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 58: The Literary Dog Gets a Gig

Zoe in front of the Athenaeum Hotel, Chautauqua, with her male human

For the first time in known history, Zoe has been granted entry to the Chautauqua Writers Festival.  She has a room that she shares with her two human attendants in the Victorian hotel, the Athenaeum, on the first floor, across the hall from a student in her person's workshop--a young woman who, like her instructor, sees metaphors everywhere, even in the parking lot, and is writing an essay about a wasp that terrified Darwin because it laid its eggs inside a spider's abdomen and the creature was churned inside out.

When things that belong on the inside are outside it gets scary: ulcers, skin ruptures that look intestinal, parasites, alien embryos, intense emotions--like the kind that a memoirist relives, never exorcising them completely, through writing.  

At the picnic before the reading a clump of admirers have gathered on the grass to love up this dog.  They praise her beauty, her sweet ways, her proffered paws, her polite begging technique, her lean-in hugs.  After her person gives the dog bites of pulled pork and chicken, the nonfiction festival director takes care of dessert.  The lovely tattooed poet who is writing about her relationship with Rilke gets teary-eyed talking about her writing mentors, including this festival director--how they not only nurtured her muse, but how they also found her and her small children a place to live and gave her the will to live when she was in the lowest place ever.  Zoe's person's eyes fill too, and Zoe notes that this is a place where people really share things, essential things, life-affirming things, and not just pulled pork and pie.  The tattooed poet has lived with cats but is drawn to Zoe, she says, because she can see something special about her, something soulful and wise in her eyes that transcends speciesdom.

Zoe with Diana Hume George and Traci Morell

Erica Sklar and Zoe are in love

One of the student interns, a talented nonfiction writer, has veterinary science training.  Zoe's person took to her at once, and Zoe adores her so quickly, so instantly, that it's hard for anyone else to get her attention.  The two submit to a photo shoot, but would rather just commune without all the fuss.

Zoe has a lump on her neck that is seeping.  It was the size of a golf ball before the road trip began, but it's shrinking.  Her people keep patting it down with disinfectant, but then it bleeds.  Even though an oozing growth isn't easy on the eyes, the writers pet her anyway, complimenting her on her lustrous black coat, shiny after being groomed, although one poet at the barbeque suggests that it might be a good idea for her person to wash her hands before she goes to the podium because there's blood on it, which is probably also metaphorical, but not in a good way.  Because Zoe looks so good it's hard to believe that something deadly is growing inside her.  These lumps are the internal made external, even if they aren't harmful--her local vet doesn't think so, but really doesn't know--so they are the focus of her human attendants' administrations.  It comforts them to help make something shrink when other things are so beyond reach.

At the podium, before her person reads, she tries to explain to the audience how Zoe came into her life, how this dog's cancer has changed the way she thinks about time, and how she expected to fall in love with her dog but not like this-- so deeply, completely, helplessly.  She says something about how when humans adopt dogs they risk their hearts because they know they are devoting themselves to a creature with a lifespan that is normally much shorter than theirs, and when that lifespan is limited even more by a disease . . .  Around the room, a few people, she will find out later, are thinking about their own pets and trying not to cry.

Zoe is seated in the back row of this crowd with her male person.  The two humans have wondered how Zoe will comport herself at this event.  This dog is fabulous at parties and weddings.  If people are speaking, delivering toasts, reciting vows, promising to love each other in sickness and in health, feeding each other cake, opening champagne, dancing to bad Eighties music, she is the perfect guest.  Retirement dinners are okay too.  She likes listening to embarrassing tidbits about the retiree's thorough e-mails, idiosyncratic office attire, and generous deeds at the copy machine.  But if it starts to feel too much like a classroom to her, she whines. 

Case in point: her person took her to the final day presentations at the Adirondack Semester in December and at first she thought it was a party and did what she does: quietly made the rounds, leaning into the people who clearly needed to snuggle.  But when the talks went on for just a tad too long, or the blue sky beaming into the window lit up the spot where she stood, she decided it was time to play in the snow.  Her sighs went stereo.  They could be heard in every corner.  She was like the kid with ADD who taps her foot and sighs extravagantly when her person delivers a lecture.  "Gee, I'm sorry.  Was I boring you?" said person is always tempted to say.

Zoe's person tells the assembled that it could go either way depending on what Zoe thinks is going on here: party or school.  This is, of course, a great challenge for a writer at a reading.  Well, it's both, one wants to say, if the purpose of literature really is, as Horace once told us, to delight and instruct: plaire et instruire.  Can you say the same thing about a blog?  Can a blog be held to the same standards?  We don't know.  This is the first time Zoe's person has read something that hasn't been published, let alone shared the posts from this corner in the oral tradition.  It's a little scary.  Like wearing something that belongs inside, outside.  Underwear, say.  Or maybe a nightshirt, like the one with down dog paw prints that her friend Rebecca gave her one year for her birthday.

When she hears her name, Zoe whines audibly.  All human heads turn to look at her again. What has she decided?  Does she want to stick around?

She does.

It doesn't hurt that all the people smell a little like pulled pork.

Although Zoe's person rehearsed and timed her reading, and was able to get through five posts in her allotted 20 minutes when she practiced in her room, when all is said and done, and done and said, and heads have turned to admire the dog in question again, and again, the writer in this corner only has time for three posts: Under Wild Apple Trees, Bark and Soul, and Which Way Do we Go? She wanted to end with Pink Twilight Sky, but hey, the clock has ticked.  There is never enough time. 

Zoe listens respectfully to the whole thing, never making another sound, and for a mad instant her person wonders if the two of them might be able to take this show on the road.  Maybe they could stop at other dog-loving literary venues.  Maybe other dogs could come too.

Then it's over, and the amazing, dog-loving Puerto Rican-American poet, Martin Espada, is coming to the podium.  He will rock and sway, sing and chant, performing poems about immigration, and childhood, and his childhood muses, and the staff at Windows on the World, many of them undocumented workers, who lost their lives in September 11th, and no one will be the same afterwards.  It's going to be one of the best poetry readings this dog's person has ever attended.  Just before he goes on he'll tell Zoe's person that he lost his dog to cancer last year, and he and his wife still haven't gotten over it. 

And Zoe will miss every minute of it. Someone will leave the room and Zoe will tug at the lead to follow.  She's had her fifteen minutes of fame and now it's time to stalk the other Chautauqau dogs out for evening strolls along the lakefront, rest beside the fountain, and lap up a drink at the Victorian hotel.

She's been inside among warm bodies for too long, and the outside beckons.

Kerry Grant, Natalia Singer, Zoe, Kristine Newman, and Ruby at Chautauqua, photo by Diana Hume George

P.S.  The dog's person would like to thank the kind and generous Sherra Babcock and Kristine Newman and Diana Hume George at the Chautauqua Writers Festival for opening all these doors to Zoe and making her feel so much at home.  Kristine even brought her dog over for a play date and swim to tire Zoe out before the reading, and gave her a toy.  These dog-lovers are beautiful humans and Zoe and her person are grateful to have them in the pack.

Chautauqua is supposed to be about the life of the mind, but for this dog, it's the life of the body.  And in particular, the head scratch . . .

Part II: Day 57: Summer with Zoe

The first official calender day of summer was on June 20, and on that day Zoe watched my friends and me do yoga on a boat launch deck at Lake Findley, New York.  She thought it looked like a lot of work for such a hot day, so she napped in the shade. 

Zoe is back to watching the house, barking at the wandering hound who just roamed past the house as I began this post, swimming in the Grass River, and enduring my endless photo shoots on the lawn.

In the past week Zoe has:

eaten barbeque at a picnic for writers at Chautauqua, where she was cooed over by poets and memoirists and novelists and fed bites of pie by an essayist and literary festival director;

attended a literary reading for which she was the subject;

watched a wedding procession accompanied by Scottish bagpipes at the Anthanaeum Hotel;

strolled through pre-season Chautauqua paths and bridges and grasses;

met six women who spent time with her person in elementary school, junior high, and high school in Cleveland, were well-acquainted with her predecessor, Ginger, the family collie/shepherd mix, and know where all the bones and bodies are buried, what books were read, which teacher had eyebrows like caterpillars, which ones were in the closet, which ones made sexist remarks, which ones made us want to learn, how weekends were spent and what music was playing--think Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young--and who kissed which boys and when, where, but not always why, definitely not always why;

dipped her paws into two Western New York lakes;

witnessed the dare-devilry of flying squirrels;

dined out at in the outdoor seating area of a restaurant, reliving her glory days in France when she was served water before her people got their drinks;

illegally entered a rest stop in the Finger Lakes because her person had to pee and thought they both should get ice cream and was not going to leave her in the car in 93-degree weather;

was discussed, petted and admired by many.

The stories and blog posts continue tomorrow . . .

Part II: Day 56: Watch the House!

When Zoe first came into my life I got a lot of my first lessons in dog parenthood from Doug, my sister's husband.  He could tell from looking at Zoe, even when she was only a little twelve-pound bundle of tail and paw, that she had a lot going on in her head and that she needed a job.

"When you leave the house, just say, 'Watch the house,'" he told me.  The implication was that when I left her to go to work, I wasn't leaving her for long, and I was entrusting her with an important job.  The implication was that I'd be back, that this was just a brief good-bye.  "Dogs have separation anxiety or they get destructive when they're left alone for two reasons.  Either it's because they don't get enough exercise, or it's because they don't feel needed.  Working dog breeds like Zoe need both."

Zoe's main job is to watch me, just as my main job is to watch her.  But she is possessive of our house, and when I'm not around for her to manage, this work distracts her, I hope, and gives her a sense of purpose. 

We never asked for a watch dog, never felt the need to scare people away from the house, but we like that Zoe feels useful.  She sits at her post outside the door and supervises the construction project going on there as men work on our house.  She rests under the deck when she needs a nap or it gets too hot, then bolts out like a shot when another dog saunters past her domain without her prior authorization.  She alerts us to the presence of groundhogs, porcupines, and foolhardy cats.  We know when the UPS guy arrives or a friend or the pizza guy because she is always on the job.

So now I have to be away from her for three whole nights.  The kind people running the Chautauqua Writing Festival were willing to break the rules and let Zoe be there with me the entire time, so at first my husband and I thought we would attend the conference as a trio.  But I am going to be working all day until bedtime, and we decided it would be better for her if she sticks to her routines at home for a few days longer.  She and my husband will arrive on Saturday.

I'm planning to drive away this morning while she's on the gentlemen's walk because it's so hard and painful to say good-bye, even for only three and a half days.  But if I'm still there, packing, I'll say, "Watch the house!  I'll see you soon.  Watch the house!"

Zoe says, I don't remember authorizing this random person and dog to shuffle past our domain

I look forward to meeting you in this corner again soon.

Part II: Day 55: Beauty and the Beasts

The gardener has summoned me: it's peony time.  We have talked about my taking a tour of her sumptuous gardens for weeks, but this visit cannot be postponed.  Nature waits for no one.  And these peonies . . . You will see yourselves, gentle readers, but my camera (well, the human being behind this camera) cannot do them justice.

I bring Zoe to save time--the woods near campus where I'm taking her on today's walk are halfway to the gardener's house--but I realize it's a mistake as soon as I pull up to the wrong house and call my friend to get her house number.  Zoe is whining.  She's whining as she does when I've altered her routines and she's afraid she'll be left in a ditch on the road, or in a lab where people in white coats will perform experiments on her--she's whining in the way she does when any of us leaves the house without her permission.

I can see this patch of enchantment before I see my friend standing outside waiting for us.  We pull up and I'm so blown away that I can barely speak.  How many words are there in the English language to say, "wow, beautiful, wow, that's gorgeous, wow, these plants are happy here, wow, look at that color!"  I'm always humbled by the limitations within the medium I've chosen for making my own kind of beauty.  Words can paint pictures but the things themselves--these radiant flowers--point to nothing beyond themselves and need no signifiers: they are just busy being themselves, because that's their job.

My friend thinks the gardening bug came to her through a great-grandmother, but she and her sister only developed it in their middle years.  What is perhaps just as beautiful as the hot pink peonies, red peonies, pale pink peonies, and while we're at it, the irises and bleeding hearts still in fine form (my friend thinks that the house she shares with her musician man-friend is just higher enough in altitude to delay the demise of our favorite May flowers)--is the smile on my friend's face.  These lovely gardens surround the house, one after the other, and lazy me can't help but think with horror of all the hard physical work and time that goes into them, hours and hours of it every day, but the contentment and satisfaction this labor gives my friend that she carries in her arms and shoulders is very moving to behold.  Being beauty's architect is soulful work.  It takes a lot from the body, and from the earth (although speaking of earth, her mulch from the top-secret location is one of the secrets of her success) but it gives back with gusto.

a neighbor's cows trim their fields beyond the gardens

Zoe runs around the house as I meet each patch of flowers and learn the story behind each one.  This one was moved here because the sun was better.  That one didn't like that spot but thrived here.  This one is new.  This one volunteered and arrived unexpectedly like a stray cat.

There are many cats that have "volunteered" in these parts as well.  I count four in the stories my friend tells me, but I may have missed one.  Zoe whines to go inside and meet one, and we oblige her.  I have to say that in all my travels, I have never seen a more pronounced display of Cat with Hackles Rising than in the moment Zoe runs into the living room.  There is a beauty to this tableau as well: Curious black dog barking at Gray Cat.  Gray Cat Saying Back Off, Beast.

Zoe cries to be inside near the cat but when we go outside, she cries to come back out.  She cries to go in again when she spies the gray cat through the window and thinks that meaningful contact will now occur.  We can tune it out, sort of, until we arrive at a moment that my friend knows will appeal to me in a Secret Garden kind of way.  She tells me how her prize peonies have come to her courtesy of the hidden peony patch her 90-year-old neighbor told her she could transplant on one of the days when he remembered her name.  When we cross the road so she can show me the mother load--it's just a few yards across the way--Zoe's cries through the window are so piercing that if an animal-lover heard her they would think Zoe was being abused.

"Next time, this dog is not coming with me," I tell my friend.

But my friend is very patient.  She says that she understands that Zoe is a member of our family, just as the cats are for hers.  And one of the most deep and satisfying relationships she has in her life is with her horse.  "There's so much to see when you look into a horse's eyes," she says.

She's still upset by something terrible she witnessed earlier today.  She was at Agway and a boy ran in, distressed because his beagle had jumped from the car when his stepdad parked in the lot, and now the dog was running around out there.  When the stepfather found the beagle, he beat her.  He beat her again when she was inside the car.  We are sitting on the front porch of the house as she tells me this, admiring the beauty of the gardens, the bouquet of peonies she has picked for me, and this story has us both on the verge of tears.

"Some people shouldn't be allowed to have pets.  Or kids.  Or any living being under their command," we both say in our own way.

We talk about the intelligence of animals and how people still have a long way to go to understand the range of talents and ways of knowing and sensitivity the creatures we both love possess.  My friend volunteers at the local stables as part of a group that leads children with cerebral palsy around on the horses.  The more gentle, patient horses are picked to do the honors.  They are the ones who understand what this encounter is all about.  Her horse is one of them.  Her horse understands that this is not going to be a vigorous ride, and that the rider is not going to be alpha and predictably dominant, but is not necessarily afraid either.  Her horse understands that what happens in these "mixers" is just a sweet inter-species exchange that helps the riders find joy in their physicality, in the moment, in encounters with other sentient beings.  "My horse just kind of gets it," she says.  "And really likes it."

this stuff is like gold

But not all of our animal lovefest is about their high emotional IQs and spirituality.  Zoe needs grooming.  I need to wash her butt and now and then I get a whiff.  I mention this to my friend, but she has seen it all.  Our tales about animals move on to the grotesque.  A white cat runs off after word gets out that a dog is on the premises.  When my friend rescued her, this kitten had severe frostbite.  My friend took the kitty to the vet when she thought its ears and tail smelled bad.  The vet just tugged on the ears and they  . . . fell right off!  He told her that the dead part of her tail would fall off too, in its own time.  One morning my friend saw her cat in the kitchen playing with something: her own amputated tail.  The cat was fine with this new development.  She hears and navigates perfectly--enough so to fly out of town when a dog comes knocking.

Meanwhile, my dog eats all the cats' food before I can stop her, then stares provocatively inside the screen door to Gray Hat with Hackles.  In an earlier post I gave the various animal characters lines from action films.  Now I imagine that white cat saying to Zoe, before it headed to a distant pasture, "Want a piece of me?"

It's time to go home for dinner.  I carry those gorgeous hot pink peonies in my lap all the way back in the car, careful not to squash an iota of petal.  And then I find a place of honor for the vase in our kitchen.

How can I begin to describe the magic of this peony?

peek-a-boo!

Feline hackles, as art form.  Feline hackles as performance piece.  Feline hackles as architecture.

The cat is looking at her from the other side, saying "Ha!"

I carried them home on my lap and now they are in the kitchen

To see more photos of these peonies, taken by the gardener herself, go here.

Namaste, gentle readers.  Even if you don't have a green thumb like my friend does, I hope that you have at least one person close to you who is an architect of beauty, and you can schedule a visit soon.

Part II: Day 54: Treating the Patient's Codependent Pepes

On Saturday Zoe's integrative vet, Dr. Don Thompson--Dr. T., Don, I never know what to call him--comes to the house at lunchtime.  It's Zoe's monthly acupuncture house call.  I am in my studio writing and Kerry is in his shop turning a bowl when we hear Zoe barking wildly, and we know the visit has already begun.

gold star if you can find the needles

Zoe appears to be happy about this shoulder needle, for some reason.

I have never seen this man look quite this tired.  I was planning on calling the other Dr. Thompson, Amy, Zoe's local vet, to come over and join us as she has on the two previous visits.  She is following an acupuncture course herself, and Zoe is her patient, so these house calls are an opportunity for her to learn more about her craft with a dog she knows fairly well.  But when we texted each other early this morning she told me that her husband would be working on a fence today and she would have to bring her young daughter with her.  Zoe is still a little afraid of children who are too young to write papers and meet a professor in her office hours--the pre-verbal, pre-driving demographic still spooks her a little--which could be distracting and disrupt the calm vibe, but I thought maybe my husband and I could play with the child while she and Don got down to business, all in the spirit of Bring it On.

But that's not going to happen.  This man is exhausted.  He left at 3:30 from Stowe, Vermont this morning to drive to the North Country and he is only halfway through the 15 house calls he has to make today.  The next one is in Harrisville, which sounds far, even though I don't know where that is, exactly.  Not our county, anyway.  He won't get home until 11 PM tonight.  I offer him tea, but he's worried that he'll overload on caffeine and get the shakes, so we settle on Strawberry Serenity Kombucha.  I'm so suggestible myself that when I drink this stuff the word "serenity" works on me before I've even finished a bottle, but I realize that not everyone reads a word on a label as a command, so I just hope for the best.

After he puts in the needles, we fill him in on all that has happened with our dog in the last month.  Namely, the bad news we got on May 18 about the size of Zoe's lung tumors, how the biggest one was now 4.78 centimeters, and the oncologist's prognosis then: one month to three.  We're a week away from a month already, but Zoe's still full of zest.  She's supposed to head out with us next weekend for a short vacation.

She relaxes for 20 minutes with the needles in

He tells us, "This dog is not going away any time soon."  He doesn't mean travel.  He means die.  "From what I could see, with that greeting she gave me in your driveway, she's still very engaged with life.  She's got lots of time left."  He says he doesn't need to press the will-to-live point, for example, because her will is very much in evidence.

"This is how it is for us," I say.  "We think she looks great.  And then we get these grim numbers and the grim prognosis.  And I get all upset, and try to hide it from Zoe, but I know she senses it, and then she probably wonders what she did wrong when she feels my sadness, and then when she sniffs out unhappiness, she's not so happy either.  It's one of those feedback loops.  But those dips never last long.  We get back into our routines, and all is well, and Zoe sees you, and I start to think . . ."

(Not long ago I wrote a post about the dog's codependent pepes.  Even my very rational husband agrees that this is our affliction.)

"That's the difference between Western and Eastern medicine," Don says.

He asks about the India trip.  On a previous visit, I asked if he thought it would be okay for me to leave her in late July and early August for a two week work trip.  He has said consistently that he thought Zoe would be in good shape then, that it would be okay for me to leave.  If I went by the oncologist's prediction, I would be gone for Zoe's last two weeks of life in the most optimistic of her scenarios.

"The trip is being postponed to sometime after Christmas," I say.  "It's better this way."  I explain that my husband is having surgery in July, and of course I don't want to miss a minute of the time Zoe and I have together this summer.  Except for a short trip coming up this week, I'm hunkering down.

Don shoots me a look, but doesn't comment.  The way I interpret it, he thinks that Zoe will hang on that long, and that I'll be in more conflict about traveling then than I would be this summer.  But I really can't read minds, even though I try to all the time.

Today's acupuncture points, which he writes down for me, are just the general tune-up points that go with treating a dog with cancer who is in overall good form.  Stomach points.  Spleen points.  Bladder points.  Six in all.

He pets her, and we point out all the lumps that have sprouted overnight, it seems, since she started taking the new drug, Kinavet.

"It's ironic, in that that drug is supposed to be for inoperable mast cell tumors, which isn't Zoe's cancer.  But is it just a coincidence that now she's getting lumpier every day, now that she's taking this drug that shrinks tumors?"

We point to the place where he removed a lump via laser a while back.  Now a new one is growing there.

I've just been assuming they're all cysts, the kind dogs get increasingly as they age, and not dangerous at all.  Kerry's not so sure. One of them started bleeding last week.

"They're not osteosarcomata," Don says.  And he tell us not to worry.

We talk about all the good indicators.  How Zoe's appetite is strong, although she is getting pickier again.  How Zoe's still walking five miles a day without showing signs of exertion, and still cuddly and sweet when she wants to be and still bossing people and critters around in the yard.  "The other night I asked her what she wanted to do when I took her out after dinner and she pointed to the street," I say.  "In the early days, I would take her on four walks a day.  One was the after dinner stroll through the neighborhood.  We stopped doing that long ago because I didn't have the time.  She seems to want to do that again now.  So we did it twice this week."

He knows the geography here, since his family has a house around the block, and he's impressed with the ground Zoe covers on this walk, especially since it's an extra one after she's already walked her five miles.

"That's what you have to do with a cancer patient," he says.  "Just make them happy and do what they want to do, the things that keep them interested in life.  That's very important."

We talk about my husband's hip replacement surgery planned for next month, and when I mention some pain I woke up with today, Don channels his wife, who does Chinese Traditional Medicine for humans.  He shows me the points to press near my right knee for the inflamation along my left elbow, the tendon going down to my ring finger.  "That's the triple heater meridian he says."  I'm not that optimistic that we can treat it this way, but I'm open, and here's the thing: the next morning, most of the pain has lessened and as I finish this post now, Monday morning, there's just a little of it left in my finger and the rest is gone.

blissed out after the session, she rolls in the grass

Later, my husband and I dissect the visit.  He's still very worried about Zoe's lumps.  I'm trying not to be.

"Then why didn't you say that?" I ask him.  "Why didn't you say what you were thinking?"

"Because it was obvious to me that part of his job today was to treat you."  I think about this for a minute.  "He wants to make sure that you are as positive and optimistic as you can be.  Because he believes that your moods and your beliefs will affect Zoe's overall prognosis."

That's my girl!

"So maybe that's what he really means by the difference between western and eastern medicine."

Western medicine is more about what the x-rays show: the dimensions of the tumors and their location, the numbers.  The composition of the blood.  But beyond all that I don't understand about acupuncture meridians--what we really mean when we say a needle is entering a bladder point or a stomach point--integrative medicine entertains the notion that our thoughts and feelings can have a tremendous impact on our health.

I used to resist this way of thinking.  I objected to it on political grounds.  I thought it was kind of a blame-the-victim thing, like, if you get sick, it's because you're Debbie Downer.  I strenuously object to any belief system that over-emphasizes the role of the individual in health and wellness and doesn't name and critique, say, the polluters in our environment that make us sick: industry.

I'll never forget the trip I took to the site of the World Trade Center a month after the attacks.  My friend Cathy and I walked there from our hotel in Gramery Park and I smelled the damage half a mile before we arrived.  The acrid taste in my throat, the headache, the dizziness, the disorientation, the heaviness in my lungs: it hit me pretty fast, but what upset me most was the sight of all those people and dogs at work without masks.  The EPA had just put on its web site that there were no dangerous emissions at the site.  I knew in my body that this was a colossal lie.  And just this week I heard a story on the radio that all kinds of cancers are showing up for people who worked or lived near the site, and some people will be able to receive compensation.  But it's no compensation when our environment is making us sick and the agencies charged with protecting us are willing to suppress that information because of political pressure.

But on the other hand, since I started meditating I've read the science about how our ways of thinking and of dealing with stress affect the brain.  I firmly believe now that the feedback loop we create by negative thoughts, emotions, and stress can change the layout of our brain until being perpetually anxious is our new normal.  And I also believe that meditation can undo the damage.  Through meditation I've learned to witness my thoughts as though they were birds alighting on a branch of a tree.  They land, they sing, and they fly off.

Every day, the same message: it's not just that Zoe's good days are contagious, but that mine are too. We are kindred.  We are soft-wired to one another.

And every morning I search for the stillness inside to help me see the tree branch that is right before me without needing to know where and when the next bird will land.

Part II: Day 53: Good Bad Dog!

Yesterday at lunchtime I was working on a scene from the novel when my character arrives in France only to discover that a thief has made off with her wallet.  It's one of the few truly autobiographical elements of the story--that is, this happened to me once.  It was just this week that I decided to give my character that same crappy experience so that she could know firsthand what it's like to be in Europe as a middle-aged non-student with No Money At All.  I never figured out who got my wallet and how, and neither does my character, but she has her theories.  The bad guys win, just this one time, but her inner resources get a good workout.

Things were tense there in the train station in Toulouse.  My character had been up all night on the flight getting there, and she was hungry.  It was lunchtime here, but I wasn't thinking about the here and now.  But then my husband opened the door to my studio and called to me from the stairs: "Didn't you hear me yelling out there?"

I hadn't heard a thing.  I'd been very far away listening to an imaginary person's stomach grumbling.

"Zoe almost ate a baby groundhog.  She came very close to catching it.  I kept yelling at her and yelling at her, and she was ignoring me.  She chased it to its little lodge in all the sticks, and had her head right inside, but then she finally stopped."

In the old days, if Zoe was in bad dog killer mode, she wouldn't have stopped.  We've seen her eat live bunnies.  We saw her get scratched up by a little badger when she stuck her snout deep into its hole.

I was so sorry to have missed this.  The camera sat on my desk, unused for a couple days now.  No groundhogs were photographed on my watch.  The picture you see here below of a groundhog and its baby looks exactly like what we see in our yard every morning, but it was taken by someone else:

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e172/PATMAN68/Groundhogs1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.turtletimes.com/forums/topic/68144-baby-groundhog-pics/&h=683&w=1023&sz=166&tbnid=SFCv57bYIKRwyM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=129&zoom=1&usg=__iirE3b2sAD45RRJWnpED345fWEU=&docid=ogZx3Q-pDUfQNM&sa=X&ei=vnnST9mvIamS0QGSn7W1Aw&ved=0CFsQ9QEwCA&dur=183

I used to be so upset when Zoe did things like this, but instead I patted her--she was panting now after the exertion and looking pleased with herself--and said, "That's my girl!"

Later I gave her the Chinese herbs Emily and Don have prescribed to her, in capsule form.  I wrapped them in cream cheese and got all six of them down that way.  I've started giving her these alternative medicines again this week, in this way.  She only eats canned food now, as I mentioned in an earlier post.  She's like the daughter of vegans who gets fed up and goes on a hunger strike until they bring her home some burgers and fries.  After I gave her these capsules, I sat beside her eating my lunch.  Today it was quasi-hippie/farmer fare: an organic salad with arugula and quinoa and chick peas and goat cheese feta and an all-beef hotdog (the beef from a local farm) and Zoe got very interested in my plate.  She sat and begged for some hot dog bites.  She was so insistent at one point that she grunted, then flashed me a winning smile.

All of this, of course, is extremely bad doggy etiquette.  I remember when I first gave her tidbits at an outdoor party when she was a puppy.  Before that, it hadn't occurred to her that my food could be hers.   Another guest at the party who was an old hand with dogs warned me that Zoe would never not want my food after this.  Because of my slip, because I liked having my cute little puppy licking my fingers, forever after, my friend predicted, she would always be a nuisance at dinner parties setting her head in peoples' laps, not all of whom would be as dogcentric as we are.  I did it anyway.  And I have to tell you that my guests have always said one thing about Zoe's begging: she's polite about it.  She does it demurely, quietly, and isn't insistent.  But of course these are people who are sitting at our table being wined and dined.  What else are they going to say?

But now, Zoe doesn't beg like she used to.  When we bring our dinner out to the deck, instead of straining on her tie-out to come up and join us and get in on the action, she sometimes prefers to nap.

So now, when Zoe reverts back to her wolfy ways and stalks a critter, or reverts back to her spoiled-humanized-center-of-the-universe-replacement-for-children ways and asks for me to share what I'm eating with gusto, I am very happy.  Her hunger for meat, living or otherwise, is a hunger for life.  Bon appetit, Zoe.  Bon appetit!