free to good home

He was the standard shaggy brown dog of indiscriminate lineage that one encounters on walks through somewhat seedy neighborhoods the world over, and has been commercially popularized by years of shaggy mutt stories. He weighed perhaps forty pounds, and may have been a bit heavier if he was fed regularly, and was shaggy the way terriers are shaggy if they've skipped a few too many trips to the groomer's.

No one could remember exactly when he arrived in the neighborhood; it wasn't that there had always been a brown stray just in the corner of one's peripheral vision, sitting in the park or trotting down the back alley behind the grocery store or investigating the playground or churchyard. At some point the dog must have been abandoned or arrived on its own, but no one could recall a time before the presence of the dog.

There were explanations that it wasn't actually a recent arrival, that it was the tenth generation of shaggy street dogs, from a field dog kept by one of the original farmers, bred down through the years and becoming a free range mascot, but while the Historical Society tried to oblige most seekers of local knowledge, there was in fact no evidence whatsoever of a historic link to the canine. Not that dogs frequently appear in newspapers, of course, but one high school senior had written her final thesis on the story of the dog, and had read through most letters and diaries in the town archives, without ever once finding a reference to a town dog.

But everyone knew it was, essentially, a part of the fabric of the community, for when an overprotective phobic new resident sought to have the dog impounded by the dog catcher, and, when that didn't result in any action at all started a campaign to trap, neuter, and vaccinate the stray -- hoping that it would then be adopted out and not allowed to maintain a free range lifestyle -- even the mayor, a retired welder and lifelong citizen, stood up publicly for the dog, reminding the newcomer that the city code didn't include a leash law, nor were there any reports of animal aggression that would justify the use of city resources to go after a dog that had been in the town since his boyhood. The anti-stray brigade managed to pick up a few supporters, but most people agreed with the mayor, that the dog had been here longer than the newcomer and was a lot easier to live with.

The mascot of the football team was technically a bulldog, but there was something about the silhouette on the football helmets and booster team paraphernalia that suggested a canine of less pure ancestry, and most school children assumed the animal on their school t-shirt was the town dog, not a bulldog. After all, the only bulldog in town belonged to the retired police chief, and had never been known to do anything more worthwhile than sleep under the oak tree in the backyard and march in the homecoming parade.

Everyone recognized the stray, it was seen by the library, the pizza parlor, the car dealership, the hair salon, even by the bleachers for home games and track meets. No one really took responsibility for the dog; no one left out scraps, for fear of attracting squirrels or skunks; no one tried to build a winter shelter or lean-to of sorts to protect it from storms, for no one knew where the dog made its nest.

The last-call crowd would catch glimpses of the dog as they wove down the sidewalks to their cars; the insomniacs and before-sunrise runners would see the dog as they made their way through the neighborhood. At fires and police calls and ambulance arrivals at all hours of the night, he would be spotted, somewhere, trotting along, with a mission and sense of purpose no one questioned.

There was some sense that he was the protector of the town, a gargoyle brought to life where there was otherwise only the clapboard of the Congregationalist church; a spirit perhaps related to the Greek god Pan, something of a troublemaker but not out to cause harm; or even a reincarnation of a fireman who had died rescuing an elderly woman or a doctor who had sacrificed his own life treating the town's citizens in the overwhelming outbreak of smallpox that coincided with the flu pandemic of 1908.

The Tuesday bocce group held that the dog was the spirit of a local farmer who committed suicide when his farm was foreclosed upon during the depression, and felt that rather than being a protector he was just lost, and assumed the form of a dog instead of a ghost or poltergeist because it was actually easier to haunt the town as a dog rather than as a disembodied spirit. The poker group that met on every third Thursday firmly held that seeing the dog was a warning to look to the security of the domestic front, and had stories of finding out about spousal affairs, mysterious leaks in the bank account, stolen credit card numbers, lost letters, untimely pregnancies, all foretold by seeing the scruffy brown dog.

The preacher would look out into the churchyard while offering counseling or composing a sermon, and if the dog happened to be nosing around, he would be inspired to advise forbearance and forgiveness, even though his own temperament were for action and engagement. If the school principal caught sight of the dog in the playground while disciplining a truant, cheat, or disruptive student, he was much more likely to issue a warning and recommend some community service rather than detention, expulsion, or contacting the student's parents.

There was nothing statistically unusual about the town that could be attributed to any influence from the dog, benign or otherwise; the life expectancy, car accident rates, crime statistics, school test scores, football ability, divorce rate: all of these were very firmly within the averages of the statistics published by the Census Bureau, and while the dog could just as easily be a vengeful spirit of a fatality from a massacre as a protecting spirit from a compassionate Other, it was felt that the dog belonged, just as surely as anyone else.

One day, the dog was gone. It wasn't noticed at first; after all, days would go by between an individual's sightings, always just in the peripheral vision, and it wasn't a regular topic of conversation in the town, just an acknowledged fact. No one really noticed that they hadn't seen the dog in a while, until the resident who had originally agitated for his capture was overheard in the grocery store, commenting to a neighbor that she was glad the animal had stopped trailing her around, it had just been spooky, how it appeared wherever she happened to be, but it had been weeks now since her last sighting, and she was starting to finally sleep better.

No one had heard of the dog choosing individual residents before, and people started to conjecture. Was she telling the truth? Had the dog been haunting her, or was she an unreliable witness, a woman who would embroider any story so heavily that the actual facts would disappear? Had she been responsible for the dog's disappearance, or was she honestly merely grateful that it seemed to be elsewhere? And where was the dog, anyway?

He had never had a name, since he had never had an owner, and no one had any photographs of him, or could even sketch a verifiable likeness. "LOST" posters appeared on telephone poles, letters to the editor were written, searches were undertaken, but of the dog who had always lived just on the outskirts of everyone's life no trace could be found. There were no footprints, no signs of a lair, no body, nothing to indicate that a dog everyone had seen had ever been in this area.

The police used infra-red vision goggles for night searches, and even a forensic team from the city was brought in to look for signs of the dog, but no evidence was ever found. The dog whom everyone had known simply wasn't, and apparently never had been. While the citizens were conscious of a loss, they could not say if it was a weight lifted or a protection removed: things were just different.

Principals were less lenient, preachers less passive, and stories of past citizens dead from heroic conditions and haunting the town in their afterlife were forgotten. The children remembered the dog longest, although by the time they grew to high school and were cheering on the football team, it was just the Bulldogs, any resemblance to a brown mutt lost to the shadows of childhood.

---

reading
The company we keep : a husband-and-wife true-life spy story / Robert and Dayna Baer

weather
I don't care if we're scheduled to receive an April Fool's Day foot-o-snow. I'm still buying a kayak.

memoir

None of it was true. All of it could have potentially been true, if we're talking about a totally different person with a totally different temperament leading a totally different life.

Of course, it could be claimed that life changing experiences, near collisions with trains at poorly marked crossing while driving at night, behavioral modification therapy as part of a plea deal / early release / community service agreement, an especially engaging revival preacher, any of these events could have plausibly induced major shifts in personality, so that the story would then incorporate elements of truth, but even then it would be the truth of the misremembered event, the faulty recall, rather than the rockbed of verifiable experience as is claimed.

Oh, you can discount my opinion, say two conflicting narratives and memories may in actual fact both be true, since my engagement with the past is just as subject to the meanderings of an untethered mind as everyone else's. That's only reasonable. But the story that you've got there, none of it was true.

Trust me on this: I was there, for the duration, from day one, and I witnessed those events from that vantage point where the only focal difference is internal prejudice, and everything can best be understood if we retell the story completely.

It won't take too long; stories never take up as much time as you're afraid they might, for when they're done, finished, they're over, and you're free to leave. It's as easy as that: I won't keep you a moment longer than the narrative requires. You're welcome.

There never was a band. There was an old upright piano in the corner of the living room, one of those pianos that is never quite right, on account of it having been stored on an exterior wall by a wood stove, so the back was cold and damp and the front was hot and dry and the soundboard was warped out of any semblance of respectability, but it was a piano, it was convenient, and as long as we tuned our instruments to that piano, everything was fine.

Of course there were difficulties once we started getting gigs, and trying to perform with technically perfect pianos whose every key matched a mechanical note at 440, but those early gigs were at honky tonk bars where the pianos had been used and worn down for years, and no one was listening anyway, we were just music to drink to or to play pool to or maybe to dance to, if the drinks were flowing and the audience was frisky. But even those early gigs came later, much later, and even then, there never was a band.

We'd get a last minute phone call because the real musicians had a need to cancel, maybe laryngitis or a bad love affair or car trouble, and we'd get called because my sister's babysitter was dating the bartender, and they knew we never had any other plans and couldn't afford to say no, so we'd start telephoning like mad, trying to find performers who hadn't already made plans to go out and were still sober enough for the fairly lax standards of the honky tonk, and then we'd have a group.

Not a band, mind you: remember, there never was a band. A band implies regular practice sessions and a playlist and maybe even some fans, but we didn't even have a name. They'd just introduce us as the house band, when they bothered to introduce us at all, which was, basically, never. We only became The House Band when we were playing elsewhere, and then only when we had to fill out paperwork or tax forms. Which was never.

We'd frantically round up whomever we could find, as I said, and some nights it was piano-tambourine-piccolo playing early big band standards and some nights it was piano-fiddle playing bluegrass variations of Puccini operas, because the fiddle player was actually a Julliard student in town visiting her grandmother when we got the call for the gig, and she was game to help out but her knowledge of the world of music was a bit one dimensional. When we could, there was some singing, but the thing about singing is you've got to either remember the lyrics or have some sheet music, or failing that be a damn convincing improvisor, and between the marijuana and the bourbon and the lack of a band, none of those were possible with any regularity.

One night we had piano, trombone, and accordion, and played Christmas carols with a Sousa rhythm, and the time we had piano, harmonica, and cello we pulled off some passable variations on folk songs. That must have been the night that the hot shot city newspaper critic was slumming at the bar, because we managed to sing most of the choruses and sounded almost together on the downbeats. We still weren't a band, but the critic either had a spiteful sense of humor or incredibly bad taste, because the roadhouse was written up in the travel section, and special mention was made to the "effervescent qualities of the deconstructed and reimagined organic talents of the freshest bluegrass group this side of Appalachia, The House Band."

Yeah, that quote's probably in the book, we all got copies of that overpriced newspaper and framed the article and placed it every place we could think to stick it. So once the bar gets written up like that, they have to keep us on a bit more regularly than they were used to doing, and once we know that our presence is requested with some kind of frequency, it starts getting easier to find other people to fill up the stage, and we start practicing, not too often, because that would be setting ourselves up to pretensions, but if one of us heard a song on the radio we might run through it a few times on our own, try and get a feel for it, maybe work out some of the easier lyrics.

Otherwise, though, we had too much else going on, with the shifts at the factory and the hundreds of trivialities that make up a life. We never had a set list of songs, we never formalized a list of performers, although once we started getting a bit of recognition and it was easier to find musicians we were able to institute a rule against performing with ex-lovers.

Let me tell you, that was an interesting rule to enforce. You think you know someone, hell, you know you know someone, you've known them for years, then there's suddenly a new line of disclosure for personal entanglements when you could've sworn you'd had that conversation before, and maybe some of my disclosures were just as unexpected, but, really, we never had one of those bourgeois monogamous relationships, and after a few months of the no-ex-lovers clause, we decided to rescind it, since it was affecting our performance options too much.

When certain types of middle-aged men would have a few drinks too many they would try to convince us to record an album, but we knew that would take a certain amount of money and talent, and we sure as hell didn't have enough of the former to make up for our lack of the latter, and our would-be managers always seemed to change their minds the next day. There was always a valid excuse, a child's college tuition, a medical emergency, a wedding, a new roof, but we knew they were excuses and they knew they were excuses, and no one's feelings were ever hurt.

But, you see, this is how things were, this is how we lived in that town on the outskirts of progress. None of us had a passionate commitment to any cause except getting through this day and into the next one; none of us were driven by an inner demon of ambition to realize a world beyond the offerings of what we had. Sure, we got a laugh out of that restaurant review, we had a good time playing together at the bar, but we didn't dream the great dream or nourish the forlorn hope of being someone else or somewhere else.

We weren't really happy, but only in the sense that we also weren't really unhappy, and if that memoir you're so keen to read as an unvarnished reliable historical witness to the development of a Senator from the life of a bluegrass performer claims that we were musicians, then it's just three hundred pages of hogwash. We didn't even pretend to become musicians, and that man who stands proudly before you as a patriotic Senator wasn't dreaming about anything more exceptional than scoring some decent pot and living the life that was, and whatever alien kidnapping it was that turned him down the road of respectability, well, sweetheart, that story ain't revealed in that book.

I can tell it to you some other time, if you like, but I've gotta run; you know how things are.

---

reading
finally finished Nightingale Wood / Stella Gibbons

weather
well, taxes are done, one day it might deign to be spring

home base

The car wouldn't start. There may have been a perfectly valid reason for the car's refusal to engage the spark plugs with the offerings of the fuel injectors: after all, batteries grow ever weaker, failing one day to provide the essential spark necessary to start things moving, tanks which one was certain of holding a sufficiency of petrol for the demands of the immediate future may be siphoned dry by forgetfulness or mischievous neighbors, the car one is attempting to start may simply be a model of similar styling and color and not actually the mate to the ignition key in one's hand. For whatever mechanical reason, that day the car wouldn't start.

Other things had been off, just enough to suggest a hangover or an impending bout of the flu or something very important and yet just out of reach: the coffee never came to a boil, the toast didn't quite reach that color of medium tan that one expects, the shower was tepid, and the cat sauntered off without waiting to be fed. Socks were missing, shirts lacked buttons, and it took longer than usual to successfully turn off the alarm clock. None of these were unusual in the cosmic sense, but they gathered and simmered below the surface in a stew of things not quite working, which in the rush of a morning are inconveniences without being actual problems.

Finally, the moment of the locked door, the click of the ignition, the utter silence as nothing happens. It is not a universal silence: in the space vacated by the chugging of pistons can be heard birdsong, a truck in reverse, traffic on the thoroughfare, the chirp of a crosswalk, the noise of landscapers. But within the space demarcated by the outline of a car, the silence of the engine is paramount.

And so, accepting defeat in the face of mechanical ignorance and failure, I left the car and the locked apartment to trust in the vagaries of public transportation, certain to be late but equally convinced of an eventual arrival. Other people seemed to have encountered similarly off mornings: while there was traffic on the road, there was a much larger than usual crowd waiting for the bus, and the bus, when it arrived, was teeming, not only with the student, hippie, and burnt-out crowd, but with commuters in every type of business dress.

Whatever was affecting our conveniences was acting without regard to age, race, or income level. School children, addicts, suits, construction workers rubbed elbows in a way which generally only happens in the subways of very large cities, not in underfunded regional buses serving small town populations. If we had had other options, we would have used them, but as the bus took on more and more passengers, I realized bicycles must have had perennially flat tires and cab drivers must be on strike. Looking out the window -- we were at this point so tightly packed there was no safe middle distance to gaze into: I was all too aware of the unfortunate cologne choice of the guy in front of me, and was squeezed against a support beam by three oblivious teenagers -- I tried to find some pattern connecting those cars which were, in fact, operating on the road.

There were enough of them to not create a sense of inappropriate vacancy on the road, but a fraction of what would be expected at this day and time, and the bus was filled well beyond its legal capacity, a number whose determination seemed equally incalculable. What creates a maximum bus capacity? It is not seat belts, for there aren't seat belts; it is not seats, for standing is expected and encouraged; it is not oxygen masks or underseat flotation devices or emergency exit rows. Regardless, even with the flagrant disregard by the bus driver of posted limitations, we were at capacity, unless people started sitting two to a seat, and tossed their briefcases and backpacks and duffles and oversized purses out the window or strapped them to the roof.

The weather was clear, or as clear as it ever is on an early spring morning when it isn't quite certain whether to rain or snow but decides to hold off for a few days, and the other cars on the road drove without any particular sense of urgency or a sense of showing off their access to the mysterious ways of mechanics. There were black cars and red cars and new cars and jalopies, there were sports cars and farm trucks and station wagons, there were domestic cars made of foreign parts and foreign cars assembled domestically, there were men and women and teenagers and the elderly, all toodling along in their private conveyances, while we, their partners in all discernible ways, were consigned to the bus.

Finally we reached the outskirts of the next town, where traffic picked up and grew more frantic, and in the collective breathing of the bus could be felt the impatient, impending relief of a promised exit. Perhaps our region had been affected by sunspots or a shift in the earth's magnetism or a flare from the power company, which had blacked out our car's mechanical systems without affecting our neighbors; this would be unexpected but explainable, in the sense that all natural phenomena are unexpected but explainable, and we would hope that the services of a competent mechanic would soon put everything straight, and the exorbitant fees associated therewith would hopefully be covered by insurance as an act of god.

I looked closer at the streets as we drew nearer to the city center: something about the way people were walking was off, not wrong, but not quite right, the way one walks after a long boat voyage and those first moments on land, or the loose gait of the almost drunk, not quite clumsy, but not quite coordinated. The purposeful march of the morning commute was taking place in an undersea, slow motion funhouse variation, and the people on the street, while not dressed incorrectly or inappropriately, were not dressed in quite the way that they were accustomed.

In crowds there is always sartorial variation, reflecting age, gender, class, taste, but these differences were not in keeping within the standard deviation of strangers living in the same time, and the same place. Bell bottoms in lurid pink were paired with navy double breasted blazers. Plaid skirts were worn with sequined evening halter tops. Baseball caps were worn by elderly women using walkers, wearing otherwise neatly pressed suits with football jerseys under their jackets. A woman in a hoopskirt walked past, and a small boy in an oversized button-down dress shirt and sandals and nothing else waited at a crosswalk, holding the hand of a mother with gray hair, a pink tutu, and a tuxedo jacket. Taken separately, they would have been eccentrics gathering at a convention of hobbyists or attending a couture fashion show in a cosmopolitan city, but grouped here, randomly, in the center of a small city of no particular note, they struck a jarring note.

The other occupants of the bus were not so wildly attired; we wondered what we would seem as we entered this city that was not quite the one we had worked and dined in yesterday, or last week. Except the bus driver didn't stop; the driver ignored our calls to the front and ringing of the bell. We weren't to be taken to our city, which had suddenly become not-our-city, but protest though we may, we were the prisoners of our fate, and remained, trapped and packed, as the bus picked up speed and left the downtown behind.

---

reading
best excuse ever for owning a full expanded set of the Oxford English Dictionary: a support for physical therapy knee & lateral quad exercises.

weather
foggy frosty mornings (& yet another lost umbrella)

penitence

Was it Fat Tuesday over-indulgence (salmon, and an edition of crepes!) or the invasion of a microscopic foreign super-power?

Regardless, DYP! is out cold, and will see you next week.

then

We were there, on the lawn, having tea, not because we were hungry for tea cakes or because it was a bright Sunday and tea tastes better outdoors under such circumstances, for neither of these were true; the tea cakes were dry and held very little appeal; the day, while bright, was not warm; nor was it even a Sunday. Rather, we had been posted as sentries on the lawn, a combination welcoming station and line of defense against intrusion, for with our best dresses and curled hair we were to frustrate any advances from invaders, not allowing them access to whatever was to be kept secret at the main house.

We knew nothing of this, at the time, aside from having the finely honed detection of subterfuge and awareness of the secrecy of adults telling partial truths, but none of this could we have explained, even to ourselves, that inner sense that things were more complicated than they appeared, but that our outing to take tea on the lawn was to be seen as a treat and a joy. None of us wanted to be there, we were at ages where the elaborate theatricals of early childhood had lost their glamor and not yet desirous of preparing to enter that coded world of adulthood, and so we resented the tea cakes and the starched clothes and the need to present ourselves as directed, without quite being able to rebel against the plan.

In the distance we could see the woods, and our teepee, and at the edge of the lawn was a brown rabbit who was studying us with an eerie air of indifference, as if the rabbit knew what the adults knew but what we could only surmise. We, in turn, watched the rabbit, and in watching the rabbit and drinking our milk we constructed ever more elaborate stories of sailing out beyond the cove and the line of rocks that marked the point of no return, where our world ended and the ocean began, how we would become brigadiers or pirates or persons without a country and live off of the bounty of the sea and what we could steal or charm at ports along the way. We would hunt for the mysterious squid that is larger than the elephant at the zoo and we would swim with otters, diving under the waves and somersaulting back into the boat and we would communicate in sign language with savages with bones stuck through their noses who were trying to trick us into becoming their cannibalistic dinner, and we had just reached the island of giant tortoises when the first car arrived.

We did not know it was any particular type of guest, we merely made our curtsies and offered a tea cake and a cup of milk at our table under the trees, and while the guests did not seem to have expected to join us for tea that afternoon, they obligingly sat in the chairs we indicated and somberly discussed the benefits of our Airedale as compared with their Scottie, as the dogs wrestled together on the lawn. Some hidden signal prevented them from leaving our table and approaching the house, and when a second car appeared and we all crowded together over the dry cakes and the mismatched chairs, a silent indication between the groups cause the first to make their goodbyes, leaving us in the sole company of the new arrivals.

We had seen the adults do this many, many afternoons, and we stood and we curtsied and we smiled and watched the first group and their Scottie dog move on to their next destination, and the second group, a couple, search for some common ground upon which to converse with us. They tried throwing a ball for our dog, who never deigns to play fetch, and then they sang some popular song from a comic opera we had never heard, and then they asked us about our teepee, and we explained how it had been built as a special birthday present the summer before under the very strict supervision of our uncle, who believed that all children should know how to start a fire without matches and how to find a stream of water in the woods and what berries to never, ever eat, no matter how hungry we are, and how our uncle was to return this summer and teach us how to roast wild animals, although our mother disapproved.

We described all this without telling them about our secret cave or the arrowheads we had found stored in the base of the oak tree or about the ghost whose husband had died here in the massacre that took place long ago, because we knew that they were adults in a world not our own, that they no longer believed in ghosts and would want to turn our secret cave into their own discovery. Then they sang us another song from another comic opera we had never heard, and felt their visit had been sufficiently thorough to satisfy their social obligations, and drove off.

We were tired of our dry cakes and our milk and our scratchy dresses, we were ready to crunch on apples and run barefoot through the recently turned earth in the flower beds, dirt which would still be cool and dark despite the brightness of the afternoon, and dirt which from being recently turned would be full of all sorts of grubs and beetles and mysterious rocks and maybe bones of small animals or bullets from long ago battles that may have taken place on these very fields.

In our secret cave we kept a museum of treasures we had saved from the fields, a silver spoon, a broken blue glass medicine bottle, a rock with crystals growing on the inside, a nail from a cabin with a square head, the skull of a raccoon, an old corn cob pipe, things we could feel were still alive after the tractors lifted the roots of last year's beans or cotton or corn, things we treasured and knew not to share with just anyone. We had such a brief window to search the fields, between the turning of the earth and the replanting, for once they planted our dirty clothes would indicate not merely betrayal of proper manners but the even greater sin of disturbed crops, which we had learned to respect in a way we did not yet fully respect behavioral regulations.

As the stream of guests ebbed and flowed throughout that long afternoon, we watched our plans for raiding the old cabin and for playing with the kittens behind the barn and for running away to live as searchers for gold dust in the mountains of Mexico and for piloting riverboats to cities full of foreign sounds all become impossibly distant. The sun began to change direction, to settle into a position indicative of the end of adventures and the beginning of evening routines, the routines of final lessons and cleaning the playroom and recounting our stories before bedtime, and we knew that the fundamental order of our life had been irrecoverably altered.

In the course of entertaining our stream of visitors with cake and tea and dresses we had taken on the role of the adults, who in hiding behind their undeclared schemes at the house had usurped the adventurous secrecy of childhood. We felt tired, and cranky, and bored with the stories we had been forced to listen to and cheated out of a perfectly promising day, without the slightest understanding of the situation we had been placed in, the part we had been drafted to perform.

It is only now, as I stand in the corner of the hallway, looking through the window over the lawns, to the spot under the oak tree where we had the tea, and beyond it, to the woods and the teepee and the cove, that I have been able to appreciate the subtlety of the planning that placed us there, at that moment, and allowed everything to happen here, out of sight, unsuspected, that would determine so much of our future, whose adventures as children we could not even begin to name.

---

reading
a feast of Sándor Márai, a trio of novels, one newly translated

weather
three degrees // far too late in the season for this