Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 24

Scarf

The head of animal control came to our house on a Friday. I was  in Philadelphia at a conference. I took at 6 am train home and reached the house about an hour before the “chief” arrived with an animal control officer. That Friday was one of the worst days in my memory. Unlike days when you learn a loved one has died or days when you must attend a funeral, when the shock of grief inoculates you from completely experiencing the day and the script of grief offers you and everyone else a manner of operating, the day they came to take away Tibe there was no script. It was just a nightmare day that went on and on.

By 4:30, the “chief” returned to oversee Tibe leaving our home. I knew where he was going, and I knew where he would be staying, but still I could not look as the woman from the rescue loaded him into her car. I packed bags for him: food, wet and dry, treats, towels, and blankets. At the last minute, I folded and shoved a scarf I had worn the day before at my conference. It was black with gold accents, thin but long. I wrapped it twice around my neck. I thought that if that scarf was in the crate with Tibe that Friday night, he could smell me and remember me and know that I was coming back for him, no matter what.

Our animal companions, of course, lack the verbal language to know the commitments that we make to them. Nor can they understand the changes and the reassurances we provide. I still think that some mornings and evenings when Emma and I are walking and she wants to walk just a little farther, she thinks if we walk just around the next corner we will be back home on a street she recognizes perhaps running into her friend Molly. I am not sure she will ever fully understand the time here in Michigan, the move from our home in Maryland. Nor do I think Tibe understood the days he was away from us that we were going to get him back, that he would sleep with us again and walk with us again and live with us again. Each day that I visited him, he was lying on the scarf in the base of his crate. I washed all of his bedding every five days, including the scarf, but I always wore it a bit before returning it, trying to rub my scent on it, that Tibe might find comfort the hours I was away from him. That scarf was a promise to him. Even if he could not fully understand it. It was a promise I could make.

And a promise I kept and keep everyday.

  

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What I Have Become

When we moved into the house that I now pay for but cannot live in because of the bigots and bullies, we had a long list of things we wanted in a home. We were young. Ambitious. Idealistic. We wanted to live in a multicultural community near a metro stop so that we could go into the city for dinners and museums. We wanted a great yard for the dogs. A place with light and space. We wanted a place where we could imagine happiness.

I just talked with a realtor on the distant hope that we might pay a mortgage on a home we can actually live in someday. The realtor, like all realtors, was lovely. She wanted to assess who we are and what our lifestyle is so that she could find the perfect community for us. She asked me what we like to do when we are not working. (All I could think of was the dowager countess: what is a weekend? This made me giggle.) 

  She asked if we were planning to spend a lot of time at the beach. (Yes, we have destination in mind, but I am not yet revealing publicly to where we are moving.) She asked what kinds of homes we liked. I felt peevish and without the wherewithal to answer these questions. Finally, I told her: All I want in our next house is a big piece of property where I can walk my dogs, carrying my gun, never leaving my land. And if someone comes up to me while I am walking my dogs, if someone approaches me, threatens me, harasses me, threatens my dog, I can shoot’em. That is what I want in my next house.

This is what I have become.

  

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An Eviction

While I feel as though I have lost a lot over the last six months, Saginaw has lost more, over many months, many years. People. Industry. Infrastructure. Last weekend, one family in Saginaw lost their home. The eviction happened on Friday, April 1st. On Friday, I drove by and saw an adult male standing beside the washer and dryer sitting at the side of the street. He was protecting them while he waited for someone to pick them up. I assume he was the owner of those appliances and a member of the family that was evicted.

The entire space between the street and the sidewalk was filled with stuff. Over the weekend, we drove by the house repeatedly. It is only a half a block from where we live, from the house where I grew up which is for the moment our safe haven. The pile of household and personal items was like a car wreck for me. I wanted to avert my eyes, but I could not. I stared at those personal belongings piled at the side of the road.

Mostly I watched the pile dwindle over a number of days. Last week, Emma and I walked by the house a number of times. She smelled everything sitting there. By the first day we walked by, most of the metal had been removed, picked up by scrappers. Anytime I put out anything for the trash that is metal or has metal in it, it is picked up before Waste Management comes on Tuesday morning. One of the efficiencies of poverty (what a horrible turn of phrase yet I think it is accurate) is transforming anything with value into money. Scrapping an example of this efficiency. Last week, the old hangers I set out, the kind on which you can hang four shirts or five pair of pants, we’re all snatched up within an hour of placing them at the side of the road. Metal was the first thing to go from the eviction pile.

The last time Emma and I walked by, there were mainly broken objects. A storage bin with a hole in the bottom. Some mismatched children’s socks, a princess castle, dirty and faded, a baseball bat, broken. There must have been at least two children who lived in the home, a boy and a girl. Two dresses were abandoned at the side of the road, and a mirror also broken.

The eviction so close to home made me sad. There is much in Saginaw that is sad. The bank branch of Second National Bank where I had my first saving account three blocks away is closed and abandoned. Second National Bank no longer exists, after multiple mergers, I do not even know what is its successor. The Kroger where we used to go grocery shopping is also an abandoned building. It is the store where my mother sent my sister for a Dove bar one day when she was feeling particular frustrated and at the end of her rope. Lara came back not with the delicious chocolate covered ice cream bar, but with a bar of soap. Both titled Dove. My mother was furious, then she laughed.

Miscommunication, loss, evictions, displacement, closure, migration away, unplanned returns. All of these circumstances a part of life. I hope the family who was evicted earlier this month has family or kin that can shelter them. I hope the parents are hugging their children extra tightly to reassure them that they are safe in the world, that there is space for them, even as the world repeatedly indicates otherwise. I hope they find stability soon in a new space. I am haunted by the plastic at the side of the road, by the dresser with missing drawers, by the toys and clothes, wet and frozen out on the curb. I want something better for those children, for their parents. I want something better for us all.

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How do you live in the world knowing evil, knowing you have no protection from its clutches?

Nightmares. Or more accurately, dreams that disturb. My night was filled with them. The one I remember most vividly was of driving and suddenly being in my old neighborhood of University Park and Tibe was with me in the car. I was frightened to have him in Prince George’s County given that he is banned there, but he was sitting on my lap while I was driving and was licking me and giving me love and affection as though he was a little puppy. I was simultaneously so happy to be cuddling with Tibe in the car, to see his incredibly affectionate, kind and generous self, and frightened that something bad would happen to him. When I woke and was in Saginaw, underneath the wool quilt (it is freezing here–25 degrees on our morning walk and more snow flurries), with Tibe snuggled next to me, I was relieved.

What has happened with Tibe has become a cosmological, spiritual, moral, and philosophical question for me. One that I can distill more clearly now that we are gaining more distance. So here is what happened: on the last Monday morning of October, Tibe was agitated and pulled away from the beloved. Another dog, a golden retriever was nearby and Tibe attacked him. They had a dog fight for about thirty seconds. The beloved pulled Tibe off the other dog, and we all went home. The other dog had to go to the vet and have stitches. We paid the vet bill and apologized profusely.

Now in the world I thought we lived in, that should have been it, an end to the terrible accident. As a friend said when his dog was bit at doggie day care, he took the check from the other dog owner and grudgingly accepted the apology. Dogs fight; dog fights happen. That is not what happened to us, however.

Owner of the dog cashed our check and filed a complaint with animal control. Actually, that is fine with me. That is why animal control exists. They investigated immediately and determined that Tibe was fine in our home, that we are responsible and responsive dog owners, and they suggested that we continue with his training and take a few weeks of not walking him in the neighborhood. We did all of those things. Again, that should have been it, an end to the terrible accident and the investigation by animal control. That is not what happened.

The neighbors organized to call animal control saying that our dog was vicious, they were afraid of him, of us walking him, of walking by our house, and that their concerns were greater than anyone else’s and the dog should be removed from the community. Over a dozen calls to animal control. An angry, bigoted mob of people, primarily women, who wanted our beloved Tibe either put down or banned from the neighborhood.

Eleven days after the incident, animal control, responding to the frenzy, came to our home to impound Tibe. Our county puts to sleep ov 8,000 animals a year. In November 2015, when they wanted to take Tibe into the shelter, 127 dogs were euthanized, including 26 healthy dogs. Knowing these statistics because we adopted our beloved Vita from the shelter, there was no way I was going to let Tibe be taken by the county. So we put him in an alternative care situation with a member of the rescue from which we adopted Tibe. He stayed there eighteen days until I drove with him and Vita to Saginaw, MI. We have been here since then. In January, there was a full trial for Tibe, all of the mob of bigots and bullies turned out to talk about why Tibe should be put down so that they could live and enjoy “their” neighborhood in the ways that they want. Tibe was convicted and sentenced to never return to Prince George’s County, where we have lived for fourteen years and own a home.

So those are the facts as I understand them. Now for the cosmological, spiritual, moral, and philosophical questions. Most baldly, the first question is how can I live in a world that allows this to happen? I think that question has paralyzed me for the past four months. How can I walk though and occupy a world where this happen? A dogfight is of course most serious to the guardians of the dogs. I do not want to diminish its significance to the people involved, but for people not directly involved, for community bystanders, how can their actions be justified? If we cannot individually and as a community recognize that a dogfight while serious to the dogs and humans involved needs to be contextualized in the face of other crises, then how can we recognize the significant issues of our world. Or, let me be more direct, I am aware that there are many more terrible things than a dogfight and even to being banned from my home. War, forced migration, the threats of nuclear war and climate change, poverty, aggressive policing and punitive and racist criminal justice system, murder, violence. I could go on. There are real problems in the world. These problems in the world regularly make me ask the question, how can I live in a world where these things happen?

This question is to me a fundamental one that prompts activism and commitments to change. If the answer to the question is, I cannot live in the world, the next step is, I can change the world. Yet it is also a question that breeds despair, the next step may be depression and a sense that the world cannot be occupied. This is the constant challenge for activists, balancing these answers to the question. So in that way, what has happened is not outside of my experience.

Except that it is. Large societal and global issues invite community and national solutions. What happened to us with Tibe does not offer abstracted solution. Reconciling myself to the experience of the past six months means accepting that there are people in the world who are evil. People who will hurt other people and create circumstances that are hateful and vengeful to people who they know and to whom were once socially kind. People who are narcissistic and only concerned about themselves in a society that is predicated on some sense of empathy and commitment to other’s well-being. How can I live in a world like that? What is the solution?

The only solution to advocate to prevent my circumstances from happening to other people is individual. Telling people, don’t be gross. Don’t bully. Don’t be unkind. Don’t create circumstances that hurt other people. All good things to advocate, but completely unenforceable. There is no way for me or anyone to be safe in a world where people can act the way our neighbors did. There is no way to inoculate ourselves against such evilness, especially since it is unrecognized and possible nascent in all people.

I want to pause here because of course many people have suggested that the easy solution to our problems in life is to simply give up Tibe. I’ve written previously about why that is a non-starter for us in particular and I have written about the uncertainty of our future. That is, what if Tibe was untrainable? What if he really was everything bad that neighbors described? Well, friends, we are now five months into our life in Michigan. Tibe is over two years old. We have been working with him on lots of training issues. He is a lovely dog. It is a testament to patience and love and sticking with a difficult project. Do not get me wrong, Tibe still has issues. He will bark like crazy at cars and this morning he barked at a runner in the park. Yet he is getting better. We do not keep him around other dogs. But he can look out the window and not bark. He can see other dogs outside and not bark. He is not jumping up on people–or on me when I handle him. He is kind and loving with us, with Emma, with Vita. And he will continue to grow and learn. He is a great dog and as a result of the last six months, the dog of a lifetime for us.

Another solution to our situation, one that we would have had to avail ourselves of if we did not have the resources or the wherewithal to move, would have been to stay where we were and lobby for an alternate resolution through animal control. We unwittingly accepted the ban (which I continue to maintain is illegal and unenforceable) by leaving the neighborhood. Had we not had the resources and the support of our respective employers, we would not have been able to leave and decamp to Michigan.

All of this of course is mulling our actions and our solutions but I struggle with what can be done in the world to prevent such situations in the future. I continually return to the idea that there is no solution. That I must reconcile myself to this evilness in the world. And to my own vulnerability to these evil people.

How can I live in a world knowing that this evilness exists and that I cannot protect myself or the people I love from it? I have no answer to that question, only rage.

Rage of course offers no sustenance, it east us from within. The only thing that sustains me is the fact that every day Emma and Tibe need to be walked four or five times. They need to be fed and cuddled and loved. So does Vita. She expects breakfast and dinner and is grateful when I position a towel around her while she sleeps. She continually reminds us it is freezing here, even in the house.

How do you live in the world knowing evil and knowing you have no protection from its clutches?

 

Tibe and Vita on the bed the other night.

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Hardened

Calluses fascinate me. I love how the skin hardens and thickens through repeated contact with the world. Calluses are not injuries. Unlike scars they are not permanent. Change the behavior that elicits the callus, and it disappears. Do more of the activity that creates the callus and it gets thicker, stronger, more pronounced. Often you can tell what kind of work a person does based on the calluses on their bodies. Our skin creates calluses wherever we use it, so calluses are not only for people who do plumbing or auto repair or work on the assembly line. String players, violinists and violists, get calluses on their necks whe they rest the instrument and on their finger tips. The fingertips are marked for all string players, the cellists, the bassists, the harpists. If you look at their fingers, you can tell. Calluses on their fingertips. The beloved gets calluses on her palms where she rests her wrists while typing. And feet calluses! They tell a story of what shoes we wear, how we walk and where, how we balance our bodies on the ground. Calluses respond to our body in the world and protect our bodies in the world.

I appreciate the hardening of skin into calluses, but there is a similar way that our minds harden to the world that frightens me. My mother hardened as she aged. In some ways she hardened daily, ossified like the trees in the petrified forest, turned to stone over many years as a result of the wind and air pressing down on them. Yet, there were moments of dramatic hardening, moments when I could see her turning her heart, her mind, her will to stone like mere mortals staring into the eyes of Medusa. There were events on her life that hardened her: her mother’s death, her cousin’s death, moving to Saginaw, my sister’s death, a stroke. She emerged from each changed, harder, grim, resigned. As a child and as an adult, I saw my mother harden, and I recoiled. I wanted something different for my life.

The hardening is like a callus. It is in some ways a healthy response to the world, it’s insults, it’s slights, it’s vagaries. Like a callus, the hardening is protective. It suggests resilience. Yet, it evokes bitterness and various forms of misery. The hardening is a retreat from goodness and kindness; a rational retreat in a world that is cruel, even brutal at times. Hardening saves the fleshy, exuberant underbelly of our being from the ravages of life. After trauma, hardening makes life more bearable, more survivable. I saw my mother harden and I saw the value of it but I do not want it for myself.

Yet, I can feel the stoniness sliding into my body. I feel myself hardening. In a world with nothing firm and good to offer me at the moment, it feels like hardening offers something solid, something reliable. Hardening though is not like the calluses that slough off. Turning to stone a permanent solution to the vagaries of climate. The circumstances may be different, but I fear I am my mother’s daughter, trapped in Saginaw, bitter, hard. So very hard.

  

The petrified forest from The National Park Service.

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Drive, Louise, Drive

  When I was a teenager there were two or three mothers who one day just took off and left. They abandoned their families, their homes, their lives. One day, they just walked away from it all. These were not usual divorces where mom or dad moves a few blocks away and kids shuttle between houses. Or the mother moved in with a new boyfriend across town. This was abandonment, radical departure with no return. I remember my mother shaking her head, saying, This is bad, bad business. Then muttering about the terrible situation in which it left the children.

I remember the situations, but I never understood. After college, lots of people packed up all of their worldly possessions into cars or suitcases and milk crates and carried them across state lines to other university towns for law school or to big coastal cities to start their lives. This seemed like a big risk, like stepping off the edge. Thelma & Louise came out a year after I graduated from college and in many ways defined how I saw myself in my twenties: gal pals avenging the oppressions of patriarchy, but doomed to drive off the cliff. Along the way, though, Louise had so many good lines (given to her by the fabulous film writer, Callie Khouri): You get what you settle for. And: You’ve always been crazy, this is just the first chance you’ve had to express yourself. And: Well, we’re not in the middle of nowhere, but we can see it from here.

For the past four months (four, yup, count ’em four. That is over 120 days. We have 200 coffee filters. I fear I may be buying the reusable kind before I am on the road out of Saginaw.), the middle of nowhere line has been echoing in my mind. That and the ending of driving off the cliff. The truth is: I envied the folks who picked up everything and moved after college. I lacked that courage. I moved down the street from Ann Arbor to Detroit. I wanted to be bold like Louise, but I feared I would spend my life whiny like Thelma. (This blog may provide evidence that I am in fact a whiny Thelma as well as evidence that I am twenty and a bad pet owner.)

I never made the big, risky, bold move to another, unknown city, but the big post-college move was never the same as those moms that left everything, some not talking with their children again. I never understood them, until the past few days. Now I understand the desire and the power of leaving. Those moms? They were tired of snotty noses, of picking up poop, of trying to read something, trying to do a bit of work only to be interrupted for the umpteenth time for something, some request, some demand, some banal statement of fact. Those moms? For years, they had given up their lives for husbands, children, family. They did what was expected, for hours, for days, for months. No one asked they who they were, people only told them what they should be doing and how to do it and why to do it. For years, people sucked the life out of them; their time, their energy, their brains and their bodies in service to some notion of family, to some narrow constructions of children, to the walls of a house. Then finally one day, they snapped. They left it all. Oh, the joy of being able to walk away. Some days, I want to be able to just walk away. And I have come to believe, those moms that walked away? They were happy after they left. Unlike Louise, they survived. Drive, Louise, drive.

  

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Evidence that I am, in fact, still twenty years old*

1. I am listening to music by Melissa Etheridge and Nanci Griffith in constant rotation.

2. I wear dresses and tights.

3. My hair is nearly down to my butt, and I braid it in a French braid that falls down my back.

4. I dream of owning a house, a big house.

5. I dream of having a writing studio in the big house with a couch from This End Up where I can sit and read and the room is painted purple and lined with books.

6. I dream of running a publishing company from the big house.

7. I am moving books in mismatched, oversized boxes.

8. I am in Michigan where it snows in April and people are not dismayed.

9. Horn-rimmed glasses.

10. This past month, I wore green army fatigues at least three days in a row.

*Evidence that I am not, in fact, twenty years old

1. Melissa Etheridge is out as a lesbian.

2. I am paying a mortgage on a house that I cannot live in because my dog was banned from the county where said house is located.

3. I understand Lucinda Williams’s music, and I love it.

4. I cannot remember the last time my car broke down while driving on a freeway.

5. I own matching dishes, stemware, and mugs (though they are not with me, see #2 above).

6. The books are not mine, they are my father’s.

7. I did not actually move the books; I enlisted my cousin’s son and his friends to pack and move said books.

8. I paid them for their labor.

9. Emma, Vita, the beloved.

10. Tiberius.

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March and Its Betrayals

As a child, I was fascinated by the Ides of March and the betrayal of Julius Caesar. I remember delighting in high school telling people, Beware the Ides of March. This month, I read about another betrayal: David Greenglass’s betrayal of his sister Ethel Rosenberg. Sam Roberts’s book, The Brother, is an extraordinary review of those events between 1944 and 1953 that haunt our country. I confess, I thought a lot about Tibe while reading the book. In some ways, he is like Ethel, framed for a “crime” that emerges from a frenzy of people unable to step back, take a deep breath, and consider the long-term consequences of their rhetoric and actions. Of course, unlike Ethel, Tibe escaped with his life. Ethel always gives me comfort because of her silence in the face of intimidating power. She would not speak and incriminate herself, her husband, or her comrades. We would all be better with such courage of conviction.

March is not simply about betrayals for me. March is also about births and deaths, and the ways that they mysteriously overlap years and years apart. My sister, Lara, now of blessed memory, was born on March 28th, and my grandmother was born on March 27th. In Maryland, their birthdays always occurred during cherry blossoms and the budding of azaleas. Here in Michigan, however, the end of March is more vexed. Some beautiful sunny days, though still cold in the morning. This morning, there was a frost on the ground when we woke and we had to wait five or eight minutes while the front windshield defrosted. On Sunday, though, when we celebrated my grandmother’s 94th birthday, it was warm and sunny, and we could spend the whole day outside without a jacket. Spring is not quite here; the days are variable. Snow boots still sit in the kitchen; gloves and hats still in all coat pockets.

Three years ago, on my grandmother’s birthday, my mother stopped to rest at the top of the steps after watching a movie in the house we are living in. She must have been tired, not feeling well. She stopped to rest atop the steps, then slumped over. She never regained consciousness. The doctor pronounced her death on March 28th. It would have been my sister’s 41st birthday, had she lived beyond her 24th birthday, which she did not. Lara was born on the day my mother’s cousin Diane died. Also, a car accident; steel rods feel from a truck and crushed her in her car. Lara carried Diane’s name as her middle name, though mother rarely talked about Diane and her death. Mother’s death straddled the birthdays of two other women in my family.

At my old home, in my other life, my life before we were driven from our home by bullying bigots, I rarely marked these last days in March. My sister’s birthday passed quietly; I sent a card to my grandmother. This year, however, we marked my grandmother’s 94th birthday with a family party, and on Sunday night before I went to bed, I paused at the top of the steps. I did not sit down. When I woke the next morning, I was grateful for the late sunrise, for the wool blanket on the bed, for Tibe’s warm body next to me, for the beloved’s steady breathing.

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How Big the World

My mother hated Saginaw. She moved here a few years after she married my father when she was twenty-eight years old and I was an infant in her arms. She hated what a small town Saginaw was, how there were no good department stores like there were in Detroit, how people lacked the sophistication and taste of the city. She was always very clear she was not a Saginawian and that she regarded natives, like my father, with disparagement. She regarded her confinement in Saginaw as one of the great tragedies of her life. She always looked south to Detroit for an imagined better life there.

It is no surprise that her daughters fled Saginaw as soon as they could and that we looked even beyond Detroit. We did not want to become trapped and miserable in some town where we always believed that we deserved better. Lara fled first; she went to Utah and then Oregon. As the oldest, my departure preceded hers, but I went first to Ann Arbor, then Detroit and did not regard these small moves as a real escape. Escape was leaving the state. Greta went east to New York then west to Los Angeles. We all hugged coasts as though a shoreline would save us from a boomerang return to Michigan, to Saginaw.

Returning here to live, even for a brief sojourn to save my dog’s life, is filled with my mother’s disappointments about being trapped in Saginaw. Each day I can hear her bemoaning this town and all that it lacks. My mother wanted to live in a world that was bigger than what Saginaw offered. She wanted an opera house, a larger symphony, more chamber music. She wanted a big world. Her daughters all left for a bigger world. We found it, too, which both made mother proud and pissed her off enormously.

Every day in Saginaw, I remember how big the world. Outside. Beyond these boundaries. And I feel my mother’s despair about being trapped in a small, inadequate world. Even though the big world remembers me and even  arrives to me throughout the day on email, on Skype, on the telephone, it feels more remote in Saginaw. I worry I might lose my world here, like people lose sight with a cataract, the vision tunneling, narrowing, until it is gone. I think that is part of how it happened for my mother, a slow winnowing, a retreat, daily absence building into a lifetime of loss. My mother could not live in a world as big as she wanted. I did once. I hope to return.

  

Photo by VisualSupply.com https://unsplash.com/photos/-03UAJK6-w8

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The Kind of Person I Want To Be

Living in my childhood home prompts much reflection about what has changed in the past forty years of my life; it provides for a type of introspection about what I hoped I might do with my life and what I might become from my childhood imaginings. Sometimes, my life stands in stark relief to these dreams and aspirations.

Over the past two months, I have felt a sense of great disappointment in myself, particularly in my ability to fight and win. I ask myself, Why is Tibe banned from our home county? The answer centers around my passivity, my inability to fight for him, my choices to leave and walk away and not challenge and confront. I think to myself, he may have his life, and I am thankful for that, but his liberty was lost because I did not fight hard enough or long enough. I fear that I let him and me down. Of course, I note that I take full responsibility for our current circumstance. I blame myself and not the bullies. This dynamic is another way homophobia–and all manner of oppressions–works. The object of the bullying, the hatred, the meanness, the pettiness, the expulsion thinks that it is her responsibility. If only I had done better, fought harder, been nicer, fit in better, apologized more, etc., then this terrible thing would not have happened. Homophobia tells us the circumstance could have been avoided with different behavior. In fact, the circumstance was created not by our behavior but by the hatred and vitriol of others.

Still, I wish I had done more. I wish I had hired different lawyers, fought back more, rallied others, told more people, named the bullying behaviors, challenged the process. I wish, I wish.

Since we are always reimagining and reinventing ourselves, I want a future where I am stronger and bolder and protective and victorious. That is the kind of person I want to be.

This process has taught me a lot about the kind of person I do not want to be. I do not want to be a person who organizes against animals and people who care for them. I do not want to be a person who studies other people’s social media profiles to “diagnose” their fitness as a caretaker of animals. I do not want to be a person who is silent while others bully. I do not want to be a person who is unforgiving, who does not create space after mistakes, who is unrelenting in a view of rightness. I do not want to be uncaring, mean. I do not want to act out of bigotry and hatred.

In the mornings at the park where I walk Tibe, sometimes we see a man feeding birds and squirrels from his small, old Chevette. He stops his car at the side of the park road near a small grove of trees. He makes sounds, speaking to the birds and squirrels so they gather around. We have never spoken to him. There is a silence and serenity around him that I do not want to disturb. Believe me, a 135-pound dog disturbs any sort of serenity at all times. Still I watch him from afar. He sits in his car, tossing bits of bread as the animals gather. Every day, he puts out his hand and a bird comes and lands on it to take some small seeds. I think a lot about this man. I try to imagine his life, what he does in the other twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes of his day when he is not at the park calling and feeding birds. All I can conjure is the kindness that must surround him. The tranquility he must exude for those small birds to land on his hand. How gentle his being. He is the kind of person I want to be.

  

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