Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 26

Tibe’s Elbows

Tonight I went out to get groceries for my grandma and saw that Snow Moon rising. She is beautiful. The scene at the grocery store was gnarly, however. We have had the thaw. My walks with Emma had evidence everywhere of people peering out from their hibernation. Two or three cars stopped to ask just how much Emma weighs. And the children of the neighborhood are fascinated by Emma. She has had three, four, and five year old children petting her, touching her nose, and flipping her ears. She laps it up and leaves behind a little bit of slobber for them all. The thaw is not to last, however. Tomorrow five to seven inches of snow and another one to two inches on Thursday. Everyone was picking up provisions from the grocery store. My grandma is stocked. The beloved is coming home a day early. She landed forty minutes ago and will be making her way north tonight, perhaps in the early hours of tomorrow. We are ready for the snow. We are stocked. I am especially excited to report finally purchasing fifty-five gallon garbage bags to line the can where we deposit the dog poop bags. I have written about my intimacy with dog poop and plastic bags before, but in the past two weeks my intimacy with plastic poop bags ramped up as I have struggled with getting the too small plastic liner bag out of the large bin while containing the smaller bags of poop within the large bag. Imagine soaked and melting bags of poop slipping around between and under that bin and me trying to get it all bagged and out to the curb. No more. Fifty-five gallon liner bags will do the trick, containing everything. 

Generally, I am a fan of containment. The other day, I commandeered a small tin for my paper clips; my desk feels more orderly. My mother collected longaberger baskets which have become containers and catchalls for our life here in Saginaw. One type of containment, however, of which I am not a fan: dogs in cages. When Tibe first came to us, both of his front elbows had hatch marks on them. The cross hatch of the cage pressed into his skin so deeply, it scraped away his fur and left black and gray marks on his elbows.

In addition, Tibe had a hygroma. When our vet first met Tibe and assessed the hygroma, he was excited about the expense we would eventually incur in treating it. I exaggerate, but only slightly. The rescue had the hygroma aspirated and a drain inserted. Tibe had scratched and pulled that out within thirty-six hours. It felt, in those early days with Tibe, like a great failure of ours (and, if you are a regular reader, then you know I am reticent to admit our failings as dog parents as our stewardship of animals has been challenged, even pilloried, by bigots with a sense of moral superiority on one hand and a willingness to threaten us with violence on the other hand to enforce their misguided world view). Fortunately, Tibe pulled out the whole drain at one time, avoiding the need for exploratory surgery to try and remove it. Our wonderful vet said that hygroma a usually never go away; they are primarily managed and minimized. They come from sleeping, sitting, pressing too long on a hard surface. Our beloved Tibe probably spent many of his earliest months in a too small cage. His elbows bearing too much weight without adequate room to move. That hygroma broke our hearts. It was a visible manifestation of what Tibe had been denied as a pup–space to live, a comfortable bed to rest his little body, some human love and compassion. We figured from early vet reports, we would also have this little reminder of Tibe’s past; we thought that he would also have this deformity, this little fluid-filled sac.

Now look at Tibe’s elbows. Aren’t they beautiful? Gone are the hatch marks from a cage. More significantly, gone is Tibe’s hygroma. His elbows are healthy, beautiful formed, free from deformity. Tibe’s elbows are a daily reminder: we heal. Even that which seems written on our body permanently can be rewritten, revised, reimagined.

   

   

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Kindnesses, Large and Small, and What Must Be Done in Michigan

  

The weekend was difficult. Three full days with the beloved which is never enough. On Saturday morning, I FaceTimed with a friend working at the house in Maryland. Seeing the house makes me melancholy. I am excited that work is getting done on it and am always happy to see friends, but the house reminds me of what we have lost. That prompts the reverie of what I have done–or not done–that brings me to this place, to this return to my childhood home, to this time in Saginaw. The work of the first twenty years of my life was dedicated to eliminating homophobia, to making a world where gay men, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people can live openly and honestly and not be subjected to harassment, threats, and bullying. Just last June, when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell, I thought that the work of my life had been a success. Now I feel that not only have I done something terribly wrong in my life to bring me to this point, this place, but also that my life work has failed. Then, midday on Sunday, the beloved departed for New York. Then that Snow Moon last night. Did you see it? So big. So bright. So utterly hopeful.

One strategy to release the bitterness that continues to plague me is to create a list of things that I would like to do that can only be done in Michigan. Things that are geographically bound here where I am. As though being here might be less of a punishment and more of an opportunity. So here are the things that I want to do that can only be done in Michigan:

Meet the famous feminist philosopher (this is a bit of a cheat as it happened today!)
Spend an afternoon at John King Books
Research something in the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News from the 1960s (I am trying to figure out if I can do this at SVSU or UM-FLINT)
Go to the Flint Institute of Art
Visit the Jim Crow Exhibit at the Castle Museum in Saginaw
Hang out more with the incomparable historian in Lansing
Meet and have a drink with Ferron (no clue how to do this one–I am open for ideas and/or introductions.)

The list helps. A bit. Still the Snow Moon seems to taunt me. It’s hopefulness, it’s serenity, as though it wants me to adopt such a mindset.

What helps more than the list are the kindnesses that come from friends, fellow humans, compassionate listeners, near and far. Today brought two such kindnesses. The first, the wonderful quotation from Adrienne Rich that begins this post. The second, the glysolid which arrived in the mail today from a dear friend. Already, the skin around my nails is healing. More so, my spirit feels more aligned with the Snow Moon, more sympathetic to her light, to how she challenges the darkness with particular intensity a few days each month.

The photo of the rich, creamy glysolid also has the book I completed this evening. I hadn’t read it before, but picked it up because I am on the hunt for novels that portray lesbian separatism. Have suggestions for me? Put them in the comments. I am on a reading binge. And keep scrolling down, a photo of Tibe. Tibe, in some ways the reason for us being here, in other ways, simply a pawn in the cruel games bigots play to hurt, isolate, bully, and intimidate. Tibe continues to thrive here, even as more dogs are out and about with the thaw of the past few days. Here he is with a toy, a blue elephant, a gift, another kindness from a friend. He adores the blue elephant almost as much as the purple dragon we play fetch with each morning. Small joys. Kindnesses, large and small, beneath the Snow Moon.

   

 

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On Aesthetics, or in praise of lesbian beauty

 This morning it was twenty-five degrees when I took Tibe to the park, but more than the temperature, it smelled like a thaw. By Friday we are supposed to see forty. There will certainly be a melt. We could smell it. We could feel it. There is still a half a foot of snow at the park and the wind whips through there every day almost obscuring the path we walk around the stage, to the other parking lot and the trash receptacle with another of my mother’s plastic bags. The snow was still fluffy and there wee ice fishers out on the river, but there was a feeling in the air of thaw. Not spring, mind you, but thaw, release from the bitter cold.

I have been mourning losing our home, and all of the forms of beauty that we created there and that surrounded us. I will not enumerate them and make myself sad before I go to sleep. Rather, I will note that while I regard our current living situation largely an aesthetic waste land, there is a lovely aesthetic experience that has emerged walking the dogs in the park in the morning. Perhaps it is simply the change in the landscape from Maryland to Michigan, but I think it is more than that. The solitude of the park, the serenity of the river which runs on either side of the park, the tangential connection with other humans as they use the park in different ways.

When I say aesthetics, I mean the experience of beholding. On Saturday we were at the park while the sun rose and it was so clear and cold that the pink ball of light struck the metal on the one structure at the park and it looked like an open doorways I almost thought that it was a door to a secret garden, that something would be revealed to us through the light and the metal and the early morning hour. It was an experience to behold. In a world of ratty towels and old carpets, it was a moment of beauty.

I struggled throughout my dissertation to write about aesthetics and ultimately never succeeded. Now, as I emerge from the trauma of the past months, I am thinking about aesthetics again, about the experience of beholding and the pleasure that gives. I continue to believe there are lesbian aesthetics. That is, experiences of beholding that are unique to, informed by, inflected with lesbian. The dog, the snow, the light, the garden. Aesthetics. Lesbian.

A dear cousin sent me a box of tea. Gorgeously packaged tea. Herbal tea, each tea bag is a pyramid with a small leaf on the string at the end. Each tea bag is packaged in a pyramid box that unfolds to a perfect square. The pyramid boxes fit into two trays and then into an outer box. The tea is the best I have ever tasted because of the experience of unfurling each tea bag, of making each cup of tea. I am having an aesthetic experience and it feels to me uniquely lesbian because I imagine the women for whom I might make tea, how they might respond to the tea, what they might say, how we might talk together, what might happen intoxicated from that conversation, from that tea. Herbal tea, pyramids, packaging, conversation. Aesthetics. Lesbian.

My hands are dry and cracked. At the side of my fingernails, I am getting small ulcers where the skin just cracks open. The same is happening to the beloved. We moisturize. We cover our skin in the cold, but still our skin breaks down from the harsh weather. A thaw is coming, though tonight when Emma and I were outside and she was sitting in front of our neighbors house insisting that I pet her then rub her belly as she rolled in the snow, there was more snow coming down. Lightly. Gently. I did not care that my fingers hurt. I did not care that the dry air which roiled these snow flakes around also leeches the moisture from my skin. I wanted to sit in front of the house watching the snow in the street light. Two neighbor dogs came bounding out barking at Emma. Tiny dogs. She was intrigued, but I trundled her inside as Tibe was barking about the hullabaloo.

I am not yet writing about aesthetics how I want to, how I imagine I could. I want to write the aesthetics of butch, the beauty of the visible, recognizable lesbian, the aesthetics of lesbian sex, the experience of beholding a woman. I am not yet there, but for the first time in three years, I interested in trying again. Maybe it was the sun, the thaw, my poor ulcered finger, the evening squall. Behold.

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Vengeance and Restoration

This weekend I read part of Marilynne Robinson’s essay collection, The Givenness of Things. Robinson always makes me feel like a Calvinist. I admire her conviction; I want to make it my own. The new essay collection was no exception to my Calvinist aspirations after Robinson encounters, but I also was struck by her readings of Shakespeare. She reenergized me to want to return to Shakespeare and to the Greek tragedists. As usual my reading desires serve selfish reasons. I want my own life to have the final act that tragedies deliver: vengeance and restoration.

In the last act, vengeance is always meted out upon all of the characters. I spend a lot of time thinking about the vengeance I want to see inflicted the actors in this tragedy of my life over the past four months. The gun threatening neighbor will die suddenly and painfully of a heart attack. The disingenuous neighbor who posed as a friend expressing false concern for me and my family will lose her beloved dog in a tragic car accident that she will witness then she will be enfeebled by a massive stroke. The neighbor married to the prick who continually threatened to kill Tibe will lose her husband and have both of her children turn on her and never speak to her again. The woman who studied my social media profile to demonstrate that I should not be able to have either Emma or Tibe will go blind and find herself without any friends. The mayor of our hamlet will be impeached and charged with criminal activity of some sort in relationship to the county and the state. I could go on. This is not how Robinson imagines one should write or use one’s imagination. I said, I want to be a Calvinist, but I know in my heart, I am not one. I embrace my fantasies of revenge. My only sadness is. That they will not come to pass. I do not wish to be cleansed of them; I simply want them to happen. I want my pain and anger and despair and rage to be visited on those who hurt me seven times over.

Yes, the vengeance of the final act is satisfying, but the other equally important part is the restoration of the world. Tragedy makes the world out of order. At the end of the play, the playwright has to restore order so that the audience can continue living. It is the lack of order, the lack of restoration that continues to plague me. The things I once believed about the world are no longer true. I cannot exit the current tragedy of my life without the restoration; without it, I am simply trapped in the saga of the play. Even if I were to see the vengeance, it would not be enough without the restoration, without the return of a world that I can recognize and embrace.

The difference of course between a play and real life is that the play has the final act and the closing curtain. It ends. The audience returns to their real lives. I on the other hand am in Saginaw, in a house without a fenced yard, working in a space without my books, without my desk chair, without my couch to sit and read, and with carpet and drapes that are forty years old. There is no vengeance; there is no restoration. There are four or five dog walks a day. There is the small victory of Tibe being calm and obedient enough for me to take out the garbage with him on our last outing of the night. There are the new leather gloves the beloved gave me for Valentine’s Day and the memory of that delicious Beef Wellington. Mainly though there is this deep profound grief that seems unabating. It is like the cry of Nel after Sula’s death, “loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had not top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”

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A Bag Collection and Those Cashmere Sweaters

We had a new dishwasher installed about a week ago. This has been a major improvement to our live here at the Michigan house. Prior to the new dishwasher, I spent an hour or more a day washing dishes. It was pleasurable to have my hands in hot water for a spell each day, but I grew tired of the time it took. I am a dishwasher gal; I’ll put anything in there, and I like the activity of loading and unloading it. It is an activity about order and I enjoy that.

In preparation for the dishwasher installation, I had to clean out the cabinets next to the dishwasher. There is a skinny one to the right, space that really isn’t useful for anything meaningful in a kitchen and so it became the storage space of my mother’s bag collection. The skinny cabinet space wasn’t even enough space for that, however, so it overflowed to under the sink, which also had to be cleaned for the installation. It took me about forty-five minutes to clean my mother’s bag collection. 

I would like to suggest that her bag collection was a lifetime project, but I think that would be overstating it. Underneath the sink, things were generally clean. I suspect she had cleaned there relatively recently. The garbage disposal is relatively new and so is most o ft he plumbing underneath there. Still, there were a lot of bags. All of the plastic bags I kept, and the dogs are pooping there way through them. (As an aside, for the scatological among us, we walk them four or five times a day and some days Emma, the Saint Bernard, poops on every single walk. That seems excessive, no? Even two or three poops a day seems like a lot. That is what we are observing though. A minimum of two poops per dog per day and sometimes three or four each. Do the math, we are working through the plastic bags quickly.) The paper bags, large shopping bags, small storage bags, gift bags, and all other manner of bags were recycled. I know for some of the readers, a little part of you is dying, but my dad is moving from this house, I am not shipping the bags to wherever we live next, so I had to dispose of them.

Like my mother, I am a collector. I have my own bag collection at home. Plastic bags and paper bags and now cloth bags. They seem to multiply. So ever few months, I have to thin the collection. Recycle bags. Throw things out. I regularly gift the free canvas bags to people, often with other things I am trying to move out of the house. I must write this so that you know, I am not a hoarder like my mother.

Although I need to tell you one story which may tell you I am not the best informant about mother. I was reminded of this by a friend from high school over a recent lunch together. During the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I was in a car accident. It was, if memory serves, my fault. The sun got in my eye, I pulled out in front of another car. It hit me in the side. Though now I wonder, did I have the right of way and he was at a stop sign and did not see me and I was passing and he pulled out and hit me? Memory is so uncertain. I was with my friend Jules. We were certainly playing music. We were certainly talking. Then the accident. What Jules remembers that I had completely forgot was calling my home and my mother a swing the phone. She said, Mrs. Enszer, there has been a car accident. And my mother said, Oh, my god, is the car ok? What happened to the car? Now as Ruth’s daughter, I know that this did not surprise me at the time, nor did it surprise me hearing Jules retelling it all of these years later. My mother loved me, yes, but she loved her things first. Years later, Jules was still peeved by my mother’s response, by her not caring about me and my safety over the car. And I appreciate that enormously, because it is witnesses like Jules that remind me that how things are perceived in our family do not always reflect the values that I want to have in the world. I want to be the person who cares more about people than things. Ruth cared about things.

Thus, there is a cruel irony that I am the person sifting through her things. Throwing them out, donating them to good will. Giving them away. She never did any of those activities. She rarely threw out anything. Hence the bags. And the plastic containers. And the paper plates (I just discovered another two hundred or so cleaning an upper shelf in the kitchen.) And the threadbare towels and sheets. I could go on. 

I do not know why she did not throw things away. Even things that had exhausted their useful life she saved. Perhaps it is that she was born shortly after the Great Depression. She was a child raised by parents who survived the depression. Though even my grandmother (my father’s mother) throws things out. I think for my mother she never had the sense of having enough. She never felt sated by what she had in the world.

This brings me back to the cashmere sweaters. A few thousand dollars of cashmere sweaters. Why did she have so many? Pragmatically, I can say, well, it is cold here. (Today we have moved back into the fuck all cold temperatures, where your skin freezes the minute you walk outside and so you have to cover everything or risk frostbite.) Those cashmere sweaters are warm. Particularly in her later years, she did not do laundry more than once a month (she laundered her cashmere with Woolite), so having many sweaters I think kept her warm. 

Yet I think it is more than that. She had more than she needed–more cashmere sweaters, more clocks, more dishes, more silverware, more everything–and she kept everything; she never threw anything out. She loved her things; she wanted them around her; she never wanted to share them, and she never wanted to let them go. I am not sure any of this explains why she had so many sweaters or why she kept all of those bags. Nor does it capture the overwhelming sadness I feel regularly being here, living in this house, sorting through her things, knowing how much she loved them and how in the end, they never loved her back.

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Nightmares

People who know me well know that I believe most of life can be explained through quotations from St Elmo’s Fire, the iconic movie from the 1980s. Lately, I have been thinking about a line of Jules. At a dramatic climax in the film, Leslie discovers that Jules has been fired from her job, Jules locks herself in the apartment, everyone breaks in and Billy sits with Jules who explains what she has been doing with her days since she was fired.  

JULES: I’ve been sitting in the hospital with my step-monster. We’ve had the best talks we’ve ever had. Of course, she’s in a coma, which really pisses me off. Because all that time…I just waited… for one word from that woman… about why my father hates me so much.

Jules wants to know why her father hates her so much; I want to know why the crazy women of University Park hate me so much.

I think about this today after waking up at five am from a nightmare, another one where I imagine screaming at the women who organized against Tibe demanding that Animal Control have him put down. Truthfully, the visceral anger I experience is too much to engage my conscious mind during the day. It only comes out in nightmares. Only my unconscious can process my anger. Of course, the unconscious working through of the anger, and the questions, Why do these women hate me so much? Why do these women hate Tibe so much?, haunt my daylight hours leaving me tired and listless. Yet, I am like Jules; I will never get an answer to my questions. It makes them no less urgent, though; it does not lesson the power of the question in my psyche.

While I know it is unhealthy for me to be obsessed with these sick fucks (pardon my language, I do not know how else to describe them, though), I return to Jules. My mind cannot let it go. Why do they hate me? Why do they hate Tibe? I just want one word from those women. I want some answer, some shred of reasoning for why they hate us and organized to drive us from our home. My conscious and subconscious mind cannot rest with the idea that they simply want to be able to walk wherever they want to walk without hearing a dog bark, behind a closed door or in a fenced yard. I cannot fathom this assertion of privilege, this cold, calculating hatred.

And I know it is hate. After the dog brawl (and I will say it again, Tibe was wrong and bad, and it was terrible), the owner of the other dog walked away screaming, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. We do not know who she hated, my beloved who was standing there or Tibe. We do know we had never met her before. We do not know her; she does not know us. She does hate. Us, perhaps, the open lesbian couple. Tibe, the boisterous and loud dog. Hate figures into this story, though I do not fully understand how. Those words echo though in my mind awake and asleep:  I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. 

The woman who fashioned herself as the “expert” on dog behavior, the one who took my Facebook posts and blog posts and photos and used them to explain how I am an inadequate dog owner, how I do not assert dominance over the dogs, how I allow the dogs to sit on the couch and create a dangerous environment for all of the dogs and people in the hamlet, that woman does not know me. We have never met. She has not met me. Or Tibe. Or Emma. It is clear to me that she hates me and the pack. I do not know why and I do not understand how someone can hate a person she has never met. How someone can scan social media and decide that a dog should be put down. How someone can decide to drive a family from their home. I am Jules waiting for just one word from that woman. Or any of the women because it was a cabal. A hateful cabal.

Hate is a powerful emotion. Through the whole experience I have been struck by the people who are able to see what is happening to us and the people who are not able to see what is happening. My college roommate surprised and delighted me when she named the dynamic immediately as homophobia. She felt we were not mounting a vigorous enough defense and encouraged me to find another lawyer. In retrospect, she was right. It was incredibly powerful, though, to hear that from a heterosexual woman. She named the dynamic of homophobia and racism within seconds of hearing the story. Other people have reacted similarly. I actually think that counter intuitively it is ever for heterosexual people to name the dynamics than for other queers. For queer people to hear what is happening to us and to name the bigotry that has driven us from our home is to admit that this could happen to them, to acknowledge that we are all vulnerable to an angry cabal that could organize to deny us our homes and our families. Other people have doubted my account of the events and the situation we are in. There are people who think I am underestimating the dog bite incident. More than one person has said, “Well, something really bad must have happened.” And I have said it did. And it was an accident. People do not get forced out of their home because a dog bites another dog. 

A handful of people have asked me in all sincerity, What did you do to make these people hate you so much? Oh, if only it were that easy! If only there was something I did that I could undo and make it all go away. The truth is, I hate being in the situation I am in. I do not want to make anyone uncomfortable–queer people or straight people or any people. I want to be the nice girl from the Midwest. I want to say hello to my neighbors. I want them to like me. I do not want them to scream at me. Although I realize typing this, as much as I want to be the nice girl, I am entirely unwilling to do as I am told by bullies–or anyone else for that matter. Hate me as much as you want, but I will not turn my back on my dog. I will not put him down because you think that is the only thing to be done. I may not believe in community any longer, but I do believe in change and redemption. 

This afternoon, there was a small grey dog two yards over when we went out to walk. Tibe barked and started to work himself up as though he was going to carry on. I brought him in line to walk with me. He sat to calm himself down. Then we walked. He looked at that dog. He wanted to go crazy. He didn’t. He still wanted to, but he didn’t. This morning, he wanted to bark and dance about when a truck came through the park. I told him down. He looked back at me, really, mom, really? I looked at him with stony determination, he sat. Looked. Then went down. He is learning. I cannot say that we are out of the wilderness. I would not make any guarantees how this story ends. I hope it ends in ten or twelve years with old age, some sickness, a trip to the vet.

In my dreams, I am the one screaming:  I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Rather than be the object of the rage, my subconscious makes me the actor. I am the angry woman screaming,  I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. It does not make me feel better. Jules and I are never going to get our questions answered. She will have to learn to live without knowing why her father hates her; I will have to learn to live without knowing why the sick fucks of University Park hate me and Tibe. I feel better for Jules imagining the fabulous life she went on to live; I know she became a together woman of the 90s and 00s and 10s. What makes me feel better is waking up in the mornings with Tibe’s warm body pressed against me. It doesn’t prevent the nightmares, but it is a balm.

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More Pictures Than Words

 First, three photos of Vita stretching this morning after a long sleep and dreams of playing more with her mouse friend. The mouse died overnight, curled up in a ball at the side of the house. Sad. I buried it just beneath the surface of the flower bed where my father grows begonias. Then covered it with snow. Four or five inches today, captured in the last photo. I would like to hibernate for the next few days.  

    

 

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Emma’s Molt and Other Instincts

Yesterday, after the beloved left for a few days in New York, I took the brush out with me for Emma’s walk. I thought she needed a little brushing for the week; I did not expect her to be in full molt the first week of February, but she is. I spent about twenty minutes brushing her out, capturing much of the hair for a garbage bag, but it still covered my coat and left tumbleweeds on the exposed grass. Today, I brushed her more and, on each walk picked at her coat, pulling out more fur. It has actually been a while since Emma has had a full on molt. More frequently, she just sheds throughout the year, never getting a really thick winter coat and never quite shedding everything in the summer. So I was thrilled about the molt. Happy to brush her, to pick at her coat, to rub her and touch her, inspecting her skin, making sure she is healthy. So happy, I almost thought that I would write about the inevitability of change and optimism about change.

Optimism about change is, of course, what everyone wants. On Facebook, kind friends suggest that what is happening is a sign, that I need to be in Saginaw for some reason, that we needed to leave Maryland, that this circumstance we find ourselves in is destined, preordained, predetermined. I want to believe them. I want to believe the optimist aphorisms that implore us to not lose the lesson in the difficult experiences. Experiences transform us. We learn from them, but I am not convinced that experience transforms us positively. Some experiences damage us. Forever. In the midst of the experience, the outcome, positive or negative, is unclear.

So Emma’s molt started yesterday, this afternoon, I found our little Vita playing with her first mouse. Vita is, you may remember, only about eighteen months old. She has not demonstrated her skills as a mouser prior to today, and today’s demonstration left something to be desired. Yes, Vita found a mouse, played with a mouse, but could not quite close the deal. As she rested on Emma’s bed, I went to pick up the mouse, who moved. I had to gather up its live little body in a plastic container to deposit outside. It may live; it may die.

I hesitate to write about Vita’s killer behavior (I’ll be calling her NBK for the next few days). The bullying bigots used my Facebook posts and this blog to gather information to prove that we are negligent animal owners, to prove that Tibe is a vicious dog. Might they now read this post and determine that Vita is endangered at our house? That we are exposing her to live rodents, encouraging her to kill? Bemoaning her failure? Am I not protecting her enough? Should the local animal control be protecting the local rodent population from our little would-be killer? Should I expect a visit from animal control impounding Vita for attacking a mouse? Will there be a detention, a hearing, a trial?

Prior to the experience of the last four months, I considered myself a communitarian. I believed in community as a unit of solution to the challenges in people’s lives. Now I believe community is nefarious. I believe it is a way for people who are alike, people who share a set of immutable characteristics, to come together to shun, ostracize, pathologize, and harm people who are note like them. I believe community is a way to diminish people and enforce one’s will on people deemed to be less powerful. Community to me is now about power and control and keeping people in line. It is not something of which I want to be a part. I am no longer interested in the communal, the collective, the shared; I am interested in privacy, property rights, and protection.

Experience changes us and not always in good ways. In the midst of our anguish about Tiberius, we considered returning him to the animal rescue from where we adopted him. The possibilities for pups who are returned, however, are bleak. More than that, however, we had to contemplate the consequences for us of not fulfilling our commitment to Tibe. For Some people, these considerations may not be significant, but for us there were emotional implications of returning and adoptee. The beloved was adopted. On the dark day animal control visited, she knew if we gave Tibe back, she would be altered forever. Her sense of what is right in the world, her sense of how people fulfill their obligations to others would be challenged, altered, even potentially destroyed. One of our fundamental commitments and beliefs in the world is that family is built by love and commitment, not simply by blood. How could we turn our backs on that? How could I love my beloved if we abandoned the dog that we adopted? How could abandoning our adopted pup not psychically alter us? So we made our decisions and had the resources to implement them. Yet, the experience changes us.

Our little Vita, now sleeping a few feet from Emma who is snoring, will be changed by her experience with the mouse. Maybe she will sharpen her hunting skills, finding more mice and learning to kill them. Maybe she will adopt an anti-instinctual platform and find a way to coexist peacefully with mice friends. She will be changed. In three weeks, Emma too will be changed, lighter, clean, molten. We, too, will be changed, though we do not know yet all the ways.

  

Emma at rest.

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Some End of the Week Levity

Friends, we are in danger of losing the adverb. Even the NPR station here in mid-Michigan says, every morning when it snows, drive slow! Though I holler at them, though I rage in the car driving Tibe to the park, then continue to say, drive slow, drive slow, drive slow. Every my father, a high school teacher for thirty years and a committed lexophile, admits that the adverb is a lost cause. It is tragic.

About three blocks from my grandmother’s house, on the street I must drive from our house to hers, a can hit a skunk three days ago. Since then it has rained, frozen, rained more, snowed. That skunk still smells. I have to be honest, I admire how it endures.

The Sunday between the Monday that Tibe bit the other dog and the Friday that Prince George’s County ordered him out of the county forever, I walked Emma. It was the day after Halloween. I picked up stray candy wrappers and other trash as Emma and I slowly rambled the streets of our old neighborhood. If I could I would go and throw all of that trash back on the streets. 

Today, walking Tibe in the park, I picked up some trash (the park is very clean; it was unusual to find trash). Then Tibe and I played with purple dragon on his long lead. He fetched it, chewed it, caught it and threw it. After, I picked up the small pieces of white stuffing that came from purple dragon. Tibe and I both have pride of place. We want to care for where we live. We want where we live to deserve our care.

The woman working at the Little Caesar’s tonight when I picked up a pizza was exhausted and stressed and she had to work until closing. My singular goal this year is for my grandmother to live to vote for Hillary Clinton in November because she was a working woman who often must have had exhaustion in her eyes and because that woman at the Little Caesar’s needs a country who offers her more.

This was supposed to have levity. Walmart has the cheapest prescriptions in town, so my grandmother’s scripts all go there. It is convenient to pick up her medication and then quickly pick up some groceries as well. Tonight I did just that. Yoghurt, cheese, sugar free ice cream, breakfast sandwiches. Walking back from grocery to pharmacy, I noticed that the spring clothes are out at Walmart. There were some cute skirts. If I buy a spring wardrobe at Walmart, send a rescue squad; if I buy a spring wardrobe at Walmart, we have been in Saginaw too long.

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Who Are These Clowns?

A telephone ringing in the middle of the night is never good news. Last night, our phone rang at 2:25 am. On the caller id: my grandmother’s name and number. When I answered, though, it was not her voice. It was a police officer. She called the police believing there was an intruder in her home. There wasn’t. Could someone come? Yes, yes, I will be there in ten minutes, I replied.

Again, my mouth lined with adrenalin as I pulled on jeans and a warm shirt. It was so the dead of night that none of the animals even came downstairs with me. There was no one on the streets. I arrived quickly at my grandmother’s house. She was frightened and disoriented. The police officers departed quickly. We sat at the kitchen table and she explained how she woke up and the was a man in her bedroom, just a small man, maybe five foot four, and his son was with him. He looked like a clown. They opened and closed the closet doors. She was frightened. She called my dad, then when he didn’t answer, she dialed 911. 

There was no intruder. She was having “visual and auditory hallucinations” as I came to explain them to her doctor, her nurse, and her home care team. Though that ostensibly learned phrase belies the terror and confusion my grandmother experienced. In the middle of the night, after a glass of milk, she settled down and finally fell asleep. Though the experience continued in the morning. She thought the clown and his son painted on her walls and on her television set. She wanted my dad to help her call the insurance company, the wall pain was, after all, $35 a gallon. (I share this in part because I delight in the specific, vivid accounts she gives, in the vibrancy of her imagination.) I spent part of my day trying to unravel what was happening to my grandmother and mobilizing people to help her. I am not sure that I accomplished either of these goals, but by 7:30 this evening, she was bundled up in her rocker, happy about her bowling score in the afternoon and eating a cutie.

We will see how tonight goes and tomorrow will bring some medical tests. I am cautious writing about my grandmother, not wanting to give too many details, aware of her right to privacy, but I also want to make visible the challenges, even the terror, of old age. Being close to it is both precious and frightening. Last night, as she was lying in bed, I held both of her hands and she told me about the clown playing an instrument, perhaps a recorder?, she could feel the air from the instrument blowing on her face. She kept asking, can you hear the music, can you hear the music? And in the middle of the vivid description of what she saw and what she heard, she said, you are taking such good care of me, just like your mother would have. I am going to tell her that when I see her soon, what good care you are taking of me. Then it was back to the clown and the music.

When I came home, Tibe snuggled next to me and we slept in until 7:30 am. Tonight, the beloved cooked a delicious meal. My beloved one hates clowns. She was as terrified by this story as my grandmother was of the hallucinations. We all face an uncertain future. We all have questions without answers. Where will we live? What will happen to us? How can we endure the indignities of this life? Who are these clowns? Without answers, we try to care for one another. I rejoice in canine warmth and home-cooked meals, in the difficult moments with my grandmother.

  

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