I Believe in Dog

This seems like a good sign: even though it's 11:48, and I still have about 2 hours of work to do on the baby food cookbook, I have not one but TWO entries I want to write. I think I will choose one and have the other in my back pocket for tomorrow. But maybe this will spiral out of control in a good way and tomorrow I'll have seven or eight ideas, and what will I do then? As one of my wiser friends would point out: That would be a high-class problem.

So which to tackle first? Dogs. Or rather dog as conduit to a light at the end of the tunnel, by which I mean a shift in perspective, which really, when it comes right down to it, is often all I am looking for, all anybody ever needs. Today was Sadie's second dog job in two days--they don't call collies working dogs for nothing. (Although don't tell Scout--he thinks his job is licking the garbage can and occasionally moving from the couch to the bed.) This visit, for several key reasons, is mine and mine alone. For one, it takes place when Lily is in school and Annika, theoretically, is napping. For another, it is to the YAI NAtional Institute for People with Disabilities, and when they say disabilities, they're not kidding. I thought I had prepared myself, done my homework, before my first visit, but I was truly taken back by the severity of some of the disabilities: people who could not see, hear, speak, walk or move their limbs of their own accord, people missing eyes, hands, arms, legs, parts of faces, people who, on first sighting, barely resembled what we think of as people at all.

So what is a person, anyway? An assemblage of limbs and organs and brain and skin and blood? What if all that isn't there?

As it turns out, Sadie knows, knows what a person is and how to pad right up to one and lick that person's hand and then her face, turning slightly and leaning into a wheelchair so that person can rest her hand, a loose and angled contraption with three fingers and heavy bulging veins, on her back ever so lightly, burrowing those fingers into her fur, throwing back her head, sightless eyes toward the ceiling, her smile so wide you can't bear to look at it for long because you feel yourself on the verge of bursting into tears, which would be a human thing to do, would make one certainly a person, too, but wouldn't be quite right under the circumstances.

Wouldn't be quite right because this room, the lunchroom of this huge facility, with a sort of funny not-quite-hospital smell and plastic chairs around the edges and social workers and therapists who have that earnest liberal arts vibe and groovy faded t-shirts from expensive islands and a leader of the program who has a digital camera to photograph the people with the dogs and a shiny bald head and the confidence that must come with knowing you are going to heaven if there is one and six dogs, from the polar bear sized Homer down to a teeny curly ball of fluff named Mica, and about thirty people who didn't come with the dogs, people in wheelchairs and careening around unsteadily and lying on the floor and leaning into the walls and clutching at my arm and reaching into my back pocket where I keep the pictures of Sadie--this room is full of joy.

It is the most joyful place, in fact, I have been in years, maybe ever, because the people--and feeling joy, that makes a person--are so joyful that they are shrieking with it, some of them, mouths open so wide I can see their tonsils, or so overcome by it that they are trembling with it, rippling all over from head to toe with it, throwing out their arms and throwing them around the dogs, the whole dog in the cases of the smaller ones, the neck or midsection or tail end of the larger ones, like Sadie, who licks and leans and makes a sort of vibrating whistling happy sound she doesn't make anywhere else, overcome herself, perhaps, with so much showing of joy, so much directed at her.

What makes a person? Joy, and sorrow, too--the man who whispered, "Noreen died," in my ear each time I drew near until one of the earnest social workers explained, "He loved her. It was a very long time ago," and I looked closely at this man's face, his leathery black skin, his red stained sweatshirt, the mournful piece of spaghetti stuck to the top of his shoe and put my arm on his shoulder. He jerked; I realized he hadn't seen or sensed me. "Noreen," he said, shaking his head, and I could see his eyes were cloudy white all over. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

But most of all, I think, more than the joy or the sorrow (one thin line, remember?) is connection--that moment when a person becomes linked to you and you to them in that moment more meaningfully than anything else in the world because for the two of you, it is that moment--that is the moment of your life right then. Sadie knows this, always has, knows how easy and life-affirming it can be to simply connect. She brings me to it, takes me home remembering, valuing, wondering--wondering how many people like this there are in the world, people we just don't see.

Oh, Sadie. You are such a very good dog.

And finally, one last late note: the director always tells the people who come to visit with us in the lunchroom not to touch us, to touch the dogs but not the people. They never listen--they prefer the dogs, for the most part, but when one isn't right at hand, they reach out to me instead. And I close my hand around the hand on my arm, it is always my arm, and whisper, "Thank you."

The Thin Line

That song from the Breakfast Club is running through my head as I type, in part I suppose because the one small section of the Oscars I managed to catch involved a somewhat disorienting sighting of Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald standing on stage together. I felt like I should be spraying Sun-In in my hair and zipping up the bottoms of my jeans. You know which one I mean: Don't you, forget about me...

This blog, my struggles to keep at it despite, well, everything, is exposing an insecure side to me that I'm not sure what to do with. I do know that I cannot, will not, give up on it, especially when I least know what to do with it, so here I go, again--is that a song title, too? Anyway.

A new friend, someone I liked from the instant we were introduced, wrote to me recently that, "...the line that separates happy stages from sad is always rather narrow...along with our age seems to go a sense of deep vulnerability." This struck me as astute and even somehow comforting, not to mention the fact that "deep vulnerability" is such an apt way of describing how I am finding 40 so far. These girls, my fierce, open-hearted, self-possessed Lily and my merry, sharp-eyed sponge of an Annika: they fill me with awe, make me laugh until my eyes water, cause me to lie awake consumed by their well-being until the sun rises and it's time to fill the milk cups, leave me dazzled and drunk with exhaustion, and raw. Vulnerable. Deeply, deeply so.

Tonight at dusk, the three of us set out for Sadie's "dog job," our therapy work at Gilda's Club, into a perfect early spring evening, the kind when the air feels so clean and new on your skin that you almost want to lie down and sleep on the sidewalk. A loud night--ambulances, more dogs than ever, it seemed, strollers swerving, pizza parlors open on all sides to the world, radios blasting, even a bagpipe player in front of the art house on 6th Avenue, wearing a kilt and sending piercing honking notes out over the sounds of the voices. "Mama?" Lily said, flushed with pride on our way home as passers-by commented on her leash technique and praised Sadie more extravagantly than usual. "Yes?" I said, suddenly a little bit shocked that she was old enough to be walking beside me like this. "Is it mean to say I find that music a little annoying?" I just laughed, and she laughed, and Annika, who loves nothing more than when we are laughing, laughed, too, and we kept walking, and laughing, and becoming, I saw later, when I thought about it, a part of the beautiful chaos of the evening, the street, the city, and in that moment, on the happy side of the line.

Talking Points

You know that thing we all learn in a college linguistics class or from some yahoo sitting next to us on a bus to DC or because it seems to be one of those things that Americans just know by osmosis about how Eskimos have so many words for snow? I am, again, tempted to look this up on Google, exactly how many words for snow the Eskimos have, but am remembering the time I found myself looking up how old Barbra Streisand was when she made Yentl, for no reason any reasonable person could discern, and so again I will stop myself--although I won't promise not to do it tomorrow, after another glorious four hours of sleep. Did you read the Huffington Post piece about how sleep is the real feminist issue these days? If not, do. But back to my story. I know you were riveted: Eskimos. And snow.

No, not riveting, but this morning when I was helping Lily decide which coat to wear, the snow thing popped into my head, and for the first time ever I found myself thinking it didn't necessarily make very much sense. Or rather, that if we were to ascribe anew a word to every possible noun in our own language, there would have to be as many words for each noun as there are Americans (again, tempted: Damn you, Google and your infinite knowledge).

It's late, and even in a land that hands over Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to a Cosmo centerfold, it's not really a good idea to follow Obama. But do you know what I mean? When I was first explaining to Lily what a dictionary was, I told her that if you wanted to know what a word meant, you could just look it up in this book, and the book would provide you with a definition. "Does it have a picture for the word?" she asked, and I smiled, thinking of all those SAT words: loquacious, indeterminate, obdurate, scintillate. "Not usually," I said, but then--when I scoped out the children's dictionaries at the bookstore--realized that kids' ones do and became perhaps irrationally enraged. If anyone can picture what a cupcake looks like, or a kite, or a carousel, it's a kid, and whatever the kid's version is, it's bound to be better than the dictionary artist's. It's like falling intensely in love with a book and then seeing the movie and thinking: What? That character isn't supposed to look like Matt Damon.

More to the point, if you say cupcake to me, this is what appears in my mind's eye: a white, fairly fine-grained, regular not behemoth sized cupcake in a foil wrapper with a tall swirl of the kind of icing that definitely contains shortening, not butter, and when I say tall, I mean about two-inches, and when I say icing, I mean fluffy but solid enough to hold its shape, pastel-colored, and I wouldn't be adverse to a sprinkle of colored sugar crystals for a little additional crunch. If you say cupcake to a certain friend of mine, this is what appears in his mind's eye; a dense, fudgy, low-to-the-ground little mouthful with a slick glaze of dark chocolate on top. If you say cupcake to Lily, there's no cake at all: she's strictly a frosting gal, a quality I endorse in my children.

So a hundred words for snow, if that's what it is? I guess I'm not actually all that impressed, you seemingly ubiquitous (why are the SAT words coming so fast and so furiously?) linguists, you. Go beyond, deeper than, cupcake, and see what I'm getting at: love, family, mother, peace, happiness, anger, life, death, self, I could keep going forever. Does any word mean what it means to me to anybody else in the world? Not even close. Frankly, I think it's a bit of a miracle most of us find so many people to communicate with. I wonder how often we actually know what each other is saying.

Tomorrow

The world seems off-kilter, and I talk, talk, talk and think, think, think, and still it rains in the morning, hard, and I send my first-born out the door in her yellow rain jacket, walk her onto the school bus, kiss her soft head, and walk off again, the little one in my arms, send her off as though she were a parcel or a soldier: out into the world, thinking, thinking as I watch the bus disappear around the corner: I would die for you.

The little one searches my face as we wait for the elevator, reaches out and touches my cheek with a delicate finger. What you name, Mama? she asks, a new game, and I answer, wiping a speck of crayon from her forehead, My name is Amy. She chortles, shakes her head in mock-dismay. No, no, she says. You not Amy. You Mama. You my Mama.

Later I emerge from the subway, from this bizarre maze of train-filled tunnels below the streets on which cars and trucks and buildings dash and perch and settle, and as my head clears the overhang and is first exposed to the air outside the subway system the sun appears, and the sky, for the first time all day, is a sort of dirty pale blue but blue nonetheless, and the rain has stopped, and I walk my boots around the puddles stretching my gloveless fingers, testing the air for premature signs of spring or at least a winter on the wane.

The girls have been listening to Annie, begging me to sing the songs they love best: "Maybe," to see me rock an imaginary baby, or a gleeful Annika, or even a lanky Lily; "I Don't Need Anyone But You," to hear me tell the story of the duet I performed as a babysitter on the beach, in Cape Cod, as a just teenager (while I wonder how at thirteen I minded seven children most of each day for a week, marvel at the energy and resourcefulness of my barely adolescent self); but most of all "Tomorrow," for the sheer belting joy of it, the way my woefully inadequate (so pretty, Mama, they say, believing it) voice cracks at every high note, the way I beam when they join me in the chorus.

And as I walk up and down the city streets, especially, only, on those rare occasions when I am alone, I find myself singing it in my head, wondering about the lyrics--is tomorrow always a day away or only a day away? I want to check it, but I keep forgetting, and then when I could, say now, I decide not to do so, not to know.

Instead I remember what I keep letting myself forget: that I have always had a way to set things straight a little, a little at least, a way to rein in the voice at the edge of an octave-and-a-half, a way to be everything I am, to center, to breathe. And so I do that, this, instead. And a little, a little, at least, it works.

I would like to remember that...

this morning Annika announced, verbatim, "Hey guys! Grandpa Joel is fast asleep on the couch, dreaming."

And stay tuned for my thoughts on hardware stores. Baby steps, baby steps...

Lily is Six

Fortieth birthday came and went with little fanfare; in truth, but for the constant questions as to what my "big plans" were, it seemed like a blip on the radar screen. But tonight, although I was up until nearly 4 the night before, I am not so sure I am going to be able to sleep--all I can think about is this night six years ago, nearly to the minute, when Lily was born, and everything changed irrevocably.

I now cannot help but thinking of my life as "before" and "after," meaning that an almost impenetrable ravine exists between the part of my life before I had children and every instant since. Do I think this is too dramatically stating the case? Not for me, and not, I think for many people I know. It is hard for me, sometimes, to recall the "before" parts now in any way that doesn't seem like a dream. But this night, December 19th, 2003, the dividing line, as it were, I know will remain real, concrete, alive, for as long as I live.

It is true that I don't remember it seamlessly. Certain parts are blurry--I can access faces of loved ones popping in and out, the race down the corridor, the way my mother looked at one moment as the doctor was speaking to me, the Indian accent of the anesthesiologist, and so on. But other parts, scenes, are so visceral that my eyes well up if I so much as conjure them into re-existence: the moment my eyes met Lily's for the first time, for example, the tiny, soft yellow outfit my grandmother had knit for her to come home in, and the strangeness of trying to get it on her tiny limbs in the hospital room the frigid morning we brought her home.

I was just having a conversation with a friend about how in a way, there are no right choices, or wrong choices: there are only choices, and we make them, and then we take it from there. It's the unknown, the "after the choice," if you will, that defines us, and the way we respond to what we can't or don't choose: what happens to us, as we plough ahead, perhaps thinking we actually have more choices than we do.

I am such a skeptic, such a pragmatist. I have always, since very early childhood, been one of those people who believes you make your own luck, that the notion of fate or destiny is a bit of a fool's gold--shiny and appealing but worthless in the end. But somehow, although it defies logic, and my very core, I also believe on some level that Lily and I chose each other, and I felt that way six years ago, when I lay on a narrow gurney late in the night before we almost lost each other, and looked into those eyes and in that looking, that lock of connection, for the first time in my entire life lost sight of everything else in the world.

Forty, Day One

My graduate school thesis, which led to the writing of two books I wish I hadn't written, was a collection of essays written during the year I was twenty-five, which somehow seems like it happened about seventy-five years ago. I remember one line from the introduction of this thesis, or at least part of it, that described twenty-five as "the year I decided to document." This is not entirely true, however it is true that I did, actually document that year almost inadvertently, due to the requirement of writing the thesis. I can decide, purposefully, to document forty, and maybe because I have had an extra glass of wine tonight, I think that I will. So here I go. Night one. I have the venue. I have a goal. Let's see what happens from now until forty-one.