A Dog's Life

My dog is poised on her rocky perch, staring out at I don’t know what. Alert to anything and everything, squirrels and deer high on the list of attention getters, cars and trucks (UPS and Fed Ex especially) a close second. I learn a great deal from watching her. She’s a smart dog, smart enough to turn a command– Come, Maggie! Now!– into a game of ‘catch me if you can.’

The wind spooks her, so does heavy rain, with or without thunder. She follows me around, a panting shadow. It is a bodily thing, sound and air pressure combining to unsettle her. No amount of soft words or gentle stroking reassures her. She wants to be – with me – downstairs where she can tuck herself away in the washroom, knowing I’m within easy reach, on the couch in the family room. Who, I wonder, has trained whom?

She stands next to me, awakens me with her restless pacing and a slight whimper. It is the middle of the night, she wants to – needs to – go out. I admit it, being awakened in the middle of the night by a dog who has in all likelihood feasted on something in the yard not really meant to be eaten is not the way I pictured my life. On rare occasions (for example, years ago when a family of foxes was playing near the pile of logs in our backyard) it is the call of the wild rather than the euphemistic call of nature that makes her wake me. And yet, inconvenienced (do I daresay annoyed?) as I might be, there is a kind of silence that only comes in the deep night outside. If it’s a star-filled night, or the moon hangs high, I might even say I’m grateful to be pulled out of bed. In ministering to a dog in her senior years, annoyance gives way to compassion.

Old dogs do not get up so quickly in the morning. That’s not all that different from old people. An older dog with lymphoma has a way of making you worry when you look at her lying on her bed, a little like a teenager, do I really have to get up? This is a far cry from the dog standing so close to my side of the bed I can feel her breath, feel her tail wagging, wake up wake up! The dog who would start barking at my husband, barely finished with dinner, let’s go out, have a catch! The fact that her idea of fetching is to retrieve the ball about three times before running off with it and hiding it is irrelevant. The fact that she almost never does this anymore is something I’m just coming to grips with. It's said that humans are the only animals with a conscious awareness of what it means to die. When I watch my dog poised on her perch, looking out at anything and everything, I gain some new awareness of what it means to live.

Days of Awe

The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are called Yamim Noraim, Days of Awe. This is not something I had any awareness of as a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, putting on holiday clothes to gather, with my friends, at the synagogue (a.k.a. schul) I could see from my living room window. Going to services was something you just did, whether or not you knew the full import of why you did it. My mother didn't go (she was busy cooking), and my father went on occasion (if not religiously), always for the Yizkor service in memory of the dead on Yom Kippur. So it goes: we celebrate the new year with apples and honey, we atone for our sins, we connect with loved ones no longer with us.

If the memory of rituals I did not understand, with all their power, is imprinted, so is the sense that my Jewish upbringing was more cultural than spiritual. Yes, all those life events − the birth of a new baby (and the rituallstic brith for a boy), the bar and bat mitzvah, the weddings and funerals − were done (almost) to the letter of the law. But little by little something gave way. Dairy products and meat might never appear on the table at the same time, but the dishes used for each would be interchangeable. Maybe in the days of old there were reasons for observing the rules of kashrut. But these are modern times, and modern times bring new ways of doing things. You don't have to be Jewish to know you can make an argument for anything. You don't have to be a Jewish mother to know that there are strategies more powerful than guilt to keep families together at holiday time. You don't have to be too sentimental to long for something that seems farther removed with each passing generation.

If, as a young girl I came to see Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as days of eating and fasting, as a grown woman who loves the power of language I relish hearing that explication in the rabbi's sermon about these 'days of awe.' My curiosity takes me further, to a book by the Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon, where I read: "Because the world is judged by its majority, and the individual judged by the majority of his deeds, happy is the man who does a single good deed, for he tips the balance in his favor and that of the world. Woe is him, if he commits one transgression, for he tips the balance against himself and the world." And even within that scale of sins, some carry a heavier weight than others, the point being that 'awe,' as in reverence or even fear, is intended as a way of examining the pages of one's life between those bookend days of judgment and atonement. And then we eat.

How Smart Is a Smartphone?

Calling a phone smart is a little like calling a cat a dog because he begs for food, though I confess to once having a cat whose eating habits made him seem more canine than feline. He would gobble up the food in his bowl, then horn in on the other cat's food, making her back off without even a hiss. With some behavior modification, the more demure (and skittish) of the pair quickly learned to eat in a less catlike manner, as in nibble/walk away/come back for more. The name of the game now was: get it while you can, and when there's no more left, learn to beg and scavenge, leftover fresh fish (duh!) a favorite. He was eighteen pounds at his most rotund, down to a healthy thirteen within months, doctor's orders, my ministrations.

All of which begs the question: how smart really is a smartphone? Anthropomorphism may tempt us to imbue our pets with traits they may, or may not, possess, so yes, I can call my dog smart because she outsmarts me. But animals have hearts and brains; phones, call them simply cell or smart, are devices of convenience. Sometimes, like animals, they save lives, but the call-911 alert is a far cry (a learned response, I would add) from that instinct to bark or howl when the person who dubs you his or her best friend has fallen down a flight of stairs. Not that I'm not completely charmed by my new toy, the latest and greatest (putting aside what Consumer Reports has to say) iPhone 4. I'm not obsessed with e-mail (really I'm not) but there's something liberating about not having to be at my laptop to access it. Twitter? I'm a newbie here, and a tweet in hand seems what the app was really designed for. Even my texting has improved with that spiffy touch-screen keyboard. My daughter is proud of me. Say good-bye to those clumsy-fingered typo-ridden texts from my antiquated cell.

Which brings me back to my original point: 'smart' implies intelligence and/or a quick wit, maybe impertinence; a smart dresser is someone I admire; a scrape on my elbow that smarts is something I could do without. Language evolves, too, and a 'smart' device is one 'capable of independent and seemingly intelligent action.' When it comes to phones, there are technical distinctions in determining whether they can be called smart, but according to an article in Computerworld, there's no clear industry standard. All the more reason to add even more criteria to the mix: Can my phone pinpoint that word that's on the tip of my tongue or find the eyeglasses my husband misplaced? Can it teach my dog that 'fetch' means bring the ball to me (not the other way around), or keep her from hyperventilating in anticipation of a thunderstorm? Can it keep me from ending up in the slowest checkout line at the supermarket or make sure, when I tune in to Pandora, that the stream of rock I get is finely enough tuned to my idea of classic?

Weather Watch

I'm sitting on my deck, the sky turning dark, day to night in minutes, rolling thunder in the distance. The wind kicks up, followed by a frenzy of rain, churning up memories of late-summer hurricanes, Donna a biggie in 1960 when I was growing up in Brooklyn, Bob the first time a male name was used, 1979. Resistance to male names was riddled with sexism − God knows the weather can be unpredictable, fickle, just like a woman − and took the form of a silly quip ('ever hear of a him-icane?), oddly semantic in nature. In actuality, hurricanes were first named for saints, then longitude-latitude positions, which became a little unwieldy for quick communications. It was a novel by George R. Stewart, Storm, published in 1941 (and reissued in 2003) that spawned the practice of giving hurricanes female names. The fictional storm is given the name Maria, and the novel takes readers through the twelve days of her life. She lives on, too, in the Lerner and Lowe classic, "They Call the Wind Maria," inspired by the novel.

The other day at a barbecue the talk turned to the heat spell we've been having, no end in sight, is global warming the culprit? I made the point, between sips of my margarita, that we'd had a beautiful spring. Some unusual highs and lows for the season, yes, but so many beautiful cool nights and sunny days filled with flowers that seemed especially vibrant. There was agreement, and with it some reservation. Winter, sandwiched between spring and autumn, seems endless. And summer, even with the sky still light at eight in the evening, so fleeting.

The rain stops, I decide to go for a walk, only to be caught in an unexpected shower. Did I say 'unexpected'? Didn't I check www.weather.com, the hourly breakdown, and see that promise of sun poking through the clouds? My instinct is to pick up the pace, get home before my sneakers start squishing. A picture comes to mind, of people I once read about who run into the rain, smiling, instead of avoiding it. I ease back into a comfortable stride. How much is really necessary, or even possible, to 'know before you go'?

Happiness

Mother's Day 2010: A long annoying beep wakes me, an alarm system's battery back-up out of whack. The power outage that began last night shows no sign of letting up anytime soon. Before going to bed I saw the sky light up. It's the kind of thing that happens when intense winds send tree limbs falling onto power lines. Is there a message here?

My cell phone tells me I have a voicemail, Happy Mother's Day from my daughter, far away (Los Angeles). A voicemail is not quite the same as a live voice, but at the precise time she calls I'm in some cell phone dead zone, and besides, the card already arrived, a Golden Retriever puppy nestled against her mother's snout, image and words compressed into the thought, all that really counts. I think about my own mother, gone longer than I like to remember, who would probably cringe at the thought of cell phones and e-mail. Some years I miss her more than ever. Sometimes I think she died in April to remind me that renewal is not a figment of my imagination. My first Mother's Day without her was a milestone for my daughter: she rode a two wheeler for the first time. I ran alongside her, my hand on the bicycle seat. Then I let her fly.

A headline from my Google Reader catches my eye, Huffington Post, 7 Simple Ways to Be Happier. I follow the link to the full feed, intrigued as ever by reductive approaches to a better way of being, even if I'm not buying. Maybe even more intrigued in light of the book sitting on my desk, Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by Richard Powers in which he casts his brilliant eye on the question of genetic enhancement in general and the happiness gene in particular, at the same time exploring the blurring of fact and fiction in a technology-driven world. The 'happiness' article tells me that women are more wired to worry than men (duh!). If the article is essentially a rehash of what many years of yoga and my own growing consciousness of mindful living continue to teach me, it's also a reminder that sometimes we need to look out before we can look in. At the same time, I resist this commodification of what strikes me as simple common sense. When my mother was dying, she wondered why it took a lifetime to just smell the roses. No meditation teacher suggesting that “simply being aware of what is happening right now, without wishing it were different” or finding yourself a "joy buddy" as ways of increasing happiness could have made the insight more profound. Do physical exercise? Sing or dance? Be still? Any prescriptive that strikes one's fancy is bound to bring some happiness, so long as it doesn't become just that, a prescriptive. Old patterns die hard; new ones take a long time, for some a lifetime, before there can be a true shift in perspective.

A day before Mother's Day I was walking my dog and I stopped to chat with a neighbor. We talked about Mother's Day, the busy restaurants booked solid, all those fathers knowing best, all those daughters and sons doing what they believe they do so well in the interest of honoring mom. How about letting them all go out, we joked, and we stay home, two mothers sharing a quiet afternoon and a glass of wine?

Every Picture Tells a Story

Mother and Child, James Litaker

I recently had the pleasure of participating in an art exhibition premised on the Greek notion of ekphrasis,which is essentially a written representation of a piece of art, a response of sorts. Stare at a picture long enough and a story may well take shape. If not a story, then a poem maybe. Representational or abstract, a piece of art can strike an emotional chord. Memories are jarred. Images become words, which in turn become images all their own.


No Moment Will Ever Be like This One
after James Litaker

Ouch! says the girl, to herself. If she complains, her mother will only pull harder, hurting her more. It’s the nature of the comb, her mother will say. Something to be endured. Just for once she wishes her mother would let her go to school with her hair loose. A classroom is no place for unruly hair, her mother will say.

Already nine and hungering to be nineteen, says the mother, to herself. She runs her fingers through strands of her daughter’s hair, a soft tangle that reminds her of nothing so much as the swift passage of time. The more impatient her daughter seems, the more the mother is inclined to slow down, teach her a lesson about beauty, the kind that comes with precision, the rhythmic comb and weave, comb and weave of a perfect braid. Now she stops, just to savor the moment. To the girl this feels like punishment, maybe even torture, a braid that gets longer with each twist. To the mother it is a kind of release, a morning ritual that gets her through the day, each and every one the same, with its hopes for her daughter, maybe a teacher or a secretary or a beautician; anything but standing behind the counter of a delicatessen, dishing out macaroni salad or ladling soup into a container, slapping slices of turkey or ham onto bread slathered with mayonnaise or mustard, sometimes both. She feels like a surgeon, cutting through the bread. There is nothing so unnatural as making sandwiches through a filter of latex.

She picks up the pace again, comb and weave, comb and weave. Pictures her daughter at nineteen, braids gone, hair cascading to her shoulders.

A Day (almost) like Any Other

Last night I went outside with my dog. The light under the deck was shining on me in a way that cast a shadow against a tree on the slope of our hill. It made me look twelve-feet tall.

Two days ago I turned sixty. I tried to make it a day like any other, a typical Saturday beginning with a Pilates class. There is a core of women I've grown fond of at the gym. We do Pilates together. We talk about our grown children (and grandchildren). Today, though, we talked about what it means to be sixty. Don't go gray, said one of them. It sucks the color from your face. What are you doing to celebrate? asked another. No party, I said. Some close friends and family would gather at my home. We would make a meal together, drink some wine.

I thought I was clever in marking other decades, with big parties at twenty-nine, thirty-nine, forty-nine. When fifty-nine rolled around, I could not muster the 'dance-the-night-away spirit.' The years pass quickly enough; sixty would be here in the wink of an eye. Try as I might to talk myself into not making too much of it, there is something about turning sixty (without trying to color it as the new forty) that begs honoring, if not out-and-out celebration.

A week before the big day I was riding a wave of buoyancy. Years of doing yoga have given me a particular frame of reference for understanding that everything comes, in its time. I am nothing if not a warrior, but even warriors know that effort needs to give way to grace. There is lightness (do I daresay light?) in some of my poses. If this is what it means to be sixty, I'll take it. Another wave sends me crashing down, into the grip of an unsettling deflation: the dentist finds a red spot on my gum (nothing suspicious but let's have a look in a week); the dermatologist says not to worry about the keratosis (but we'll have to treat it); the gynecologist does her best to reassure me that Vagifem is safe (but for how long?).

In one of Jon Kabat-Zinn's meditation tapes, he uses the lake as symbol for a deep resource of clarity. There may be turbulence on the surface, but with mindfulness and attention, it is possible to access the clarity beneath. In my own moments of clarity, I can see those swings of buoyancy and deflation as nothing more than part of a whole. Some days are simply better than others. Some years, markers that they are of past and future, loss and gain, are as bitter as they are sweet.

Optimism
by Jane Hirschfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.