Predation Picnic

Some days build into magic, and you can never know which days those will be when you set out. Remember this. I had forgotten to remember, when I showed up for an afternoon art exhibit in the nearby burg of Rosendale. A small canal town enlivened at the end of the nineteenth century by the cement industry (Rosendale cement was famed, and ended up in the pilings of the even more famed Brooklyn Bridge), it has now been re-colonized, a century later, by a new generation of Brooklynites. These are the hipsters looking even farther afield than the shores of the tapped-out borough that is simply too cool for most humans: it will slay you dead if you dare to show yourself in Red Hook without the proper accoutrements. The shame of it! I call Rosendale "Williamsburg North."

On this Saturday afternoon, the Interesting people had gathered in the town park for a show of sculpture and furniture made sensuously from cement, on the site of derelict kilns cut out of natural caves in the cliffs and then bricked in. A little grassy sliver of park with some big rocks and little running water, which is all children need to amuse themselves with for hours, so the grown-ups can conduct their business (which my son defines as "yak-yak-yakking for hours!"), aided by microbrew from a keg. Of course, since events in Rosendale are always louche and cool--ruleless--off-leash dogs wandered among the yakkers. As did a couple of twentysomethings who were got up in costume they had taken from the set of Gangs of New York. Nelly, though, was ordered to stay on leash, at least until the giant platters of cheese and Asian noodle salad were all gone. Not even Rosendalians will suffer a dog to stand in their food and gorge on it till sick.

Lots of friends, no goddamn computers, a pretty day: magic rose up out of the grass. The children were up to their knees in pond scum, and so it was magic for them, too. Four hours, and nary a toy, just opportunism: using empty beer cups and gravel from the parking lot, they built dams in the stream, and jumped from rock to rock. With all the cheese finally gone, it was time for Nelly to groove the day as well. I dropped her leash.

That was the moment I apparently forgot where I was. Rosendale. Rosendale--where there are chickens on leashes.

It happened so fast you could practically smell the release of adrenaline into the air. Nelly and chicken, different sorts of extreme desperation acting as rocket fuel (life and death, respectively). Around in a circle of increasing velocity, and I tried to grab the ring on this infernal carousel. I have rarely acted this fast. In a blur.

How glad was I she was still wearing her leash? Well, how glad is the chicken to be alive still? Just before the first mouthful of feathers, I glimpsed an opening. It was worth the skinned knuckles: I got her. Magic. Friends who had observed from far off came over to commend the mindless burst, the save. Nelly was shaking. Every cell in her body was on high alert. She wanted chicken dinner. Warm chicken dinner.
The day, and its happy vibe, was preserved. We went home to eat our dinner of omelet. I let Nelly lick the pan. That is as close as she was going to get that day--the skin of her teeth. I was so glad I had not let her out of the house that morning, because there was a newborn fawn in the side yard. Alive, and magic.

Drunk Again

Have you ever had an emotion hangover? It's worse than the day after those four martinis you artfully talked yourself around, because not only do you feel physically sick, you are also empty, corroded from inside, and certain you must be black and blue, although when you look there's no evidence of it on your skin.

That was the result of the emotion binge I went on last week, when all the heavy boxes I had precariously stacked on the closet shelf -- there! that's handled, she smartly tells herself and shuts the door -- came tumbling, brutally, out at once. Knocked senseless to the floor by cartons of realizations.

Every damn thing was in there--every wound, every anxious moment, every aspect of how I live my life from how I greet the store clerk to what ambition I have as a writer, every piece of what I am, or were, or will be.

A Dark Night of the Soul was had there, in the closet, all my psychic possessions now naked on the floor, where I could see them exactly for what they are.

The next day, puking sick. Revisiting the site, like the party that never got cleaned up, I saw all of it still strewn, and now I could see how meticulously built the whole thing had been, over the past few weeks, this disaster meant to resemble the original disaster I've repeated and repeated and repeated my entire life.

I have used others, too, in my precise creation (that which hides as it simultaneously rips off veils, endlessly). To them I say, I am sorry. It's not your fault. Even if I do still want to spit bullets at them for their selfish cruelties. I never claimed consistency. Still, I apologize. I was the one who cast them in this drama. I was the one who wrote the play.

The day after it all fell on me, after I wiped up a bit, no hair of the dog available, I placed an emergency call to the only one I could think of, my go-to guy for truth, A. He ladled it out in ample spoonfuls, an act of generosity. Then an emergency visit to the shrink, where she commented, "You know, A. really loves you. Maybe more than anyone else." I know, I know. Perhaps this, then, is the curative that will bring about the end. So that I will never again find myself on the floor among the detritus of what I always do.

Then, to the walk with my dog, the streaks of tears dried by the stiff spring wind blowing across the freshly tilled cornfields. Not the portion of fields where I'd been--the one of the deadly rat poison, the one with the carcass of raccoon into which the dogs would delicately dip their pulse points like teens at the perfume counter--but the other one. The one that to Nelly is a candy store of wild animals; the one where I've lost her, time after time.

From the point ten minutes in that she flushed the wild turkeys, then, she was gone. I took the walk by myself, cursing myself for coming back here again. Why do I keep looking into the alluring blue eyes of disaster, and proceed anyway? Another box hit me on the head.

Sick of this, too, I tell you. I rounded the field, wondering how I was going to find her in the twenty minutes I had left. That is as nothing in Nelly-time. I stopped to listen; do you know how many birdsongs precisely mimic the distant sound of dog tags jangling? Oh, she was well and truly gone. Why did I come here, the scene of past lives in hell?

I walked back, dejected and pissed at myself. The car came into sight, way over there. And then, what's that? Can it be? Nelly! She was there, waiting. She had thought it was I who was gone. She was now ecstatic to see me. She ran to the encircling leash.

And so, this time it did in fact end differently. I am thinking, now is the time for it all to finally end differently. I am going to try, in twelve steps or less. The first is to stay away from anyone I can write into the script called "Here We Go Again." I hate hangovers. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

You Meet the Nicest People on a BMW

Maybe returning to biking after long years away is analogous
to becoming pregnant a second time: only a severe and pervasive amnesia preventing recall of the physical details permits one to dive in and do it again. Then, when it's too late, you go, A-ha. It all comes flooding back, the sensations, the joys, the miseries that feel like joys.

At night, after the first ride, you unclothe and see that mysterious forces have been at work on your body without your knowledge: there's coal black stuff under the skin of your fingertips, which you haven't seen in eleven years, like the return of an old (unkempt but convivial) friend. And a bruise on your shin, another on your thigh--you have absolutely no recollection whence they came, but you know their wandering about your person is to become a permanent feature of your skin for as long as you ride.

You find yourself suddenly wishing you did not have to work anymore, because it cuts deeply into your riding time. But just as quickly you reflect on the fact that after all you do need some way to buy all those hyperexpensive BMW parts, key fobs, and coffee cups. (Not to mention rally fees, hotels, and gas.) It all adds up, Sigh. You vow to keep working, harder than ever now.

You know what cold is once again; 80 mph in the early-spring-night cold, that is, which is a special brand. The next day it has taken up residence in your neck, which is so painful you can barely turn your head. Now you remember you need to remember to bring that green wool neckerchief you last wore all those years ago. It is still folded in the underwear drawer, and now you take it out and look at it for a while. It is not saying anything, but it knows all about every mile you ever put on your former bikes.

You get the experience, at long last, of walking into the convenience store at the gas station and looking around the racks, total permission to have anything your eye falls on and desires: sticky honeybun, fake pie, peanut M&Ms, anything. (Except liquid: there are the stirrings of a need to pee, and since the bathroom is in the building behind the pumps, and motorcycles are only good for what's before you, you no longer want to take time to go back, anywhere. Riding alone, especially, is about proceeding--into space, into the future, into the experience of going into the pure air of what's ahead.) So you choose a big slab of prepackaged carrot bread. And you know that you can take its caloric load and burn it all in the next twenty miles; there's been no dinner, and who cares, when you can have cellophane-wrapped carrot bread eaten in chunks off the bike's seat while you put your gear back on, oh, and the ear plugs too that you had forgotten for the first sixty miles.

Also forgotten all this time was the weight of guilt for those you've left behind, in others' care. The wondering dog--oh, the dog. What to do now about the poor, sweet pooch? Since there is no answer to the splitting of your loves right down the middle--riding away to the places you want to go; staying with the dog who wants you to stay--you do a Scarlett O'Hara and tell yourself you'll think about that tomorrow. Although you know that tomorrow it will be as unsolvable as it is today, and just as fretful to think about.

How was it, how possibly was it, that you had forgotten that a hundred dear friends, fomrerly strangers, were waiting on the other side, and that as soon as you opened the door again, they would spread wide their arms, say "Welcome back!" and mean it with a sincerity that is stunning for its depth, unknown to any human bond but this? You want to weep for its strength, for its warmth, which we need.

Before you left on your first voyage after such a time, something, you don't know what, caused you to run back to the bedroom to root through the jewelry box: there it is. The talisman. The ring you never once forgot to wear, under your riding gloves, on your right hand. Lucky charm. You need to cling to this, that you'll be safe, that there is a way to make yourself safe. You put it on and rush out the door, into what awaits.

{Not my bike up, there, but damn . . .!}

Sproing

The new season announces itself in oriental tones: every morning as we wait for the school bus, we see that fairies in kimonos have overnight added new watercolor daubs to the weeping willow, painting expressive longings in ever deepening, lengthening strokes of green. An even more telling seasonal appearance, on a Moto Guzzi listserve, is one clever wag's Oil Leak Haiku. It prompts a call-and-response of a dozen other haiku on the eternal sadness of leaky seals (clearly lots of folks out there doing last-minute maintenance on their old Ambassadors and Sports), and in them you feel the fresh wind of hope, impatience, frustration. And good spirits.

That is what the new season inspires in me, too. Actually, I'm impatient in fall, winter, and summer as well, attested to by my growing collection of speeding tickets; I narrowly averted one yesterday only by the grace of a school bus placed around a corner by the angel who occasionally looks after my bank account. A few seconds after I stopped, a state trooper filled my rearview mirror with ominous blue and yellow.

See, there's this urging to move, in every sense of the word. All us mobile creatures have it--and for all I know, barnacles dream of velocity--the desire to spring forward fast. (Nelly most of all: she gives me this strange look, and then she's off, a flash across the street, to torment the neighbor's dog, tied up so he's safe, ha, as she noodles around in their yard just out of his reach; thankfully, unless there's garbage or rodents, in which case all bets are off, I have an ace in the hole or rather my pocket, leftover lunchbox cheese quesadilla, and she's soon back for some greasy yum.) Assisted quickness, aka engines below us, are a permanent draw for us humans, hence the lure of motorbikes. I invite you to imagine what Nelly would do with a pocket rocket of her own. And no, she's not getting one for Christmas.

We thrill to the speed burst, canine and human both. As Mario Andretti said, "If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."

Yet also in this season, for me, is the persistence of remembered unhappiness: it will never quite leave my system, the linkage of May with the sudden loss of the great dog of my heart. As soon as the mourning doves make their return in this month, I am drawn back to that time when their amplified heartrending coos echoed the song of my grief.

Aversives are imprinted in our cells in that way. That is why it is so important to remember what behaviorism taught us. They can even trump the most essential biological urges, such as the drive for food. My friend J. tells me of her friend's child, who as a baby had such powerful, painful reflux that even the appearance of food became aversive. Now, with the medical emergency past, she finds the sight of food distressing. At age five, she weighs thirty pounds.

Thus our bodies bear the memories of the good, and the bad. Our histories, carried forward into the present. This is the lesson of Pavlov, and it is how positive reinforcement works (a law, like gravity, not a theory). I saw it in action, and I will never forget that moment, either. In group therapy, a long lifetime ago, one of our members came in for several weeks running complaining of a sudden darkness that had descended on him; he couldn't explain it, this oppressive cloud that hung low and wetted him with its gray tears. He kept searching for the cause--work? something a friend did? the weather? And finally the therapist said, quietly, "Isn't it this week, eight years ago, that your partner died?" He looked stricken. He had not thought of this. But he did not have to think of it, because his body was thinking of it for him: Yes, he said. Yes. It was.

Spring forward, but bound back. When we do, fast into the future, we take with us, in our bones, the places we've been. The things we've felt.

Dead Bird

What is the cure for loneliness? (And why don't rhetorical questions get answers?) I am sure I have never felt it as I do now, but then I remember I make a habit of fooling myself; I was, after all, once twenty-four and living in a big city alone. Of course, every other of those eight million in the same place were happily enmeshed with others, and all wore their bright badges of affiliation with self-satisfied smiles.

The admission of loneliness is not tolerated well by those I know. They hasten to tell me they are sometimes alone, too. Hey, occasionally their partners go away on business or work late; they are alone for an entire day or even week. This makes me smile. For sixteen years I too was left on my own for a weekend or a week, and I loved it. No loneliness in that whole span of time, ever. One must be alone on occasion in order to be together with oneself.

This, this is different.

I was driving home recently from a public place in which I was both alone and lonely. I suddenly knew in that deep pit of understanding why someone might rush to the liquor cabinet, to find a fast friend in a clear bottle. Someone who would stay right beside you until tingling numbness replaced the ache of loneliness. When they can't cure you, they give you an anesthetic, right?

*&*&*&*

The days are filled with stuff: volunteer work (in which you do not get to speak anyone but rather stare at Dewey Decimal numbers, or desperate dogs straining at the end of a leash; and when you do this, you think, Why am I here? All this serves to do is increase the frantic feeling that you should be at home, taking step after step up that Sisyphean mountain of work). More stuff: the daily root through the schoolboy's backpack, filled with papers from school to review and sign and mark down on the calendar; the computer, with its endless illusions of togetherness. And then you fall into bed at night, exhausted from the loneliness, which is like a sack of stones you drag everywhere behind you.

Your dog is there, and in some measure she allays the feeling that you are standing on the edge of a precipice whose bottom cannot be fathomed but is felt, by the whistling of a cold wind you are not entirely certain is below you and not inside your chest.

You look it up online. The word "loneliness" generates 13,400,000 hits. Ah, so there are a few others interested in the same subject. The day's first laugh escapes your lips as you wonder how tough it might be to connect with just one or two of these millions--surely you both could take care of the problem with a single stone. Come on, just one or two!

In the online encyclopedia entry, you read the following: "Loneliness is a feeling where people experience a powerful surge of emptiness and solitude. . . . [It] is not the same as being alone. . . . To experience loneliness, however, can be to feel overwhelmed by an unbearable feeling of separateness at a profound level. . . . It is often a very common though normally temporary consequence of divorce or the breakup or loss of any important or long-term relationship. . . . Chronic loneliness (as opposed to the normal loneliness everyone feels from time to time) is a serious, life-threatening condition."

Powerful. Surge. Emptiness. Overwhelmed. Unbearable. Profound. Loss. Chronic. The bell tolls, a sound you know. How temporary is "temporary"? Separateness feels like death for some animals.

What is the cure for loneliness? Your child plays upstairs, alone.

Then, the phone rings. A friend calls. Dinner? Quickly, you make herbed deviled eggs, assemble a salad, then trundle the kid into the car and drive down the hill. The sun is preparing to set. While the children run and catch frogs from the swamp and muddy their pants legs, you sit on the back porch of a lovely, serene house and look out over thirty acres of wildflower meadow and wetlands and rock gardens, a drink in your hand, and talk and talk. You swallow it whole, conversation, like sustenance, and you haven't eaten in days. Then you and your friend drive to get the wood-fired pizzas, the four children running around back there god knows where but safe, because it's only nature. It's people and their cars (and guns) you have to worry about, not stones, sticks, or skinned knees. They're fine; anyway, the father is there. So you drive and talk some more, this time about other people's problems, not your own, and it's far better than a drink to relieve what was pulling at you. You don't feel it at all anymore, that which was crushing you earlier. A friend, some talk, citron vodka, and pizza outside while the clouds go orange-pink--restored to humanity, and restored.

*&*&*&*

The other day a bird hit the upstairs window in the sunshine, right into the reflection of a sky that was not there. He fell to the earth like a rock, and for a while lay there, his heart thumping visibly in his chest. He was a yellow-bellied sapsucker. His gorgeousness lay exposed.

Borne Away

Why does some music, entering the ear, seem to launch itself directly to the lachrymal glands? In other words, make you powerless not to weep? By what strange physiology does this occur?

[Actually, it's not all that strange--contrary to some of my previous assertions, science has taken a bit of the literary magic out of this by studying how music affects us, e.g., here. The seat of the emotions is the amygdala, the most "primitive" part of the brain, so this is what lights up when we listen; also when we eat, have sex, or fear, not necessarily in that order. It is also a part of the brain all other higher animals possess, so so much for the naysayers who would deny other species emotions like ours.]

I am asking myself these questions as I wipe the tears from my cheeks during a concert in the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, after a performance of the famous Largo from Handel's Xerxes (transcribed for flute and piano) . I simply cannot hear this air without feeling that upwelling of--what? It's not sadness, but it is; it's not regret, but it is; it's not yearning, but it is.

The theme music that rises and falls behind the logo of New Line Cinema movies does something even more profound to me, even more ungraspable. Does this mean it was written by a better composer than Handel? I won't say that. Only that whoever it found a way to transport the heart in a fifteen-second clip.

Our brains live in our bodies. Our bodies experience nothing without our brains. Some people want to forget this. Indeed, much of human culture is based on efforts to try to forget this. But I can't. Not when thoughts are loosed by action, and vice versa.

Thoreau knew it, without the latest findings in neurobiology: "In my walks I would fain return to my senses. . . . I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. . . . My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant."

And (since you knew I was going to get here eventually, good Saunterer to the various mileposts of my life as I am) riding a motorcycle makes the amygdala positively glow red. A fascinating book about the physiology of riding, Bodies in Motion by Steven L. Thompson, details why our emotional and hormonal selves are fed by riding.

If there were a little window in Nelly's brain, I would see more clearly the feedback loop that is triggered when she, too, takes her physical and artistic pleasures: out in that Thoreauvian Wild, moving, crashing through the undergrowth, catching a scent, sinuously, athletically exploding, running on the very edge between control and abandon. The flow of brain chemicals would limn neon paths, both provoking her further action and streaming stronger in turn by it. Ah, life.

Now let me go bathe my head.

Thoughts on Watching a Nutty Movie Called "The Five Thousands Fingers of Dr. T"

* Isn't it about time to resurrect saddle shoes?

* Where can I get one of those beanies with a hand sticking up from the top, along with the legend "Happy Fingers"?

* The song about adults--who keep their wallets "near their hearts" and grow up to push kids around because they've only gained pounds but not a sense of compassion--should be made the national anthem.

* Would this movie be immeasurably improved by taking some hallucinogens first? (My generation obviously thought so; or at least that's what I suspect most of the audience in the back room of Maxwell's in Hoboken had done when it was screened there in 1985.)

* Perhaps our economy would be a lot sounder if it was based on the Fistoola rather than the dollar.

* I think I need that raw silk, A-line, cocktail-length coat Heloise wears, in jewel tones of topaz, turquoise, and emerald. It looks like it has the power to change lives.

* Is it really possible I heard "Percy Granger" used as a rhyme in a chorus? And I am sure in fact they quoted from Hamlet.

* That's because they don't make films like this any more, the kind that has no purpose other than to exercise the imagination, and see if it can come up with something weird, mixing high, low, and everything in between. Like sardonic political commentary and such lyrics as "Dress me up in Bock beer suds"--a cri de coeur if ever I heard one.

* A nuclear threat really can end it all, especially in 1953. And again in 2009.

* Was it all just a dream?

The Answer, Part XXVIV

Why did I not realize, like in high school, how utterly fantastic, mind-blowing, and richly consuming biology, evolution, behavior, were? To me, it was a lot of . . . science. Science had charts, and numbers, and lines on graphs. Real flowing blood: that was in novels, stories, poems (though I confess at least to getting the appeal of bunsen burners). Science was dry. Science had none of the electric charge of Shakespeare, of Faulkner.

I persisted in this gross misapprehension for a significant piece of my life. But then came the revelations of science, and suddenly it bloomed open for me, sang operas, wove tapestries from threads in colors that made my eyes vibrate. The truth of what we are made of. Before, I had tried for the big picture by jumping dot to dot in the words of poems' lines, listening to the meaning of silence in the caesuras. I thought this was big stuff; Eliot and Stevens making my head hurt in a very pleasant way.

But what I mistook for the big picture was merely brushstrokes in it, and evolution, ethology, and biology revealed themselves as All Ye Need to Know. Every motet, cathedral, sculpture, ballet, is captive to the all-encompassing work called Survival of the Fittest. It is so complete, so magisterial, so intricate that I cannot imagine a god more staggering to contemplate than one single aspect of this wonderment that is us (and the rest of animal creation): pheromones, or the muscles in the face that telegraph our emotions, or the broken-wing display of the piping plover. Put it all together, all the billions of tiny gears and bolts, and you are standing under one overarching organizational principle to the whole--the symphonic theme--and that is what works. What works for our cells will cause those cells and not these to survive; what works for organisms will survive (thanks, Darwin); what works to the aims of language will survive as words; what works in behavior, gets us the cookies, will survive (thanks, Skinner). Art-making is a subset of language--that which can be expressed no other way than this--and is subject to the laws of its own evolution. But laws nonetheless: that which defines science.

Survival of the Fittest. Not a musical title, certainly, but the single reason why. The reason we are here (which is, um, to be here), the reason at the bottom of everything we do. Art written by science.

Perhaps I may be excused my teenage excursions in the wrong direction, anyway. My dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, the seat of wise decisions, was as yet not completely developed. But how was I to know?

Her Seventeen Lives: Eight-point-five and Counting

This is just a story. There is no narrative arc.

The walk was the time-honored cornfields walk, the rocky path between the Esopus Creek, sent on its way after a sojourn in the drinking water reservoir of the great metropolis to our south, and the seed-corn fields. We've been coming here for eight years. It is convenient. It is a good walk the dogs love. We have only to dodge the detritus left by other users of this old-time private-but-public place: rusted fishing hooks, half-burned beer cans (one of the towering challenges beloved of the local yahoo set), dismembered deer legs. (Once I found a rottweiler's severed paws, tossed by the side of the path, but this belongs in a different story. Although thematically related to this one.) I can tell it's spring again, because the black garbage bags are blooming by the riverside; their presence is a mental puzzle I use to keep my mind fit as it tries to figure out why people choose to drive their bags into the beauteous landscape rather than to the dump. I have not succeeded in untying this particular knot yet.

Today it's the usual crowd--Bonnie, Janet, their four dogs, and Nelly--only, actually, it's sadly not very usual anymore since I've moved. Anyway.

On we go. Bonnie stays in her car with the pile of New York Timeses Janet has brought for me; it's too cold for her to walk. So her Malcolm comes with us, while Nora turns back soon and rejoins her human. Dogs--as individual in their proclivities as each of us.

We walk to the end, the literal bend in the river, where last time we saw a quick brown fox jump over a log.

That is not a story. That is true. A true story.

We turn back. Nelly is searching frantically (she has no other channel than the frantic one here) for rabbits in the undergrowth. At one point I see her in the field chewing on what looks like someone's coonskin cap, but I actually call her off of it, so there must not have been anything left but hair.

Ah, the getting back in the car part. Always a challenge. Bonnie got out and spied Nelly at the water's edge, down the ravine. It was just a matter of waiting for her to decide--or not--to come. Miracle of miracles, she soon did. Hup! I say, and she jumps into the back, with a bit of biscuit as thanks.

When I started the car, I noted by the clock (though no timepiece I own tells the actual time; all are set differing times ahead, though none has yet succeeded in making me anything but late) I had fifteen minutes to spare. So I ran to the drugstore for an errand. Then it was time to make the after-school pickup, at which I learned my son is the school's top expert on Poptropica.com, and much in demand for advice on how to beat the next level. It was hard extricating him from there.

And so it was that, after an hour of waiting, the little miss was on her way home. We were on the final curve before the drive, and What should we have for dinner? Well, I have some-- Suddenly from the backseat came the most horrific sound my dog has ever produced. It was a howl of agony. By the time I'd braked to the side of the road, hit the hazard lights, and turned around, Nelly had vomited all over the exactly five inches of upholstery that was not covered with old dog blanket. Now the deed was done, I raced to home. When I had the proper perspective to actually inspect the stuff, my stomach clenched in fear. Blue and green crystals of some sort--nothing that nature could produce. It looked like something I had seen, but what? How did I suddenly know it looked like rat poison?

Nelly was now consumed with an overwhelming desire to re-consume what had just been forcibly evicted, and she waited panting by the closed car door to regain entry.

I ran in to call Bonnie. She confirmed what I already knew: get to the vet. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes to close.

I had to weigh the choices. So I told the boy, who is not old enough to be left home alone, to stay home alone and do his homework. I didn't need to tell him to avail himself of one of the electronic babysitters, perhaps finish watching that HBO series on John Adams. Then we got back in the car, Nelly this time perched on my lap with my fingers around her collar so she could not get access to the backseat again. And I drove, fast fast fast.

It cannot seem like luck to have your dog ingest a poison that will kill her in the most brutal, bloody way possible. But it was a series of individual pieces of luck that unreeled this movie backwards. The what-ifs are arrayed like the spindles of the hard-to-hit carnival ring toss game: if we got home any earlier, she would have gone out somewhere in back field and I would never have seen what she threw up (and ate again). I would have watched her drink increasing amounts of water all night, to no avail, and merely wondered why. If the vet's office had not been open, they would not have been able to induce her to vomit the rest, and given her quick applications of medicine. What if, what if.

What if Nelly were not here now? But she is. Sidelong on the couch behind me, three feet away at this very moment, and I can hear her gentle breath. Sleeping beauty. And we lived happily ever after.

High Dive

Say I have an errand in another town (say, going to look at a house for sale, and, say, having big hopes crushed to powder yet again). First I ascertain how to get there--which is why god invented Google Maps--and then I break out the paper maps. In a combination of nostalgia and necessity, I revert to the hopelessly old-fashioned for this most meaningful of tasks: finding a good place to take Nelly for an off-leash hike.

When you are a motorcyclist, you read maps as others do tea leaves (or 401K statements, and we now know which of these holds more promise for the future). You know that if you look deeply enough into what was folded and is creased, new worlds will be found along the yellow brick road. Only one hopefully less slick. You will find the Here to There that will take you somewhere. You get good at reading maps for all their nuance, their lines like those of sonnets you will repeat as their scansion pulls you down into a corner lean.

Then, when you get a dog, you go even deeper into the map, searching out those green swathes of unroaded space that signal the ever-shrinking gift of running room, that which bears no threat of accidental death for prey-besotted canids. Because you love to see your dog run, it's that simple; even if you plod on two feet, your heart flies on four.

This kind of map reading is itself a map, back to the vast territories of the inner imagination.

On the state forest trail by the careening Kanape Brook, heading gently upwards under still-unleafed giants in the early spring, I reentered a place I had forgotten. It was a country where I used to spend so many hours, of such historic importance to me that now rediscovered, I can hardly believe I had ever left (this is the kind of age-propelled amazement that now drives Facebook for the middle-aged crowd). This is the place where, when you are a child, what is inside the imagination is colored far more brightly, with sharper edges and deeper deeps, than anywhere your sneakers actually meet the ground.

This struck me full in the face at a turn in the trail. Up ahead, a spring freshet was chasing itself down the slope that rose on the left, hurriedly pulled by the magnet of the powerfully rushing stream in the ravine to the right, via a culvert underfoot. The bed of this melodic little waterway was a tumble of rocks entirely painted in emerald moss that glittered in the slanting sun of late day. (And begorra if it this wasn't St. Patrick's Day, too.) Suddenly I was there, at seven, with wondering eyes that beheld fairyland. I just knew it was peopled by the handsome, spritely beings in a gigantic book, called, yes, Fairyland, that I had found at my grandparents' house, itself a sugary magic land for an introspective child. The book, with its watercolor drawings, had belonged to my mother, or maybe my aunt, at the same age as I when I discovered it. Its pages were over-danced with creatures who slept on such moss beds, and I too lived with them, and sailed on their leaf boats, huddled under their toadstool umbrellas in the sweetly dripping woods; the works.

This was the time when I not only looked at such pictures in books--I dove into them from a height, splashed down into their depths and stayed there, bubbles silvering from my lips. And remembering this now, at the sight of a fairy stream, made me wonder where it all has gone. The immersion in something other than details and logistics and responsibilities and groceries and agendas: the life vest that keeps me bobbing on the surface, unable to sink down into the wanderings of the mind. The way you get to be who you become.

For a moment I recaptured that way of being, the one who stared outward to see inward. Then we turned back on the trail, because I had an appointment to keep.

Endurance

There she is, through the window, my dear companion, her head bobbing up and down in the field: she is supping on deer shit. Ah. My son says, "Nelly the barbarian." She is that, oh yes, though she is also the closest thing to civilization I have in the middle of the night, pressed close against my leg as I wake in a literal cold sweat, numb and in pain at the same time (she, like me, specializes in encompassing opposite poles at once).

It was she alone who prevented me from making a panicked run to the emergency room at 2 a.m. -- But I can't leave Nelly here by herself! -- though there was also the unsavory aspect of a thirty-minute drive when I was so exhausted it might as well have been driving drunk. It seemed safer to use denial, cue up The Thirty-Nine Steps and sing mantras to myself (It's probably nothing you'll die from . . . ) while breathing deep, and fall back into fitful sleep, to assess the situation in daylight.

It was a good thing that the results of the second blood test later revealed that the cost of such a dark quest would have been paid in vain: it was simply a continuation in new symptomatology of the same virus that for six weeks had stretched me on the rack, toyed diabolically with my senses, and made me recall for the first time in decades the movie scene that had spooked me so completely as a child that it erased everything else, including the film's name, from my memory: a convicted witch, laid beneath a wooden raft on which was heaped rock after rock by a mirthful populace until she was crushed to death.

This illness has caused the physical strength to seep out of me, at the same time that psychic confidence has also sprung a slow leak. I try to recall if it was ever thus with me--the heaping on of circumstance and emotional reaction until I am like that pancake witch, in a cycle of boom and bust that has me up in the clouds of hope one week, plodding through an earth-hugging gray fog the next. No, I realize, the cycles are much shorter these days --and sometimes they occur so rapidly that they are almost simultaneous, so that I take on the quality of the many-armed Kali, a statue of whom sits on the sill in the yoga studio. I look at it and see a mirror. Destroyer and giver of life, all inside my one little brain.

The source of one great hope lately is simply an idea--one that came on me gradually, a dawn whose sun soon blazed hot and huge overhead -- and ideas excite me more than anything else in this world, even chocolate, money, or the prospect of not having to decide alone at 3 a.m. whether to get out of bed and drive to the ER.

This idea has to do with something I once deemed peripheral, but now see as central to the whole shebang. It arises from the top echelon of a top echelon organization, the Iron Butt Association, whose membership has cornered the market on what is essential in life: single-minded purpose that can blast to powder the notion of impossibility. A few of these people see something that cannot, should not, be done (say, ride through all forty-eight contiguous states in eleven days; sleep is for wimps, or people of little determination) and then do it. Simply do it. The idea is a window into not only a particular psychology -- one may say pathology, but then, like Kali, sanity and insanity may be encompassed by one and the same act -- but into the nature of purpose itself. This is an amazement to me. And a lesson, at this particular juncture in life.

The friend whose pronouncements about the import of recent events have never yet been found untrue, paradoxical as they are, has given another. In order to not be alone, I must first learn to be alone.

So Nelly and I once more climb the familiar trail in the Shawangunks, my ailing bones protesting at every step (and even worse when we get home, giving me a presentiment of life at age ninety). The endurance of this virus is arm-wrestling me now, and both of us tremble in the stillness of the effort. My dog, civilized barbarian, turns back to look at me with adamantine eyes from her advance position on the trail. The slant of the sun reveals her eyes to be both brown and blue. She is with me, except when she is not. My mind is the destroyer and it is the creator. The man who wills himself to stay within the funnel of light his auxiliary headlights throws always ahead of his machine into the long night of a thousand miles just to prove it can be done is at once unhinged and the most rooted of all. That is what this means.

Razzed

Sometimes I look out through my eyes, and I have a feeling that they do not belong to me. That is because it is not me doing the looking--it is the other me, the one who used to exist many years ago, the me who has been displaced against my will by time. The other one still lives in the years of youth, the juice-filled years. In these moments I feel I am walking in my body many years ago, and it is a coiled spring of energy and hope and possibility. It is the body that had curves (yes) and swagger, the one that leaned back into life watchfully, as if perusing the buffet. The body that my mother, in the passenger seat, would stare at and then bark, "Both hands on the wheel!" When I would silently persist, as it felt much better, right, to cock an elbow out the window, let my right hand hold all the power, she would sniff, "You drive like a dime-store cowboy."

And that is me, a dime-store cowboy who is every inch a girl, walking down Fifth Avenue at lunchtime, aware that eyes were following. Sometimes the mouths below those eyes would open, and I hated it. I cringed, because those comments were supposed to rile me, rob me of my composure and thus of my integrity. And now I hate the fact that no one says anything anymore. Hypocrite.

Or else I might just be sad at what I can not control, and what I did not understand. This is a special sadness that belongs only to women. See, we were the girls who reveled, for the first time in this social history, in our ability to wield our sexuality for our own devices, or so we thought; but now that we're old, we find we've lost the visibility that helped make us who we were. You'd think we'd feel free at last, now that no one wants to take us. We can walk where we want, unremarked. But it feels like a terrible loss anyway. We can't win.

American Girl in Rome by Ruth Orkin

Exactly thirty years ago, I walked down a street in Athens, Greece, with my new junior-year-abroad girlfriends, tight in the embrace of adventure. A car slowed to walking pace next to us. We kept our gazes steadfastly ahead. They razzed us continuously: "Beautiful! Oh, my god, gorgeous! Come with us. Let us buy you a coffee. Please! Just a coffee. Come on. Oh, beautiful!" We said the appropriate things, in our American-inflected Greek: No, sorry, we're busy. No, really, we can't. But they didn't stop. "Just one minute for us. You won't be sorry. Oh, gorgeous! We don't believe you." Each moment we had to up the arms race, the words more and more forceful: No, leave us alone. Still we walked (now looking for anywhere, an alley or a shop, into which to duck, but there were only apartment buildings, miles of them, nowhere to hide). Then we were yelling: Get the hell out of here! At last, Leila, a spirited Greek-American from Boston, threw a plastic bottle from the gutter into the window of their car. They asked for it. And suddenly, it was war. Full-out war. "Whores!" they screamed. We walked faster, and faster, and their car jumped the curb. They were driving behind us, and we were running. For our lives. Because if they couldn't have us, they would hurt us.

What is this impulse?

That kind of controlling assault by men--constant, from the minute you went outside--made my sojourn in Greece something I almost could not wait to escape. My experience there now, I suspect, would be that of an entirely different country. I might actually get to see it, instead of hiding behind ancient kore and dusty shrubs half the time.

So why is it that I fervently wish for, oh, I don't know, just five years to be erased from my log? I mean, is that so much to ask?

Ah, but it wouldn't really change anything, would it? Anyway, I have my small pleasures: prime among them the pastime of thinking, as I gaze upon some dewy-cheeked young beauty, "Know what? Some day you are going to be exactly as old as I am now. You too will look at pictures of your cohort when they were thirty years younger, and be stunned to realize you cannot even recognize them as the same human being."

But if hope is the province of the young, then I am suddenly a child, with a whole life spread out ahead of me, with surprise and greenness. Things are going to happen. I am not sure which eyes I will use to see them with.

Comparative Affection Studies

You suddenly spy them through the trees: the bent and broken pens, small dark houses with snow-caved roofs within, where once the family pet was exiled from life. Over days, over nights, he went slowly mad from sensory deprivation. The sight of these abandoned places--thank god, I think, that at least this one is no longer used--makes me involuntarily avert my eyes; as if I'd chanced upon a decaying crime scene. The original sense of horror is amplified by the sense that it happened here long ago. That ghost howls may be heard upon the wind, if one is unlucky enough to stand and stare. It was unheard when it occurred; now it must be heard forever more into the future, the cry of tormented souls without cease.

It is no easier, just different, to confront the dog of today in his lonely pen, or tied on a short rope that holds him back from getting near the house, or anyone to touch. There are still plenty of such solitary confinement cells here in this suburbanizing, formerly rural place. And now I am putting myself in the direct path of ten of them.

Every Friday afternoon, in a sort of return to the labors and convictions of my youth, when I walked dogs at the holding pens of the Akron, Ohio, humane society, I am now doing the same at Rondout Valley Animals for Adoption. This is a state-of-the-art facility, run by a woman who travels the country to lecture on the subject of the wellbeing of shelter dogs, but it still amounts to dogs kept alone in a box, no matter that the runs are clean and bright. The dogs are still desperate. The dogs still make me feel desperate. They lead me at the end of the leash, pulling me through the doors, and they are looking for something.

When someone close to you dies, your life stops too. Fluids refuse to move, frozen in the stems of your veins. The power source to the record player has been pulled, and the needle in the groove makes the sound of a sudden awkward decrescendo: BWOOooom. Then the music is gone.

If the someone is a dog, you might find yourself unable to go for a walk in the woods anymore; what would be the bloody point? The woods enter your senses through those of another, so that in effect you are joined together in one being, one being with two noses, four eyes. Your dog's happiness is so much yours that it alone makes the world spring into existence. Without her, no happiness or beauties are really there.

If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound? If you walk in the woods and have no genie of a dog appearing and reappearing in the distance ahead of you, does the woods actually exist?

Look at the back of her head as she alerts. This vision draws you closer to her: it is the heart of tenderness, though nothing you could ever tell anyone else. Her ears are pricked up, reaching. The two tufts of hair on the inside quiver ever so slightly, and this is the split second of love.

As I stand in the kitchen this morning, shoveling cereal at high velocity into my mouth--no time to sit down, for it's a busy life--I watch two squirrels outside the sliding glass doors. They are linked together with invisible thread, moving like a single drop of mercury that occasionally breaks into two, then rejoins. Up, down, over the shrubbery. They draw sinuous lines; when one speeds up, the other does too. They search, combine, and react as if one, pixilated.

And I have seen a squirrel mourning the death of his other half, lying curled and partly smashed in the road. This loss: just before the dark hole of winter, when you need another half, badly. He stood up on his hind legs, as if needing to be closer to heaven to ask something; then crouched, turned, and ran. Just as quickly he turned back, ran over and sniffed her. What? But tell me: I don't understand. He was dancing alone now, the dance of disbelief. What has happened here? Oh, god, no.

Somehow, the absence of any possibility of telling him what has transpired (who has expired) was to me most painful. Confusion is more horrible than death; it is like seeing death come, and come, and come.

The dogs howl on the other side of their closed dutch doors. I can see them briefly through the bars on the window, leaping, throwing themselves at the portal which might, just might, open. When I do, they cannot be contained. I drop one leash, get the other on, pick up the first, fumble with a clip while this rotating madness hurls itself at all corners--this, now this is desperation. This fifteen-minute walk is an exercise in management only. They cannot "hear" the words of give and take, of the imagined positive-reinforcement training I was thinking I would give. Ha! No way in hell. Instead we go careening out over the icy snowbanks. I get dragged through muddy puddles on the driveway. They are searching, searching, madly. Then they pull me back to the door. There was something in there, wasn't there? At least there is something familiar there, in the face of the older woman who volunteers and serves them dinner, calling out to the sound of thuds on the other side of a door, "Hush now, there, Zee! You know, I'm coming. I can only move so fast."

I commit a terrible crime when I put them away. They suddenly see they're in front of the door of their cells, and then they pull back. No--no! Not in there! I don't want to go back in there, alone. And I pull them in. I throw a treat to the opposite corner, in a bid for a few seconds where I can close the door without them slipping back through at a run. Evil. I am a jailer, the one thing I never wanted to be in this life. But I have to be one, in order that they can have fifteen minutes of freedom at least.

I close the door, and the wails begin. They follow me out to the car. I want to get home and have a drink and not think about them again for a week, because it is like pain. It is like being left back there with them, alone and confused.

"Bye, sweet dog," I say. "Lovely dog." I have loved, and they have hoped, for a few minutes on Friday afternoon. The nights are long, and dark.

Victory Garden

There is a certain beauty in necessity.

Here is the golden coin I found buried in the dirt. At first it looked ugly, worthless, and it hurt my fingers to scrabble so for it in the hard ground. Important lessons arrive in frost heave. But now I am seeing how it reflects an impossibly warm light. After endless, merciless washings.

This is all I will say about the place I am at now. But for those impatient with the obliqueness crap, I offer a translation. I'm getting it. The stuff adversity wanted to teach me. Like a perverse Santa Claus, he cracked me savagely across the jaw, then stood back and smiled, proffering some lovely gifts wrapped in self-improvement-design paper. Way to go, Santa. They're just what I needed!

[Melissa est morte. Vive Melissa!]

Less wifty-vague is my second, related realization this week: that you're a fool if you don't plant a vegetable garden. (Apologies to those who don't have sunny enough ground, or any ground: you are not foolish, just unlucky.) This is going to become more apparent over the next year, alas, so I would encourage you to get busy now. This is that lovely time for dreams: the seed catalogs start appearing in mailboxes still nailed shut by frost in the morning. A fantasy on glossy paper. How I remember those years when I could fully participate in the mental sowing of those fantastical seeds, which would grow into lush greenness (unaffected by blight) and heavy fruit overnight, in dreams. As it was, in reality, I was able to have rainbow chard in profusion, and cilantro, basil, lettuce, and cherry tomatoes; dinner outside the door, already warmed by the sun.

This gift, wrapped inside our current state of woe--because growing a garden is a sensual pleasure, on top of being a new necessity--is a result of the crumbling of capitalist castles in the air. (Limestone is good for soil.) It may well bring us to a communist future, whether we wanted one or not. I'm not talking about the one when a controlling government snatches the best for itself, and distributes the crumbs to everyone else. And I'm not talking about the kind of communist future I glimpsed when I flirted with the actual Communists--yes, because I was a pissed-off, disaffected youth, but perhaps equally because I thought the charismatic blond guy who wrote their zine was awfully cute--the future where "bloody heads will roll down Park Avenue." (This he said with a wide smile, and that is when I decided he was maybe not so cute after all.)

I speak of true communism, where we have to help one another, or we won't eat. In lieu of the garden vegetables I probably won't get to have this year either, I will trade you some bread, either quick or yeasted, OK?

Just a quick question: Where in the stimulus package is all the money for community gardens? Just thought you might know. Billions for car manufacturers; none for good food. Well, something to think about, anyway, eh?

So this is not all bad, this backward gift from the economy. Sometimes adversity brings presents with tears rolling down them; sometimes with dirt clinging to their fragrant roots. Something to hold out to another in need, and receive back their thanks like sunshine. But do wash carefully; grit between the teeth, you know. Bon appetit!

E A

My name is Melissa. And I am an e-oholic.

Now that I have identified my illness--a dependence on the often illusory rewards of the computer--what is the cure?

It crept up on us slowly, didn't it? Ten years ago it was a mere tool, like the telephone or the scotch-tape dispenser. We used it when we needed to, then put it down. Then, day by day, moment by moment, the computer became more central to every aspect of life. People like me preferred it for communications, because we could hide our shyness and, in an e-mail, sound like the confident wits we'd prefer to be. There's a powerful reinforcer right there. And it's all about the reinforcers, baby.

For most of us, a communication from another human is inherently rewarding. It feels good, because a desire for communication is a part of who we are, biologically and therefore emotionally: pack animals whose survival, as a species and as individuals, depends on connections to others of our kind. Even a message from a robot wondering if we need low-cost Viagra (and apparently a whole bunch of folks do!) can feel satisfying, if only for a split second before we delete it. Disgusting.

The post office only delivers once a day; e-mail is pouring stuff into our boxes 24/7. I can almost remember the day I discovered what the Send and Receive button did. Watching those green bars progress into fullness, and boldface possibilities ensue, provides a rich moment of hope, particularly for the freelance writer: Is it a friend reaching out? An offer of work? That, on occasion, such is the case means we are on a variable schedule of reinforcement, and as Skinner wrote in About Behaviorism:

All gambling systems are based on variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement, although their effects are usually attributed to feelings. It is frequently said, for example, that people gamble because of the excitement, but the excitement is clearly a collateral product. It is also sometimes said that people gamble "to satisfy their sense of mastery, to dominate, to win"--in spite of the fact that gamblers almost always eventually lose. The inconsistency is explained by calling the gambler who ruins himself and his family "compulsive" or "pathological," his "irrational" behavior thus being attributed to an illness. His behavior is "abnormal" in the sense that not everyone responds with similar dedication to the prevailing contigencies, but the fact is simply that not everyone has been exposed to a program through which a highly unfavorable ratio is made effective.

We are all susceptible to it, in other words, because this is what natural selection has created us to be. (And by the way, happy 200th, Charles Darwin!) Yeah, that's right, a monkey hitting Send/Receive obsessively. It is also a very valuable procrastination tool, I've found, and therefore doubly reinforcing.

As Karen Pryor further elaborates, in her great book Don't Shoot the Dog! (whose title, she never fails to relate to her audiences, was not her idea, since the book is about operant behavior in people, as extrapolated from her work with animals):

The power of the variable schedule is at the root of all gambling. If every time you put a nickel into a slot machine a dime were to come out, you would soon lose interest. Yes, you would be making money, but what a boring way to do it. People like to play slot machines precisely because there's no predicting whether nothing will come out, or a little money, or a lot of money, or which time the reinforcement will come (it might be the very first time). Why some people get addicted to gambling and others can take it or leave it is another matter [another matter which Skinner explains above], but for those who do get hooked, it's the variable schedule of reinforcement that does the hooking.

In 1979, I was a walking, talking illustration of Pryor's example. The Greyhound from California to Utah passed, as perhaps all buses must, through Nevada. As soon as we crossed the state line, people were suddenly more eager to exit than our arrival at some pungent urinals and indifferent snack foods would have predicted. At last I figured out why: It was not the sun-splashed dust of the parking lot, or the promise of a bag of BBQ potato chips; it was the slot machines at every rest stop. Oh, how sadly absurd, I thought: as if they're going to win something. Pathetic. Then, at one stop, there was a nickel slot right outside the women's room. On my way in, I slid a coin in; I could, just barely, spare five cents to a new experience. Next, suddenly, clatter and clatter. Nickels flowed in joyful rain onto the floor. I scooped them up in wonder. At the next rest stop, I was elbowing the elderly and infirm out of my way in haste out the bus.

Now I sit all day in front of the keyboard like a test monkey, or probably more aptly, like a chicken at training camp. (Yes, peck peck peck: a way to finesse your training skills, because as explained by Teamworks Dog Training, which holds chicken camps a la Bob Bailey, the venerable behaviorist who created these camps for trainers, "Your chicken will be an excellent trainer--you will be training an animal with lightning-fast reflexes and a very low tolerance for an insufficient rate of reinforcement. The other advantage of working with a chicken is that the emotional dialogue [like the one that exists between dog and human] is not a factor in training. Chickens do what works for them. If you don't set achievable criteria, and reinforce them at a high enough rate, they will simply fly to another trainer's table." How's that for a message, eh?) It cannot be repeated enough: All organisms do what works for them. Evolutionarily, cellularly, biscuit-wise: we're all living at the prodding end of some form of natural selection or another.

And so, on the morning walk, I say, tetchily impatient, to Nelly as she stops to sniff, and sniff, at some invisible marker on the side of the road, "Come on. I don't have time for this!" Yeah, because what I do have time for is hours upon hours sitting and waiting for my reinforcers to appear on the screen. I tell myself I'll just check e-mail for at most half an hour, then get on with the day, with my "real" work. The next thing I know, I look up and three hours have passed. Damn, then: I won't go online for the rest of the day. I won't!

I recognize the same sort of self-talk and bargaining that an alcoholic engages in--"Well, I'll just have one drink, because it's been a hard day," and then lo and behold they're all hard days, hard days which get harder and harder as time goes by. By four in the afternoon, I'm sort of tingling a little, or itching. "OK, maybe I'll just boot up and take a quick look . . . " and I read the e-mail, then hit Send/Receive a few more times. Peck, peck.

We should have known how speedily, how utterly thoroughly, these machines and their screens were going to take us over, body, soul, and economy. Because the portents were there, in the waking dreams we call "movies." The science fiction, the cartoons, of half a century ago: they all showed men sitting behind large consoles of buttons, and things lighting up (lighting up, just as in a Skinner box for rats or pigeons) that we were obviously meant to take as signaling quite important events beyond. It was coming, and they foretold it, though we did not heed. Science "fiction" indeed. We should have remembered that fiction always tells the truth. It is nonfiction that lies so dirty.

The thoroughness of this technologic takeover is seen in our language, or more properly, in our poetry, in the elided words (MySpace, eBay, Craigslist) where the space between things is now gone. We are all so much closer together now.

Do You Believe in Magic?

There are mysteries all around. (And no, I'm not speaking of reiki.) Things happen for which we have no explanation. So we reach to the lowest shelf and pull off the nearest product: hmmm, maybe this God Is All Around stuff will do the job. Whiter whites and brighter colors? Keep in mind our Energy Field soap powder!

Up until now, science has provided all the mystery decoding I've ever felt the need for; even when I couldn't understand it, or no one had yet explored it, I felt confident the concrete, the quantifiable, took care of everything under the sun. Notwithstanding my own addiction to my horoscope: even then, I knew that it was foolish on its face. But a good astrologer is merely a good psychotherapist, mining the universal themes and keeping it vague enough for anyone to locate himself as in a mirror. All a trick of exegesis anyway.

Lately, though, I find myself beginning to believe in another dimension. Or something. I don't know what to call it--the connectedness of love and subconscious thought? I am aware that everyone who knows me is, upon hearing this, suddenly very concerned about me. Please let me reassure you that I am not really going over to the Dark Side. You know, like Christianity. Indeed, I am every bit as committed to my atheism and biological determinism as ever. I am just, you know, thinking. Thinking there's something else in us. Something that resembles a psychic string between two tin cans.

I phone someone I have not spoken to, or (sorry) even thought about, in two months. She picks up the phone, a little breathless: she has just been to the post office, after a long trip, to pick up a package I had sent to her in early December. She is holding my gift and thinking about me as the phone rings.

A friend tells me a dream. A nightmare, really: he has gone to his garage, found the door open, and--empty. Someone has stolen all his beloved motorcycles. Later that day, for real, someone breaks into his truck and steals all the worthwhile gadgets one often keeps in one's truck: camcorder, GPS (with "home" nicely mapped out), and garage door remotes. Garage door remotes! The GPS to locate the garage door! Holy BMWs. The sudden recollection of the dream impels him to go change those codes, quick.

My aunt--the fabulous aunt, the one who helps keep my spirit together, with the force of her goodness and love--calls me to discuss one of my recent e-mails. (I can't imagine I was whining about something or other in it, but you'll have to use your imagination.) She's sitting in her car in a restaurant parking lot while her husband has gone in; he had suddenly declared himself in need of smelts--yes, smelts--for dinner. And in all of Salt Lake City, there is only one place to go for smelts. This Greek place. They rarely go to this restaurant, but tonight there was this need. This sort of smelt need. As we're talking, suddenly she gasps. "I don't believe it!" she tells me when she's somewhat recovered. She laughs out loud. Her daughter and baby grandson have just pulled in to the parking lot. She had no idea where they were going to be that night; and Salt Lake County is home to 1.2 million people, hundreds and hundreds of restaurants. So what were the chances they would end up in the same one?

Yes, what are the chances? The chances that these things are chance. Or are they something deeper than that, the connection between people and events and the opportunity that arises from them, the match's sulfur striking the box, for a burst of luck, like flame.

You have your own examples, I know. Occurrences that seemed too finely wrought in their synchronicity to be an accident. These things happen all the time, but we let them drift away. We don't have a paradigm into which to fit them, much less an explanation. Too wacky--and you're not a wacko! you're a proud member of the intellectual elite!--to think you were just visited by some mystery of the sixth sense.

Yet perhaps you were. "With what's unreal thou / Coactive art," says Leontes in The Winter's Tale. I think so too.

Nelly, Speak!

"If animals could speak, maybe then we wouldn't keep them in zoos, and
we'd have to take them out. We could trust them, and tell them things."

In our house lately, we've been talking about language. My young son gazes longingly at Nelly and wishes he could know what she's thinking. With the extensive work ethologists have done, we can come close.

So I tell him that dogs do not like to be leaned over (a sign of aggression), or hugged about the neck (ditto). Thus he refrains from doing what he wishes he could ("Nelly is addicting!" he says of her deceptively winsome look as she sleeps) in what amounts to the growth of his nascent compassion--a sense of concern for The Other, in the act of turning away from one's own.

Language spells freedom. If the denizen of the zoo could look through the steel bars and, in a clear, articulate, Harvard-inflected English, say, "Please don't incarcerate me. I have done nothing wrong (besides being unable to plead my case). This is unfair. And moreover it is painful," would we be able to ignore it? Only because the animal lacks speech? (And thus the only way to prick our conscience?) Or, perhaps, because he also lacks the ability to fight back?

My son longs for an interpreter, as he watches his dog watching him.

Unfortunately, all too often I know exactly what Nelly is saying. Like today. On a snow day, with little traffic on the road, I decide the risk is worth her company as we attempt to guide the plastic sled down the pitiful slope at the side of our house. (It doesn't want to go; the sled protests, "But I was having a good time napping in the shed!") Nelly stands at the bottom of the drive, returned from a small stroll about the neighbors' garbage cans and potentially rodent-infested deck undersides, and, reassured that we have not left for vacation in the meanwhile, stands motionless looking at me while I call, "Nelly!" That seals it. She flips around and races off down the road in the other direction. She has spoken. Quite clearly. And what she has said, in West Virginia - inflected English, is "See ya later, sucker!"

[For the benefit of true behaviorists out there, I will suspend the joke and admit that I am well aware that although I would like to believe that I have trained the cue "Nelly!" to correspond to the behavior "come," her behavior informs me that I am mistaken. I have, unwittingly, to be sure, taught her it means the opposite.]

My son has also sagely observed, when I bill and coo to our dog in that unspeakable patois--baby talk, blech--that if Nelly could talk, what she would say at that particular time is "Why the heck are you talking to me like that?"

For those who truly want to know what their dogs are saying, there is a wealth of decoders available. (And why people persist in living with dogs without availing themselves of a few language lessons--I mean, could you imagine marrying a Chinese person but insisting you would never, ever utter a word of Mandarin in their presence?--is, I think, a matter for abnormal psychology to investigate.) Starting with Konrad Lorenz, and extending to Roger Abrantes; there is even a pretty good capsule in Wikipedia. Why the heck do people insist animals have no language? It's speech they don't have, folks. The claim is bizarre, given the subtle richness of what ethologists have observed--and one should quickly suspect they haven't fully caught even the half of it. So, worse than bizarre, it is stupid. And often leading to abuse, as is ignorance's wont.

There's a photo in the KV Vet catalog, which I was just leafing through in pursuit of vitamin supplements for the girl dog who probably needs fewer nutrients, not more, that made me pause. There's a Corgi receiving a treatment with an anti-flea wipe, but I'm not sold on the product, as they mean for me to be. That's because the little beast has been caught by a quick shutter in an expression of slight distress, with a tongue flick to his nose. It happened in a second, but just because we are rather slow creatures doesn't mean he is not saying something meant for us to hear. It is one of the "calming signals" in Turid Rugaas's terminology, as she catalogued in her On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals. Dogs' language is, of course, body language, and their vocabulary is quite rich indeed. When dull-witted humans miss it, or misinterpret it, or dismiss it, it is sad for all involved. For, as the Norwegian behaviorist puts it, dogs use these communications to "prevent things from happening, avoiding threats from people and dogs, calming down nervousness, fear, noise, and unpleasant things."

And nothing could be more unpleasant to our companion animals than the unwittingly threatening behavior of what to them is the equivalent to us of a 750-pound person throwing us on our backs and pinning us down in the name of "fun," or a canine-aggressive move like hugging their necks, in the name of primate love.

We will never be fully fluent in Dog, of course, until we have a tail to wag, ears to prick or lay back, loose skin to shake, the eyesight of a radar scope. In terms of dog language, we will forever be at the level of the robot maid in the Jetsons cartoon, who described love as "the most ut." (And love certainly is that; as are all the ways we express it, spoken or not.)

Another thing my son said blew me away. Staring at Nelly, he suddenly wondered if she had another name. "I mean, what if her parents gave her a name before we did, one we'll never know?"

Not in any dictionary I know is all that a dog, or a child, is capable of saying.

Prolix

When unhappy, it is all I can think of doing. When anxious, it literally saves me. When excited, I anticipate using it to conceive, chisel, and free the thought. This is writing: my life so far, and by now all I am fit --I hope and trust--to do.

Though I did want to be a veterinarian for quite some time. And before that, a princess.

I am opposed to the notion of writing as therapy, although it has performed that function for me. No, I employ a flesh-and-blood therapist to do the kind of work that only a therapist can do, to listen to the tears, and at times provoke them. It's the way the structure of the mind works, and even if you would like it to be true that you can "do it alone," that won't do anything to alter an immutable fact. You can't. Just like wishing the apple would float up instead of fall. Gravity is a law; so is the need for outside corrective to the damaged psyche. And I'd love to meet the person who doesn't have one of those. In order to get off the damnable gerbil wheel of repetition most of us get stuck on, we need someone else to stick a pencil through the bars of the cage. We might go flying and land with a bruising thud, but at least we're off. Not getting right back on again is the real trick.

There is a great bonus, too. Psychotherapy is one of the most enthralling intellectual pursuits there is. It encompasses virtually every strain of thought we have yet come up with: philosophy, biology, the mysteries of art, the literature of narrative, metaphor, and fable. And puzzle: It's as if, at the first meeting, the world as you knew it was broken up and dumped on the table before you as a 1,000-piece picture for you to reassemble. And so nothing will ever again look the same. The front page of the newspaper, even, reveals itself to enumerate the same patterns of behavior you yourself are beginning to realize are the result of a buried motivator that propels you every waking moment, and every dreaming one, too. I imagine this little thing as looking something like a mine. A hard metal sphere with a few wires sticking out. At once improbably innocent and radiating malevolence. And look, on the side--something stenciled, though fading. The owners, perhaps? The ones who hid this under a light layer of soil, waiting for a slight disturbance? Yes, now I can read it: "Mom and Dad."

Learning about how this was set in place--or at least it was for me; let me speak only for myself, since I write in the self-serving egotistic form that is called "slow blogging"--was like a repeat of the most exciting classes I took in college. And there were many; they hopped me up as if delivering speed directly to a vein. I'd want to collar strangers in the quad and shake them till they saw stars--exactly what I was seeing when I read Hawthorne and Melville, Heidegger and (now I cringe) Derrida. The world was shaking under my feet, re-forming itself.

Not that it's entirely pleasant, though. Sometimes it feels like being slapped upside the head by someone much bigger than you. And sometimes it feels as though you're back on that gerbil wheel, only now you're in the chair revisiting, again and again, the same shit you thought you had identified and thus washed away sixteen years ago. Not. It just keeps coming back, in ever new inventive disguise. But your kind, wise, compassionate shrink says it must be repeated. As many times as it takes for you to get sick of it, or to finally see it. The first three hundred times were just warm-up, apparently.

I thought of this again as I was reading (quaintly, on the printed page, that which is about to be phased out completely, which makes such people as writers very, um, nervous) The New Yorker. I can't remember what it was exactly, but it made me reach for a pen and one of those flighty scraps of paper on which I write all these disparate notes and then tear my hair out over when, three years later, I'm trying to corral them in their thousands and make some sense out of them so I can start writing a book. Whatever it was, it struck me as a long argument predicated on something fictive. A false originating motive, which then makes the conclusion false too--like the notion of a whole-cloth substance called "evil," or the dominance myth of dog behavior (on which Cesar Millan has made his empire, but which is woefully faulty and functionally ends up as actually near to evil for the dogs on whom it's perpetrated; hmmmm). Something someone wished to believe (as to why, I must refer you back to psychotherapy) but wasn't in fact true. So the elaborate argument was a house built on a foundation of whipped cream.

This then dovetailed with my beginning to read, finally, when I should have done this two years ago before life threw its spanner into my works, B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Oh, how I wished he hadn't titled it that. Because what he says about what motivates human behavior, in just the first couple of pages, is so patently true that one can easily believe all of human life would be vastly, immediately improved if we could just make this "paradigm shift" from wishful thinking. The worldview would change, just as it does on that first day of psychotherapy. And it can never go back, which is a good thing: let us evolve, in our thinking, just as we have done in our bodies.

Writing is like therapy, even though it is not therapy, because writing feels good even while it pains one deeply. I actually feel itchy, short of breath, uneasy, needing suddenly to do the dishes or the laundry, or go take a walk mid-sentence. I'm dying to get away from it, even as I'm dying to get the next sentence down, see if it is one of those sentences that takes off like a kite with you at the end of the string pulling back with all your strength. That's what feels good: the appearance on the page of a line or two you didn't know you had in you. A thought that actually sounds smart, when you were feeling dumb. A rhythm that comes out like the percussion line of a driving dance song.

This is what feels good about writing, and why I keep doing it, why I've let myself go unfit for any other employment. So now I am undiversified as General Motors. With the same financial outlook.

To further clarify, I am, I just decided, an "ostensible writer." That is, I never write about what it is that I am ostensibly writing about (yeah, baby: check these blog posts! a whole new genre!). There are always other things that fit themselves in sideways, or insert themselves underneath the thin film of the surface. --This is the way I think, too; I wander through the woods looking at whatever, or I see my dog holding up her hurting paw from the snow (is she asking me for help, and if so, what does this say about her ability to intend, or posit results?), and a dozen new spokes are suddenly radiating out from the center of the thought. Jeez, it's a miracle I end up finishing anything I start writing, come to think of it. Or maybe I'm just ostensibly a writer.

This does tend to lead to a problem, though I experience it as a richness. "Prolix" was a word I first encountered on the top of one of my grad-school papers, meant to be a slap of a rebuke. It certainly is that. But it means that I will always be able to sit on top of a mountain of words, and that, at least, is a form of luxurious soft cushion. From it I see even more.

Uh-oh.

A Wing. And a Prayer

Airmen are sexy. They always end up looking like Gary Cooper when they wear their leather flight jackets. This is because they are the sort who look right into the steely eyes of death. And they don't blink either. There is the sense that they can do anything, and running along the narrow edge between life and death, the possible and the impossible, is "anything," all right.



They take a knowledge of science (and you better have a supremely tight grip on aerodynamics and internal combustion, when you're venturing where nature never intended you to be) and marry it with courage. What could give more of a shiver? What could throw a brighter spot on the dark place where sex and death whisper into each other's ears?

They seem to say, Hey! It's all a big crapshoot anyway! Hand me those dice.

And sometimes they get out alive. There's a picture of my father (not this one)--yes, boyishly handsome in his leather flight jacket, trained as a bombardier, and because he was a college boy, sent out west to train other bombardiers. Instead of overseas to war. He was never sent to unload a bomb over Berlin, or even more thankfully, Nagasaki. No, by chance (or by fate, thinks the person who writes this), he was kept where he had a far better try at coming back.

His daughter is made of different material: fear, at least when she gets in a plane. Though after years of almost exploding panic (averted only by fervent scribbling in her journal; see next week's blog for more on this), she now has blessed assistance in the form of little blue pills. These are courtesy of the Veterans Administration, as it happens, via a vet who was given far too many. These now enable her to sometimes, incredibly, sleep on a plane. As if she could stay awake. But, as she discovered, an adrenaline rush can all but wake the dead.

Two weeks ago. Returning home. Sitting comfortably, the Airbus ready to throttle up and take us above the Salt Lake airport. The pill has been taken, is doing its work. Then it comes. My son, in the window seat, looks up suddenly from his book. "Mom, can I tell the future?"

The heat--or is it a chill--geysers up from my feet to engulf my head. Dead fear pinions the gut. My words come out half-strangled; I have to get them out quickly, before he says any more, because I know what he is going to say, and maybe if he says it, it will happen. "No, honey, probably not." I think to say "probably" because I need to at once tell the truth, and what I hope to be the truth. "Good," he replies. "'Cause I don't want what I saw to happen."

Oh, god. I reach for another half pill. There is nothing else to do. We are tied here, to whatever might happen. Whatever will. And then, for one small second, a calm thought slides by before going out the window into the rushing air: If it's going to happen, it's going to happen, and that's all right. Then it'll be over. At least we're together.

When the second leg of our journey is finally over, and our plane lets down in the dusk of Albany onto a snow-covered runway, prompting a round of applause from the cabin, I turn to him again. "Now can you tell me what it was you thought would happen?"

"I had a bad feeling about that flight. I thought we were going to, you know, crash."

This incident has caused me to hold in the forefront of my mind the realization that fears are not the same thing as destiny. Sometimes they might be, but what makes them so is just luck.

This week, in the icy Hudson after a jet had improbably, impossibly, ditched there, fears became reality, but also did not. I don't know what to think, or what to take away. I stare at the picture in the paper. Relief. Appreciation for the cool skills of airmen, their nose-thumb to the greatest dangers of them all. And renewed belief that the future is, thank heaven, not ours to know.

POP!

Here is the top of the bubble. Proof that it has not burst entirely--but needs to. Here is Park City, Utah, mecca for those who live to ski. (Utah's license plates feature a figure on skis carving through the powder for which their mountains are known, and the injunction to "Ski Utah." OK, thanks, I will.) Those who live to ski are necessarily rich. One week of skiing here--lift tickets, lessons, lunch at the lodge--would consume the equivalent of two months of my family food budget. This kind of money is as nothing to the thousands of people who pour into the ski resorts of Park City. There are six of them; and this is just one town in one state. So there are, daily every winter, hundreds of thousands of people raining money onto the ranges of the Wasatch, the Rockies, the Catskills, the Berkshires. Once upon a time there were animals here, and silence. Now there is busy enterprise. Over it all hangs the persistent whir of ski lifts, and clouds of two-stroke exhaust from the skimobiles of the ski patrols.

The houses crawl up the sides of the foothills, grab on with mighty arms of concrete and steel. The pounding must have been ferocious. The sound of graders scraping away the soil to adhere the ribbons of roads that wind through the canyons and up the slopes; the vast condo cities biting into the earth, the huge houses times hundreds. The first wave of building here--the second and third have been ever more grasping and huge, making the first look positively innocent, though it was hardly that--was documented by photographer Lewis Baltz in his powerful and depressing book Park City. It revealed, starkly and with an unavoidable truth, the rape of a land.

It bends the mind to contemplate this many people with $4 million in their pockets to build second (or third or fourth) houses that sprawl to contain so much faux Mission style furnishings, vast beds and six bathrooms and echoing kitchens and several flat-screen TVs and Wolf ranges that are basically like having a Boeing 767 in your kitchen. The decor comes from Anonymous Central; the houses are owned by people who simply do not have the time to furnish them. They hire others for that. And these others forget small items like books: there will be none of those, though the Jacuzzi with multicolored lights and little waterfalls, and of course the gaming system and billiards table in the basement, will have been seen as essential, top priority. Perhaps you will feel an unnameable twinge, this is odd, I think, when you first notice the large "painting" over one of the four fireplaces picturing a village of colorful stacked huts on a mountainside, possibly somewhere in Peru, where a family of seven lives in a space roughly the size of one of the walk-in closets. But this is an irony-free zone: This is America, home of the free, the willfully ignorant, and the over-leveraged.

From these roads you can walk up into public lands (what has been left for everything else not already displaced by 5,000-square-foot shelters for the most important animals of all). At the top of the earth here the clouds meet the ground, under a wide sky. In the distance sparkle all the lights of Park City, and the curving lines of a multiplicity of ski runs. This is where the moose wander free, and occasionally after the human interlopers. It is a sight of supernatural power, this landscape. You may wish to come live here. With all your heart.

It is so mythic a place it might well be the scene of such a tale as that set forth in Hayao Miyazaki's fist-in-the-gut environmental fable Princess Mononoke. I first watched this elemental, eminently sad animated movie--it crosses the samurai epic with biblical allegory--about the battle between the spirit of the forest and the humans who will kill all other life in order to feed their own needs--upon returning from Utah. Is it any wonder I wept?

Maybe in the future, though, I think in childish hope, those massive houses will become communal living spaces for those who, displaced by the bursting of the unsustainable bubble we blew and blew up until it could stretch no more, cannot live anywhere else. We could form small units of people helping other people simply to live. Not to take more than is needed. And the ski runs will cease to be groomed, and the scrub will regrow, the wolves returning to the place they belong. They will do what they can to right the balance.

I told you, I am a child, lost in an animated feature where the bad guys look like they're winning, but in the end some hope appears. Always, always, hope.

This is not going to be all bad, you know, the bursting of the bubble. There are silver linings to all clouds, no matter how black and how full of hard rain.