Part II: Day 62: Visitors

It starts Monday afternoon.  Erin comes over to say good-bye to Zoe and me.  Erin and her family are off to the cottage until August and in our ideal world their sweet dog, Max, would still be alive to run on the beach with them, and Zoe and my husband and I would join them.  We would eat watermelon on the deck and spit seeds at each other, and we would all swim, and Zoe and Max would compete for the sticks we'd toss, but they'd sometimes swim to shore together with the same one in their jaws.

Instead we humans have to make do with a good talk and a cup of dandelion tea.  But it's enough to lift our spirits, and not long after the visit, Zoe wants to walk, and eat, and tell me a thing or two about how she'd like things to be run around here.  This visit marks a turning point.  We started this day with such sadness, but after Erin's visit Zoe understood that we had heard her and we kind of eased into this new phase of our life together with grace.

Zoe adores Erin.

Eve and Blue arrive on Tuesday afternoon at 3, around the time we'd normally be thinking about a long walk along the river.  Zoe is so excited to see Blue that she chases him downstairs and back up again, and that's how I first hear and witness "the cough," the dreaded sign that the mass in Zoe's lungs is interfering with her respiration.  Well, we knew this was the case a few days ago when Zoe started stopping en route on walks a few times to pant and catch her breath when she went uphill, but now we're onto something bigger.  But our vet tells us a couple hours later that this doesn't quite mean The End.  When Zoe coughs like that when she's at rest, doing nothing at all, and when the cough interferes with her sleep, we'll know.  Plus, Zoe took those stairs to greet her old friend like she did as a pup. She was so happy to see him and his person; her mad tear up and down the stairs to herd Blue was her version of dancing a jig.

Here's how it is for her: It's like she was an Olympic runner and all at once she woke up with the lungs of a two-pack-a-day smoker, and she's just trying to learn how to move again.  Later I will tell this story to Danielle and Steve and Steve will say it's like when Lance Armstrong first got on his bicycle after chemo.  He'd think he was pushing hard, going as fast as he could, and then "a little old lady would fly right past him."

Danielle and Steve and Milo, the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who Thinks he's a Greyhound, pop over just after Amy Thompson has finished giving Zoe acupuncture.  Milo has a hard time finding a comfortable place to rest in my studio, and Danielle wonders if he senses that things have shifted for his friend, the big black dog with the wolfy face who used to herd him: if he feels the impending loss.  Zoe is sleepy from the acupuncture so she elects to go out to the balcony to rest.

My husband is having hip replacement surgery on July 10, and Danielle offers to come over sometime after that and make a nice dinner for us, partly in honor of Kerry's birthday which is later in July.  Danielle is one of the best cooks we know.  We were originally going to go to dinner at her and Steve's house on Saturday but now we just can't make plans, and before we could even tell her this she sensed it.   Normally when we go to her and Steve's house she has a bone waiting for Zoe, and all the dogs lick our plates.  Now it seems unlikely that Zoe will be up for leaving the familiar, the comfort of her domain, so the party will come to her--but only if she's up for it.

I feel so lucky to have such kind friends.  And it lifts our spirits, Zoe's and mine, to have visitors.  Zoe snuggles against our friends, or offers them a paw,  and the presence of others lets this sweet dog know that there's still a world outside our house and yard even though, since yesterday, she hasn't been up for heading out there.  I like to think it lets her know that her people won't fall apart.  That she can go when she has to, that she doesn't have to stick around just for us.

Last night my husband said to me, "Would you like to go away for a few days if  . . when . . ." and then the sentence trailed off.   It was such a kind, sweet offer.  We're both kind of tapped out financially now.  He suggested a couple places not far away, one that we've been to in Essex, Vermont, that is connected to the culinary institute, and do you want to know, honestly, my first response?  Before I could say it, I was thinking, 'That's a good choice.  They take dogs."

I'm going to have my work cut out for me.

But I don't have to do it just yet.  For now, Zoe and I are camped out on the balcony watching the river.  The fat groundhog mama just visited, although she thinks of himself, I'm pretty sure, not as a visitor but as an inhabitant.  A hawk swooped above us last night and did a few loops around the yard and we were enthralled.  And although we're all just visitors to this planet, I feel very lucky to have claimed this particular spot on a cool morning in late June with a smart, sensitive dog whose snout reaching over the rails picks up the scent of every creature in our vicinity, and whose big, tender heart keeps teaching me more ways to love her even now.  She's snoring, and that sound as she visits the land of dreams is as comforting to me as the sound of the river flowing past.

Another day.  How lucky we are.  The gift of another day . . .

Blue and Zoe

They have been friends ever since I took Zoe home to live with us

Zoe and I were so happy to see Eve, and I was happier still to see Zoe this happy

When I first brought Zoe home, Eve bought me a pet advice newsletter and was my go-to person on all kinds of pup matters.  She and Zoe have always understood each other.

photo of Milo and Zoe taken by Danielle Egan; I didn't have my camera out to capture their sweet visit on Tuesday

Part II, Day 59: A Dog at Camp Baker

It's soupy-hot as we make our way to Lake Findley for the girlfriend reunion, otherwise known as Camp Baker.

Sandy and Stephanie and Herta come running out to greet us, and Zoe snuggles up to them right away.  It's a relief to see her wagging her tail, eager for the next adventure.  We worried about this road trip.  Five weeks ago our oncologist gave Zoe a prognosis of one month to three.  When she survived the month-mark we still thought it might be hard on her to be in a car for six hours, then shuffled between hotel and lake house with all those stairs and all those new people in hot weather.  She's always been a good traveler, but on the last car trip we took, a month ago, to my sister's--the Memorial Weekend Meltdown one week after the sad oncology visit--Zoe cried the whole way there, and I wanted to.

But she sat in the back seat as my husband drove her to Chautauqua with nary a whimper.  She was feted at the Chautauqua Literary Festival, roamed and swam, and now she is making fast friends with the girls of Camp Baker.  She's our mellow, cuddly girl this week--no signs of being stressed. She's just hot--we all are--and would just like some cool water and a bit of shade.

Herta, I think, was the one who named our summer get-aways Camp Baker.  This is because we were all classmates at Newton D. Baker Junior High, in Cleveland, Ohio, then lost track of each other after high school.  When each of us wanted a pal to nudge under the table because someone in our vicinity--in Minnesota, Indiana, Delaware, Seattle, Massachusetts, or Cleveland--was saying something that reminded us of, say, the art teacher who used to intone, about magenta, "Some people like it, some people think it's kind of wild" we had only our own shins to kick.  None of us stayed in touch.  When we graduated, most of us broke our ties with the past, even the ones who returned to Cleveland to work.  When one of us recalled the time Herta and others (I think Sandy and Pam were both in on it) wrote "This School Blows" on the back of my sister's campaign buttons when Mira ran for class president, and Herta almost got suspended, and had to get on the P.A. system to apologize and tell the whole school that her mother was punishing her, big-time, by having her scrub all the walls in the house, we had to tell the story to civilians without assistance from the team.  (This was a symbolic punishment, akin to washing out one's mouth with soap and water, we were meant to understand; although Herta did not know what "blow" meant yet, our principal told her and her mother that the word was "pornographic.") Now that we are reunited we each have our own details to add to the saga.

This is the third gathering of Camp Baker--my second because I was in France with Kerry and Zoe for the first, in the summer of 2010.

For Pam, who arrives later with her tasty homemade moussaka and marinara sauce, it will be the first.  Herta was the last to see her--in the early 80s.  I don't remember seeing Pam after 1974, when she had piled up enough AP credits to graduate early, as did Herta.  Herta worked for a while as an air traffic controller.  Pam became an engineer.  Before that, when Pam married at 19 the same guidance counselor who tested all of us in grade school to determine if we were smart enough for "major work," Cleveland's answer, circa 1970s, to enrichment programs, those of us who knew about it were worried.  Now it occurs to me that whether we liked and trusted him or not, this man was the reason we all became friends.  When kids seemed bright, their teachers referred them to him.  He was the one who tested our IQs.  If we scored above a certain number, we got put in these great classes where we began studying foreign languages by age eight and nine.  We went on field trips to the Cleveland Art Museum and got tickets to hear the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra.  Our art and music classes were among the best in the state.  I don't want to sugar coat anything about this confusing era--Pam reminds us how parents in most houses she knew were taking Valium, and only Sandy and Steph knew just how severely ill our mother was--but it's an odd moment for me to realize that one thing we all have in common is the recognition by this one particular individual that we were smart enough to earn the keys to the kingdom.  It's a direct line, one could argue, from that test in a guidance counselor's office when I was eight, to the ten trips to France I've made since grad school, including the one with my husband and Zoe that lasted seven months.  We all remember seventh grade French class and the chic, gamine young French girl with the Vidal Sassoon haircut who assisted our teacher.  Sandy and I invited her as our guest for the home ec Bring Your Teacher to Brunch.  She sat at our table and ate the coffee cake we'd baked.  When we made skirts in home ec (I got a D--sewing was never my forté), we wanted to design outfits like our French role model's.

These days, most public schools don't start kids on foreign language until eighth grade or so--far too late for the kids to become bilingual.

Rosemary is coming, also for the first time.  She lived on Grapeland Avenue, the street my sister and I passed when we walked to elementary school--a street that I still see in my dreams although in them the houses look bigger, as they did in childhood, and the trees are taller than they ever were.  She is not a Baker babe, as we call ourselves; she went to St. Mel's, the Catholic school in our neighborhood that we all called Saint Smells, right through the eighth grade. We were in the same high school junior year, but that's the only time our paths crossed. 

But here's the miracle: Rosemary knew our mother.  Not only did she remember her from the neighborhood, but as a nurse practitioner committed to serving the poor, she helped found the homeless shelter our mother sought refuge in for the last decade of her life.  When Rosie thought of treating street people, helping ease their mental and physical suffering along with providing them a safe bed for the night, my mother was exactly the kind of person she had in mind.  In later years she saw our mother at the shelter.  She made sure she was okay.  (For more information about my sister, Mira Bartok, our mother, and the memoir about our childhood my sister wrote, The Memory Palace, go here.  To learn more about the women's shelter that was later renamed for our mother, go to a post I wrote in January, here.)

And when Sandy committed her life to treating at-risk babies, children of drug addicts and of the mentally ill, she says she often wondered what it was about my sister and me that allowed us to thrive.  She is now the acting director in her unit at the county hospital--the same hospital where my sister and mother and I went for our health care: i.e., the place that took Medicaid.  Sandy remembers wheeling me out of that hospital, drawing on her old candy striper skills, after I had surgery there the June after we graduated from high school.

Steph and I met when we were six.  She lived across the street on Triskett Road, and all through grade school we spent all of every summer day together.  We rode bikes, played Cold War-inspired spy games, and ran back and forth between her house and our apartment and our grandparents' house a block and a half away where we would climb fruit trees, run in the fields behind them, put on skits for the neighborhood, and play School--with me as teacher: my warped idea, then, of fun, and neither she nor my sister had the heart to unseat me from my dictatorial pedant's throne.  Steph indirectly led me to yoga when she taught me all the stretches she was learning in gymnastics class.  I loved her dachsund, Penny, and she loved Ginger, our collie/shepherd mix, the recipient of all my secrets.  Steph was tiny and nimble, with hair long enough to sit on, and when she moved to Strongsville, Ohio in high school my sister and I never stopped missing her.

Herta and Sandy and Pam went to a different elementary school, and when we all met in seventh grade in our A.P. math and science and English and dreaded home ec classes, I thought they were the coolest girls in the world.  They had better taste in rock music than I did.  They knew about Crosby, Stills, and Nash, whereas I was still stuck on Neil Diamond.  They had boyfriends before I did. Herta would pay us to eat gross stuff we mixed up in the cafeteria--jello, mystery meat, orange juice, milk.  She was funny and smart, an inspiring public speaker, and should have won the all-school competition for poetry recitation with her rendition of Poe's "Annabelle Lee" but some boy we didn't know won instead.  She was robbed.

Cathy, my sister's best friend, has just retired.  In the thirty years she taught special ed, and then fourth grade, she affected the lives of some of the toughest families in the city.  These were kids who had been abused.  Kids with special needs and not enough resources in the school budget or in the home to help them achieve.  A product of a great public school education, she witnessed its starvation due to budget cuts at the federal, state, and local level: she was in the trenches through its slow decline.  She survived No Child Left Behind and all the crazy rounds of tests and testing and more until she finally had enough.  She hopes she'll find a new career to take her into the next stage of life.  She's thinking about doing something at a park.  Something with trees and creatures instead of children who are suffering.  She wants to sleep through the night and see what that's like.

When I reminded Steph how our teachers would write our IQs on the roll and that I checked once, and hers was the highest of all the girls in sixth grade, she said, "Then why didn't anyone say to us, you're going to go to college.  I wonder what I would have become if my parents had told me this and said, we're going to pay for it."  She got a nursing degree and was married and working by 19.  Now she's ready to find out what else she can do.  Like Cathy, she's thinking of finding a job in a park.  She is an amazing gardener, and has done the flowers for her kids' weddings.  Her kids have doctorates, and she could too, but no one told her that was an option for her.  Not in Cleveland, circa 1970s, even in our excellent public schools.  We may have learned French, French impressionism, and seen George Szell conduct Mozart and Bartók at Severance Hall, but Cleveland was slow to catch on to the women's movement--at least in our little corner, on the West Side.  Our sex-segregated lunch line at Newton D. Baker Junior High was a case in point.  The boys ate first, then filed out of the lunch room, and we marched in while the assistant principal patrolled the halls, checking the lengths of our skirts.  Home ec was sex-segregated too.  No girls took woodworking.  Mrs. Fields, who taught clothing, was a Stepford Wife with helmet hair, and we knew only that we didn't want to be her, but not who we wanted to become.

We went to a skiing lodge in the hills of Western New York for a walk.

So here we are now.  Two nurse practitioners, both of whom love their jobs, have major managerial responsibilities and work thirteen-hour days; a ready-to-retire nurse in search of an epiphany; the department coordinator of the classics and history department of a well respected liberal arts college; a retiring elementary school teacher; a disgruntled engineer who has been laid off more than once in the economic crisis and is afraid that she won't be able to finance her health care as she ages.  Plus there's this dog and her person who loves words.  If they wanted to, the medical gals could be physicians, but they are way more excited about the way their field is going, and how soon there will be a doctorate degree in their nursing specialties.  As recognized experts, they'll be teaching the teachers.  The department coordinator could be department chair but she's busy conducting her own history project--interviewing her aging father about his life before and after World War II.  The engineer could be an executive at Boeing but she's more interested now in the career of her gifted college-age daughter.  They're all bright and accomplished, highly competent women, but what matters to them most are other things: social justice.  Their kids.  Their gardens.  Their health and the health of their siblings and their surviving parents.  The state of our nation and our world, which they all find shaky.  The nurse is going to Nicaragua soon to volunteer her services at a health clinic.  She's ready to do more than what she does now, which already sounds like too much.

Big paws up to Pine Junction, a Lake Findley restaurant that let us bring Zoe to their outdoor patio for dinner.  She helped the non-vegans in the group eat their burgers and fries.

In this crowd, Zoe basks in love.  She laps up Pam's moussaka and asks for more.  Baker Babes scratch her belly and her ears.  They tell her she's gorgeous and good.  "Such a good dog!  Such a great dog!  So mellow!  So tranquil to be around!"  They sit beside her in the shade and tell her she's the most beautiful and wise and sweet dog in the world, even though some of them have dogs waiting for them at home.  We take her on slow walks around the lake houses, eat with her on the deck, watch the flying squirrels and hummingbirds flit around our heads, and meanwhile, in Camp Baker form, we seven catch each other up on the last thirty-some years.  We drink and we laugh.  We share book lists and health tips.  We exalt in the miracle of just being in one place at one time.

Pam will write me a message when we're both back.  "I can see how Zoe grounds you, and you ground her.  How lucky you were to find each other." 

It's true.  We have had a great life together.  Zoe has slowed down considerably in the past two weeks.  We don't have much time left.  And now that I understand that this trip to Camp Baker was our last vacation together, ever, I'm so glad we got to visit these wise, compassionate women I knew in a time and a place when even though we weren't encouraged to take over the world, we found power in climbing the fruit trees in our yards, with another herding dog nipping at our heels, urging us to climb higher.

Part II, Day 44: We are Family--the Disco, the Play, the Bugs, the Sisters

"We see some protozoa on Zoe's specimen slide.  Her immune system is compromised so we want to give her medicine so that the cocci we see here don't multiply."

"I'll be right there," I said, smiling.  I drove over to the Canton Animal Hospital and saw all kinds of people with dogs going in for what looked like routine examinations, and I was one of them.

This conversation cheered me up so much I wanted to sing and dance.  Maybe it wasn't just the new medicine taking away her appetite and screwing up her digestive system.  And the song I heard in my head was "We are Family."  Let me explain. 

When I was a senior in college I wrote a play called The Woman.  In it, two women wait for a man to come home.  One woman is kind, patient, nurturing, mature, wry, a little plump, and wise: an earth mother.  The other is pretty, skinny, sarcastic, demanding, a little needy and narcissistic, equal parts snarky and seductive.  As the play goes on, you realize that the two women are two sides of the same person.  That's right, readers.  In a not-subtle way, I had taken two clashing sides of my personality and put them on a stage to duke it out for all to see.  I don't remember the dialogue very well, but I think I was trying to cook up a dose of Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" by marinating it with my favorite non-sequitors from Chekhov and Sam Shepherd and folding all the ingredients into a hearty casserole of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.  In other words, the ambition was there, but some of the talk must have come across as pretentious and heavy.  Still, it was great fun to write and put on a show.

The best part of this experience was working with the talented cast.  Some of the most accomplished people in my college community came together to put this one-act play on stage.  I had a very insightful, gifted male director whose work I had admired from afar.  Two of the three or four most respected women in our acting program at Northwestern University played the warring selves.  My freshman year roommate, C., whose golden doodle dog I wrote about earlier this month in "My Friend Has a Hole in Her Heart Now" wrote the music: a lush piano score that was achingly beautiful and sad, a bit like Michael Nyman's score for The Piano, which you can hear again if you press here.  I remember the guy who played the man the two women love as a real sweetie, an econ major who was friends with someone in the show, maybe the director.  Years later I ran into him in New York City at a brunch and didn't recognize him.  His head was shaved because he'd just had surgery after some thugs mugged him at an ATM, and I felt so badly for him.

The two actresses were very different from one another in real life as well as the play.  The one who played the Earth Mother was probably the more talented of the two.  She just exuded authenticity. She went on to do theater and TV work, and I saw her in a show in the late 80s about a Seattle family, the young daughter of which was played by a very young Sarah Jessica Parker.  The woman who played the snarky vamp was strikingly beautiful, but not terribly warm.   She reminded me in looks and build of a young Joan Collins.  I saw soap operas and commercials in her future, not major stage credits, but success nonetheless.  She was perfect for the part in my play except that it was very hard for her to be vulnerable.  And if she couldn't come across as authentically vulnerable without seeming melodramatic, the play wouldn't work.

Then we had another problem.  Earth Mother almost dropped out because she had a financial crisis at home and needed to get a job.  I promised her I'd find her a job with flexible hours that paid well within 24 hours, and I did.  I went all around town until I found a funky vegetarian restaurant in Evanston that had just opened.  I ate there that night and by the end of the evening I had befriended the staff.  They offered me a job, and I said, "If you like me, you're going to really flip when you meet Jane."  Then I told them that if they hired her and didn't put her on shifts that conflicted with rehearsals, they would save the day for a certain aspiring playwright.  They told me they would consider it, but she had to know something about vegetarian food.  Earth Mother was a hard core carnivore, but I went home and made flashcards for her.  It had words and concepts on it like "macrobiotic," "tofu," "tempeh," Diet for a Small Planet.  Jane auditioned for this exotic new part and she got it.  Everyone at the café loved her, as I knew they would.  I think some of the crew there came out to see the show.

I continued to have trouble with the vamp.  She just seemed so cold.  When she acted out her sadness, her hidden vulnerability, she came across as wooden and whiny.  But whenever we took a break and put on the radio, if the song "We are Family" by Sister Sledge came on, she would dance around the room with joy on her face, high-fiving everyone, shaking her bootie, and we would get up there with her, boogying on down, singing how we were all sisters, all of us, so "get up everybody and sing!"

I later found out from someone that this woman, who had seemed so spoiled and difficult, had a father who was a big-deal producer in L.A..  Once she'd called him on the phone to ask for help about something and happened to catch him in bed with a young startlet who was probably her--the daughter's--age.  He said, "Sorry, honey, but I've got a pair of tits in front of me here and you'll just have to wait."

After that, whenever I saw this woman the earth mother in me softened.  I hummed her favorite song in my head.

That song is a mantra for a lot of people in all kinds of circumstances.  It's a little bit camp, as anything from the Seventies is bound to be, but it still reminds me of the power of friendship, of how sudden joy can overtake one and change the atmosphere in the room.

And it also reminds me of parasites.

I had them once.  Giardia, nasty intestinal parasites that give you bloat, nausea, headaches, misery.  I got them in Paris, of all places, when I was in graduate school.

To lighten the atmosphere, make the whole ritual of taking a stool specimen on the bus from Northampton, Mass to Amherst, a bus packed to the gills with anxious students and hipster wanna-bes in black, I sang this song, "We are Family," in my head.  To honor the colonizing microbes whom I would soon kill off, one by one, with harsh medicine I'd have to take every day for six months, I serenaded them later with this song and danced around my apartment: anything to make a dark comedy about bodily functions feel less heavy.

Zoe has had all kinds of critters inhabiting her gut over the years because she eats gross things in the woods.  When I thought her lack of appetite this week might be due to little bugs and not the anti-cancer drug, I rejoiced.

Thank god for small things.  Thank dog for small things.

Bad puns abound.

Now, back to the opening scene of this post.  I return from the vet's.  Later, after I give Zoe her kill-critters-in-the-gut medicine, I pick up my friend Rebecca and we head into Potsdam to run errands.  Rebecca's cat, Webster, now has a little kitten sister, a cute black-and-white kitty our friend Diane rescued.  "Webster's less lonely and needy now that he has a sister to play with," Rebecca says.

There is so much construction work going on in our town that the first road we go to is closed.  We try another, but there are flares in the road marking an accident.  So I turn around.  I was already running late, and now I'm really late.  Rebecca's going to be on time for her eye appointment, but I'm going to be late for my pedicure.

Now, not to be gross here, but when I get a pedicure, it's not exactly a blissful spa experience.  I have inherited my grandmother's ingrown toenails.  If you don't know what that feels like, imagine having little slivers of glass around the rims of your toes.  I have found the only person outside of a podiatrist's office who can and will get these awful internal claw weapons out while also massaging and buffing and beautifying, and she only charges $30 and won't accept tips.

She's a busy professional and has clients coming to her tonight until 10 PM.  I can't miss this appointment.

Rebecca calls from the road on her phone and then navigates as my wing-woman.  "Don't get behind that truck," she says, when we're finally on Route 11.  "He'll slow us down.  Good, now get ahead and pass him.  Go, go, go!"

My friend Rebecca is a director in the theater.  She read and critiqued the only other play I wrote in my life.  She's the perfect person to have along on this escapade.

After the conclusion of our appointments, we stop at Agway, where Rebecca found out a few weeks ago (I just linked to that post) that I could buy some rabbit for Zoe.  Rebecca is here to purchase a perennial flowering plant for her husband's grave.  I'm honored to be along for the mission.

That evening, at dinner with some of my soul sisters, one of them raises a glass and says, "We have to see each other more often.  We have to make more time to be together."

We all agree.  Schemes are hatched.  There's a lunch date coming next week.

And today, while I send this post out into the world, Zoe, my husband and I are packing up to go off to see my actual blood sister, who is hosting us this Memorial Day weekend with her husband and dog.

We weren't planning on spending the weekend together, but with Zoe's situation before us, it's carpe diem, baby, every single diem.

On the first trillium walk of the season, I called Zoe and she came running up with this dead thing in her mouth.  I forgot all about it, forgot even I had documentary evidence of her hunting prowess, but then a few days later, when she wouldn't eat, and she had the runs, I found this photo and rejoiced.  In a way, I have to admire her for taking the matter of what to feed herself into her own capable hands/teeth/paws.  She's getting tired of being force-fed medicines and here she is, reverting to her wolfy state.

We are kindred.  Even the critters who live in us that we don't want to feed.  Even the needy, difficult selves we can't accept when we're young, that take us a few decades to incorporate into our whole being.  Sisters, brothers, protozoa, with feet, with ingrown toenails, with tails.  My apologies if now there's a certain song you can't get out of your head.

Day 45: An American Dog in the City of Light, Part I

One day in early spring, Zoe took the train to Paris from Rouen.

The dog's person, Natalia, was a little nervous about taking Zoe on the train.  She had been forced by law to buy Zoe her own seat and a muzzle.  Zoe had never worn a muzzle before and she didn't like it, so Zoe's person removed it while they were waiting on the platform.

When they got on the train, Zoe's person realized, to her dismay, that the muzzle was gone.  She was afraid she and Zoe would be asked by the conductor to leave, or be made to pay a fine.  Zoe had just settled onto the seat next to her and looked comfortable, so Natalia said "stay."  Then she looked in the aisle, at the open door, and across to the platform where they had just been.  She hopped off the train briefly to retrieve the missing item.  She thought it would take one second.

But then the doors closed, leaving Natalia on the platform and sending Zoe on a train heading for Paris without a human companion.

Luckily, after the terrible minute had passed, one of the longest minutes of Zoe's human companion's life, a conductor saw what had happened and the doors opened again.

Although the Norman countryside is beautiful, Zoe did not enjoy her first train ride.  It was loud.  It rumbled.  She wanted to hide under the seat, and then she wanted to run down the aisle, and then she wanted to get off the train.  Zoe's person thought perhaps it felt, to a dog, like an earthquake.

Zoe and her person were very happy when the 70 minutes had passed and they were in the Gare St. Lazare, where they headed off on the metro to the neighborhood where much of Natalia's novel is set.  The rue Mouffetard.  In the novel-in-progress, two young women rent an apartment that overlooks a bustling market scene and this church, pictured below, inside of which is a painting of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, whom one of these two women resembles.

the Church St. Médard, on the market square of rue Mouffetard

In Paris that day, Zoe made a new friend, the photo-journalist, memoirist, and singer-songwriter, Sandra Reinflet.  Sandra is also known to music-lovers as Marine Goodmorning.

Zoe was more interested in the smells than the sights; photo by Francois Bernier

The two ate crepes at a café on the rue Mouffetard, and got acquainted. Their mutual acquaintance from Quebec documented the day as it unfolded.

photos of Sandra and Natalia and Zoe all by Francois Bernier

The two female humans had a lot to talk about: art, travel, life, relationships, family, books, and life in Paris, circa 2010. 

What neither of them knew was that the two would have many chances to see each other in the coming year. 

They were fated to have more lunches in Paris, and to meet sometimes for a cup of tea or a drink.  Every time they met, they chose a different part of Paris.

Sandra would even come to the States the following September and visit Natalia and her students at St. Lawrence University, where she would read from her book, Same, Same, but Different, about 81 remarkable women she met on a tour around the world with her best friend. The students would learn one of her songs in Professor Roy Caldwell's class, and they would all have a party in her honor in the home Zoe shares with Natalia and her husband, Kerry. 

Zoe was very accustomed by now to sitting under the tables in French Restaurants

window-shopping on rue mouffetard with a friend of Sandra's

photo by Francois Bernier

photo by Francois Bernier

After lunch, Zoe and the humans walked for hours. 

Zoe met two fine Parisian dogs who were curious to learn (by smell) of her travels.

During the visit, Natalia got an idea that ended up not being Zoe's favorite in the long list of ideas her person hatched while traveling.

Zoe's person thought, Wow, wouldn't it be nice to have a better camera and to take even MORE pictures of my dog?

Maybe, eventually, there will be a blog!

And perhaps a book.

Zoe thought there were already enough pictures of her on her person's computer.  

As afternoon faded into early evening, Zoe saw a lot of the Seine, which smelled wonderful to her with all those fish and the dregs of people's picnics.

The beautiful, fragrant Seine

She liked Sandra's neighborhood near Montmartre with its hills and snacking tourists.

Zoe waiting patiently to go home

A wind-blown Natalia and Zoe on the footsteps of Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre

But she really didn't care for the Metro, despite the fact that it is one of the most efficient public transportation systems in the world.

photo by Francois Bernier

Later, when Zoe's person was figuring out how she would get them home, she realized, to her great dismay, that she had left her reading glasses at the kitchen table in Rouen.

Zoe's person, squinting at the train schedule unaided, did not realize that the evening train they were supposed to go on did not operate on this day of the week.

It got later, and later.  Zoe had missed her afternoon walk with her male companion, Natalia's husband, and she missed the forest of Normandy where spring for her was a peaceful, bucolic place.  It's quieter in the Norman countryside than in Paris, and you can run off the lead, without worrying too much.

Zoe and Kerry in La Foret Verte

shop windows in Paris were fun to look at, though

As night fell over the city, Zoe took the metro one last time to the train station.

They had originally planned to be home in time for a late dinner, but now it was nearly midnight.

And then something unexpected happened: their train broke down somewhere on the way home, in the Norman countryside.

Zoe and her person now had to make the rest of their way home by bus.

By the time they returned to Rouen, it was 3 in the morning and Natalia had to teach the next morning at 9.  Natalia's patient husband, who'd been home that evening, sleeping off a bad cold, picked them up in the car.  The three were overjoyed to be reunited.

Later, Zoe would return to Paris for an entire week in July with both her human companions.  The trio would spend Bastille Day there, and they would ride the bateaux mouche, see museums, eat picnics, and relax.

For the sequel to this story, in American Dog in Paris, Part II, please return tomorrow.

bookstalls along the Seine

Natalia and Sandra, 11 months later, in Paris.  This picture was taken by a waitress at the café where Edith Piaf used to sing

Zoe's person loves Paris.  She was--and always will be--thrilled to return to this beautiful, vibrant city.

As for Zoe, the city of light was a delight, a marvel, a place to make new friends, and a museum of powerful smells.  But maybe not the best place for a dog raised in a village of 6,000.  This American dog decided that Paris was an interesting place to visit, but not after midnight, especially if public transportation was involved.

And for months afterward, even when they were back in the States, Natalia's student, Scott Robinson, would ask her, "How's Zoe?  Did you leave her on the train?

photo of the view from the top of the Arab Institute, by Francois Bernier, as fierce storm clouds rolled in.  The group would get caught briefly in a rain shower.

Zoe learning the joys of public transportation in Paris after a life of riding around in station wagons.  She rode for free, on the canine four-paw discount.

At the Rouen train station, photo taken the following spring by Mira Bartok