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?

Eternal Questions

Imagining a literature composed of nothing but questions, one sees the potential for depth, resonances, that cannot be reached by other means. Questions echo. They ask for the reader to enter their space; they embrace, not distance. Maybe someday I write something using nothing but questions. Maybe it will qualify as literature. But not today. This is just a list of questions.


Why does Nelly insist on kissing me, vigorously and annoyingly, on the face while I'm trying to do a downward dog asana?

What's with all these ladybugs?

Why is gas so much cheaper in New Jersey? (Is it a conspiracy to keep their disproportionate numbers of SUVs on the road?)

And why is it against the law to pump it yourself there? I mean, what's going to get hurt?

Why did the New York Times decide to make the paper narrower, thus eliminating some of its content, and then decide to blow up the table of contents so that it now spans three pages and eliminates the content there, too?

What profession should I practice now that people will no longer be able to afford books because they have to spend every cent they have at the grocery store and gas station?

What is all that product filling the tables at Barnes & Noble?

Why do dogs hump people?

Why can't days be 36 hours?

Where does our daily increasing population live while no one is buying new houses anymore?

Why do people insist on thinking that if their dogs never taste fresh meat they won't ever want to kill anything?

Why do people drive Ford Explorers?

Why, in the middle of one of the country's largest apple-producing states, are the only organic apples available at the store flown in from New Zealand?

Why is it always one of your favorite socks (rarely one of the ones that never fit quite right) that goes into the laundry room's black hole--and has anyone ever found this cache of a billion orphan socks?

Why does Nelly scream as if the world is coming to an end when I leave her home or in the car, but when we're out on the trail, no distance is too far to be separated?

What the hell was that that she rolled in yesterday??

Pancakes for Nelly

Last night, I returned to childhood. I was transported there by a thought. As Nelly pressed her weight against my leg in bed, an imagining bloomed in my head. I was suddenly her. Looking through her eyes, seeing what she saw. It caused my brain to jolt, the way it used to when I was eight and looked up at the sky and tried to conceive of infinity. It hurt. It was exhilarating. It was profoundly weird.

How does she experience living?

Quite different from me, obviously. Obviously: this was just a few hours before I woke from a dream in which someone was pushing a knife into my back. I felt it slowly pierce my liver, my pancreas. The pain. I woke as I was dying.

I suspect Nelly dreams of other things. But being inside her head, for that moment, was to have the universe open up. Actually, it opened, it widened, it deepened, simultaneously. The whole thing vibrated. I could almost taste it. Inside Nelly's head, it seems, is nirvana, where all is the experience of this moment and every sense fires at once. People take really dangerous drugs so they can feel just what Nelly feels, being her doggy self curled in slumber against a warm leg.

Of course, I would especially love to be Nelly on the Sundays I make pancakes. That's because I always make dogcakes too, always have ever since I've had dogs. I see their noses lifted, palpating the air, as the butter spreads in the pan. Who can turn from the sight of that, that anticipation of future joy? (Who says dogs don't have a concept of the future? Watch them in the kitchen.) So: buckwheat, with a touch of nutmeg. Nelly waits by the stove with breath held, eyes glinting. She will wait till I tear her small pancake into pieces, and then she does her stuff. Ask nicely. High five. Talk. Quiet. Put your head down. Roll over. On your side. Wave. Those are it, all the tricks I taught her a couple of years ago now. I hope to teach her more soon. But I just lost eight months of my life into a black hole (boy, was it black) in which I did little that would qualify as living, much less teaching my dog new tricks. She's not averse to teaching herself some new ones, though they are not what I would necessarily consider fun and valuable. She does, however. We live in different universes values-wise.

My son and I eat our pancakes with maple syrup, and Nelly does not. Later my son lies in bed, and I see he is inhabiting that eight-year-old mind that is more akin to Nelly's than to mine. "Do you ever think what it would be like to not be you?" and I know he is experiencing that delicious dislocation of perceiving beingness, the I-in-space. And I was there too.

Here, and Gone

She rises up, dark and looming. Her fangs are eight inches long. Bigger and bigger. It's . . . it's Nelly, her shadow on the wall, thrown by a reading lamp. Yet that is in some ways her truest self, epic, ferocious. A wolf in Nelly clothing.

How cute! How pretty! Such a sweet little dog! they exclaim. They didn't see her today, trotting down the rail trail with a decapitated bunny in her mouth.

Let me hasten to record that she was not responsible for the demise of this truly cute, pretty, sweet little creature. Not this particular one, at any rate. A half hour before, I heard the inimitably excited bark she employs only on wildlife sightings, and then saw Peter Cottontail speed by through the trees, Nelly still far back trying to figure out the scent trails, doing demented figure eights. Then she returned to me, practically sighing.

This one was just lying there, already headless, as we walked back to the car. Nelly was on leash, for once. So I allowed her to pick it up and carry it for a while--and there is nothing like the emblematic pride of a dog carrying a dead animal: they were made for this. The carriage goes up; the step becomes impossibly light, like a dressage horse doing a passage. I don't want her to get the idea that she better run fast because I'm always going to snatch away her prize. Even though this is exactly what I intended to do. But let her have her few minutes of glory first. (I had just given her some expensive and caustic wormer last month to get rid of the lovely tapeworms that were colonizing her gut and the hair on her behind, and I was not eager to have my stomach churn again like that so soon. Or hers.) So I give her the thing she'll remember: What a nice mom, to let me have my bunny. Just like when I let my child stay up late or eat too much ice cream. What a nice mom. Then I revert to being the gatekeeper to homework hell.

There are benefits to having a small dog. Like the ability to pry her jaws apart with relative ease. Not so with Nora the great big Leonberger with jaws like a trap. Not so with Nora the big dog who then picked up the headless bunny when it was freed from Nelly's grasp.

She carried it back to the car with the same great pride. And got in, and proceeded to eviscerate it. Long glistening strings decorated the upholstery. This unhinged Nora's owner. Curiously, though I am the vegetarian in the pack, the sight of red globules disappearing quickly down the throat--hmmm, that's interesting: wonder what bit that is?--didn't bother me at all. In fact, I was thinking instead how Nora had just had the ideal meal, one that would have cost eight bucks at Adams! I would never spend that much on Nelly; she gets chicken feet and gizzards, at 30 cents a pound.

The dead flesh in cellophane is what really makes me queasy. Precisely because it doesn't make most people sick. And because I know that that is exactly what I would like after the butcher got through with me and loaded the white styrofoam tray.

From the high electric wire spanning our road, a long pine bough dangles. It blows back and forth, suspended by only one small twig. It has been there for months, looking as if it might fall at any second. A breath could bring it down. It might be there forever.

I walk Nelly down a road of permanence, a road of impermanence. Tumbling down the bank to the beaver swamp is a rusted car half. It must have been there since the forties. The person who once drove it has been in the cold ground lo these many years. He is forgotten. We look at his car, though, as we go by, Nelly very much alive.

It is our expectations that are the most durable things of all.

Perhaps we are at the same remove from death, she and I. Perhaps not. You never know. You never know.

There is a church-ish mystery in the phrase "This too shall pass." I have had cause to say it to myself a lot of late; I uttered its calming syllables to a friend in extremis the other day. But the thing is, it's not true. Only some things will pass; others will stay, swaying in the wind, forever. Context will die before they do.

But I find myself wondering. What kind of creature takes only the head of the rabbit?