Swing Setpiece

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intuition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mother Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Falling

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free to Be You and Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loyalties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There. That's better.

Silver Linings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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