Part II, Day 69: A Photo Montage Intermission

photo by Tara Freeman, Zoe and me in my writing and meditation studio

Zoe in her favorite bunker, under the deck, watching the house

in trillium season, May of 2012, there was also phlox

Zoe and me in trillium season, photo by Kerry Grant

Zoe looking wolfy in May

Zoe at the entrance to the woods, trillium season, 2012

Zoe's meditation post

 I thought at first this photo was by Tara Freeman, but in fact I took it in early March when we were driving to do a walk with Cooper

photo by Tara Freeman of Zoe and me

I kept seeing this version of Zoe again, this exact face, in the last 10 days of her life

photo by Karen Strauss

photo by Karen Strauss

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

Zoe and me having a chat, photo by Tara Freeman

Zoe and me in May, 2012, photo by Kelly Prime

Zoe in front of Chenonceau, the Loire Valley, France, May, 2010

Zoe at her meditation post on my balcony

resting on her funky day bed, a ripped up old sleeping bag of our kids', in my studio

We lived for these moments when she would roll on her back and let us pat her belly

Zoe in winter, her favorite season, after first major snowstorm of 2012

February 12, 2012

Zoe in the French Alps, late May, 2010

I have more posts to write, gentle reader, but today I wanted to share the photo montage I keep seeing in my head as I try to come to terms with both my grief for my beloved Zoe and my gratitude for the beautiful days we've shared together, up to the very end.  

The other day in an e-mail a friend quoted me from an early post when I said that sorrow's soft underbelly is made of the memories of the beloved that give us joy.  (I think I said this more succinctly the first time!)  These are a few of them in pictorial form.  I have more coming soon, and more stories.

Thank you so much for reading and for sharing your own stories about love, mortality, dogs, and more.

Namaste.

Day II, Day 26: What do Hippies Eat for Breakfast?

The special of the day is the "dirty hippie omelet" and two members of this trio order it.  The third person wants it too, but he's on Atkins and the dish has too many vegetables.

The dirty hippie omelet has fiddleheads, homemade sausage, mushrooms, and smoked cheddar.  The eggs are from a nearby farm.

Of the three in this party, one was in the military and now works somewhere with a dress code, another worked many years in marketing and is currently an IT guy, and the third is an English professor, although truth be told, she spent formative years of her youth working at a place that was commonly considered a hippie café, a collectively owned restaurant in Port Townsend, Washington that opened in 1976, the same year as this warm, funky restaurant in Stowe.

The three are eating here for the first time and they are hesitant to leave.  The vibe is so inviting, the home fries perfectly browned, and where else can you get fresh seasonal fiddleheads in your omelet?

Zoe looks at her bowl and says the Dirty Hippie Doggy Special isn't for me

"You have to be careful with fiddleheads," the former marketing guy says.  "You have to blanch them first, to remove a toxin, or you can get sick."  He also has a nutrition degree, which helps when you're trying to figure out what to feed your dog.

"I knew that but I forgot," the former hippie restaurant collective prep cook/English professor says.  "I'm hoping they'll be in season soon at home, and I'm glad you reminded me.  I would hate to get sick eating something good for me."

The slurry is introduced

Meanwhile, the dog is waiting in the car.  The dogs that run with this pack sometimes think they are eating too many things that are good for them, which in Zoe's case means too much to make it edible.

Her food of the moment has kelp in it and that green color looks like grass.  When she wants grass, she eats actual grass.


The three Chinese herbs she takes for bone stasis, immunology boost, and lung cancer look like big doses of garam masala, cumin powder, and coriander, but smell like the medicinal section of a health food store opened in 1976 by back-to-the-landers, as her local one was.  She had gotten used to them, and ate them on her food without balking (when their taste was disguised with meat), but then Zoe's person had to go ahead and add something new to the mix.

after the slurry, the treat

It's called Poly-MVA.  Zoe's person heard that it's helpful in shrinking tumors.  She has recently met a woman whose mother had stage 4 lung cancer, and is now in remission because of taking this stuff.  The same woman's brother was diagnosed with lymphoma two weeks ago and ten days after starting on this health supplement his lymph nodes shrunk back down to size.

The problem is that Poly-MVA reeks of B vitamins.

Imagine your smelliest multivitamin and B-complexes in liquid form.

Zoe looks at her bowl and runs away.

"Dirty hippies," she mutters under her breath, in dog.  "I've been all through France, and I've eaten foie gras and lobster ravioli and the best pâté in Normandy, and they think they can serve me this hippie crap and call it food."

Zoe's person asks the former marketing man with a nutrition degree how to spin this.  He suggests the slurry.  You give your dog the food she really wants, even if it comes from a can, or was served in a Michelin-starred restaurant in France (a place with a dress code that excludes dirty hippies), and you then mix up your hippie ingredients, your herbs and unguents and slithery slime and mud and snake oil and cosmic moonbeams and put them into a giant turkey baster and shoot it down your dog's big trusting maw.

He demonstrates.  Said dog is willing to slurp this concoction down and is promptly rewarded with a treat.

But Zoe thinks this compliant dog votes for the wrong candidates and runs with the wrong pack.  Maybe this dog was programmed by the EST people.  Maybe Christian Scientists had a say?  Maybe the dog hasn't been to France and hasn't sampled enough haute cuisine.

Two humans give it the college try, but the slurry won't go in Zoe's mouth.  She is willing to open her mouth, with some coaxing, but then the stuff just slips right out, all over her fur.

"I think her mouth isn't big enough," the former marketer says.  "Milo has a huge head.  Zoe's is much smaller."

"My husband has often lamented the size of our dog's head," Zoe's person says.   "I think she's beautiful the way she is, but he thinks Zoe is out of proportion.  Her big booty is the first thing some people see."

The dog now has a nasty mixture of expensive hippie potion running all over her gorgeous fur and these people are arguing about her beauty, her proportions, her measurements.  This is the absolute limit.

The dog was clean and shiny, but she is dirty now.  She would much rather soil herself by rolling in something respectable, like a dead deer or maggoty squirrel or fermenting fish, not these hippie herbs and oils.

Later, back at home in Upstate New York, Zoe's other person, the gourmet chef, figures out just what to do.  "I think she was fine having all the herbs and things on her food.  But she doesn't like the taste of the new stuff, the Poly-MVA.  So what if we separate it, and I make a really rich beef stock, like a veal reduction you would use for French country cooking, and we give it to her as a starter course?"

This solution works brilliantly.  Zoe enjoys her two-course meal, and sticks around in the kitchen while we eat our meal, hoping we'll let her lick our plates, instead of going into duck-and-cover mode.

Vive la France!  Vive hippies, dirty and clean, near and far!  And vive la difference!

Day 85: More Travels at Home

Today I have traveled from the North Country to France to India to Iceland, and then back to the North Country with a vengeance.

I start with the novel.  Today the characters get into a sketchy situation in a bar in Montmartre and I have to figure out how to get them back safely to their apartment above the Mouffetard Market on the other side of the Seine.  Homework for tomorrow: learn more swear words in French and the French version of the finger which I knew once but forgot, as I never had reason to use it. 

At lunchtime I tour our back yard with our intrepid voyager, the dog.  I try to see it all as a new wondrous place.  Lately I have been channeling Richard from Seattle (whom I wrote about on Post 52, Travels at Home) who declared himself to be a traveler in his own city and made it his mission to invest every walk, every errand run, and every excursion into the familiar with the same curiosity and sense of adventure he brought to his trips to far-flung locales.  And of course, I channel Zoe.  So I am part smiley mellow dude circa 1982, and part dog.  This new way of navigating through the familiar works for me.

Today our crusty North Country snow is especially fragrant.  Zoe explores the back yard as though she has never seen it, not even in postcards.  She goes from patch of icy snow to patch of icy snow, sniffing with excitement.  Is it the groundhog who has come early this year?  Or something else?

I find the opening to a tree trunk I've never noticed before although I walk past it every single day, and she thinks I have found something good in there to eat, so she starts smelling that too.

Cindy arrives and tells me about the four movie-like dreams she has had this week.  In the one last night, she was cleaning the house for a family like the Von Trapps, and they had to flee because the Nazis were coming.  She was doing laundry and helping them pack.  Then, in a small room, with a bench and a toilet and a bath all in one, she found a skinny naked woman who needed her help.  The woman, she realized, was Anne Frank.  She never died in the camps and has been hiding from the Nazis ever since.  Cindy tried to help her get dressed, but then she woke up.

At 2, I have a tea date with a work friend.  I try to see this café with new eyes, even though it's generally the only place I go in town for lunch or for tea dates.  It's nice in there, with all the old wood, and I love the lemon tea, and I like the sign out front too.  If you were a stranger to my town and you came upon this door, wouldn't you want to go in?

My friend and I talk about her partner's voyage around the world by sea, and how soon the ship will land in the town of Cochin, in Kerala, a southern state in India. We talk about how long it would take to get there from here--two days, but you cross the international date line, so coming home you get a day back.  It's Saturday twice.

We talk about farming in the North Country, and farming in India, and I mention a farmer I met who lived for 20 years in Seattle designing software but now has returned home to India and lives in a town known for its camel fair every year.  My friend is excited to hear about the camels in India.  I will later send her the link to Pushkar's camel fair and I am sending it to you now, gentle reader, right here.  Pushkar is in the Northern state of Rajasthan, where I traveled last summer with 10 of my students and another professor, and is probably one of the true sources for the Tales of Arabian Nights.

When she asks me what I like about India I confess a big part of it is the food.  France and India are my favorite foreign countries.  (Italy is up there too.)  "I couldn't get excited about a place that didn't have good food." I tell her.  There's the yoga and meditation in India, yes, and centuries of history, and temples, and so much beauty, but the food is out of this world.

She tells me that I probably should avoid Iceland.  The specialty there is a shark meat called Hákarl.  To make this delicacy you have to gut and behead a shark, she explains, and put it in a hole and cover it up.  The shark ferments that way, and the fluids leave its body, and eventually, two or three months later, you have a salty, fermented fishy foodstuff you will never forget the taste of for as long as you live.  If you can get past the ammonia smell first.

After my friend and I part ways, I take Zoe for a walk on the track around our campus.  Zoe meets a beagle/retriever mix and the two take off.  I am so happy when she is disobedient.  I know, then, that she is feeling her best.  After I think the beagle/retriever has left with his person, Zoe disappears for a few minutes and I start to get nervous only because she has headed in the direction of a big road.  She has taken off on her own independent voyage.  She is gone.  She hasn't done this once since she got sick.  She has stayed by my side.  I call for her, and she eventually races back at top speed, looking quite pleased with herself.

When we return to the car, she says, "I'm not done."  She sits down and puts all her weight into this resistance.  It's her stubborn pose that I need to capture on film for you soon.  It's her  Hell no, I won't go.  We've only walked for 40 minutes, she tells me.  That won't do.  So I ask her where she would like to go and she points.  We eventually work our way around a few blocks and find the beagle/retriever again with his person going into their house.  Did she smell them from where we were--a half mile away?  Has my dog stalked them? She looks sublimely happy.

It is clear that Zoe wants to travel for as long and as far as she can, and I'm fine with that.

At the restaurant/bar where I meet friends early at Midwest Supper Time as from my youth, 5:15 PM, because one is trying to beat the storm home to Canada (and as we established recently in Post 80, The Lady and the Dog Enter New Territory, Part Two, Canada has stopped plowing its highway to and from the U.S.) and another has to get up at 4 AM to write, we have a spirited conversation and eventually overhear a mother and her kids at the next table ask the men beneath the TV to "tone down" their "language."  We ourselves have used quite colorful language, but this nice family haven't heard us.

To retaliate, the foul-mouthed men turn up the TV until it is blaring so loudly that no one else in the restaurant/bar can have a conversation.  They tell the woman who asked them to tone it down that she has no class. That's it.  I want to avenge the nice family (even though, had they overheard us, they would not have approved of our diction either) and I say to the men, "Are you happy now?  Driving all of us away?  Clearing out the place?"  They say yes and cross their arms in that pleased way certain bullies have. Then they swear at me.

Do you want to know what I do, gentle reader?  The nice English professor with the dog, who meditates every morning and reads Thich Nhat Han?  I give them the finger.

Now I feel like I've traveled far from my familiar to the most distant land of all.

It felt as foreign to me as drinking in the red-light district of Montmartre.  Or riding a camel in the sands of Rajasthan.

And it was very satisfying.

I suppose the day has come full circle.  My fictional characters were swearing in French at thugs at 9 AM today.

I can tell myself I was just doing research. 

When I get home to my husband and my beautiful dog, I feel that I have crossed many continents, even though I have only put a mile and half on my car's mileage today. 

Day 71: The Flâneur and the Dog, Part Two

The flâneur--or in my case, flâneuse--wanders without a destination.  She is a passionate observer who delights in getting lost in the crowd.  She is easily distracted.  If this is a form of mindfulness, then the flâneur's aim is to fill his mind with his surroundings until he, as a self, as a mind, disappears. 

But what if you are far from the metropolis?

What if you are exploring not a foreign landscape but the one where you live?

What if there are very few people to absorb your meandering consciousness?

No intriguing signpost to remind you, at the meta-level, of your mission? 

No compelling graffiti or sticker art?

No arcades to poke your head into--no secret doorways with worlds beckoning just inside the window?

The St. Paul area in the Marais, Paris

This is the intriguing Butte de Chaumont area in Paris, the 13th arrondissement

To be a flâneur in the North Country is to be conspicuous.  The landscape is the crowd that absorbs you, but it is mostly not-human.  The squirrels take an interest in you.  The birds scatter.  The clouds become characters become Rorschach tests: is that a flag, a kilim rug, a dog's head, a minotaur, a minaret, a miming clown on a city street, or a storm coming in tonight? 

If anyone is awake in the vicinity, you will be noticed.  But you won't see them.  They'll be behind a window, looking out.  They will know if your dog is in a good mood today or not.  They will know if you tucked your pants into your boots, or if you pick up after your pet.  As a flâneur, you are witnessed more than you can witness, unless you take your time and try to see every little thing.

photo by Tara Freeman

But if a North Country flâneuse is in the right company, she can still lose herself completely.

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

Day 64: Hooked on Downton Abbey, In Love with Love

Last winter when I taught in France, and I got homesick for my husband, who has a slight but charming English accent, and for our dog, I found a distraction in TV form, Downton Abbey.  I had no inkling how much this show would take over my life.

The show is a great outlet for the Anglophile in all of us.  Last winter, in addition to missing my husband, I had family in England I wanted to visit, but our group had visa problems and were not able to leave France.  The year before, when my husband and I were in France together with our dog, we'd each gone on our own separate getaways to London while the other stayed behind with Zoe.  I went over in May, just in time to see the flowers in full bloom in Green Park with my friend, Jennifer.

Green Park, London

I can't even say why I bought Downton Abbey, on I-Tunes.  I hadn't seen it, and I had never bought any show on I-Tunes before.  All I can say is that it was love at first sight, and from the very first episode, when we saw the wire come into the grand estate that the Titanic had sunk, I was hooked.  From then on, all I had to do was hear that rhapsodic opening music and watch the cute yellow lab scamper across the property and I was transported.

My internet connection was unreliable in my apartment, and when I look back on that time I can track my moods on those nights alone as to whether or not I got to see a whole episode.  I had a big TV in the living room, but I never turned it on (I wish I had--my French would have improved much more quickly) so my only couch potato activity was to watch this show on my laptop, and one other.  (Madmen might be a subject for another post.)  I saw each episode three times, and then, when my sister, Mira, came to visit in May, I got her hooked on the show too.  We could not believe we would have to wait until the winter of 2012 to pick up the storyline again.  How could the writers and producers do this to us?  How would we wait?

The show has everything: history, class struggle, war, scandal, schemers, love, thwarted love, wealth, new inventions, beautiful clothes, architecture, and manners.  Perhaps most exciting is the wild ride of witnessing the Western world at the cusp of dramatic change that will affect everyone's lives, both private and public.  An old world order is breaking down, and as some fortunes rise and others fall, it's impossible not to hope that some of these star-crossed lovers will finally end up together.

But I'm starting to think that wanting love to prevail somewhere, anywhere, on the estate of Downton Abbey might be too much to ask for.  Why can't poor Edith finally have a man?  Does she really have to resort to the married farmer, or now, this mysterious burn victim from Canada who says he had amnesia and he's really the heir?  Will Sybil give up everything and run off to fight for Irish independence with the chauffeur, Tom Branson?

And then there's our so-called happy couple who preside over all, the Earl and Countess of Grantham, who at first seemed to demonstrate, in defiance of Western romantic tradition, that marriage and passion might possibly be found in the same place.  But then Cora was suddenly too busy making herself useful in the war to join her man at table for every meal.  Can their marriage function if she joins the twentieth century?  Will he seek comfort with the new maid? 

That leads us to the two primary couples.  In the downstairs realm, will Mr. Bates and Anna ever be able to wed?  It looks now like the murder of Mr. Bates' nasty, blackmailing ex, Vera, might be pinned on him.  Will he and Anna ever get a break?  And has there ever been a valet in the history of the aristocracy who had so many brushes with the law and scandal, and was always forgiven and taken back by his lord and master?

And finally, Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley.  They had their games, their differences in class and upbringing, their colossal egos, and they blew it.  Now they each have someone in the picture: Lavinia for Matthew, who wants to be with him despite his war injuries, and Sir Richard for Mary, who will ruin her if she tries to break it off because of what he knows now (thanks to her own confession, thanks to Vera Bates) about her deadly dalliance with the handsome Turk.  That would all make things difficult enough, but then the writers had to give him a war injury that would make it impossible for him to "sire" heirs?

This might be taking the classic Western love plot too far--or perhaps it's just a very literal interpretation of the genre?

My addiction to the show made me want to go back to my trusty, Denis de Rougement, who, in Love and the Western World, explains the age-old conflict between passion and marriage as the conflict between those two kinds of love, eros and agape.  He tracks the basic Western romance plot back to the troubadour poets writing in the 12th century in Languedoc, who were perhaps influenced by the Cathars, the heretics that believed that God was love, but the world was evil, including all institutions, among them, marriage.  While the Cathars tried to be chaste (especially their perfects, their version of priests), their believers struggled in their bodies to follow the path with varying success.  (See Day 51: The World on the Page: On Keeping a Journal, Part Two, for a little more about the Cathars, especially one French reader's comments.)  The troubadour poets, some of whom may have been heretics, de Rougement proposes, celebrate "faraway love."  Falling for someone unattainable has its roots in these medieval poems.

In the legend of Tristan and Isolde, the basic romantic love plot solidifies to become the form we now know so well, even eight centuries later.  Boy (Tristan) meets girl (Iseult) on a boat.  Girl isn't available. (She's engaged to be married to the king.)  But they drink love potion and fall into each other's arms.  Later, King Mark suspects the duo of adultery, sends her off to be swarmed by lepers, and sentences Tristan to the stake.  They escape into a forest, and when King Mark finds them one night, Tristan's sword is lying between them.  The king assumes that this is a sword of chastity keeping them pure.  All is forgiven, but things still don't end well.  To review the rest, I suggest going to see the Wagner opera.

Unconsummated passion is one of the features of the Western love story.  And the classic delay of fulfillment, all those obstacles, provide opportunities for the characters to become better humans, and far more spiritual.

Or not.

So Matthew's war-induced impotency is the sword of chastity.  And given the show's emphasis on their distinguished line carrying on, and not dying out with the Earl, this plot development fits a little too perfectly into both the Western romantic tradition and this particular story.  But, seriously?  It's clear that Matthew still loves Lavinia, and that Richard won't let Mary go without ruining her, but is his injury to his vitals going to be the ultimate obstacle that keeps the lovers from being together?

How can the writers do this to us?

Well, at least at the end of the last show, Matthew was feeling a curious "tingle."  So there's hope for him, for them, and for the romantic fools among us who are still holding out hope that this story will end well for some of them, at least.  (But not Thomas or O'Brien, and don't get me started.  Why did they have to make the male villain gay, and the female villain a lady's maid with an Irish name?)

When the love potion does its magic, Tristan is in love with love.  Maybe that's our problem too, eight centuries on.

For those of us who are hooked but wish the formula were different, perhaps we are like Lysander, in Midsummer Night's Dream:

Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
But, either it was different in blood,-

It's hopeless.  Until this story ends, and even thereafter, I will continue to be smitten.  Unconsummated passion, lovely countryside, beauty, history, revolutionary change:  Downton Abbey has it all.  Now, if they would just give that cute dog more to do, the show would be perfect.

Day 61: Dragon Magic

By some accounts, the Year of the Dragon began officially on the Chinese New Year, January 23.  (See Day 47: New Moon Monday, New Moon Year.)   In others I have read, it began on February 4, just as we began the weekend.  Did you feel a new surge of power?  Personally, I was exhausted, but by Sunday I had rallied.

Chinese astrology works in 12-year cycles.  According to legend, Lord Buddha challenged all the animals of the zodiac to race across the river.  The cunning rat got there first.  The sluggish pig took his time and arrived last.  The goat, which is Zoe's sign, came in 8th.  I washed up 10th, as a rooster.  The dragon is the fifth year in the cycle.

Babies born between now and February 9, 2013 will be dragons: the free spirits of the Zodiac, wildly colorful, flamboyant, extroverted, showy, confident, fearless, and probably very successful.  Dragons are gregarious and generous and make a lot of friends, but are secretly solitary at heart.

Apparently, not all dragons are alike.  2012 is the year of the water dragon, or the black dragon, and the dragon contains earth, water, and wood.  You have to use Chinese astrology to determine which of the five elements are dominant for you to know what qualities this dragon year will bring out in you.  If you want to avoid your work this morning, you can look this stuff up pretty easily.

The goat, which is Zoe’s sign (I only just found this out today, in my research) tends to be very shy.  My hope is that the dragon will give her the extra power she needs now.

In the Sun Dynasty (AD 960-1279) the dragon was described as having the head of an ox, the muzzle of a donkey, and eyes of a shrimp, horns of a deer, body of a serpent covered with fish scales, and feet of a phoenix.  The dragon usually clutches a pearl symbolic of its super-natural powers.  Accompanied by thunder and rain, dragons move like lighting and whirlwinds—all powerful yet totally unpredictable.

The water dragon of this year (the last one we had was in 1952) is not as bold as the other dragons.  According to one source:

Water has a calming effect on the Dragon's fearless temperament. Water allows the Dragon to re-direct its enthusiasm, and makes him more perceptive of others. These Dragons are better equipped to take a step back to re-evaluate a situation because they understand the art of patience and do not desire the spotlight like other Dragons. Therefore, they make smart decisions and are able to see eye-to-eye with other people. However, their actions can go wrong if they do not research or if they do not finish one project before starting another.

http://www.usbridalguide.com/special/chinesehoroscopes/Dragon.htm

But according to my sources, the dragon is considered the ultimate auspicious symbol of success and happiness, and it should be a good year for all.

In May of 2010, my husband and Zoe and I visited Blois, the birth place of the illusionist Robert-Houdin, who began his life as a watchmaker and became a magician and illusionist who inspired many who came after him, including Erik Weisz, who changed his name to Harry Houdini in homage to this great master.  There are some rooms devoted to him as well in this museum, which I recommend you visit if you ever happen to be in the Loire Valley of France and want to take a break from gawking at all the châteaux and tasting all the beautiful wine.

At the Robert-Houdin House of Magic, a dragon automaton on the façade of the building comes to life every hour.

If you look closely, that's me inside the chess pieces

A statue of Robert-Houdin

Our timid year-of-the-goat dog who is afraid of inanimate objects that look like critters but aren’t, including large ceramic animal shapes, snowmen, and over-the-top Christmas displays like the one we saw one year on our street of some reindeer at a bus stop, was, to our great delight, undaunted by the sight of these giant golden mythical creatures bobbing their powerful heads at us.

She had made a friend, a living friend, of her own kind, and was otherwise engaged when the dragons came out to breathe on us all.

Wishing everyone a year of dragon magic.