July 2019
Monthly Archive
Jul 24, 2019
On Friday night, we put Toivo to sleep. After months of mobility issues and inexplicable infections, her final decline was swift and sure. Early Friday morning, Toivo was panting heavily in her kennel, so J took her outside, and she became uncharacteristically aggressive. By the time we arrived at the Angell Animal Medical Center, Toivo was listless, unable to walk, and had to be rolled into the critical care unit on a stretcher.
While at Angell, Toivo did not improve. Instead, the ER vet said Toivo’s neurological responses were “inappropriate” and indicative of meningitis, encephalitis, or a brain tumor. By evening, it was clear Toivo’s condition was dire. When we arrived for one last visit before putting her down, Toivo was awake but unresponsive, staring with glassy eyes and not reacting when the vet moved a hand quickly toward her face.
Before she died, Toivo struggled to raise her head as I got settled on the mat beside her, as I had so many times during her week-long hospitalization in April. I’d like to think that in some corner of her brain, Toivo could still recognize the familiar touch of my hand on her head, my scent, and my voice telling her she was a good girl and everything would be okay.
We had Toivo for a shockingly short period of time–roughly a year and a half–but she had become deeply embedded in our lives, and closely bonded with me in particular. When we first brought her home in February, 2018, she acclimated almost immediately, as if she’d been born and raised with us rather than arriving as an adult dog. From day one, Toivo loved playing with our other dog, Djaro, leading me to suggest the best way to tire a Belgian Malinois is to bring home a second one.
Initially, I hadn’t wanted a second Malinois. The breed is energetic and intense, and whereas J prefers tough and intelligent dogs–so-called “mean breeds”–I’ve always preferred floofy doofuses. What sold me on Toivo was her spunk. Too small to be a protection dog, Toivo was also too much of a goofball. Whereas the word that best describes Djaro is “intense,” the word that best described Toivo was “happy.” When her whole body wasn’t arthritic and painful, Toivo was a joyful, hyper little dog: a dynamo in a seal-slick coat who spun like a top when excited.
Although we’d chosen Toivo to be my walking buddy, what cemented our bond wasn’t the walks we took when she was able-bodied as much as the four months she was a Medical Mystery. Toivo was a fearlessly hardy dog for the first year we had her, eager to walk in any weather, but this past March, she was suddenly creaky and reluctant to move. It was as if she had gone overnight from being a dog of four to a dog of fourteen.
After many diagnostic deadends and weeks of physical rehab, we finally learned that Toivo had immune mediated polyarthritis (IMPA), a disorder that caused her immune system to attack her joints. When we started her on steroids and an immunosuppressant, she responded almost immediately. Within days she went from being hunched over and limping to being her old self: active, energetic, and hyperalert, like a lion caged in a dog’s body.
One word we kept hearing throughout Toivo’s veterinary odyssey was “idiopathic,” which refers to a condition with no clear cause. We never learned why Toivo developed a huge abscess on her left hind leg in April, why she developed laryngeal paralysis after her release from the hospital, or why her face swelled up for no apparent reason in May. On Saturday morning, after we’d already put Toivo down Friday night, we learned a chest X-ray had shown three masses in her lungs: the closest we came to a smoking gun. If Toivo had a brain tumor that metastasized to her lungs, no amount of physical rehab or immunosuppressants could have saved her.
But even a smoking gun can’t answer the question of why. Why did fate or chance choose this one dog–my dog–to struggle with so many medical challenges? Why did fate or chance choose to cripple then kill her so young? I’ll admit to feeling as much anger as grief these past few months. J and I would have done anything to keep Toivo safe and healthy, so why are there abusive and neglectful people whose dogs are still alive while my dog was taken in her prime?
There are no answers to these questions; ultimately, mortality itself is idiopathic. If you allow yourself to love a dog, you know how the story will end: they will die first, unless you do. Looking through the photos and videos we took while Toivo was with us, I feel cheated to have lost her so soon, but even luckier to have had her at all. Even the longest-lived dog leaves too soon. I don’t know why we continue to open ourselves to the heartbreak of loving creatures who are destined to die, other than we have no other choice.
Jul 15, 2019
The President has said something racist, again. This comes as no surprise, as the President regularly uses racist rhetoric to rile up his base, who either share his bigoted views or simply aren’t troubled by them. To me, these two options are equally bad. If you rush to defend or choose to ignore racism, you are empowering it: either way, you are complicit.
The fact that our President is racist is not news; people who were paying attention in 2016 knew this, but plenty of folks still voted for him. But what is new is the way the past two and a half years have revealed people’s true values. I’m willing to give voters the benefit of the doubt if they voted for Trump with a vague hope that the solemnity of his office would tame or temper him. But as the President’s Twitter tantrums have continued, his policies have gotten increasingly cruel, and his cozying up to dictators and autocrats continues unabated, I haven’t learned anything new about Trump himself. This leopard hasn’t changed his spots, and what we’ve long seen is what we continue to get.
What has been revelatory about the past two and a half years is the behavior of Trump’s supporters and enablers. If you still turn a blind eye toward what Trump does–if you continue to say nothing or merely offer excuses–this tells me everything I, your neighbors, and your children need to know about your character. As much as you claim that you yourself are not racist, your failure to condemn abhorrent behavior says more about your priorities than any of your arguments.
History has its eyes on us, and so do our companions and contemporaries. When I was a young and impressionable child, an impassioned priest showed my religion class footage from Nazi concentration camps, imploring us to learn from the past so we would never repeat it. As I watched the grim and grainy images, I wondered with childlike innocence how ordinary Germans could have stood by and watched while genocide happened in their midst. Now, decades later, I have my answer.
Genocide doesn’t start with death camps; it starts with divsion and objectification, with slogans and conformity, and with repeated exhortations to support your country right or wrong. Genocide starts with a moral muddying of waters and with the suggestion that some folks and families don’t matter as much as yours do. Genocide starts with good, otherwise decent folk deciding to stand by, shut up, and do nothing as norms and morals are violated, the act of minding one’s own business being weaponized as a tool of the state.
Plenty of folks who voted for Trump in 2016 insist they aren’t themselves racists; instead, they argue, they voted for economic reasons, or for the sake of Supreme Court picks, or because they disliked Hillary Clinton. But now that we see the kind of behavior the President is engaged in–the kind of behavior he talked about and that some voters chose to ignore, defend, or quietly agree with–we now know how low Trump’s supporters and enablers are willing to crawl. I haven’t learned anything new about the leopard, but I am continually heartbroken by the hyenas who continue to hang around him.
When I studied Spanish in high school, I learned a saying that seems particularly apt these days: “dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres.” Tell me who you walk with, and I will tell you who you are. If you tell me you voted for Trump in 2016, I can be kind and assume you were duped. But if you tell me you still support him, I must assume you either support his abhorrent behavior or (worse yet) simply don’t care. Two and half years after Trump was elected, ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you continue to lie down with dogs, you must enjoy waking up with fleas.
Today’s photos show protest signs on the Green Street parking garage in Central Square, Cambridge: part of Representative Ayanna Pressley’s Congressional district.
Jul 10, 2019
I recently started reading Jeffrey Cramer’s Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. One benefit of 19th century literary friendships is the wealth of written evidence they leave behind. Future biographers researching friendships between modern-day writers will have to pore over emails, texts, and tweets rather than the letters and journal entries Cramer read in writing his book.
Both Thoreau and Emerson kept journals and maintained voluminous correspondence, albeit not always with one another. In the portion of Cramer’s book I’ve read so far, Thoreau is more emotionally intimate with Emerson’s wife, Lidian, than with Emerson himself, sending her letters that could pass as journal entries, so intricately do they chronicle his thoughts.
The problem with writerly friendships–especially friendships between two journal-keepers–is that writers are very good at talking to themselves. Isn’t a journal entry nothing more than a letter to an anonymous audience that is never sent? When you are accustomed to pouring your heart on paper for an audience of none, it’s easy to think–erroneously and egotistically–that anyone willing to receive and read such correspondence actually understands and empathizes with you.
But while the blank page has no desires or concerns of its own, friends are not blank pages. There is a very real way that two friends who are also writers can correspond at cross-purposes, even when communicating face-to-face. Each person wants their own needs met–each speaker longs to be listened to–and these desires can clash rather than finding a complement.
In a radio interview about his book, Cramer said Emerson and Thoreau had contrasting views of friendship. Emerson had many friends and drew different things from each, but Thoreau had few friends and strove (unsuccessfully) to have all his social and emotional needs met by one. This difference is a recipe for relational disaster, perhaps, and it helps explain the tense complications of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s friendship. What started as a conventional mentorship between an established writer and an idealistic protege deteriorated as it became clear that Thoreau would always be his own man, a nonconformist who marched to a different drum.
But longevity is not the only (or best) way to judge a friendship. Although their relationship would ultimately grow strained, both Emerson and Thoreau were forever influenced by the insights of the other. In a passage Cramer quotes near the beginning of his book, Thoreau compares long-time friends to two trees who stand apart but whose roots intermingle. Above ground, two venerable trunks might seem distant and disconnected, but beneath the surface, they take sustenance from the same soil.
Jul 9, 2019
Now that summer is here, Toivo and I have a new routine. After I’ve finished my morning chores, we take a short walk, then we sit on the patio while I read and write my daily journal pages. We started this ritual earlier in the summer, when Toivo couldn’t walk fast or far. J suggested that being outside surrounded by new sounds and smells would be good for Toivo’s spirits while she recovers, and he was right.
We call these days when Toivo and I sit on the patio our “beach days.” I pack a bag with a book and notebook for me and water and snacks for us both, and we sit in the shade until the day gets hot. We sit outside for the sensory stimulation a summer day brings: Toivo hearkens to every smell, and I follow every flash of motion. We both are all ears, but we are attuned to different things. My ears perk to the smallest bird sound, like the chirp of a house sparrow in the neighbor’s hedge, while Toivo sits alert and expectant, waiting for the smallest sound from any of our neighbors’ dogs.
At first, Toivo was restless and whiny on beach days, tangling her lead while pacing the patio, unsure why we were sitting outside doing nothing rather than walking. But now, she’s come to see our time outside as another everyday routine, my accustomed spot at our patio table no different from my place at my indoor desk. In summer, the size of our house expands, the yard and patio being an extra room without walls whose roof is the summer sky. If it weren’t for the dog, I’d forget to venture out, having grown too accustomed to long winter hours at my desk, still tethered long after my lead has rotted away.
Jul 4, 2019
Today is the 4th of July. After reading outside on the patio for a short while this morning, I’ve spent the heat of the day inside our air-conditioned bedroom, trying to keep the dogs cool and ushering them outside for short, closely supervised bathroom and exercise breaks. So much for the Dog Days of summer.
I’m currently reading David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, a weighty brick of a book I checked out and returned to the library several times before making time to read. Yesterday, I read the chapter in Blight’s book that discusses Douglass’s famous speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” which seems more relevant than ever this year.
Blight accurately interprets the speech as a classic American jeremiad: a speech intended to provoke and spur listeners to action and repentance. In it, Douglass argues that Independence Day means nothing to slaves who lack the freedom it celebrates:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
This year, I find myself wondering what the Fourth of July means to migrant children detained in squalid holding pens, citizens in gerrymandered districts denied the full power of their vote, or homeless and suicidal veterans fighting PTSD while our draft-dodging President entertains himself with military parades.
Today I celebrated the Fourth of July by doing two things that I consider to be my civic duty. First, I spent some time writing Postcards to Voters. Voting is an important way to preserve freedom, and encouraging Florida voters to enroll in Vote-By-Mail is one way to get-out-the-vote one person (and one postcard) at a time.
Second, I spent some time with the Mueller Report, which I’ve committed to read in 10-page daily installments over the course of the summer. In today’s installment, I read Robert Mueller’s indictment for Russian social media meddling, which the Washington Post edition includes in an appendix of supplemental materials. It feels important to understand what the Russians did in 2016 and how easy it was to mislead voters with fake news, sham social media profiles, and even in-person rallies organized from afar and designed to energize some voters while discouraging turnout among others. It’s easy for nefarious agents to mislead gullible constituents; being savvy and thinking critically are also part of our civic duties.
July 4th is when we celebrate America’s birthday, but every day it is our job as citizens to defend democracy by doing the work of engaged citizens. This means educating yourself: read books and understand history. Vote and encourage others to do so, too. Pay attention to the news and hold your elected officials accountable. These are the gifts any one of us can give Uncle Sam on his birthday or any other day.
Hoarded Ordinaries 