Stop in the Name of Love

It’s the Monday of Labor Day weekend. As we approach the intersection of Main and Fifth streets, the light, long yellow, turns red. We stop, but the car behind us in the adjacent lane guns it through the intersection. To our left, on Fifth Street,  is a City of Dayton Police Officer in his patrol car. We chuckle a bit, expecting the cop to pull out (he has the green after all) and pursue the scofflaw. To our consternation, the officer simply drives across the intersection at a leisurely pace and onwards to whatever non-pressing destination awaits him.

In the days that follow, I make several attempts to bring this incident to someone’s attention. Anyone. It is deeply disappointing that an officer of the law cares so little for the enforcement of those laws that he simply does not bother. I cannot find anyone who is interested. I leave messages at several different offices and not one single solitary representative of the Dayton Police Department bothers to return my call.

While the Dayton Police Department’s tendency to turn a blind eye towards traffic misdemeanors is worthy of a column in itself, just looking at the issue of red-light tickets in our fair city should be enough to make you pause. From 2003 (when red-light ticket cameras were installed in ten intersections around the city) until June 2011, 92,900 citations for failure to stop were issued. As of last summer, 46,124 remained unpaid, a staggering $3.9 million dollars worth. The city mulled the possibility of impounding vehicles that belonged to individuals who had racked up more than two traffic camera tickets. 53 percent of the local paper’s readership felt that was “too harsh.”

Typical were public comments like this one from “Loralee.” (Quoted here just as she wrote it, non sequiturs and mangled grammar intact.)

“these red light (and now speeding cameras)are causing more accidents then doing good.People are slamming on thier breaks inorder to not go through a red light causeing fender benders wasting police time with these minor traffic accidents. there is a camera just down the street from where I live so I see it all the time.We are already short staffed with police patroling the neighborhoods.Hate the idea! I think they have been watching too much reality tv! Parking wars????!!!! from Dayton by Loralee “

In Seattle, a reporter from the Post-Intelligencer was snagged violating a red light. He wrote a column about the experience (he had “rolled” the light, turning right on red) and attached a poll to his story, inviting readers to make known their feelings about the cameras. A woeful 52 percent opined that the cameras should be “removed completely,” 14 percent thought they could stay but they should have “much smaller” fines, and 8 percent were spread over a variety of non-favorable responses. Only 25 percent of those polled were in favour of increasing the number of red-light cameras. 1 in 4. You know, that’s  pretty shameful. What earthly reason could there be for not wanting a red light camera unless you make it a regular habit to plow through intersections? (There is a famous red-light camera photo of a guilty-looking platinum blond woman with her hand wrapped around the phallus of her passenger– no doubt she was, is and always will be vehemently opposed to cameras.)

The Seattle writer went on to say that now he stops at yellow lights. In Boston, we used to joke that the light turning yellow meant “speed up.” It’s not such a joke anymore, because the overriding selfish desire of drivers to “make the light” has made that quip a reality. And people die.

People like Barbara Ryan, 44 and her daughter, Joanna, 11, who were killed in Bethpage, NY when a tractor-trailer failed to stop at a red light. The truck driver was not drunk. People like Los Angeles Angels rookie pitcher, Nick Adenhart, who was killed in Riverside, CA when an intoxicated driver failed to stop at an intersection and drove his minivan into the baseball player’s car. An acquaintance of ours, the distinguished and very kind William Dwelly, who was out running errands on a Saturday morning in his hometown of Spartanburg, SC. A woman driving a truck was distracted and “missed the light.” She was not drunk. She was not charged. Bill was killed. The poor sap just trying to cross the street in the photo accompanying this piece. Journalist David Halberstam who was being driven to an interview by a student. The student (not drunk) was anxious to “make the light” and turned left in front of an oncoming car. Think for a minute of two-year-old Morgan Lee Pena, napping in her car seat as her mother drove her home from a play date. A harried businessman, not drunk,  trying to make a call to say he’d be late for a meeting missed a stop sign and smashed broadside into Morgan’s mother’s car. Little Morgan died of fatal head injuries. The man received two tickets and a fifty dollar fine.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)  classifies broadside (or t-bone) collisions as the most dangerous kind of car accident. While these collisions only account for approximately 29 percent of all automobile accidents, they make up 51 percent of all traffic fatalities. Look at it this way: more people are killed by being broadsided than are killed in every other kind of car accident put together.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, cars are not engineered to absorb side-impact force. Though some now have side air-curtains, many still have very little in the way of shock-sustaining forces. Sport utility vehicles are very prone to rollover when hit from the side. The other reason has to do with the way our bodies are engineered. Our necks and backs and brains are built to withstand the motion that we think of as “whiplash,” a violent forward and backward motion. But it doesn’t work as well when the blow is from the side, resulting in head and brain injuries, skull fractures and broken necks.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving have been very successful in developing an enormous stigma for drinking-and-driving. They take credit for reducing “alcohol-related traffic deaths” since 1982 by nearly one-third. Their lobbying efforts have led to prison sentences for repeat offenders.  They were successful in reducing an actionable blood alcohol level from .12 to .10 to .08 percent. They spearheaded a constitutionally questionable program that allows law enforcement to establish “sobriety check points” where drivers could be stopped without any probable cause and examined as to their ingestion of alcohol.

A 120-pound woman with an average metabolism can reach a .08 BAC by consuming two six-ounce glasses of wine over a period of two hours, and in fact, people with BAC of .08 to .10 are involved in fewer significant car accidents than individuals with BAC of .01 to .03, which is what you can achieve with a single dose of cough syrup. Eventually the founder of MADD, Candi Lightner, was forced out of the organization by people she describes as “radical prohibitionists” and she herself has joined a DC-area liquor lobby.

“Driving while impaired” may be the only offense that can be prosecuted because a situation exists in which an actual crime might occur. It is a bit like prosecuting a hungry person in a grocery store because they might shoplift a loaf of bread.  I don’t think people should drive while impaired– whether they are impaired by fatigue, low blood sugar, prescription medication, cell phone use or the fact that they had a fight with their boss, kid or significant other. But there is absolutely no certainty that an individual getting into a car after having a glass of wine with dinner or a beer after work will cause any harm to any one.

Yet, the local gendarmes spend considerable effort and expense on questionable “sobriety checkpoints”  every holiday weekend of the year– and all the while allowing any number of drivers to blow through controlled intersections, putting themselves and dozens of others at terrible risk. If a driver makes it a habit to run red lights, how many times do you think that he’ll be able to do so without being involved in a serious accident? One time? Five times? Ten times?  Just counting the intersections where there are red-light cameras, drivers in Dayton have breached the red  light nearly a hundred thousand times in eight years.

Perhaps you’re not one of those people who pushes the yellow light, sliding through as it turns red. Maybe you’re a fine upstanding citizen in that regard. Or are you rolling those right-on-red “stops”?  The law is not that we merge, you know. It’s that we come to a full stop. We once saw a Dayton Regional Transit Authority bus nearly take out a guy that was walking his two dogs . He was crossing a side street, and the walk-light was in his favor, when the bus decided to move. He jumped back and the bus driver slammed on the brakes, but it was a very near thing. Last month one of my son’s classmates was knocked down and knocked out while standing on a corner. A woman in a Chevy Tahoe didn’t see him, didn’t look, and the impact tossed his body twenty feet.  You have to stop, a complete and utter stop.

Here’s the way to make people stop running red lights, blowing through stop signs, rolling around corners without slowing down and otherwise endangering everyone around them:

First offense is a thousand dollar fine.

Second offense is a thousand dollar fine and 3 day mandatory jail sentence.

Third offense is a thousand dollar fine, 7 days mandatory jail sentence, and license suspension until a Driver’s Education course is completed.

Fourth offense is a thousand dollar fine, 30 days mandatory jail sentence, license suspension, driver education and impound of car for six months.

If Dayton had been charging a thousand dollars on all those red-light citations, they could have collected (or at least  been owed) 97 million dollars. Wouldn’t you slow down and stop at the yellows if you knew there was the potential for those kinds of penalties?

Every morning my husband and son travel through 32 controlled intersections downtown on the way to school. My husband goes through all 32 again on his way  home. When school is over, we go through this slalom again. Everyday I worry that the law of averages is going to spell disaster for someone I love. Or someone you love. There’s nothing important enough to go through the red light at that intersection, the life you save may be your own.

A Cop at the Door

The doorbell is ringing. I am deeply asleep and it has rung several times before I surface enough to recognize the sound. It’s still dark outside and I squint at the clock.

“It’s the doorbell,” I say to my husband. “Who would be ringing the doorbell at six o’clock on a Sunday morning?’

“Larkin?” It’s my mother, visiting for the holidays, in the hallway. “It looks like it’s the police.”  The police? What. Why would the police I am confused. My husband starts to sit up and is immediately felled by a leg cramp. Isn’t this what we have husbands for, to handle a cop on the front step? The doorbell rings again.

In the 27 seconds that it takes me to sit upright, get out of bed, walk down the stairs, and turn off the alarm before I open the door, I think of four things. First, I am glad that this is a night I bothered to put on pajamas.  Second, third and fourth: did someone torch one of our cars? Are the neighbors okay? Is there a dead body on the front lawn? I mean, it is six o’clock on a Sunday morning.

It never occurs to me that it might be about my 17-year-old son. Or that something awful might have happened to one of his half-sisters halfway across the country.

When I open the door there is no one there. The Sunday paper’s been delivered though. Could they have rung the doorbell. Nope, a white sedan is backing up. It is . . . .  the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

The driver’s door opens and the trooper bounds out of the car and trots up the walk. He is wearing his Smokey-the-Bear hat, and his tie is flapping in the wind.

“Is this address 944?”

Is that code? I wonder.

“I’m sorry, what did you ask?”

“Is this 944 West . . . “

“Oh, no.” The address. “No, this is 1010.”

“Oh, okay. Well, do you know where 944 is?” He gestures towards the Cochran’s house on the left.  ”Is that 944?”

“No, 944 would be the other way, but on this side of the street. There’s just the red brick house.” I am trying to concentrate, but I am still groggy with sleep. I can’t think. “It could be on the other side of Salem Avenue, down that way.” Even as I say it, I don’t think that’s right, but I think the red brick house has a house number that is higher. I bend to pick up the newspaper and there’s a little black leather wallet under it.

The trooper, who seems young enough to be my son, turns a little pink.

“Well do you know that person?” he asks gesturing towards the wallet in my hand. “She dropped this when she was walking away and I, I was just trying to get it back to her.”  I look at the picture on the license.  It is a 30-something black woman. It’s impossible to tell if she’s attractive or not, the BMV never makes anyone look their best, and I don’t have my reading glasses on. The name isn’t familiar. I shake my head, and hand him the wallet.

“I don’t think so, I’m sorry. You could try that brick house on the corner. It could be 944.”

“Well, okay, thank you. You know, we just wanted to get it back to her, because, you know, she dropped it as she was leaving.”  I nod, though in truth I cannot figure out what he’s talking about. Why is he ringing doorbells in the middle of the night trying to return a wallet?  ”Okay, well thank you. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” I say and he turns on his heel and disappears down the steps and out to the street. I close the door and turn the lock. My mother is standing in the hall. “That was so weird,” I tell her.

“I wonder what the real story is,” she says.  She heads back to bed and I wander into the kitchen, pour half a glass of milk and bite the head off a leftover gingerbread midget. 944. Was that the brick house? I remember instead something that happened when I lived in Montana. Very early one morning, before light, two sheriff’s deputies drove out to the dairy farm of this nice couple to tell them that their 15-year-old son had been killed in an automobile accident. The couple, bewildered, said no that wasn’t possible. Their son was asleep in his bed. It must be somebody else. Of course, it wasn’t somebody else. Their child’s bed was empty. The boy had snuck out and met up with friends. There’d been a crash and he had not survived.

Before going back to bed, I continue down the hall and peek into my son’s room, and there is the sleeping form of my wild child stretched out across his bed. His iPod is still playing, illuminating the crook of his elbow. Tears well up in my eyes for a second, and I say a little prayer of thanksgiving that it was just a cop on some kind of surreal errand and not there on my threshold to deliver some kind of unbearable news.

Later in the morning I check the paper and online for mention of car accidents or anything else that might have involved the name of the woman on the license, but find nothing. She’s not listed among the inmates at the county jail. Why would she drop her wallet walking away? That was what he said, wasn’t in?  I check the address. Oh, it is the red brick house on the corner. I wonder if it is the woman with the Chevy Suburban, which rests in its regular spot this morning.  Why would she have dropped her wallet, was she running? Why wouldn’t she notice, and why would the state patrol have it? Why would they leave it under my newspaper if they were trying to return it to her? We don’t know her, really. Her ex-boyfriend used to wave in passing, he was always pretty friendly, peddling marijuana from a bicycle. But she’s always been a bit, well, aloof, for want of a better word. The neighbor across the street said she works as a stripper. Sometimes the dots just don’t connect.  I hope she got her wallet back.

THE MUSKRAT

a true story

The restaurant at the Best Western is nearly empty and the Sheriff prefers it that way. When he’d suggested it as a meeting spot for lunch, he noticed she hesitated before responding.  The place changed hands so often that even the locals stopped trying to keep up. It had been a good run for Tom down at the sign shop, though, changing out everything every time someone thought they had the “just the thing” for this dusty cow town north of the Park.  Truth was, there wasn’t really a decent place for lunch in town.

She is late. She is usually late, but that’s alright. He likes her better than the damn kids that the other paper seem to have on rotation. They always march into his office like they are entitled to something, wanting– hell, demanding details he couldn’t possibly give them. How would they like to read that their own Dad had been ground up in the combine before an officer had been out to tell the family? Damn kids. And if you needed one of them to write something, well forget it.

She wasn’t like that. She’d done some nice stories to help the levy pass. And she’d been on a ride-along when they’d found the dead ranch hand wrapped in barbed wire. Poor bastard left the safety off the PTO, and his shirt got caught. Danny said she’d been cool. Sad for the man’s family and all, but not hysterical like you’d expect some women to be.

The door opens and light fills the dreary restaurant for a minute. He can see her in the doorway, peering into the shadows before hurrying over.

“Hey, hi. Sorry I’m late.” He rises to greet her, shakes her hand.

“How have you been?”

She nods.

“Good, busy,” she replies, sliding into the chair across from him. “You know how it is,” she says, though in truth, he doesn’t. His days are quite predictable. It’s different for the guys on shift, of course but the scenery doesn’t change much in his office,  and with that bitch of a clerk he has, he doesn’t much like being there. That’s another thing he never quite understood. How could a woman like this one be such good friends with his clerk?

That was one of the reasons he started asking her to meet over lunch. He hated seeing the two women together. That phrase, “thick as thieves” always sprang to mind. Didn’t matter, she was here now.

He is concerned about some things she’s written about the one deputy. He begins to say so when the waitress comes to take their order. A burger for him and –

“I’ll have the club sandwich and a coffee,” she says and hands the menu back to the waitress. The Sheriff wonders if the waitress is one of the Bailey girls. He thinks so. Whoever it is, the boyfriend’s in the county lockup for knocking her around.

“I could use a bourbon, but I guess it’s a little early in the day,” the reporter says, laughing. “And you’re on duty and all, that wouldn’t do.” He grins back at her.  He needs to talk to her about this Deputy. He knows that she has her suspicions. You don’t have to be a genius to read between the lines of what she’s already written. And God only knows what the clerk has told her.

“Look,” he says.”I know you have a problem with one of the guys . . . “

She shrugs.

“Well, you know, people make mistakes and all. I know some of the things he does look a little  . . . ” He can’t think of the word.

“Illegal?” she offers.

“Well, I was thinking ‘unorthodox,’” he says the word popping into his head just a second later than he needed it.

“You’re going to have to come to grips with this,” she tells him, smiling. “I am worried that this Deputy is a danger to the community.”  A danger? He didn’t expect that.

“Now, I don’t think he’s actually dangerous, he just needs to do better at following procedure.”

She raises her eyebrows, and begins to enumerate her concerns when the food arrives. The bun on the hamburger is cold. He hates that. How difficult would it be for them to throw the bun on the grill for a minute? Burger’s not bad though. She is pulling a spear with a green ruffly end out of one-quarter of her sandwich.

“People are talking to me about things he’s done,” she says.

“Grain of salt,” he interrupts. She passes him the salt shaker. “No, I mean take it with a grain of salt.”

“Oh, I do. One woman could be someone with a vendetta, two could be friends, when you get to five, you start to wonder. Have you read the transcripts from his divorce?”

“No, I don’t pry,” he tells her.  She laughs.

“Well, ‘prying’ is my job. You know that.” She takes another bite of sandwich and it is quiet  for a moment while they eat. “It makes you wonder how he passed the psych eval at the academy.”  The Sheriff says nothing.

“Did he pass the psych eval?”

He sighs.

“Not the first time.”

“Not the first time?  How did he get a second time?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any insight into the academy, I don’t know how they do things up there. And you know he was already in the reserves when I became Sheriff.”

She looks at him and her face says “Give me a break.” His wife often looks that way at him.

“But you made him a regular deputy.”

“I didn’t have any choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“It had already been arranged before I got here.”  He had thought this would be a nice retirement from the patrol. Sheriff of a sleepy little town. The undersheriff did seem to have a lot of irons in the fire and sometimes that relationship seemed upside down to him. He thought when he took this job that he would have to be in charge. Rogue cops. Shit, he didn’t even want to know about it. He didn’t know what to do  anymore.

She is talking quietly about the problem deputy, stacking up the ruffled toothpicks from her sandwich in a neat pile on the side of the plate as she speaks.  Yeah, he knew the guy was a problem, but what was he supposed to do? If they tried to fire him, the union would be on them like white on rice. She is laying out the issues as orderly as her toothpicks, he can just imagine what it would look like in newsprint. She says something specific about the deputy that catches his attention.

I wonder how she knows that, he  muses, nodding his head without even realizing it. The dispatchers like her too, they might have said something, or the bitch of a clerk. Then he remembers seeing her with the coroner, their heads bent together over a file. Shit. That guy always had to be a goddamn hero, strutting around like Clint Eastwood.  More than once he’d walked past them  talking and they’d gone quiet, he was sure of it. For a minute he wonders if the coroner is fucking her, and then dismisses it. Too much of a straight arrow.

She is still smiling and talking though, and looking to him.

“Really, I need your help,”  she says, lifting the coffee to her mouth.

“I don’t know what I can do,” he tells her. He wants to tell her that he wishes she would just forget it, cut the guy some slack. Everybody makes stupid mistakes at some point. “We’re keeping an eye on him,”  he says instead.

She says okay, thank you, but she is clearly disappointed.

“More coffee?” the waitress asks, the pot hovering.

“Sure, why not” he responds, jovial.  When the waitress leaves, he leans in towards the reporter. “When I was in high school, in — “

She names the town, outside Billings.

“Right. Late one afternoon I was out with a bunch of guys. We were young and stupid, you know how guys are. Well, maybe you don’t.”  He sips the coffee, burns his tongue.  Damn. “Anyway, we caught this muskrat down at the edge of the river. It almost seemed tame. You know for such a fat little thing they can run like a sonofabitch.  So, we caught this muskrat and tied a rope around and followed it around along the riverbank for a while.   Then one of the guys decides that we should tie it to the back of the pickup and see how fast it can go.” He doesn’t look at her as he talks, studying his hands instead.

“And we start to drive around. After a little while the muskrat starts to scream, like a rabbit you know?” He looks up and she nods. Her face is totally neutral. “The guys are all laughing like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. One of ‘em says ‘I guess that muskrat don’t run so fast.’ I look out the back window of the pickup and I can see the muskrat bouncing up and down on the road at the end of the rope. It’s not screaming anymore. Just bouncing along and bits of it are flying off. It’s close to suppertime and I know I need to get home. When I get out of the truck I walk around the back and it’s just like a little piece of bloody meat tied there.”

She is looking at him, a clear level gaze. She hasn’t touched her coffee.

“Ah, hell. I don’t know why I told you that,” he says. “I’ve never told anyone that story. I haven’t told my wife that story.”

The waitress sets the ticket down on the table.

“No hurry. I’ll be your cashier when you’re ready.”  Neither of them respond, and she moves off.  He wishes she would say something, but she is just watching him, as if there might be something more to the story.  Something to save him.  But there isn’t.

“If you ever tell anyone I told you this story I’ll say you’re a goddamn liar.”  She nods, and then reaches for the check.  ”No, I’ll get it– you can get it next time,” he says though he doubts there will ever be another next time.

“Okay, thank you. ” she says at last. “Oh God, look at the time. I’m supposed to be in a meeting with the superintendent of schools in three minutes.”

“Tell Victor I said hello.”  She nods and smiles. “I will.”

Then she is gone, out the door and disappearing into the sunshine. It takes him a few minutes to find the waitress and pay the bill. By the time he is headed to the pick-up, the sky is clouded over , a cold wind kicking up out of the north. He wonders if it will snow tonight.

DAYS OF INFAMY

It’s the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base today.  2,458 people were killed; 68 of them were civilians and 55 were Japanese. Though we weren’t officially at war, we’d heard the drumbeat coming since 1938, with the Japanese invasion of China and the aggressions of  Nazi Germany in Britain and other allied countries.

Franklin Roosevelt called December 7th  ”a date which will live in infamy” and promptly declared war on Japan. Hawaii, 2400 miles off the coast of California, was a protectorate of the United States and wouldn’t become the 50th state for 18 more years.

Fewer than 200 Pearl Harbor survivors are still alive today, most of them in their 90s. Yet, every year, on December 7th, we stir up our old nationalist outrage, revisiting this “sneak attack” by the “Japs”, picking at the long-healed wound.

Let us consider for a moment a few instances of our retaliation for the bombing of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base that killed 2,335 servicemen.

Beginning in  1942, 110,00 American citizens of Japanese descent were moved from their homes and businesses to internment camps in the most Godforsaken and isolated places in the United States. At the time there were only 127,000 Americans of Japanese descent in the country. It didn’t matter if your family had been in the United States for many generations. It didn’t matter if you were as little as 1/16th Japanese.  Orphaned infants with “one drop of Japanese blood” (a letter from one official explains) were included in the program.

Lt. General John L. DeWitt, who administered the internment program said in testimony before Congress:  ”I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty. But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.”

DeWitt was more colloquial with newspaper reporters, repeatedly telling them “A Jap’s a Jap.”  The Los Angeles Times wrote an editorial explaining why the internment program was “essential”: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.”

We sent 110,000 of our own people to live in rudimentary barracks in the desert, we took their businesses and their homes and we never gave them back.  There was an attempt at redress 40 years later, when survivors of the camps were each offered a $20,000 payment. On the sites of each camp, there is a monument to the sons of internees who died in service to the United States Armed Forces in World War II.

Three and a half years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on August 6, 1945– after six months of intense fire-bombing against Japan, we dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, immediately killing approximately 80,000 people, almost all of them women, children and the elderly. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing more than 40,000, again almost all of them women, children and elderly.

Of the women, children and elderly killed on those two days, 72,000 died from flash burns, 36,000 percent from falling debris and 12,000 from other causes. In the next two months, more than 120,000 more Japanese civilians would die from burns, radiation sickness and injuries. The cities were obliterated, the whole country- about the size of California-  was poisoned.

The fact that we have a reasonable and cordial relationship with Japan today has a lot more to do with them and their capacity for forgiveness than it does with us.

Before you say, “Oh, well, that was 70 years ago, and things were different then,” I will leave you this to ponder. Remember our invasion of Baghdad, where we were going to be “seen as liberators,” “freeing” Iraq from the oppression of Sadaam Hussein? Remember watching on television the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad at night?  Iraq didn’t have a beef with us. In fact, some administrations had enjoyed friendly relations with Hussein. There were, of course, no weapons of mass destruction, and no involvement in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. My husband and I happened to be in Canada the weekend those airstrikes occurred and their newspapers, in 64 pt. headlines reported it (perhaps more accurately) as “Attack on Iraq!” In that initial unprovoked military action against another country, with whom we were not at war, more than 30,000 Iraqi civilians died.

So, before we ever talk about “Days of Infamy,” let us first look in the mirror.

WALKING WITH HOLLY

Redemption in Real Life

 

It’s late, I’m tired. There’s a long list of things that need my attention before bed. Outside, it’s quite warm for December in Ohio, though its been raining all day. I hear the swish of car tires on wet pavement beyond the front door. It would be easiest to just let the dog, a Boston Terrier named Holly, out the backdoor into the fenced yard. She looks up, earnest and hopeful and I relent: we’ll go on a jaunt around the neighborhood, in the rain.

Holly isn’t our dog. She’s just staying here until someone sees her on Petfinder and decides on the basis of a charming photograph and 50-word paragraph that she’s just the right dog for them. I tell her regularly that we are just one long layover on the adventure of her life, that her “real” home is somewhere out there in the murky future. She just looks at me and tilts her head.

She is an entirely elegant little dog, with a confident strut and a “take-no-prisoners” attitude. She is affectionate, but she never fawns.  I’ve named her after Holly Golightly, Truman Capote’s offbeat heroine in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Just like the other Holly, we can’t be sure exactly what her past is, or her future. We watch her manipulate situations and people, sometimes to her own detriment. We wonder exactly how she has survived and although I do love her I know that she will never, ever be mine.

The email was like so many others that arrive each week. An urgent situation, a dog that was going to be euthanized if not sprung from the shelter. Becky, at Midwest Boston Terrier Rescue, described the dog as a two-year-old alpha female, needing a strong human presence. Somewhere along the way “snarky” became the primary descriptor for this dog, stuck in a kennel 85 miles away.

I’d had some success with another quirky customer, Roscoe the Wonder Dog, who had recently been adopted.  I just didn’t see how I could swing it for this one. That was a Tuesday. On Wednesday night I had to leave for Knoxville, Tennessee and though I would be home in Dayton overnight on Friday, I had to  leave Saturday morning for another two days.

More information trickled through. Apparently the “Little Snarky Girl” had a problem with brooms and mops. She’d had two failed adoptions and there was some thought that she might have bitten the elderly woman who most recently returned her. For a dog that’s a crime punishable by death.

What makes us say yes after saying no time after time? I told Becky I could take her, but not until Monday. “For God’s sake,” one of the directors wrote in a mass email “someone get this girl and put her in a crate, and keep all mops and brooms away from her. At least she’ll be alive.”

There’s a vet in Columbus I’ve worked with before on rescue cases, and I called them. Did they have room to board her until Monday? They did. I gave them my credit card number and cautioned them about mops and brooms and said I’d be in to get her.  A disagreement erupted at the shelter and there was some question about whether or not they’d let us have her, someone there felt so strongly that she needed to be destroyed.

Since I’m clipping the leash to the pink and white houndstooth collar and going out the door with Holly, clearly she did make it out of the shelter alive. When I first saw her in the hallway at Whitehall Animal Hospital, she took my breath away. Boston Terriers are not generally “beautiful” dogs. They are winsome and charming and handsome despite themselves. No one would ever describe Holly as beautiful in the way they might if they were talking about an Irish setter or an Italian greyhound or a Malamute. But she has incredible presence. In the email to say I had her I described her as “the Audrey Hepburn of Boston Terriers.”

Though, of course, we would find out that she didn’t quite have the good manners of Audrey Hepburn. It only took a day or two to realize that brooms are not her only hang-up. She also hates cats. Hates them. Maybe I should have seen the foreshadowing in the way she attacked a small stuffed dog toy– tossing it in the air, pouncing on it, shaking it hard. She was having such a great time with that toy we just laughed. What we were so slow to recognize is that she has incredible prey drive, and it was that same prey drive that sent her careening after one of the cats, with my husband shouting and climbing over the furniture after them. She caught the cat, but I was right there, and lifted her away with a yank. My husband was mad and a momentary tug of war ensued over the dog.

“I’ll deal with it,” I told him and he stomped off. He does love dogs, but really he is also a cat person and he has an almost child-like expectation of fairness in the animal world, where reality is usually brutal. I took the struggling, ki-yi-yi-ying dog and folded her into her crate.

“No. Bad girl.” I said firmly. “No cats. Bad girl. I. Am. So. Disappointed.”

So she must be constantly supervised, or in her crate, or in the yard. Which is not exactly ideal for Holly, but we are managing and there have been no further incidents with cats even though at times we have to pick her up to carry her through the kitchen because the cats come out to tease her.

She is not a well-bred dog– by the American Kennel Club standard , she is too long almost everywhere: muzzle, body, legs. Her head is dainty, yet her overall appearance is powerful. Unlike some of her better-bred distant relations, she never snores and rarely farts. Her intense focus, drive, speed and ability to breathe freely could make her seriously competitive in agility, and if she didn’t hate cats so much, I’d be tempted to keep her, start training. But no, she is not to be my dog– she is just here for a little while, until her real life begins again.

On this drizzly night, we are walking down the street to W.S. McIntosh park, a wide expanse of green where Wolf Creek feeds into the Great Miami River. There’s a playground there, and a picnic shelter, basketball and tennis courts. Often it is full of Canada geese. Tonight it is empty — no children or geese or boys shooting hoops. Just me and Holly strolling along. She stops occasionally to see if she can get away with eating goose droppings, but she cannot.

McIntosh Park was named for a Dayton Civil Rights leader, William Sumpter “Mac” McIntosh, who led the first major civil rights protests in Dayton in February 1961, challenging segregation long before the movement gained national attention. When negotiation failed, he encouraged nonviolent methods to fight for the employment rights for minorities at local department stores, supermarkets and other businesses, organizing picketing, occupation and boycotts when necessary.

In March of 1974,  ”Mac” McIntosh was shot point blank trying to stop the robbery of a jewelry store, across the river from this park, half a mile away, downtown. He was simply walking down Main Street when two young black men ran out of the store with bags of jewelry. He raised his hands and told the boys to stop. One of them did, but the other shot Mr. McIntosh in the heart.

Later that night, Derek Farmer, 16 and his nephew, Calvin Farmer, 18 were apprehended by police at a Dayton housing project. The younger boy dropped the bag of stolen jewelry and money when he raised his hands to surrender. But Calvin Farmer opened fire, killing Dayton Police Sgt. William K. Mortimer.

Though only 16, Derek Farmer had an extensive juvenile record for car theft and armed robbery. He was convicted of two counts of  murders for the deaths of  Mr. McIntosh and Sgt. Mortimer and the jury recommended the death penalty, even though Derek Farmer never pulled a trigger. The judge disagreed and Derek Farmer was sentenced in 1975 to life in prison for murdering Mr. McIntosh, 15 years to life for murdering Sgt. Mortimer and 5 to 25 years for the armed robbery.

The jury was persuaded by Calvin Farmer’s defense attorneys that a similar-looking relative had killed W.S. McIntosh, even though the same jury did convict him of murdering Sgt. Mortimer. Convicted of just a single count of murder,  Calvin Farmer was sentenced to life in prison, but  served only an eight-year minimum sentence before being paroled in 1983.

While in prison, Derek Farmer earned his high school diploma and a college degree. He began a letter writing campaign that helped to bring about reform to a prison system plagued with racial tension, poor health care and substandard living conditions. Those conditions were acknowledged to be the worst at Lucasville, where Derek Farmer was incarcerated for 14 years.

After serving 18 years of his multiple sentences, he was paroled in 1993 and admitted to the Law School at Akron University.  He clerked for District Court Judge Walter Rice. He had to seek dispensation from the Ohio State Supreme Court, who allowed Farmer to take sit the bar exam because of his age (16) at the time of the murders and that he had fired no shots in the commission of the murders, in addition to the prison reforms he sought and his demonstration of true remorse. He passed the bar in 1999, and has had a checkered career as attorney, having been set down for probation at least once.

It’s hard to know what to think about W.S. McIntosh and the Farmer boys. Clearly, Mr. McIntosh must have thought that he could persuade them to do the right thing.  He must have believed that they would see the error of their ways. He pleaded with them to abandon the robbery, and died for his trouble. And what of Derek Farmer’s redemption? If life were scripted by Hollywood, the grown-up Farmer would be played by Laurence Fishburne and he’d be the kind of Noble Attorney, active in civil rights and the defense of the unjustly accused.

But this isn’t Hollywood. This is life, and Derek Farmer, like all of us, has feet of clay. I don’t know if he’s a good attorney or a terrible one, though having one’s license  to practice law stripped for a year because you are accused of having misappropriated clients’ fees might be a bellwether of some sort. On the other hand, there was all of that business with prison reform. We can only guess what W.S. McIntosh might have thought of Derek Farmer’s ability to turn his life around. We can say that Derek Farmer’s redemption has not been celebrated by many, and remains an issue for some officers on the Dayton Police Department.

The dog and I turn west along Wolf Creek. Holly is racing back and forth on the end of her flexi-lead, always slowing before she reaches its limit. She frolics in the drizzle, enthusiastic to be out on a walk. I don’t mean to be glib in comparing the second chance given to a dog to that of a second chance given to a man, but the parallels are striking. Derek Farmer didn’t actually pull the trigger that killed those two men. He was involved in the commission of the crime, and in our judicial system that makes him culpable. He was very young, and yet the jury recommended that he be sentenced to die.

Holly, too, faced a death sentence. I don’t believe for a minute that this dog ever bit a human being.  Never once has she so much as curled a lip at any of us, not even when I was wresting her from her prize, the terrified cat.  But I can see that someone might have been intimidated by her, someone might have thought that she was going to bite them eventually. Even though she was very young, someone at the shelter recommended that she die.

Up the street our house looks warm and inviting, each window lit up on this rainy night. My husband will be concerned that we were out so long. Holly turns to look back at me a moment as she bounds up the steps to the front door.  This is home, for now. This is her redemption.