BREATHING ROOM

It isn’t writer’s block, quite. In fact, the word counts make me look entirely productive: more than 5000 over the span of two nights. And when I say “over the span of two nights,” that’s exactly what I mean. This morning I went to bed at 7 am. Yesterday it was 6:30 a.m. Both times I fell asleep in absolute defeat. I have wrestled the essay two nights running and I am losing.

I want to write about why I live where I live. In the 1970s, “Why I Live Where I Live” was a regular column in Esquire Magazine, each one featuring a different writer. I read them avidly. The two that stick with me are those written by Annie Dillard and Harry Crews, both of whom lived in places where I too had lived. I’m not sure you would have recognized either place if they hadn’t named them. In the course of trying to coax the piece into shape, I re-read Harry’s column. It rambles all over the place too. Esquire notwithstanding, maybe it’s the topic that doesn’t work. Still, just like a dog with her teeth into something, I don’t want to let go.

Where we live is sometimes dictated by necessity, sometimes by whim. (Occasionally you have to wonder if fate intervenes. Why did I pick up and move to Montana, a place I’d never even visited? And then I was stuck there. For years.)

Whether or not you are at home there is at the heart of the matter. I chose Montana and lived there 18 years, but I was never a Montanan. I spent a decade in Boston, but found no peace there. However that city influenced me, it’s since washed off like a watercolor. (Well, maybe some driving habits remain.)  I wasn’t even a citizen of the one place that did feel like home, and couldn’t claim it as anything but borrowed. My whole life was like something out of Goldilocks. Too hard, too soft, too small, too large, too hot, too cold.  Until now.

So why can’t I write about it? I love this town, but when I try to organize those thoughts on paper, they read like something creative from the Chamber of Commerce. When I try to talk about how we came to be here, the essay takes on that terrible pedestrian narrative – “and then, and then, and then.”

Harry Crews said one of the reasons he lives in Gainesville is because three hours away there’s really good fishing. I like horse racing, but I don’t live in Dayton because it’s three hours from the Kentucky Derby. If “really good fishing” was the criteria for living somewhere, you’d think Harry would have moved closer to the beach. Of course, he lived in Gainesville because he taught there, just as we live here because we chose the extraordinary public performing arts high school for our son.

Why I think I’ll stay for ever and always is a whole different question. And for that matter, Harry has long retired from the University of Florida, and yet he lingers quite near there, in Melrose. I lived Gainesville as well; three times. In utero, as a little girl from age 2 to 6 and again when I was 17, and I returned for college. I don’t go near Gainesville now, it’s clearly my geographical tar baby and I’m terrified I might get stuck.  And when I left there in 1980, I didn’t even glance back.

I did take a couple of classes from Harry Crews, though. They were upper-level creative writing courses and I never should have been allowed to sign up. Lucky me the computer didn’t kick me out and neither did Harry. We used to meet at night. We’d have an assignment to read and then we’d talk about it. We’d turn in our papers to Harry and he’d return those that were already graded. I don’t think we ever talked about each other’s writing, and so much the better. We really only cared what Harry thought. One night, after we’d read Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” he asked me to tell the class what I thought about it. So I told them. “A brilliant story,” I said, “but I didn’t really care for it.” (Which I still think is an entirely legitimate opinion.)

Well, Harry was on that like white on rice. “Didn’t care for it! Little Miss Coed here doesn’t care for the great Kafka!”  And so on. Really, I suppose I should have figured that it would have been one of Harry’s favorites. I’d read all his novels in high school, and a love for Kafka should have come as no surprise. I sat there and listened while he raved and tried not to cry.

At the break, I went up and asked for my story. If you didn’t pick up your work, he threw it out.

“Name?”

“Larkin Vonalt.”

“Oh yeah. The one with the people wandering around in the middle of the night.” He shuffled through a few more papers. “Here it is.”  I could see he’d marked it with a B. He paused, though, before handing it over. Leaning back in his chair he looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time.

“Are you kin to Larry Vonalt? He drew the word “kin” out three beats.

“Yes, I’m his daughter.” Harry slapped the desktop so hard people in the room jumped.

“Well, how the hell is he??!! We were the dearest of friends. You tell him, you tell him the next time you talk to him, you tell him Harry Crews sent his luvvvv.”

Well, I did tell him of course, and my father called Harry and they had a fine old time rekindling their graduate school friendship.  What I learned from Harry over the next two semesters was how to not flinch. It has served me well. I wish I could learn from him now how to say why I live where I live.

Why do I live where I live? There’s the history of course– the brothers Wright and their bicycles, their friend, Paul Laurence Dunbar and his poems. Jane Reese and her camera, John Patterson and his rowboats (yes, yes cash registers too) Esther Price and her chocolates. There’s the Federal Courthouse where Lincoln spoke, and damn near every president after  him. There are the 3000 creches at the University of Dayton and the 104,000 inhabitants of Woodland Cemetery, itself a National Historic Landmark. Every mover and shaker Dayton ever had is buried there– but the most visited grave is that of a boy and his dog.

There are the long straight boulevards of fine houses and the cobblestone streets, and the river, like a great grey ribbon curling through the town. Great old industrial sites dot the town, factories and warehouses and great hulking ruins. There are fountains in the river and a skating rink in a park downtown and a baseball stadium where the minor league team boasts the longest sell-out record of any professional sports team. Colored lights flicker underneath the bridges.

I lost my dog here for nine days. Everyone wanted to help: letter carriers, A.T. & T. repair crews, UPS, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s office, college students, homeless men and women. A local mover and shaker wrote about her in his blog. Days went by without a word. It was like she’d fallen off the edge of the earth. The hardest call each day was to street maintenance, to see if they’d found her body. When she was finally spotted, five miles across town in a wooded area behind the Hospice, nearly the entire staff became involved in our reunion. I’ll never forget the euphoria that swept over me as she raced into my arms, and I’ll never forget the UPS man dancing a little jig on my front porch that afternoon, upon hearing the good news. “The guys are gonna be so  happy to hear this, we’ve all been looking for her.” When I brought pastries to the hospice to thank them again on the anniversary of her return, the whole story was written up (badly, but it was a sweet gesture) in the Dayton Daily News as if the return of a lost dog is a story that ought to be newsworthy. Something like that can make you partial to a town.

Just a few weeks ago they named one of the bridges across the Great Miami River the Richard Holbrooke Memorial Bridge after the late American diplomat.  In 1995, Holbrooke brokered a peace treaty here in Dayton  that ended the Balkan conflict. He wrote about Dayton in his memoirs:

There was also a real Dayton out there, a charming Ohio city, famous as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers. Its citizens energized us from the outset. Unlike the population of, say New York, Geneva or Washington which would scarcely notice another conference, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airport hailed Dayton as the “temporary center of international peace”. The local newspapers and television stations covered the story from every angle, drawing the people deeper into the proceedings. When we ventured into a restaurant or a shopping center downtown, people crowded around, saying that they were praying for us. Warren Christopher was given at least one standing ovation in a restaurant. Families on the air base placed “candles of peace” in their front windows, and people gathered in peace vigils outside the base. One day they formed a “peace chain”, although it was not quite large enough to surround the sprawling eight-thousand-acre base.

When I read that out loud to my husband, I have to stop for a second to regain my composure. Why should that make me cry? It’s not sad. That’s Dayton for you. Not always the most sophisticated, perhaps, but hopeful and optimistic and caring. Even when the city keeps getting cut off at the knees– the departure of GM was dreadful, but NCR leaving by far the worst betrayal. (No doubt John Patterson rolled over in his grave several times.) Even when that happens, the city is like a scrappy little terrier– up on its feet and ready to go.

But when I try to write about it I get tangled up in keeping all the details straight and carefully drawing each line on the dot-to-dot. I try to keep my own story in there as well– after all, it’s supposed to be why I live here, not why those other 142,000 do. (Or a million if you want to count the outlying areas.)

I’d like to tell the story of the drunk guy that helped us unload the moving truck the hot August night we arrived here, or the woman who lived across the alley from us and her beautiful daughter and how the daughter died one night while they were making dinner. Or the man across the street who helped us carry a treadmill up the stairs and the stricken figure of a dog to the car, has cut the grass, strung the lights, and borrowed every tool we have, all the while keeping us apprised on neighborhood gossip. There are still so many things I don’t want to forget. But I just can’t seem to make the words cooperate.

It’s nights like that where my skill as a writer is less than useful. The sentences are pretty. They scan well. The metaphors are clever or apt. But it’s all so boring I can hardly stand to read it out loud to myself. Two nights of that is about enough to make me wild with despair.

Now comes the question of what to do? This experiment, this 30 Days Notice, was supposed to be neatly tied up and put away two days ago, on the 30th. I cannot seem to climb over this one piece and there are still two more lying in wait on the other side. Am I supposed to just give up and walk away after devoting two days of my life to it? Or should I go on wrangling the sentences until at last they move forward together? Maybe I just say forget it about the other two stories and move on to the next thing, closing down 30 Days Notice two days overdue instead of four?

I needed breathing room to sort it out. I used to sleep on this sort of thing, but I’m so exhausted by the time I fall into bed in the morning, that the sleep is hard and dreamless.

So today I let myself breathe a bit, hugging my sides like an exhausted runner, and I made some decisions.

I’m going to save “Why I Live Where I Live” for another project. It may take 10,000 words to tell that story. Or a hundred thousand. There will be one more piece here tomorrow and after that, a little wrap-up. And though the curtains are coming down on this show, I’ve left the stage door open– and I’ll leave a note with directions to the next theatre. One of these days I’ll figure it out, and then I’ll tell you how it is that I came home at last.

 

AMBIENT LIGHT

A Writer Talks About Photography

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 126. It was under the Christmas tree for me when I was six years old. The first photo I took with it was of a pen full of hound dogs, neatly foreshadowing the hundreds, nay, thousands of pictures I’ve taken of hound dogs since.  It made little square pictures, all of them fuzzy because while Kodak was making these dandy little cameras for middle America, they were outfitting them with the cheapest little plastic lenses ever. It was like making a photograph through the bottom of a plastic wine glass.  Did we even realize how awful they were?  Looking at these snapshots now really is like looking at your own hazy memories, everyone is no more than a suggestion.

Eight years later the Christmas tree once again bore photographic fruit. This time it was a much nicer camera, a Rollei B35, at the time the smallest 35 mm camera made. The “B” is for “Belichtungsmesser”– a lightmeter, which was built into the front of the camera. (You can see a B35 in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Melinda Dillon used one to take photos of the landing of the spaceship.) I didn’t have the opportunity to take a picture of any spaceships, but I did photograph chocolate shops in Brussels, friends eating herring outside the Hague, and a shot that showed early promise– I turned around and got a photograph of the hordes of tourists all taking snapshots of the Notre Dame.

I was already cast in bronze as a writer. Of course, I planned to be an actress and took to my high school stage as the Fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof, and Mrs. Smith in The Bald Soprano. I couldn’t sing well enough for the big roles in the musicals (the Fiddler, you might remember, is not Tevye, but a mute) and when I was cast as one of a dozen nuns in the Sound of Music I hotly told the theatre teacher, Don Oickle, that I couldn’t waste my time with such things. Which was probably the truest thing I ever said in that room. I was already editor of the school paper, after all, and for the first time ever I had an English teacher who both recognized my talent and raised the bar so high for me, that for the first time in my life I was having to work at writing.

I liked my camera, but I didn’t  think of it as anything other a means of recording memorable events, and always on slides. My stepfather had a very nice camera, a Leica IIIf from the 1950s and he shot (exclusively) Agfa slide film, so I shot Agfa too. We had a lovely Rollei projector and a good slide projected across the room can make a breath-taking image. They’re just a little inconvenient to casually leaf through. In time I started experimenting with different films, taking “artsy” photographs with an array of strange film from Ilford. I remember well a series of “eggs on a table top” that all came out cyan. My first year in college I stretched myself with the camera, shooting in the rain, at the beach, and all kinds of scandalous images that I’m surprised the local photo place deigned to print.

These were, however, good enough to get me into art school. On a trip to New York before I went off to MassArt, I “borrowed” the  Leica, and shot several rolls of the Chelsea Hotel, including a wonderful portrait of the famous hotel’s famous manager Stanley Bard. The Chelsea (in those days anyway) was very plain. Radiator pipes that banged all night long, narrow beds with thin blankets. But the wrought iron staircases were extraordinary, and the lobby was resplendent with boys in leather and raccoon-eyed girls, the celebrated and the notorious, cheek by cheek. I think that week is probably when I first started to use the camera as a different way to see. When I (ahem) “returned” the Leica, I left a roll of film in it, about half the exposures gone. I understand that when my stepfather went to pick up “his” roll of photos that he was quite bewildered by half of what he got back from Eckerd’s.

At Mass Art, I studied with Nick Nixon, who must be one of the most patient people alive.  My little Rollei had long since packed up (salt water and whatnot is hell on cameras) and with the first installment of my student loan, I bought an Olympus OM10 with a motor drive and two lenses.  Nick’s work is unflinching, capturing the beauty in the faces of people with AIDS,  people in nursing homes, the blind, the sick . . . and thank God, school children and city scapes. I wanted to take photographs like that, but I was shy about approaching people, so I shot almost exclusively with the telephoto lens. Yeah, it was a cop-out.

Even worse, I couldn’t get a grasp on exposure– I struggled with the light meter and most of the time just ignored it. I still can’t tell you exactly what “bracketing” or “matrix metering” is.  I understood why it was difficult to shoot a photograph of a black horse in the snow, and what to do about it, but I couldn’t explain it to you.  I suppose that’s like a writer who never bothered to learn to spell. It’s not that I meant to be disrespectful and careless. I was just in a rush to get the photograph. Somewhere I read a statistic that professional photographers believed that about five percent of the shots they took were successful. Five percent! That was one in twenty. I could produce a reasonable photograph one time out of twenty, well, most of the time.

I started in filmmaking at MassArt, drifted to photography and then upstairs to the Studio for Interrelated Media– “Performance Art.” There I built installations, made tape loops, shot film, and piled them all together to tell a story. Even though I was using various visual arts techniques to produce the finished piece, at the core all of my installations was the essence of it all: writing. I might have been running from words, but they were chasing me down.

The Olympus with telephoto lens and motor drive weighed in at nearly three pounds– which is a lot to carry on your shoulder day after day. Though I kind of hated to give it up, years later I finally packed it away in a box on the shelf for a much lighter Nikon SLR.  I was a long hold out for film. I’d see film stock from different companies disappear forever and each time would die a little  inside. Every time I had film developed, there was grousing about the expense. I understood the transient nature of a computer file though. Formats change, things disappear, they can’t be read down the line.

Daguerreotypes from the 1830s are still very much with us. Henry Fox Talbots “calotypes” of prints made with a silver solution fixed with salt still exist. You can make new prints from very old glass negatives. I love old photographs, particularly those of dogs, but also of family. My grandfather was an avid photographer and chronicled his family’s life with a medium format Speed Graphic, which belongs to me now. I have a photograph of Grampa, when he was just two years old, sitting on the lap of his grandmother, Elizabeth Tressler, who was born in 1837. So here’s a photograph taken in 1910 that is of someone I knew very well, well into my adult life,9 in the company of a woman who was born 125 years before me. I look at this image and I am connected to her. I can see that connection– he’s sitting on her lap!

I hated to change over to a format as tenuous as a computer file, and if the risks of losing the image weren’t bad enough, there was the trouble with capturing the image. I’d used friends’ digital cameras, snapping a picture for them at school functions and the like. There was no mistaking that lag between pushing the button and the shutter opening.  That  might be fine for taking pictures of a house or a tractor or an African violet, but what about shooting dogs, horses, children? You’d never be able to capture anything. They’d be long gone before the camera even cooperated.

Well, you know what comes next right? Nikon made a digital version of my beloved SLR, and it had no shutter lag. So I capitulated and agreed that the camera should be under the Christmas tree for me, 39 years after my first Instamatic. It’s been wonderful. Given that I never did master the technical aspects of photography, the digital format allows me shoot dozens of images to get the one I want.  This year, as part of a fundraiser, I used it to take pictures of pets with Santa Claus. I know, having had my owndog’s picture made with Santa Claus, that it’s usually one shot and you’re done. Not for me. I photographed each dog, as many times as necessary, until each owner had an image that made them smile. We would have gone broke trying to be that accommodating with Polaroid film.

None of my photographs has ever stopped anyone in their tracks.  Well, one maybe. In 1998, a friend and I spent 9 days crossing Wyoming on US 20. One evening, I took some photographs of an old fire truck parked under a sodium vapor lamp at the aptly named “Hell’s Half Acre.”  They were slides, and some of them were pretty fantastic. I chose the best one and entered, for fun really, in the Gallatin County, Montana Winter Fair. I should have had copies made, but I didn’t. Imagine how surprised and delighted I was to find that the photo had been named “Best Overall Photo” at the fair and “Grand Champion.”  When the fair was ending and I went to pick up the slide, and some other prints, my ribbons and prize money, none of it was there. Someone else had picked it up. At first I thought it must be a mistake, but as no one came back with them it was pretty clear they’d been stolen. You had to wonder about the man who usually won the photo contest at the fair, if he could be that small?  They reissued the prize money  and rosettes but the picture was lost forever and now Hell’s Half Acre itself is gone.

I take lots of pictures of the place I live, my family, some of the food that we conjure up in the kitchen, and of course, the dogs. One schmuck, an acquaintance, posted online a series of photographs he’d taken of Dayton. They could not have been less flattering. They weren’t even honest, just bad snapshots of parking lots and vacant houses and the quality was horrible– they might have been taken with my old Instamatic. When I shared my own photographs of Dayton with him he said they were the “typical yuppie bullshit” and called me a name. Another person looked at some photos I’d taken along the river  in Mississippi and saw in them a condemnation, when really that was not what I meant at all. So I think I’m not very successful in using photographs to communicate.

What I am good at is that I can make a great snap shot, an informal portrait. I can take a picture of a building or a harness horse or a carnival ride and make you go “Hm, that’s interesting.” No one’s ever going to want to buy them and put them on the wall and that’s fine with me. They work for me as illustrations, something to make the stories bigger. Photography for me was always about seeing, and writing is about feeling. Each photograph may indeed be worth a thousand words, but when I look at a compelling image, the journalist’s old maxim rises up in me: who, what, where, when and why. I see the photograph and I hunger for the details.

The noted photographer Shelby Lee Adams was a close friend of my late father’s. He is best known for his images of Appalachian family life, and those images are stories just begging to be told.  There has been an ongoing controversy about his work and whether or not it is exploitive of its subjects.  These people are poor, to some they might even seem grotesque– but surely no more (and perhaps less) than the homeless on the streets of L.A. or New York, or the babies with AIDS that Nick Nixon photographed. Or the children made famous  by Diane Arbus’ work. If we look at a photograph of another human being and it makes us uncomfortable, do we then deem it exploitive? Utter nonsense. When I see Adams’ photographs, I don’t feel pity or compassion or contempt– I feel curiosity. I want to know more about what’s going on in the picture, how these people are related to each other, what the circumstances are. It’s not up to me to judge their lot in life, but I greatly appreciate the glimpse into their world. When Dad was alive we used to look at these images together and he would explain to me what he knew about them. He and his wife were invited to go to Kentucky for a “Dinner on the Ground” with Shelby and came back with more great stories to go with these faces.

I like to take photographs, but I am not a photographer. I’m a writer, so I want to use words to tell these stories, but a single image catapults that person into our lives front and center, if only for as long as it takes to turn the page.  Over my desk hangs a large print of “Chester and His Hounds,” which Shelby Lee Adams made in 1992, and when I glance  up to really look it, it always makes me grin. But then I always had a thing for pictures of hound dogs.

The Truth About the Amish

photo by N. Bourne

This horse is dead. He worked hard every day of his life and when his owner thought he could do  better with a new horse, he hauled this Belgian to New Holland, Pennsylvania, and sold him directly to slaughter. It didn’t matter if there was someone at the auction looking for a draft horse, or a rescue wanting to give him well-earned pasture rest– this horse never made it to the sale ring. Instead, they slapped a white USDA sticker with a bar code to his back and sealed his fate.

What became of this gentle giant, bound for slaughter?  If he was lucky, he went Canada, where he  was killed with a captive bolt or .22 bullet before butchering. (Because he was a large fellow, and apparently sound, and because the Canadian customs demand it, it’s likely that all the horses on that trip arrived at their final destination in reasonable condition. )

For the horses whose luck has truly run out,  they are shipped 2000 miles to a Mexican slaughter-house. Shipped in mixed lots, some are dead on arrival, or sick, or badly injured. Some abattoirs there do have a captive bolt gun, it fires a mechanical rod into the brain, instead of a bullet.  But the method most often used is a small Puntilla knife. Lisa Sandberg, in a 2007 story for the Houston Chronicle, noted that it is a point of pride to be able to drop the horse with one quick stab that severs the spinal cord. But too often, as on the day she was there, the Apuñalador is inept:  she watched as a roan mare was stabbed 13 times along the back before she fell. The horses are then hoisted into the air by a rear leg, paralyzed but still alive, their throats are cut and they bleed to death.

When equine slaughter facilities were closed in this country, the number of horses shipped across the US border to Mexico increased more than 300 percent.

Knowing this, it’s hard not to support the return of equine slaughter to the United States. I’d much prefer it if there was no need or demand for horses to be killed for their meat. Yes, they are livestock, but our relationship with horses is more complicated than that. If we could mandate and insure a dignified and humane death for each horse by legalizing and stringently regulating slaughter in our own country, and closing the door for export to Mexico– then we could at least stop that part of the nightmare.

But right now, that’s what the future held for this big gelding: a trip to Canada, or one to Mexico– with no possible chance of reprieve. No one could save him, because the seller decided to get a guaranteed price (perhaps less) by selling directly to the kill buyer than taking their chances in the auction ring.  Who does that to their horses? Who steals from them their very, very last chance?

The Amish, that’s who.

It’s not just plow horses the Amish consign to this terrible fate every single Monday all year long. It’s their buggy horses too, Saddlebreds, Standardbreds, Morgans. Often underweight, scarred by ill-fitting harness, lame from something awful, or just lame from a stone bruise.  Frequently their forelocks have been shaved, so as not to cause the farmer inconvenience with the overcheck bridle– never mind that the forelock is invaluable in aiding the horse’s comfort in fly season. They bring in a horse whose stamina is falling off, or one that can’t go so fast anymore, trotting mile after mile on pavement. No point in feeding an animal that can’t pull its own weight, and theirs as well.  (New Holland sells other kinds of livestock too– pigs and sheep and cattle.  Notable among these were some Amish-owned Holsteins, their udders swollen as big as medicine balls, dragging on the ground between their legs.)

Outside the auction house, all day long, Amish buggy horses stand tethered on pavement. They have no water. Often the check rein (which keeps the horse’s head up) is left fastened. They are still in traces, bearing the weight of the buggy shafts. All day they stand like this, and then stiff and miserable, are expected to trot briskly home in the failing light. When they are too old, or too tired, or used up they will be discarded here and sent directly to slaughter.

Oh, the bucolic simple life of the Amish! How charming the plain folk, the tidy farms, the children in straw hats and dark bonnets, the hard-working, the humble and the meek. What a load of hogwash. You want adjectives for the Amish? What about shrewd, selfish, oppressive, and cruel?

In 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV, took ten Amish schoolgirls, age 6 to 13, hostage in their school in Nickel Mines, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He let all of the adults and the boys leave the school, and then shot all of the girls and himself. Five of the girls survived. The Amish community made national headlines by declaring their immediate and complete forgiveness of the gunman and support for his family. One can’t help but wonder if they’d have been so quick to turn the other cheek if it had been their sons who had been lined up and executed.

Donald Kraybill, a scholar of Amish life (who went on to sell his book about the atrocity, Amish Grace : How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy to Lifetime Television for a made-for-tv movie) said the Amish willingness to forgo vengeance “does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong, but rather constitutes a first step toward a future that is more hopeful.”  The Amish have made “forgiveness” part of their stock in trade.

I haven’t forgiven Elmer Zimmerman.

Elmer Zimmerman is an Amish farmer, also in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He and his brother Ammon operated a large commercial dog breeding operation. During a state inspection of the kennel by the Pennsylvania State Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement in July 2008,  the two brothers were cited for extreme heat, insufficient bedding and wire kennel floors that the dogs’ feet could fall through. In addition they were instructed to have 39 dogs examined and treated for fly bites and flea infestation. The brothers chose not to comply with the state’s recommendations. Instead they shot and killed 80 dogs. 80 dogs that died without a name, without a kind word, without a comforting hand. 80 dogs that died terrified.

“The decision by commercial breeders to kill healthy dogs instead of paying to repair a kennel and seek veterinary care is alarming and will likely outrage many people,” state Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff commented.  “Until our state’s outdated dog law is changed, kennel owners may continue to kill their dogs for any reason they see fit, even if it is simply to save money.”  (Pennsylvania HB 2525 which had been in the works at the time of the Zimmerman’s rampage, was passed in October 2008, requiring that dogs may only be euthanized by a veterinarian.)

In Lancaster county alone, there are more than 300 commercial dog breeders, some of them with more than 500 dogs, and the great majority of them are Amish-owned. Up until November 2009, when then Governor Ed Rendell signed into law new anti-cruelty measures, Amish-owned breeding dogs were subject to primitive de-barking by having a metal rod shoved down their throats, often breaking the jaw and lower teeth in the process.  Farmers were docking tails and cutting off dewclaws when puppies were several weeks old. Ears were being cropped with kitchen shears. Caesareans were being performed on whelping bitches without benefit of anesthesia or sedation.

While the rights of responsible individuals to breed dogs should be protected and supported, no one has the right to subject dogs to neglect, abuse and outright torture.

The Amish are not educated beyond the 8th grade. They are entirely patriarchal. They sell the “product” of “Amishness” but it is false. Despite their evident piety, they choose to ignore the teachings of Jesus that aren’t convenient to their lifestyle. Do they not see themselves in Proverbs 12:10?  ”A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast; but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, areas of Ohio, Indiana and fifteen other states with a significant Amish population see a fair amount of income from Amish-related tourism. There is often an implied, if not an explicit reluctance to tarnish the image of the noble, gentle, Plain Folk. Law enforcement may turn a blind eye to a victim that goes to great effort to report a crime in the community. (One girl’s mother had all of her daughter’s teeth pulled out after the girl used a neighbor’s telephone to contact a battered women’s shelter to tell them she was being raped by her brothers.) State departments of education allow for the Amish to stop attending school at age 13. The Amish are expected to police themselves, but their system of crime and punishment is like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The accused confesses and is forgiven, the victim is punished.

The Amish are a cult. But because they are picturesque and we are nostalgic for earlier, simpler times, we not only accept their eccentricities, we celebrate them. We buy their faceless dolls, their dark quilts, their cheese and chairs. We buy their myth.

It doesn’t take much looking to find one account after another as to how cruel the Amish are to their children, their cash crop of puppies, their exhausted, broken, beaten and fearful horses. How an animal is treated is surely the measure of a man, and it’s not surprising that the problems in the Amish community extend to child abuse, battered wives, rape and incest.  (An extensive article in the January 2005 issue of Legal Affairs describes those problems in chilling and absolutely sickening detail. ) Isn’t this what you might expect though, from men who condemn their loyal servant  to a terrible death in exchange for a few hundred dollars?  Surely no less is to be expected from someone who denies them that one last tender mercy.

For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. Ecclesiastes 3:19

RESTITUTION

I am not a cat person. I like cats, but I have never longed to have one. When I was in the first grade, a classmate offered me a “calico kitten” and I asked my mother if we might be able to have a kitten. When we went to pick her up she turned out to be a plain brown mackerel tabby, who I named (with a singular lack of imagination) Whiskers.

Although there were plenty of “family” cats in the intervening years, it was nearly  two decades before I chose another cat for myself.  I lived in a decrepit old house in Dorchester, as close to a ghetto as Boston had. The apartment had mice, and traps were too ghastly to contemplate and poison a non-starter. So, off I went with the twenty dollars birthday money that my great-aunt had sent me, to adopt a cat from the MSPCA. (Oh, for the days when you could adopt a cat for twenty bucks!)

Cats and dogs were not separated there, and I chose the unflappable orange tabby with the extra toes. The incessant barking didn’t phase him a bit– when I held my palm flat against the front of his crate, he rubbed his face against it. This was Kaspar Mauser (named with a nod to Werner Herzog’s film about the mysterious German boy: Kaspar Hauser: Every Man for Himself and God Against All.) He would be with me for thirteen years, and for a short period of time, he was my only pet– and he was a very, very nice cat. (And an excellent mouser.)

In 1991, I drove from my parents’ house in Florida to my new life in Montana. I had decided to take the blue highways, steering well clear of interstates. It was uncomfortable to drive my little diesel Volkswagen Rabbit amidst cars and trucks traveling much faster than we could manage, and anyway, I thought I’d see more of the country that way.

My mother came along for the ride, and the very first day out,  in Apalachicola, Florida, we found an emaciated foxhound. Sitting in the Gibson Inn that night, I realized that no one would know if we rescued the dog and carried her off with us. Now, you have to understand that  inside this un-air-conditioned Volkswagen Rabbit (“Thumper,” named for its grey color and its ongoing thumpthumpthumpthump sound characteristic to diesel engines) were all the things I thought I’d need to start my new life: a few bits of crockery, an omelet pan, a saucepan, a few good knives, a box of my favorite books, sheets, quilts, clothes, three pairs of Doc Martins, my typewriter, and hanging off the back, my mountain bike. In addition, there was my little black dog of uncertain origin, Elinor Jane Pinkerton Schwartz, and in a large carrier, sitting on a blue ice pack wrapped in a towel, Kasper Mauser. It was tidy, but there was not much extra space.

In the morning, while settling the bill, I asked about the miniature dog house sitting on the counter.

“Oh, we’re raising money to build an animal shelter here, we don’t have one,” the clerk said, handing me ten dollars change. I put the ten dollars in the little doghouse and made up my mind. It took about three minutes driving around “downtown” Apalachicola (population 2000)  to locate the dog, curled up asleep on a sidewalk. I pulled over, bundled her onto my mother’s lap and sped away.  When we brought her to a veterinarian in Panama City, sixty miles up the road, we found that she weighed 35 pounds.

I confessed our dognapping to the vet. (After all, who would want to take credit for a dog in such condition.) He looked at me rather sternly and said, “My best friend is the vet in Apalachicola, and when I tell him what you’ve done . . . he is going to be  just thrilled.” He grinned, we grinned, and they gave her a bath, sent us off with a new collar and leash, stuff for her ear mites and fleas and many blessings. Now the car was even more crowded.

At this point, you’re saying “I thought this piece was going to be about a cat.” Well, it is. We just have to get there.

I’d mapped the route to Montana poring over AAA guidebooks and old atlases. We enjoyed Wintzell’s Oyster House in Mobile, and William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. We only drove past Graceland, but we spent hours on Beale Street. We looked for Ernest Hemingway in Piggott, Arkansas and quoted Hamlet in Ellsinore, Missouri. The starving dog was putting on weight, but when passersby looked askance at us, we were quick to volunteer that she had been recently rescued.

There was so much to see and do in Kansas City we decided to stay at the Best Western there for a couple of days. The motel had an interior corridor to the rooms, so I was very surprised the first evening there to hear something mewing on the other side of the door. I opened the door and there stood a grey cat.

“Hi Kitty, what are you doing here?”

“Meow,” she replied, looking me straight in the eye.

“Maybe she got locked in the motel by mistake,” my mother suggested. As I was going out to get ice anyway, I walked her to the exit and opened the door for her and out she went.

In the morning when we went out to the car, the cat hurried over to us from underneath a nearby tree. It was then that I noticed that she had caught one leg through her flea collar and was wearing it bandolier style. I bent down and undid the collar and re-fastened it around her neck. The hair under her elbow and around her midsection had been rubbed down to the skin. “There you go, that should be better,” I told her.

We got in the car, and went off to visit the home and studio of Thomas Hart Benton. When we came back to the motel, after a great dinner at Stroud’s, the little grey cat was nowhere to be seen.  We were quite relieved. We’d been in the room about half an hour when I heard it again.

“Meow.” There she was, back at the door. I let her in this time, and walked down to the desk to see if they knew anything about the cat. Maybe she’d been separated from a previous guest, who, one might hope, was feverishly searching for her.

“Oh, is that your cat?” the desk clerk asked. “She’s scooted inside several times today and always goes right to the door of your room. We thought maybe she’d gotten away from you this morning.”

The cat slept on the end of the bed that night, and in the morning I called several animal shelters. They all wanted to know if I was in Kansas City, Kansas or Kansas City, Missouri. It was Kansas, as it turns out, but at the time I thought Missouri. I got directions to the shelter and drove the little grey cat there.  When the animal control officer saw the bald spot on (from the flea collar) she said “Oh, she’ll probably be euthanized because of that.”

“What? That’s just some missing hair. It will grow back.”

I can’t tell you how many times I wish I’d just turned around and gone back to the car with the cat. But I didn’t. I did the sensible thing and I have yet to get over it. That cat had a message for me, and I failed to understand. I failed her. I failed miserably.

We went on to Montana. The little grey cat was in all likelihood dead before the day ended. We’d have done better to leave her on the streets of Kansas City. We were naive then. We believed “animal shelter” meant that they would take care of the dogs and cats, provide whatever reasonable care they might need and find them a loving home. We might as well have believed in unicorns. What difference did it make where we found her, Kansas City, Kansas or Kansas City, Missouri when they were just going to kill her?

In Montana, there were more cats; a trio of kittens I gave my husband for his 50th birthday, a pair of blue-eyed, cream-colored cats to deal with the newspaper office mice, along with assorted barn cats, and stray cats that people dumped off to fend for themselves in the country. We found Kaspar dead on a hay bale one morning, as if he’d been leaping and died mid-flight.

In 2007, we moved to Ohio. One autumn day I went to a tag sale at my son’s school. The school had once been a convent, and it is set on the top of a hill in a wooded, park-like setting. There were many great things at this sale, and it was rather lightly attended. My arms were full when I stepped out the door heading for my car.

“Meow.”

I knew that voice. Setting the box down, I looked at the cat before me. She was a half-grown kitten, a brown mackerel tabby with an orange spot on her forehead. Did you think she’d be grey? I did.  She continued to look right at me. “Meow,” she repeated.

“Well, just a minute, let me put this in the car.”  She followed me. I picked her up and set her in the car and drove her home. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

 I think I get the message now. We don’t take cats to shelters, so few make it out alive. The regret I feel for the little grey cat lives on long past whatever natural life she might have hoped to enjoy.  The brown mackerel tabby from the school lives with us, of course, along with the two cream-colored office cats, and is sleeping on top of the piano as I write. She is a kind of restitution for the little grey cat, the most I can hope for.

 

 

ONE HUNDRED WORDS

An Exercise.

(Let me see if I can still write “short.” And no, these words don’t count.)

It begins with leather work gloves, the name inked at the wrist. They are left behind in the Library Reading Room. Their owner seems inordinately pleased at their return. The banter is comfortable. A beer? I suggest. It is coffee instead, and a long evening together watching my hound in false labor, following false pregnancy. She chooses a rolled up pair of socks to be her puppy. Nearly 20 years later, the dog is gone, and mourned. The gloves are tucked in the basket on the closet shelf, their sweet owner napping on the living room sofa, waiting for me to finish.

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.