September 26, 2012
Sometime last year as I took Chuck on a morning walk down the street at our old address, I noticed the door open at a house just east of ours. I returned Chuck to the house and went back.  The house looked ransacked. Clothes everywhere, food on the ground. I knew a dog, a boxer, lived there; I could see where he had relieved himself in little piles all over the house. The blinds were a wreck, and he was nowhere to be found.  At this point it basically felt like a Law and Order cold open, so I called the police. They came and found the dog, locked the door and left a blue note on the door with instructions on how to get the dog back.  I mentioned it to A., Bentley’s companion human. He was appalled. He said he hoped they took the dog, kicked the person out of the house, pressed charges.  That’s the boxer in the window some time later. For the months afterward while we still lived there I would still say hi to the vaguely youngish woman that lived there, while he spiraled around on a retractable leash in barely controlled concentric circles. 

Sometime last year as I took Chuck on a morning walk down the street at our old address, I noticed the door open at a house just east of ours. I returned Chuck to the house and went back. 

The house looked ransacked. Clothes everywhere, food on the ground. I knew a dog, a boxer, lived there; I could see where he had relieved himself in little piles all over the house. The blinds were a wreck, and he was nowhere to be found. 

At this point it basically felt like a Law and Order cold open, so I called the police. They came and found the dog, locked the door and left a blue note on the door with instructions on how to get the dog back. 

I mentioned it to A., Bentley’s companion human. He was appalled. He said he hoped they took the dog, kicked the person out of the house, pressed charges. 

That’s the boxer in the window some time later. For the months afterward while we still lived there I would still say hi to the vaguely youngish woman that lived there, while he spiraled around on a retractable leash in barely controlled concentric circles. 

September 25, 2012
Crows recognize faces. This fact never ceases to amaze me, and sometimes make me genuinely afraid. 

Crows recognize faces. This fact never ceases to amaze me, and sometimes make me genuinely afraid. 

September 16, 2012 • 2 notes
When he was born, my son’s right hand was clenched into a fist, drawn up next to his cheek just below his eye. I know this because I saw it; I know this because the audio I took of the birth records a nurse saying so quite distinctly. All along I have assumed his smallness, the depth of his neediness, would astonish me. It has. Keeping a bulb syringe nearby in those first few hours while he expelled the stuff from his lungs; our faces close to his sporadically to check his breath in the night; his remarkable eyelashes. Even now that his bones and sinews are pushing out one inch, then another, into this fourth week of his life, I am taken aback by my thumb’s reaching almost the length of his thigh. What I was not quite prepared for—what I have been trying, somewhat comically, to theorize in between feedings—was the power it has required to bring him to the world. Specifically I am thinking of the muscle and bone in L.’s body, which I felt shudder and flex and pull for her five hours of unmedicated labor. Really this is only the most obvious of the displays of strength and mindfulness that this little creature requires of her as he continues unwittingly to draw his life from her frame. And L. is not alone in giving care, in being needed. I think of the food and blankets and toys jammed in every corner of our apartment from our friends, our families, our little church; the two shift nurses who might as well have been midwives. It’s a long list. We are not like deer or cats in this; we are among those animals that do not give birth alone, among the countless that raise them in herds. It is hard even to know what to call this plenitude, this strength.

When he was born, my son’s right hand was clenched into a fist, drawn up next to his cheek just below his eye. I know this because I saw it; I know this because the audio I took of the birth records a nurse saying so quite distinctly.

All along I have assumed his smallness, the depth of his neediness, would astonish me. It has. Keeping a bulb syringe nearby in those first few hours while he expelled the stuff from his lungs; our faces close to his sporadically to check his breath in the night; his remarkable eyelashes. Even now that his bones and sinews are pushing out one inch, then another, into this fourth week of his life, I am taken aback by my thumb’s reaching almost the length of his thigh.

What I was not quite prepared for—what I have been trying, somewhat comically, to theorize in between feedings—was the power it has required to bring him to the world. Specifically I am thinking of the muscle and bone in L.’s body, which I felt shudder and flex and pull for her five hours of unmedicated labor. Really this is only the most obvious of the displays of strength and mindfulness that this little creature requires of her as he continues unwittingly to draw his life from her frame. And L. is not alone in giving care, in being needed. I think of the food and blankets and toys jammed in every corner of our apartment from our friends, our families, our little church; the two shift nurses who might as well have been midwives. It’s a long list. We are not like deer or cats in this; we are among those animals that do not give birth alone, among the countless that raise them in herds. It is hard even to know what to call this plenitude, this strength.

August 16, 2012

They are spraying tonight for mosquitoes in Dallas. It is a startlingly bad outbreak of West Nile this year; we keep hearing about it even on the BBC, not to mention national news. They last did aerial spraying here in the sixties. 

The chemical kills by stopping movement; insects and fish lack a specific enzyme that other animals have in quantity enough to break down or block out the effects. L is due to go into labor any day now, so no matter what they say about its safety I am nervous. And though pets are allegedly fine, I am also glad that Sable has been forced indoors by our move, and I will make Chuck’s excursions outside brief. 

I wonder about where and why this choice was made, to blanket these areas. It is so grand in scale it seems like an obviously Dallas thing to do, in one sense. Anyone who knows Dallas would raise their eyebrows if they saw the map: these are very clearly the wealthiest neighborhoods in the Metroplex, as far as I know. Is the problem concentrated in these areas? Why? Is there under-reporting of cases in South Dallas? Are people watering their lawns with criminal gusto? 

That all seems a little conspiratorial, really, but it’s puzzling. More fundamentally I am anxious for the bees, the wasps, the cicadas. I was outside at odd hours when we first moved, and did not really catch the dusk songs; it made me worry that we had somehow moved out of their territory. But I was wrong. We are just a mile away, anyway. They are washing the street in the noise now. 

July 24, 2012
We moved. This black folding chair and its bright green sibling were on our back porch when they handed us the keys. We brought stuff over in “dribs and drabs,” as L says, save on the day bona fide movers came to cart big things and breakables the .86 mile south to the new place. Still built before World War II, of course. This grasshopper loitered a couple of days after we properly set up. It is gone now, I think. I used the chairs to prop up the herb pots where the mint, dill, and parsley grew. It is all, so far, we have had time to furtively grab now since June, when our overlapping lease finally came up.

We moved.

This black folding chair and its bright green sibling were on our back porch when they handed us the keys. We brought stuff over in “dribs and drabs,” as L says, save on the day bona fide movers came to cart big things and breakables the .86 mile south to the new place. Still built before World War II, of course.

This grasshopper loitered a couple of days after we properly set up. It is gone now, I think. I used the chairs to prop up the herb pots where the mint, dill, and parsley grew. It is all, so far, we have had time to furtively grab now since June, when our overlapping lease finally came up.

May 30, 2012
When it warms up, L. searches for lizards whenever we pass by the back door on the way up the driveway. The ones that survive are the color of the brick, or bright green and buried in the bushes. The cats stalk and destroy them regularly, but I still hear them all the time, skittering away when I walk by during the day; we still catch them lurking at night, waiting for mosquitoes and moths to let their guard down, get sloppy. L. walks out in the school parking lot at lunch and leaves a bit of apple here or there so that they can snack when they have finished sunning themselves. 

When it warms up, L. searches for lizards whenever we pass by the back door on the way up the driveway. The ones that survive are the color of the brick, or bright green and buried in the bushes. The cats stalk and destroy them regularly, but I still hear them all the time, skittering away when I walk by during the day; we still catch them lurking at night, waiting for mosquitoes and moths to let their guard down, get sloppy. L. walks out in the school parking lot at lunch and leaves a bit of apple here or there so that they can snack when they have finished sunning themselves. 

May 26, 2012
In Chuck’s first year—maybe even two years?—at approximately ten p.m. daily he would hop up from whatever perch he had settled in and tear about. He and I would make an unholy racket chasing each other around the house. This felt a little inconsiderate to our duplex neighbor, so I would often just take him outside. We did this in our backyard mosquito preserve at first, and then the front yard once we were convinced our complex system of warning snaps and treats had trained him to stay safely off of the sidewalk. And we would run. He would run circles at speed, flat out, banking into corners. He would leap, suspended over the sidewalk and driveway with genuine, actual hangtime, because he was not supposed to touch concrete. He would smash through the monkey grass like an alligator thrashing in the reeds. He would go on relatively hard runs, too, not just walks. He tapered off on those runs and this ten o’clock freakout somewhat after he turned two, but this time last year he began flatly to refuse even lengthy walks. Last summer was hotter than it has ever been, so we thought he was just being shrewd. Other signs preceded his crash in November last year, but nothing to indicate to us just how dreadful it would be. There is plenty to say about that whole serious, bewildering thing, and it will be therapeutic to write about maybe. For now I will just note that throughout his recovery we had to carry him up and down even the one stair off and on our porch. He curls up closer to us, and more adamantly than he did before. You can see that here. And lately he’s been demanding that I put a treat in a toy for him, a little after nine each night. We have been walking two blocks each morning, dawdling east and racing back west to the house; me a little damp and catching my breath, he wagging his tail from tip to base.

In Chuck’s first year—maybe even two years?—at approximately ten p.m. daily he would hop up from whatever perch he had settled in and tear about. He and I would make an unholy racket chasing each other around the house. This felt a little inconsiderate to our duplex neighbor, so I would often just take him outside. We did this in our backyard mosquito preserve at first, and then the front yard once we were convinced our complex system of warning snaps and treats had trained him to stay safely off of the sidewalk. And we would run.

He would run circles at speed, flat out, banking into corners. He would leap, suspended over the sidewalk and driveway with genuine, actual hangtime, because he was not supposed to touch concrete. He would smash through the monkey grass like an alligator thrashing in the reeds.

He would go on relatively hard runs, too, not just walks. He tapered off on those runs and this ten o’clock freakout somewhat after he turned two, but this time last year he began flatly to refuse even lengthy walks. Last summer was hotter than it has ever been, so we thought he was just being shrewd. Other signs preceded his crash in November last year, but nothing to indicate to us just how dreadful it would be.

There is plenty to say about that whole serious, bewildering thing, and it will be therapeutic to write about maybe. For now I will just note that throughout his recovery we had to carry him up and down even the one stair off and on our porch.

He curls up closer to us, and more adamantly than he did before. You can see that here. And lately he’s been demanding that I put a treat in a toy for him, a little after nine each night. We have been walking two blocks each morning, dawdling east and racing back west to the house; me a little damp and catching my breath, he wagging his tail from tip to base.

May 16, 2012
Pico is on the right and Oz—short for Ozymandias—is on the left. The jeans belong to J., whom I only just found out is a bartender. I guess I just assume that everyone else who wanders around our block during the day is a grad student. J. stopped by as I was working on the porch, stripping the layers of paint off of a dresser that is destined to be a changing table. Like us, J. and his wife (girlfriend? I don’t pry) are expecting a little one. They in June, we in August. Even though it is veneer, J. shared my horror at the covering over of the original patina of the dresser with globs of white paint, followed by an equally inelegant coat of brown. “Just put some chemical on that thing, let it bubble up,” he suggested. Oz used to have bigger dog, a raggedy coated black hound, as a co-conspirator; he regularly got out, and was in ill health. He did not make it past the first year we lived here.  Pico is a Yorkie, as you can see. She gets a little worked up, but it’s Oz who will come after you. Sort of. J. often sits out front of his place with them, and sometimes they slip out of their leashes. The other night Oz came barking furiously across the lawns between our houses. I dropped down and called his name. He ran into my hand and made sure I scratched the side of his head. 

Pico is on the right and Oz—short for Ozymandias—is on the left. The jeans belong to J., whom I only just found out is a bartender. I guess I just assume that everyone else who wanders around our block during the day is a grad student.

J. stopped by as I was working on the porch, stripping the layers of paint off of a dresser that is destined to be a changing table. Like us, J. and his wife (girlfriend? I don’t pry) are expecting a little one. They in June, we in August. Even though it is veneer, J. shared my horror at the covering over of the original patina of the dresser with globs of white paint, followed by an equally inelegant coat of brown. “Just put some chemical on that thing, let it bubble up,” he suggested.

Oz used to have bigger dog, a raggedy coated black hound, as a co-conspirator; he regularly got out, and was in ill health. He did not make it past the first year we lived here. 

Pico is a Yorkie, as you can see. She gets a little worked up, but it’s Oz who will come after you. Sort of. J. often sits out front of his place with them, and sometimes they slip out of their leashes. The other night Oz came barking furiously across the lawns between our houses. I dropped down and called his name. He ran into my hand and made sure I scratched the side of his head. 

May 10, 2012
The fireflies are out now. This weekend was the first time I noticed them. They are new, then, along with the crickets who just started singing in the last two weeks. Until last week it seemed like there was just one, occupying a spot just across the street and over one address. Now it is dozens. They fall silent when Chuck and I jangle past. My memories of lightning bugs are very strong; running after them in the yard of a house on Main Street in Sheffield, Alabama, after church people come over for dinner had gone home, the pink and white flowers of the dogwood tree all blue in the dusk. The neighbors around the corner, across from City Hall, were a gay couple with a great boxer, Brutus, whom they took to the McDonald’s drive thru for hamburgers. For no reason at all once I took a stick and stripped their dogwood of all its flowers. Mom was mortified and intervened but they were gracious, to her face, and to mine, at least. And that is what mattered more than anything. I am sometimes overcome with something that is like both gratitude and piety, when I think of all the things, the good people, who conspired to preserve my innocence. I think of what a gift it all is—the dogwoods, the boxer, the gracious gay neighbors, the lightning bugs and church people. Mom.

The fireflies are out now. This weekend was the first time I noticed them. They are new, then, along with the crickets who just started singing in the last two weeks. Until last week it seemed like there was just one, occupying a spot just across the street and over one address. Now it is dozens. They fall silent when Chuck and I jangle past.

My memories of lightning bugs are very strong; running after them in the yard of a house on Main Street in Sheffield, Alabama, after church people come over for dinner had gone home, the pink and white flowers of the dogwood tree all blue in the dusk.

The neighbors around the corner, across from City Hall, were a gay couple with a great boxer, Brutus, whom they took to the McDonald’s drive thru for hamburgers. For no reason at all once I took a stick and stripped their dogwood of all its flowers. Mom was mortified and intervened but they were gracious, to her face, and to mine, at least. And that is what mattered more than anything.

I am sometimes overcome with something that is like both gratitude and piety, when I think of all the things, the good people, who conspired to preserve my innocence. I think of what a gift it all is—the dogwoods, the boxer, the gracious gay neighbors, the lightning bugs and church people. Mom.

May 3, 2012 • 2 notes

We’ll be moving from this house (duplex) soon, much sooner than I thought. The new house (…duplex) is only a few blocks south. Still, it is strange to think about. Everything here is familiar in the genetic sense of the word. Our routes, our walks, the places we sit, are typical; all of it travels in well-worn grooves. I know the animals here. We are moving for quite happy reasons, but leaving the place we have been together longest. 

This is a Red Admiral I noticed still loitering about our little garden plot. I could not get a shot of the black-and-white winged butterfly that flitted away from the compost heap right before I took this. I didn’t even notice that one until I had already tossed the pineapple rind and other scraps onto the pile. 

The garden and the compost will be especially hard to leave, I think. It was all so much work! We are even considering moving the earth with us. Though not the compost, I suppose. That’s a loss.

It’s true for all of us that our presence, wherever we are, is helping make the soil what it is. That’s for good and ill. Our unpleasant effects are carted away with everyone else’s trash south of town. But here in the back it’s just worms and seaweed and whatnot coaxing the parsley into opulence. For us it’s the first time that our presence has made a tangible difference, difference we can trace, with which we can be pleased, even nourished. They are modest marks, little square jabs of hope; guesses.

I have been very grateful for the tomatoes, the chard, the herbs—especially the parsley and the mint. L. and I outside, digging, pruning, tying stalks to stakes; and the pungent smell of peels and paper when I turn the stack by the fence. 

May 2, 2012

It only does so much good to apologize for thinking birds are intrinsically hilarious. All that bobbing and goofing around.  

It’s fair to make distinctions. Dropping in on animal play is one thing—being roped in as a bit player in the little vaudevillian reparte when crowds, scraps, or front lawns give foraging an audience. Then there’s pretending dogs tell jokes. Both imply a kind of community, which Augustine in fact does suggest is easier to establish with dogs than with humans who speak a different language. But the notion that an animal is intentionally entertaining you, the way clowns or the Marx Brothers or George Carlin entertain you, is a category mistake. I mean of course they’re communicating, but their sense of humor is different. It is enough to be granted a bit part in the community of play, which only concerns you incidentally. At least, I think your inclusion is incidental in the wild, urban and otherwise.

Both these acts of enjoyment are different from laughing at a nonhuman animal, which is always a little breach of covenant. And maybe a large one, depending on context. I vividly remember the passage in White Fang where London gives us the view from the wolf as the men taunt him and laugh. 

So I know it is strictly unintentional that the seagulls were posing so comically, that the pigeon was not being ironic in its self-seriousness, and that the sparrows are not being as licentious as it seems when they all toss puddle water on each other. But it’s not anthropocentric to guess, to approximate, to enjoy. As long as I don’t pretend I’m in on the joke. 

April 30, 2012

Not being all that informed about the classification of this particular moth, I can’t tell you how it fits in with other bits of the ecosystem. I do not think it is a pest, like the Army Cutworm, or a celebrity, like the Monarch. So they don’t show up on the first page of a Google search. I actually have no idea if the sudden explosion of them last week—for just two days, really—was part of migration or a truly brief life cycle. 

We could hear them from inside on Tuesday night, fluttering against our porch light’s false moon. I let Chuck off the leash in the yard Wednesday morning and they flew up in waves. They came up out of their hiding places behind leaves of grass cartwheeling, careening, dozens and dozens of them. He looked at them like a kid who has, for the first time, seen what happens when you try to talk to a flock of pigeons.

April 28, 2012
After we have boarded Chuck, he sticks close. The first time, he had howled himself hoarse. He was still making a lot of puppy sounds at the time, but couldn’t vocalize for a week when we got home. It’s not really been that bad since then. But his reattachment has seemed more pronounced to me this time around. As I mentioned, it’s the first boarding since he got sick. Currently he follows us everywhere around the house—excepting detours to illicitly discover and devour tissues. He lies down on the kitchen floor while I wash dishes, sits on the couch while I read, flops on the bedroom rug when I write. 

After we have boarded Chuck, he sticks close. The first time, he had howled himself hoarse. He was still making a lot of puppy sounds at the time, but couldn’t vocalize for a week when we got home.

It’s not really been that bad since then. But his reattachment has seemed more pronounced to me this time around. As I mentioned, it’s the first boarding since he got sick. Currently he follows us everywhere around the house—excepting detours to illicitly discover and devour tissues. He lies down on the kitchen floor while I wash dishes, sits on the couch while I read, flops on the bedroom rug when I write. 

April 26, 2012

Animals I Have Met: Muir Woods Chipmunk

chipmunk

I am going to cut myself some slack on the quality of this photograph. Though it is hard to see the chipmunk, that is in part because half the point of being a chipmunk is avoiding being obvious. 

L. strongly recommended I post this today. 

We caught her/him just as we were leaving the trail, in sight of the parking lot; he was hopeful for crumbs, I think. There are several signs posted by the NPS forbidding the feeding of the chipmunks, varying in intensity, cleverness, and passive-aggressiveness.

There are also signs encouraging silence, especially through Cathedral Grove. It’s a kind of ravine that, apart from occasional chatter from tweens, seems actually quite silent. One of the signs at the visitor center tells parents to tell their kids to be quiet. Then it addresses them directly. “Children, why are we quiet in nature?” An ad hoc catechesis. 

It is nice, L. observed, to think there are places in the world you should just shut up for a little bit. 

Another sign further down explains the silence is a way to preserve the wildness of the ravine: its hunters, its remaking, everyone’s way home and friends. 

April 25, 2012
“You mind if I say hello?” “No.” She puts her head right into my palm, licks at my wrist. “What’s her name?” L. asks. “Pearl,” he answers. “She goes everywhere with me. She’s my service dog.” His wardrobe’s disrepair and general stains, his recalcitrant stubble: together with the prominence of his id cards it all suggests to me a member of a vulnerable population. Is there an outreach in the city that does just this work? It’s San Francisco, so…maybe. But what dog isn’t a service dog, really? We are a few stops south on Church, going a little deeper into the Mission for lunch. He had to put down his previous dog, a companion of fourteen years, one year ago. “She’s precious,” L. says warmly, authoritatively. “I know,” he replies, really smiling now. “That’s why I named her Pearl.” 

“You mind if I say hello?”

“No.” She puts her head right into my palm, licks at my wrist.

“What’s her name?” L. asks.

“Pearl,” he answers. “She goes everywhere with me. She’s my service dog.” His wardrobe’s disrepair and general stains, his recalcitrant stubble: together with the prominence of his id cards it all suggests to me a member of a vulnerable population. Is there an outreach in the city that does just this work? It’s San Francisco, so…maybe. But what dog isn’t a service dog, really?

We are a few stops south on Church, going a little deeper into the Mission for lunch.

He had to put down his previous dog, a companion of fourteen years, one year ago.

“She’s precious,” L. says warmly, authoritatively.

“I know,” he replies, really smiling now. “That’s why I named her Pearl.”