was just one of those easy dogs that make you look good. But Juni burst that smug bubble in a hurry. Jolanta had to educate herself, or else. Now she has a second career as a trainer and behaviorist--as well as accomplished proselytizer for the Way of Kindness: positive reinforcement training. I guess that's why she got Juni.

I'm still puzzling over why I needed Nelly.

Put this under heading of "Nuff Said." After our rail trail walk yesterday, Janet was kind enough to chauffeur Nelly home so I could switch gears and go wrangle children instead of dogs. Nelly jumped right into Janet's car--as why shouldn't she? It's the Dogmobile, with comfy pillows and always a jug of cool, refreshing water. At the end of the trip, at Janet's house, there is often a plate of fresh-cooked chicken livers. This, my friends, is the canine Ritz.

Then Nelly saw I was getting into the other car. She stood up on the arm rest and pressed her distraught face against the glass. Nelly is one of us "I want my cake and eat it too!" kind of beings. I realized that if the window had been open just another inch or two, Nelly would have clambered up somehow, lit the fuse, and shot out in one detonating second. I remembered to later e-mail Janet about the need for caution when transporting the Devil Dog.

Me: >She can squeeze herself, like a mouse, through
incredibly small openings.< Janet: Charles Manson was good at that, also.

Do you know now why I love her so? Not Nelly--I mean Janet. A friend with Saharan wit is a joy indeed.

(Plus, in addition to treating Nelly with kindness and understanding, and having seen me through the worst year of my life, she saves the New York Times for me so I don't have to pay for it. It doesn't matter that I get it a few days late--I'm lucky if I can find the time to read the paper two weeks later. It's all fresh news to me!)

Remember how I mentioned my friends remarking on a vague whiff of good karma they felt was emanating from my new house? Tell me what you make of this, then. The Verizon technician who came to attempt to give me telephone service in that frustrating first week without a phone told me that many years ago, she used to come riding here when they had horses. (My unpacked boxes sit waiting in the unused barn now; I seem to specialize in living on former horse farms, alas.) She told me, yeah, they used to take in farm animals, too, in the winters from a sort of zoo in the city. And apparently did to them what people usually do to farm animals. "You know what your house was?" she asked. "It was the smokehouse."

A thirty-year vegetarian, living in a former smokehouse. Is that karma? Maybe. And, maybe, it's just inexplicable. Woo-woo.

Reading Light

I sit in bed, at night, reading. I should be working. But self-doubt pulls at me. I pick up a friend's book, a memoir about having written a memoir. (Is this the start of a new genre?) I am pulled in. I know the players, the places. I know her. I know her voice. In fact, I long to hear her kind and generous voice, in real life, at this hour, because I am pulled by self-doubt. It's stretching my skin. I know, because a sick sensation in my gut is telling me that nothing I do will ever amount to much.

Or maybe the problem is that I will never allow myself to feel that it's enough. --My mind, you see, is currently saturated with a rereading of Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, her chilling anatomy of the wages of narcissism.

I first read this book almost twenty years ago. The only thing from it that stuck with me was the unbearably painful description of two adults enjoying ice cream bars in the face of their toddler, who wanted one of his own so badly--and they laughed. "But he's only a child" is the way Miller describes the unempathic grown-up's dismissal of a child's distress. Yes, he's only a child. But ignore his necessarily narcissistic needs, and you are custom-building your very own narcissist, who will grow up and be unable to see or fulfill his own child's needs, because the loss of his must go unmourned, so painful are they. And the cycle begins anew. Is there anything more depressing?The gruesomeness of that image--two big people, standing like a wall in front of a child's anguish--stayed with me, a burn on the skin. It was like the equally unforgettable image of the dog who submits (because he must) to a beating, then licks the hand of his tormentor (because he must). He says thereby: Please don't hurt me. Later, the hateful person returns, and is greeted with a wagging tail.

I want to puke.

Instead, I return to my friend's book, saving Alice Miller for later--I can only digest so much of it at once, since it is ringing bells, causing flashbacks. I can't stop reading, even if the summer childcare schedule has caused serious sleep-deprivation. I can't stop reading, even if the 500-page biography of Shakespeare's mind (yes, people: his mind. The man himself has been done, so many times before) is calling out for my red pencil. We have hidden several typos in these pages. Can you find them all?

I try to tear myself away, only to pick up a magazine--I am a master procrastinator. In an article I come across a reference to something Schopenhauer once wrote, and suddenly I realize it's something that Karen Pryor, grande dame of clicker training, has absconded with and called her own. I remember sitting in a large conference room in a Cleveland hotel, Nelly whining at my feet (she had become afraid of the sound of people clapping), fervently writing in my notebook "her" brilliant quote about the progress of all radically new ideas: from ridicule and hatred, finally to acceptance that even goes so far as to claim ownership. (Maybe Pryor took it literally.) I had been looking for, and here found, an explanation for the bizarre vituperativeness of those who felt threatened by the scientific--and, let's face it, moral--idea that inflicting pain on animals is not necessary to training them. Once this has been proved, as it has, why would you not only countenance the use of fear and aversion in your teaching, but attack those who have shown it to be the wrong choice?

This reminded me that I have to stop reading others and get back to writing my own book, which will seek to answer this question (though I suspect I won't, and will merely repeat the question several different ways).

And then a moth lights on the edge of the page. His wings stop beating, so I can look closely at him. He is a dozen shades of gray, from gleam to pewter. The edges of his wings are ragged; I can see the very warp and woof of him. Then he exerts his great energies once more, beating, throwing himself against all objects. Will I ever have such passion again myself? Or must I now be consigned only to tiredness, and self-doubt?

I should throw myself against all objects.

Sisyphus in the Augean Stables

I live in a powderpuff heaven, fragranced by milkweed. It is entirely just, isn't it, that these flowers are not to be possessed by the likes of us: you imagine a fulsome bouquet in your favorite vase, these pink explosions perfuming every molecule within your house, but they won't comply. They don't want to be cut, so they tell you by immediately keeling over. They are wild and wish to stay that way. Also alive.

But that's all right by me, because they fill, even more fulsomely, the field behind my new party cabana (aka bizarre car shed appended to this funny little house which has so quickly felt like home--and also irksome in its minor details: the stove timer that doesn't work; no phone jack in the office, or indeed anywhere downstairs but one place; no woodstove, oh ache in the heart; the shower's downstairs, so my hairbrush is always upstairs and the towel down or vice versa). What I don't like is minor. What I do is major. That I do is major.

Relief--so sweet. After a long, long time of pushing a wheelbarrow full of manure up a steep hill, only to have it roll back to ever more crap to shovel in at the bottom.

I am about to start work again. (I think: I shouldn't say I definitely am, of course, in order to ward off the Great Jinx in the Sky who waits for us to pronounce on our future good luck, and then, as soon as the words leave your lips, swoops down to snatch much-awaited fortune from your grasp. Just because you spoke of it.) That's because I have what appears to be some bad luck but is actually a paradoxical gift--my life specializes in these suddenly--of having to watch children two days a week at the park. The summer schedule is a killer. Not for the kids, but for the moms (especially the single ones) who have to watch their offspring after the three-hour-long camp is over. Ever wonder how long an afternoon can be? But I set up my camp chair, open a can of Diet Dr. Pepper (come on, we all have dirty little secrets best left unveiled), and write. Below me, the children jump off the dock into the water in an endless loop; I glance up from my notebook occasionally to re-enter the past, the dreamy summer days of merging with water, of moving through and in and out and hitting down, wanting never to stop, in a seemingly half-conscious state.

I write this, for example. Last week was the first time I composed directly into the computer, and it showed, and I'll never do that again, and I'm sorry.

I have other things I need to write, am compelled to write, and I hope and trust it won't feel anything like pushing an excrement-laden cart up a hill.

The summer schedule has made me even more efficient with my time, though frankly I thought I was already pushing the envelope there.* I put Nelly, my child, his lunch, and swimming detritus in the car, drop him off at day camp, hit a different portion of the rail trail for a half-hour so Nelly will be set at least until I get home after child-minding duties**, and then I'm able to do as much in two hours at the computer, telephone, sink, and washing machine as anyone can. In the evening, after dinner, we all three take to the woods out back for a postprandial walk, with the added bonus, right now, of wild blueberries.

Memories of cannonballs splashed in another life. The sweet taste of a berry stolen from a bear. Perfume in the night air. My child, with me but also over there, far, in his own world of water. Nelly asleep and dreaming at the top of the stairs. Freedom and the feeling of happiness floating by.


*I think I'll have t-shirts made that bear the legend "Mothers are people who think of everything." On the back it'll say, "Because they have to."

**Thank goodness dogs experience a similar lassitude in the heat; they prefer their walks in the cool of the morning or evening, and spend the rest of the day panting on their sides on a cool wood floor in a breezy hallway. So you don't have to feel guilty about not taking them on grand hikes.

Days of Independence

They were right. My friends were right. It does feel a little like freedom, standing now on the other side of this long bridge. When I was in the middle, it started swaying over the black chasm, and the slats underfoot creaked; some dropped down into space and it was so far down I couldn't hear them hit bottom. I was on the phone to my mother the night before the move, when I was in no way ready, either in detail or essence, for the truck to arrive. I sobbed, "I can't do it. And I don't want to. Mother, I don't want to go on." And I meant it. I have never wanted so badly to go into that good black oblivion. And the next morning, after three hours of sleep, I spent twelve straight hours doing what had to be done. Move. Into the future.

Then started the unpacking. I am so eager to begin again--and to get back to work, after so much time lost I could get lost in the weeping for it--I gave myself four days to completely settle into a new house. And this is a task, when you are the kind of person who has enough linens for six bedrooms, and apparently five tubes of hydrocortisone cream (I guess we packed the medicine chests so full we couldn't find what we needed, so we just went to the store and bought more. And now I have it all, here, enough to fill a house seven times this size. I am never buying anything ever again).

Of course, I've only been here four nights, but I've already had a party of sorts. Impromptu, the idea of some of these beautiful friends who have worked like drayhorses with me, steadily pulling this heavy wagon into a new life. The children dribbled watermelon juice everywhere, played up in the treehouse, waved sparklers, ran like banshees (wet and dirty banshees) through the house and outdoors and back, and at one memorable moment, right through a sliding screen door. The grownups, of course, drank wine and talked; of perfidies and hopes, of plans and stuff. I guess the way I will know I am dead is when I neglect to put out the cocktail napkins.

Nelly was up on the dining table, grazing like a horse from the plates of pizza crusts. She put her front legs on the low table and almost got a whole marbled cheesecake brownie. I couldn't get as lost in the conversation, or the mopping up of messes, as I'd liked, because she now must be watched as a hawk does a mouse. I knew my friends thought she was being bad, but I knew she was being good. Way too good. She seemed everywhere at once, an imp; one who now flies through the air toward whatever she wants, be it open car window, tabletop, lap at unsuspecting times, hapless squirrel. I got blank stares when I excitedly tried to explain how she was at that very moment expressing the basic notion behind the book I will be writing: a behavior that is consistently rewarded will be repeated. And one that is inconsistently rewarded will be repeated and strengthened. So, sometimes it's just yucky limes in empty glasses up on the table; but sometimes it's cheese on bread! Chocolate and cream cheese together!! You never know what's going to be up there!!! So I gotta get up there, I just do!!!!

That's the idea behind the jackpot reward. I love this one. It seems to drop down from heaven above, a whole mess of treats instead of just one. It's what life offers, too, if you're lucky (and I am; see above, reference to friends).

There's a little path cut through the tall grass, to a towering apple tree that should be heaven come fall, as well as relief from the twenty dollars' worth of organic apples my son goes through in a week. (You think I'm kidding; I'm not.) But Nelly, as always, cuts her own path. To the road.

We are now about to see the fruit of the work we invested in the past. (I said her name a certain way, she got a treat. I said it again, she got a treat.) Out in the field, panic in my soul, I said it again. Bless me, and she came running. What relief. And what sorrow, because my pockets were empty of treats. Before I could turn back to the house, she had done it again, and I had called her again, and she had responded. My happiness that she had was colored with dismay that I couldn't reinforce the recall: I must remember to ask Jolanta for the statistics (because everything in behaviorism is statistically backed up) on how long it is before performance drops off when it ceases to be rewarded. Pretty quickly, I think. Then we'll have to start the work all over again. This is the smell of dismay. Countered by the odor of joy: the jackpot, five treats delivered with alacrity to a happily surprised dog who has just turned quickly at the sound of your voice, streaking back to you with ears like pennants, smile wide, as fast as her legs can carry her. That's money in the bank, for future recalls when you need them.

And I needed one this morning. I looked out the window after emptying yet one more cardboard box of its essentially unnecessary contents, to see Nelly heading across the road. There is not much traffic here (am looking very much forward to the end of oil, so there will be none), but at night I hear the sound of gunning engines on the hill--teenagers returning from a party, perhaps--and go cold all over.

I did what I had to do. I called her to come. Not sure if it would work. A prayer in my heart.

She looked. Paused for a second, then ran straight for me.

A minute later, two cars passed. Nelly was already next to me, swallowing her chicken jerky with a smile. I must remember that the down-stay at a distance--Do not come; right now, lie still on the other side of the pavement from me, from the danger--vies with the Really Reliable Recall as a way to save your dog's life.

My friends are right, and I also hope my friends are right. They say this place has good karma. It has a bit of a hippie vibe, and that makes me feel at home: I am mostly, though not entirely, more of a food co-op type than a Balducci's sort. Though they did have awfully good French cheese . . . In this, my reclaimed youth, I'll burn some incense to good karma, for me, for Nelly and the road, for all.

Freedom feels good.

Happy birthday.

Swing Setpiece

Whee! I am suddenly flying down the sliding board of life, and its surface is awfully slick. (Remember those hot metal boards of your youth--the ones they now declare too dangerous, but were merely exciting, especially as they burned your legs in summer, or caught your shorts on a rusting bolt, or got polished by the evil kids so you'd go frighteningly fast?)

Only now, I view myself in this passage, thanks to those journals discovered in the literal and figurative attic last week, as not so much pushed by someone else as I was propelled by myself. Yes, I received the assist of an unexpected push. But I climbed the ladder.

My child sleeps upstairs, in his last night ever in this house. (Yesterday, I was given a copy of a chapter from a book on how to mitigate the effects of divorce on children, and one of the first things it advised was to try to keep things the same for the child: house, neighborhood, environment. Alas, my winnings from the lottery will be arriving too late for this.) He cannot really comprehend it yet: the other day he was spinning an elaborate scheme for the New Year's party he wanted to have here, complete with fire in the fire circle by the barn, and torches given to all the children (yeah, right!) so they can run around in the field out back. "But, honey, remember? We won't be living here then." Silence.

As the movers carried boxes and furniture for four hours today, Nelly lay on a pile of my clothes at the foot of the bed, looking at me wonderingly every time I came into the room. What is happening? she says with her eyes, which look a little scared, a little bemused. Like my son, she won't really comprehend until we're there. Come to think of it, neither will I. Some things are too big to grasp in advance.

I am now coming to the end of a process that is simply the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Physically. Emotionally. The screeching sound of packing tape pulled off its roll is embedded permanently in my ear. I have lost two entire months of my life to the efforts to sell, stage, show, clean, pack this old house, and look for a new one. I am dying to stop. (Especially glad to have over the part where I crawled around on my knees picking up stray hairs by hand from the white tile of the bathroom before a showing.) I am dying to get back to work. To have a new life, with myriad possibilities, begin. To start training Nelly again, instead of this sloppiness of using the word "yes" as a reward marker because I am too exhausted to find the clicker and do things right. She deserves this, because she is showing her inordinate talent as a circus dog more and more. She is a little monkey, launching herself into the air, into and out of cars, into and out of laps. The other day she tried to jump up into the back of Janet's car, with the tailgate up; it is over four feet high. And offered nothing to land on. She flipped backward into the air, like that squirrel she caught once off the siding of the woodshed, and she landed on the dirt with a hurt look in her eyes. I need to get this trapeze stuff on cue, but quick, before she really hurts herself.

Now, late at night, after packing nonstop (I represent the problem with America in perfect miniature: too goddamn much crap; we should just stop all manufacturing right now, and we can just Freecycle everything around to one another), I need some mindless entertainment. I will go read the newspaper in bed. Maybe it won't be such bad news after all.

Intuition

Am I ever glad to be a social animal. The smartest ones are! Evolution provided a way for ten heads to be better than one, and that is why we are where we are--at the top of the heap (though it's also why the heap is too big, and listing dangerously to one side). Dogs are our closest companions because we instinctively understand each other--even if, as I would maintain, the greatest part of the understanding is done on the canine side--wired similarly as we are. And we can communicate so smoothly because the wolf's evolutionary social path, the pack, caused the canid mind to become as sharp, if not sharper in some ways, than ours. No one--and I mean no one, not even a primate--has the observational skills of a domesticated dog. You can see this in action every time it seems your pooch has read your mind: I was planning on going out, sure, but I hadn't even picked up my coat. That's kindergarten stuff to your Mensa friend.

I am so happy to be a social animal because, as I have discovered in the Meaning of Life (let me reiterate this personal discovery, OK? I'm so excited I repeat myself!), our relationships with one another are the joy and the salvation. They're why we're here--I mean, why we managed to survive. And also the reason why we'd want to.

The flower and fruit of all this Darwin is appearing in my life at this moment. My friends, as well as family (notwithstanding my mother's perhaps understandable lapses into non-helpful helpfulness), are doing heroic things. And I am suffused with love for them, for every phone call, note in the mail [Heather still writes lovely cards, with stamps and all!], liquor box, errand, show of support, way with bubble wrap, advice, smile, Nelly walk, hug, and bottle of wine. It's a flood of help, and though it's still not enough to completely scale the Everest of labor I still have before me to get out of this house and into another, it's enough to make me feel almost ashamed to receive so much.

But not as chastened, and astonished, as I was to read from a diary I wrote sixteen years ago and just unearthed from a box in the attic marked "Archives." I sat spellbound and gobsmacked and amazed to read words I had apparently written. Then forgot. I have now labeled this composition book The Incredible Premonition of the End in the Beginning. "This can only end badly," I wrote then, "in tremendous pain." I knew it all, it seems: what seemed fishy, what felt too good to be true, what didn't square with how the human psyche operates, what sounded suspicious, what I saw and felt and believed would ultimately happen. Which did.

Here's my dog now. She's watching. Her ears swivel forward, back. Her eyes are bright. Their rods and cones calmly absorb. Then she acts. She receives a signal, and she does not think about it, she acts.

Intuition is a gift, a way to protect ourselves. Disregard it at your peril. Prefer the pretty picture at the cost of your devastation. I did. Although if I had heeded it then, and walked away from what I thought I needed, I would now be missing some priceless things in my life, such as my child. And some valuable lessons, not only about trusting the voice of intuition which knows. It always knows.

My friends have now been teaching me in what ways I can be a better friend in the future. Who knows. Maybe that is why.

Would that I had been more of a dog. No self-doubt. No doubt.

Mother Love

Have you ever seen baby squirrels? No, I hadn't either, until this moment. I'm sitting here watching them now, gray mercury flowing up and down the branches of a grand old maple. They are playing, in the cool crepuscular air after a day of hammering heat. In the background is the most varied range of eerie sounds ever to come from the same animal, a coyote somewhere over there in this valley between two ridges. He is invisible in the tall grass, but announcing his presence with yipping and yelping and howling and, yes, even barking.

Have you ever had someone who ought to know you, and certainly ought to care for you, say something so stunningly brutal for a moment you don't know where you are? Like, say, propose that to make your life better, you ought to set your child out on a streetcorner with valise in hand, then drive away? --This being someone who, knowing you, thus knows your child is as necessary to life as is air?

No, I hadn't either, not till this week, when two members of my family did so. Well, they didn't say I should do this with my child. But that is tantamount to what they meant, when they told me that if I couldn't find a rental that accepted pets, I should think about getting rid of Nelly.

These are people who, I think and trust, love me. They are people who have witnessed me over the course of thirteen years make commitments to my dogs that are as deep as one can make. (I suspect I would never, like one truly maladjusted person I know, claim that one "shouldn't" pet a dog more than once per day--based on the bizarrest rationale a strange mind has ever come up with--and so he won't touch his dog more than that. He just dropped off said beast at his former girlfriend's, with one meal's worth of food, and then announced he was going to leave him there, maybe forever, because she "needs" a dog--though he knows she lacks the resources to care for one. Sheesh!)

These are people who know I take that commitment seriously, because it implies a contract: my dog is a dependent, in every way, and I agreed to provide for all of her needs. One of which is to never give her away, something that hurts dogs as much as it would hurt anyone. Anyway, I'd sooner give away my heart. The suggestion, then, could not have been anything other than a slash with a razor. And why? Why seek to hurt the ones you love most?

Actually, though, one comes to expect such things from one's mother. I don't know why, but the mother-child relationship can grow from needful worship to blinding meanness in only a decade or two. My mother has been proposing for years that I get rid of my dog so I can "enjoy some freedom." When she knows I already have the greatest freedom, the freedom of joy, from my relationship with this powerful Other.

I have a pen pal in Attica, a very interesting man. He writes me at length about the books he's reading, and the fine meals he cooked in his previous life. He has very refined taste. He would never tell me what he was in for. But someone on the outside who also knew him, did: He murdered his mother. If I ever got the ear of the powers that be, I'd tell them I could guarantee this man is perfectly safe to let out, will never kill again. How do I know? There's only one Mom, and he already took care of her.

Then, I get it twice in the same week, the second time by my sister. I was dumbfounded, smarting from this overt hostility. But my wise aunt snorted when she heard about this advice-cum-attack: "Ha!" she said. "You know your sister would never in a million years give up her dog."

Why are we so prone to mental illness? As my friend Sally says, "It is little studied just how prevalent it is." In all of us. I seem to know fewer and fewer people of whom I would say, Well, they're basically healthy. Nope. I'm talking the twenty-foot well, over which darkness you lean and wonder if there's an inch of water down there, or maybe it's right here and you'll touch it if you reach out. Or completely empty. Hard to tell.

I do not let myself off the hook. Motivations are a fascinating and difficult area of study, especially when applied to the self. And 1000-piece puzzles are very hard, but rewarding, to put together.

The squirrels--so "C-U-T-E," as my son would say--have now gone back to the nest, where I trust their mother is caring for them very well. I hope she informs them about the intentions of the black rat snake who likes to twine himself through the branches until he looks like one, waiting, silent. The snake loves squirrels, too. Maybe in much the same way a mother does. Food for thought.

Falling

I'm thinking it would be more pleasant to simply have the skin peeled off.

I am letting down the people who are supporting me, the friends who have taken my cause as their own, rooting for me, cajoling, helping, searching, leading me by the hand. I do so by evincing a massive mental illness. I am aware of it, can see it for what it is--the literalization of "I don't want to go!"--and still am powerless to change it. That is why I am about to fall into a very hot soup. And I am apparently taking my child with me, he who I am charged with protecting. Whom I want to protect, and take great care of.

Ironically, I drove two hours yesterday to help a dear friend move. (She has far less stuff than I do.) She too is leaving behind a sad period in her life. She is going to get her MFA in painting. So we made a video documentary of the move, talking about art, criticism, the act of moving, and storage facilities. Into the camera (I can blather extemporaneously, just as I can in type) I mused that, without a home, my friends have become my home. It felt ironic to be moving this friend, when I can't move myself.

It is also ironic, as I only realized this morning, that it was the changes and improvements I made over the years to this house that made it so nice as to appreciate in value far beyond what I could ever buy out. So, in the end, I helped cause my own expulsion from the house I don't want to leave.

Soon, into a box will go something I want to leave you with. I'll make its acquaintance again at that unnamed point in the future when I can retrieve my boxes again. It's from an old hammered copper plaque that features a Scottie. Think on it.

DOGGIE
He asks me no questions
He tells me no lies
And when I address him
looks straight in my eyes.
Content with a little he never despairs
but in all my troubles he willingly shares.
He asks me so little
He gives me so much
then always let sympathy
dwell in my touch.

Free to Be You and Me

We can tell time without clocks. This, for instance, is the time for purple phlox. When it blooms in the roadside meadows, it is that time again. It is also time for Nelly to jump.

It was errand day. I loaded my garbage, my recycling, my books for the coming local library fair, my child, and my dog into the car. God bless the designer of the station wagon.

How I love my sweet library, my home away from home. Perhaps it feels that way because
it was once a home, an eighteenth-century stone house with its little additions that grew outward like squash vines creeping in the night. Inside are wing chairs to sit and read by the old fireplace that still bears the black reminders of ancient fires that fed people who are now ancient ghosts. How could they not rest peacefully to know that their house is beloved by so many? They are kept company by the ghosts of great writers.

When it was built, the road out its door--now with trucks and a steady stream of cars heading north, heading south, which has caused what it usually takes eons to accomplish, the crumbling of the rock in its walls--was a quiet brown lane.

I support this little library with all my heart, because it is where I go to feel I belong to something, where I go when I need a book, and it is also like another home to my child. So when they have their June fundraiser, I bring them bags of books I no longer need, record albums and stuffed animals (handy timing, given my impending move), and several copies of my own books to sell in the Local Authors tent.

It was hot on errand day, and we were in a post-dump state of mind: sticky, worried we still carried the odor of decomposition on our clothes. I scouted a place in the shade to park the car as I drove in to the library lot, so I could leave Nelly for a minute while my son and I ran in to get the book we'd asked for through interlibrary loan, to drop off our contributions for the sale. Nelly, too, knew what it time it was, because she realized she knew this place (and didn't love it half as much as we): Time to Get Left in the Car. I had not yet come to a complete stop, much less rolled the windows up for little Miss Houdini's Daughter. Then I see a white streak heading across the back lawn of the library.

She pauses by the shed behind the parking lot, stares at me (one can interpret that stare any number of ways, of course), and once I have a chance to put my eyes back in my head, I call to her, and that's when the jig is really up. She races next door, and all I can think is, She's not going to survive Route 209.

Out loud, though, I said, "Honey, I'm not going to panic." See, panic belongs to my old life; panic used to feel like a drug. It felt wonderful to finally relax into it and let it take me away. But while it might have been salutary for me (or was it?), it was certainly not for those who had to witness it.

So, calmly, we got out of the car and walked to the library door. I now had no idea where Nelly was. It felt as though it was my heart out there running loose, my heart, too near to heavy traffic. I knew it was my heart, because I felt a big empty hole in my chest.

The door to the library had been left open in the warm weather, and just as I was (calmly) explaining to my librarian-friend that I'd lost my dog and that she might come in, I looked down, and there was Nelly. The man at the computer next to me (it's a small library) asked what she was. "Devil-border collie mix," I told him. "How did she get in here?" he asked, bemused, as she continued to look up at me with bright eyes and panting tongue: So, Ma, where do they keep the steak here? When I told him, he said he'd had a dog who once jumped out of car windows too--only his did it at 40 mph. But he still hadn't quite put this story all together about whose dog this was. "Oh, that's your dog," he finally said.

"Oh, no," I hastened to reply. "This one, she's free. Free to a good home."

Loyalties

The moon is strange and stunning tonight: a round body, hanging low, with a directed look on its face, almost as if it positioned itself here in order to look through my window. (Do not think I am not hyperaware of the narcissism inherent in writing this, as well as of my recent passage through the weird halls of . . . of . . . well, I won't name it. Only a little while longer, I pledge. To myself, to you.) Maybe it has something to tell me. Maybe that something is that I will never understand what it has to tell me. I don't speak moon.

Yes, it's another 3 a.m. night. (And why, please tell me, it is always 3:00, and not 4:00 or 5:00?) I tried to get back to sleep--after all, I'd only had three hours--but lay for an hour debating gains and losses of moving to this town, or that. A fabulous elementary school vs. a place I know no one. A safe place for Nelly vs. a 45-minute drive to a decent grocery store. Uh, a fabulous elementary school vs. leaving behind everything we know and love: a library that's like our second home; our activities; the people who have saved our asses over and over and over again in so many ways; our friends, oh, our friends. Versus houses and taxes that will feel like carrying that moon on my shoulders.

I don't know what to do. I don't know what I can do. (Will you tell me, O pudding-face moon?) I don't know where to look, so I look everywhere and find nothing. Nelly sits at my feet, wondering why, since I got out of bed after a period of being in it, I am not moving to give her her yogurt and kibble. Well, not at 4 a.m., old girl. She lies on top of the map of the Catskills I have unfurled, and whines softly. There are some things she can't understand, either.

But maybe she too is trying to tell me something: Just pick a spot, it'll be OK. Is that it? Is that it, Nelly? Well, I myself do prefer the wilds of the deeper mountains--more things to chase, you know. But suit yourself. Do what's best. I'll be with you.

The weight of two dependents leaning against me, counting on me to do what's best for them, has given me a permanent limp. I don't know what's best! And I'm supposed to! Help! Back and forth I go; back and forth. I am dizzy. Turned around. On Thursday I had the actual sensation that my head was going to explode: I tell you, it was the oddest, most fascinating thing I have ever experienced. There was still enough going on in there for me to realize that it was unlikely to literally splatter its contents on the roadway as I walked Nelly to the little patch of woods that we regularly poach walks from. (I stay low behind a silent stone wall so as not to alert the nearby property owners; I practice what I was told was the Indian way of quieting the footsteps in the woods: walking pigeon-toed. Even though I suspect this was specious schoolkid gab. And it doesn't work for me anyway, though I'm no Indian, notwithstanding my childhood desire that I was adopted.)

The real estate broker who's trying to help me find a house thinks I'm bonkers. Well, aren't I? Especially with so little shut-eye. Yes, yes! I'll confess to anything! I transported those illegal aliens across the border. Just let me sleep!

It is time to consult the Magic 8 Ball. Shall I move to Phoenicia? Reply hazy, try again. See? It is always right. Hazy. It is all so hazy.

Even the dawn, breaking now outside the window, is hazy. Trees emerge from the mist like soldiers, steadfast.

Try again. So this is what I do. I become lost in despair and anger, then I remind myself that I have been given a gift, a chance to change myself. Today is election day: vote for the forces of light, or darkness. I have this choice. Sort of like Democrat or Republican. Or Green.

And so I pull myself up. I am ready now to move forward. And then it feels like I've stepped in gum carelessly thrown to a hot sidewalk. My heel is suddenly reluctant. It is the thought of leaving my friends. Everyone I know that I depend on (and who, when the tide turns, I long to have depend on me). Even though the list of people to whom I can turn for help with Nelly has dwindled considerably, what with all the little kitties and big chickens she would love to have at.

A friend reminded me of the fact that if I base my decision on where to go on not leaving my friends, there's nothing to stop them from leaving me. I mean, people move, yes?

If dogs had their way, no one would ever leave anyone. This time we put in together, these walks, these meals, these talks, would form a bond as strong as any chain. Dogs have their loyalties. Deathless ones. But we are people, and we leave. That's what we do.

Will all this turn out OK? Very doubtful. I don't like this answer, so I cup the ball once more and think hard about my question. As I see it, yes.

There. That's better.

Silver Linings

One good thing that will happen as a result of the end of oil--our headlong, greedy, unthinking reliance on free-flowing fossil fuel--will be freedom. Our kids will be able to ride their bicycles where they please, regaining a sense of autonomy that is crucial to their development. And their happiness, born of speed. (Heck, maybe grownups could ride their bicycles where they pleased, too: for almost ten years I rode everywhere in New York City. Then something changed. Something that felt . . . homicidal. Suddenly all those cars were acting like they wanted to get you. And I became scared. Then my bike became stolen. Voila: the end of an era.)

Just as beautiful in its inadvertent gift will be the chance for dogs to regain their liberty, too. No more chain-link fences, ropes forever around their necks. Just as in the old movies, they will be beholden to only their own agendas, and will make their daily rounds to the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker (tallow, don't you know).

We need to collect thoughts like these, because what we are going to go through will be painful in the extreme. Even more so because it is unknown what shape it will take, and I'm not just talking about what they'll figure out to replace the plastic that covers every item of food we buy. Do ya think about that, huh? No, I'm talking about the forcible remolding of our society and our economy. Yet all of us are just along on this thrill ride; no one really knows, and no one can control it now.

It is incredible just to hold the thought in the mind, like a smooth piece of marble, that it has been only about ninety years that our America has been reorganized as a wheel with the automobile at the center; you'd think we could just maybe back up a little (checking the rearview mirror first, of course) and return things to the way they were in 1910, say. Problem solved! But that world, I fear, is more distant from us now than they were from the world of three hundred years prior to that. I mean, where are we going to lay hold of thousands of draft horses and plows?

(Then, you can amuse yourself with this happy notion: Around the turn of the century, pretty much all produce was organic produce! You didn't have to shop at Whole Paycheck or buy fruit shipped halfway around the globe just to ensure it hasn't been doused with carcinogens. You just went to your kitchen garden, or the local greengrocer. "USDA Organic" indeed.)

The unknown chills us, to the primitive marrow. It wakes us at 3 a.m. Disaster hides in its dark folds. I should know (and now you know too, ad nauseam, I'm afraid; but just hang on a little while longer, I beg of you--the light is beginning to dawn!). The unknown is scaring me with its devilish grin, whispering from the corner of my nighttime room. I am working like a ditchdigger to feel excited and happy about my little adventure of being launched into space. The glass half full, and all that. Yet it is. At the same time my fear is justified. I can't erase it just because certain onlookers are impatient with what I feel, would like me to feel something different. They're not inside me. I am. And I will arrive at the certain gifts hiding within the storm clouds on my own time. It will be quite a party then.

Tell Nelly not to feel her fear, for instance. Well, I try, but it falls on ears deafened by terror. The lawnmower next door backfires, and I see Nelly glance around furtively. The whole carriage of her body drops suddenly; she is an inch shorter all round. Her head is held lower on her neck, and her tail arcs down, the exact negative of the ecstatic curve it draws over her back when she's happy. I try to tell her it's nothing. Do not be afraid. But she does what she must. And so do I. I know light-hearted relief is just around the corner for both of us.

Her tail is a plume, but a crooked one: what happened to Nelly's tail, in embryo perhaps, that lopsided it so heartbreakingly cutely?

And did you ever think what it would feel like to have your spine continue another foot out behind you, waving, balancing you? Weird, man. That's weird.

It's also weird to move through the changes in life without trying to resist them. Strange things happen, an alchemy of the bloodstream, I think. This morning I held a friend in my arms as she shook with sobs; I could feel the pain moving volcanically from her center and exiting through the shoulders, which moved like the things in nature move--with a force in them that can't be stopped. Her brother is dying. He had just gone to pick out his own burial plot. That must be weirdest of all. Looking at your death as it walks steadily toward you.

What is odd for me is that she and I did not speak for a whole year. Why? Well, now I forget. My own river of grief washed away all marks of it. And she became one of a series of bridges I mended, connections and re-connections with other people forged to great strength and number over the past nine months. I don't know why. I felt driven to do it. It is one of the things that now glints silver from the sky.

None of what happened in the past matters. All there is, the meaning of life (there! I figured it out for you!) is other people. So come back, if you've been pushed away. It really doesn't matter. All is forgiven. It is so easy to do. And all is forgotten, too--one of the side benefits of aging and stress. I can't remember anything anymore. Except that it doesn't get better than this.

Ticked Off

The night is interesting. It is not simply an inside-out day, showing the stitching on the seams. It is another world.

At 4:45 a.m., the whippoorwill starts calling. It is imperative, his call, and loud. For hours, it seems, he calls nonstop--or is it she?--rhythmically, insistently (whippoorWILL, whippoorWILL) and then, for a passage, speeds it up doubletime as in a frustration I know well: Answer me, please!

This is the way life starts: the day, the warming weather, the season of nest-building and life-giving. Is this why they made Mother's Day tomorrow, in the spring? The world is now greening at headlong speed, as if it cannot wait to be born.

A bird has made a nest in the back of the newspaper box; at first I thought a prankster had been at work, stuffing the box with dried moss and grass. It would come out with the paper every time I pulled. But it wasn't. It was instead a life-giving force that persisted, against the incessant destruction of the human hand, until one day it was a bird that suddenly flew out into my face when I reached in for the day's news (or "news").

This urge to build a nest and to live will continue in all things until it is finally impossible--the big human hand reaching into the box!--for it to go on. It's that simple. Even in me. It is why I woke at 3 in the morning, tossing in bed, finally to turn on the light and work for a half hour, then turn it off and toss some more, then to go at last what the hell downstairs, work spread out on the kitchen table, third cup of coffee by 5:00, a banana, and the thick dark and the whippoorwill outside the big plate glass window. There are things happening out there that I do not know. Things that I should not know.

I have the need to build a new nest for myself and for my young. But it feels (cue the violins) as though a hand keeps reaching in my box and pulling out my hard-won collection of material, strewing it on the shoulder of the road. I keep collecting more.

This is maudlin stuff, created in my head by the dark and the sleeplessness and the fear of change. That's elemental, the fear that rises when you don't know where you will go, what it will look like and feel like and be made of. It's frightening, though I hasten to add (for those who will kindly rush to tell me how much better it will be) that I also know it will be better. Even as I remain frightened. How's that for duplicity? Or human nature? I only hope that I do not have to wait yet another year for my life to begin. Or for my new nest to be built. I do not like living in the middle of transitoriness. Some people find it exciting to live in borrowed places, out of suitcases; to me, it's the definition of hell. A place where I never fully arrive because I know I must soon leave.

The light, at 5:20, is now coloring the sky a royal blue, the exact color of silk in a skirt I bought for a special occasion four years ago this week. I always thought of that skirt as a piece of night I could wear.

The coyotes are probably beginning to stir, to scratch at the places where the ticks are firmly attached. While the house was being shown yet again this morning, and I thus had to disappear yet again, a friend and I walked with Nelly into the back field and across the neighbor's property (once the realm of this old farm) to the woods. There is the melody of the stream rushing over the little falls made by the beavers' work. We trespassed on the moss-covered trails created by the custodian (obviously someone who deeply respects their magisterial quiet and insularity) of these woods. Occasionally we passed cairns, sculptures of rock balanced impossibly but precisely into towers, marking the turns, and we walked and talked, stopping before a bright green inchworm suspended on his invisible trapeze at nose height, or an orange salamander frozen at our feet, or a small purple wildflower like a violet but not. And when we came home, we were crawling with ticks.

I've since had a shower and changed clothes twice. And still I picked one off my back just before throwing in that towel on sleep at 3 a.m. I had taken three from my hair this afternoon, and a small one that had already dug into the soft place just behind the knee. Nelly, of course, was a veritable tick mop, sweeping all that lay in her path onto her long white hair, so they could get going and play hide and seek along her spine, rushing to the neck, ears, eyes. I took maybe twenty off her today, as she, not a patient dog, sat patiently--she seems to know what I am doing, and after the detachment (when some hair is inevitably included), she demands to see the proof that the pain was not in vain. I hold the moving thing out and she stretches her nose toward it, watches, then seems satisfied. I can go on.

She herself will do what work I cannot, because it's impossible to find them all. What I find difficult to do with my clumsy fingers she uses her lips to accomplish, and she then rolls it around in her mouth and finally expels it, dead. Do you know how tough it is to kill a tick? This leads me to think it is some kind of knowledge lodged deep in the canine DNA: "How to Kill Ticks: Remember, They Are Special." I hope so, anyway, for the sake of the coyotes, who do not have the assistance of a primate in tick removal. Are they covered, slowly sucked dry by hundreds of them? How do they cope? Perhaps they help one another, carefully pulling them off and rolling them around in the mouth. Maybe it's their bedtime ritual, like toothbrushing.

At 6 now the colors outside are separating themselves out from the uniform black: there is the pale green, and the gray-brown of bark, the chrome on my car. Things look like they are coming to life, but it is really a second life, just the one we are used to calling our own. The first life goes on at night, without us. I may have just broken my own record on sleeplessness, which is saying a lot considering the nighttime torture (I don't use that word lightly) I've gone through in the past eight months. It is what it is. Anyway, there had been, until this last few days, a great improvement: See? All loss is eventually survived! But this fretful waking now is testimony to the importance of nest-building. Until I make a new one, I will not sleep, transitory and afraid, and will look out onto night until it gets light.

It's Haunting

A ghost visited me the other day. Only I saw it. Nelly was having fun and games on the lawn with Sadie, a pal who is twice her size but half her age. Nelly led her around like a child's pull-toy on a string, exerting centrifugal force on the poor black dog who was powerless not to try to catch her. But the game Nelly was playing was Don't Be Caught--Not Nowhere, Not Nohow. She drew sinuous curves all over the surface of the grass, S's this way and that, changing direction in a quick bursts: Fooled ya!

And that's when I saw the ghost of Mercy. The most gorgeous, intelligent dog who ever lived.

Maybe she came back because right about now is the run-up to the anniversary of her death. I can't remember exactly, although my body must, having been imprinted permanently with the shock, a hot brand burning the flesh of the emotions. The thing my mind will never forget is the incessant calls of the mourning doves, just like now--woo-OOH-OOH-OOH--until I wanted to scream Stop! Don't you know you're torturing me? I had never really noticed them before, but that May, my hearing was suddenly changed. My senses were scraped raw so that everything (colors, sounds) was like vinegar on a cut. The whole world hurt.

Of course I had to get another border collie. I had to have her back. I ended up with Nelly, who is herself. But there she was, four years later, reanimating Mercy's game. In Prospect Park, our dog used to lead a string of other dogs a merry chase, just like this, switching back and forth, finally ending crouched under a picnic table, frustrated pooches circling with tongues dragging the dirt. Her eyes glinted with laughter. Ha-ha! Fooled ya.

No one could catch her, either.

I welcome her back.

Sadie on this day, of course, played a Sadie game. She betook herself into the back field, and dunked herself in my son's pond (the one I "gave" him for his own during our time here, the one he used to take his friends to when the grownups were otherwise engaged with margaritas on the patio during summer parties, the one for which he made a plaster plaque decorated with glass dragonflies and and declaiming, "Welcome, Friends, to my pond"). The only thing is, it's actually a mud hole.

Then Sadie burst into the house and shook herself vigorously. Mud splattered all the way to the ceiling the newly painted walls, the ones that are supposed to help sell this house to deep-pocketed city folks, along with the general cleanliness of its rooms. The floor, too, was now covered with the dog's interpretation of Jackson Pollock. Quite a good one, I think. I had three showings of the house scheduled for the next day.

As my son said, "Mom had a cow."

But my cows are getting smaller and smaller these days, I am proud to report. I am working very, very hard at "letting things go." It makes life, and everyone around me, much happier. Soon these animals will be the size of the toys my child puts in his play barn.

But once upon a time I had a border collie. She loved it here, as did I. And every once in a while she pays a visit. For which I am glad. Sad. But glad. Both at exactly the same time.

Too Much

The camera has caught his eyes so that he looks out through empty white rounds. It is just a phenomenon, of course, of rods and cones reacting to a flash of light, but it gives his stare an accusing aspect. As well it might: this dog has no home, except a prison of sorts. And it is a place that is slowly driving him mad, the depression of a pack animal left alone, the neurosis of the individual in solitary confinement.
Week after week after week, the picture of "Brody" runs in the paper with all the other Pets for Adoption from the local SPCA. The roster of other animals changes all around him, but Brody is forever, it seems. He is described as "big," and "brave & smart," and that alone could break your heart.

Better he should be dead, I think. I am in a minority on this point, because people who truly care about dogs, who even--I admit it--identify with their silent sufferings as if they were our own, strangely, are supposed to support the idea of no-kill shelters. Life at any cost. Certainly, it has to be better than the gas chamber, every three days loaded up with people's cast-off pets. (You can visit one of these in Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D., where the sight of the crammed cages of beautiful shining individuals going to their executions, pushed on a cart by indifferent city workers, will make the bile rise in your throat and a searing hatred of humans grip your insides. I hope. De Sica was criticized for the mountainous sentiment that rises from scenes like this in his movie: not realistic, too contrived, they said. I wish, I say.)

A woman named Sue Sternberg is an expert on what shelter animals experience during long-term incarceration. Her belief is that dogs with behavioral difficulties that will make them hard to adopt should be euthanized to make room for more adoptable animals, and spare them the cruelty of the madness that ensues from being held in solitary. For this she has been labeled a Nazi, deciding who lives and who dies. But someone must, or the world will, with no concern for its accidents.

Better a quick death than the one that comes only after months of unhappiness. Which would you pick? Death, or four walls that prevent you from living?

The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave currently has more people behind bars than any other nation in the world. This is our response to everything: lock 'em up. Oh, B. F. Skinner, where are you now that we need you most? The United States has less than five percent of the world's population, but a quarter of the world's prisoners. (Where is the country that will invade us to halt this unconscionable act of dictatorship?) More than China! More than Russia! More than Iraq ever did.

The elephant in the room. There is a rhinoceros there, too. (Where? I can't see it . . . )

As Earth Day is celebrated, towns all over the country will hold fairs at which one can learn all about reducing our so-called carbon footprint, and then buy a pack of compact fluorescents and a cutely packaged earthworm composter, and then feel very fine indeed. We put our many children in the car and call it a day.

Why won't anyone say it? Just about every single problem--and they're pretty dire these days, you know--that faces us would practically vanish if we stopped having so many children. Talk about reducing the carbon footprint. If we adopted a one-child-only policy (this is not about eugenics, but about survival) we can take care of oil prices, food shortages, pollution, sprawl, and killing in the Left Bank, to name a few, without doing much else. Why don't we? Life at any cost?

So we talk about everything but the fact that it's simply human population run amok. We talk about trying to do the impossible, rather than talk about the truth. Who in their right mind thinks that nine billion is a supportable number? We read it, then go on. So much life will, of course, be our death.

I am just about ready to go spring Brody. But then I might just have to bring "Simon" home, too. An eight-year-old dog brought to the shelter because he "got too old" for his family.

What is to become of us?