Friday, June 26, 2009

The Dogs of Europe

To understand America, pay attention to dogs. Popular dog guru Cesar Milan diagnoses family troubles through the eyes of the dog. He visits a family complaining of an ill-behaved dog confident that he’ll find the source of the problem in the people, who are unwilling or unable to assert their authority over their dog and create for the dog a sense of belonging to the pack. He teaches people to be assertive. When Milan came to the U.S. from Mexico and took a job as a dog groomer, he was shocked to encounter so many neurotic and unstable dogs. But dogs, he realized, are always the same everywhere; the problem can’t be the fault of the dog. This simple insight launched his career as a dog trainer who helps dogs by providing therapy to dog owners.

My travels this summer to London, Paris, and Athens helped me to see the U.S. a little more clearly through the eyes of dogs. Like us, Londoners play with their dogs in the parks, lie about with them, and follow them on leashes. They baby their dogs. Consequently, their dogs are approachable, wagging their tails, hoping to be coddled. They seem more obedient than American dogs, but the owners probably don’t need them as deeply as we need our dogs – for emotional support. In a home with no other sports fans, our late dog Arjuna was my make-believe sports buddy. It goes without saying that you don’t discipline your sports buddy the way you should discipline a dog. My wife and I both tried our best to turn our dog into a little person, and we created an obstinate little dog, pushy and needy, but bursting with personality.

In Paris I’ve seen how clever a well-trained dog can be. Parisians don’t walk their dogs. The dog trots onto the street alone. Its owner then exits and proceeds down the sidewalk unconcerned, apparently ignoring the dog – but a quick whistle keeps the dog moving along. The operation is a technique for avoiding cleaning up after the dog. When it comes to fouling the sidewalk, the dog is made to take its own risks. The physical distance between dog and owner, the lack of eye-contact, creates deniability for the owner. If an officer suddenly nabs the offending dog, the owner can walk free.

In Paris, a dog is an extension of a person’s ego, a servant trained to focus exclusively on its master and to make sacrifices for him. The dog is private property. Even when a dog is on a leash in Paris, a stranger has no hope of being allowed to pet it. Asking to pet a Parisian’s dog would be like asking to stroke his jacket or to sit on his car.

More independent than French dogs, Greek dogs are unapproachable in their own right. Not exactly unfriendly, the dogs of Athens are simply too self-possessed to be bothered. I once saw a dog on the street calmly eating a bowl of pasta. It was the same dog we had seen earlier in the day carrying a basket of groceries home from the market. To a Greek, any worthy dog must be able to act as a partner. Probably this is a very old-fashioned attitude. Dogs work. Dogs help out. Dogs also get time off in the evening to wander about the city, passing through the tavernas to look for fallen scraps of bread. Begging is beneath their dignity. In Athens, a stray dog can walk right onto the Acropolis without being harassed. People assume that dogs know what they’re doing.

I was happy to return to the U.S., partly for the dogs. I admire Greek dogs, but I find it disturbing that they don’t need us. Their cold competence is inhuman. I prefer a dog that needs to be loved, and I’m ready to accept a margin of bad behavior and uselessness for the sake of emotional warmth and a sense of fun. In America, the dog is the one without the cell phone, the one with nothing to do but play or sleep. The dog has learned, above all, how to get us to forget work and enjoy a little innocent clowning. Cesar Milan would say that we aren’t allowing them to be dogs. But we get so little pleasure elsewhere that we need our dogs to be a little human, and we’re happy to meet them halfway and to indulge in a little dogginess of our own.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on June 26, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, June 19, 2009

Lawnmower Boys

Darell and Daquan are shooting hoops in front of the vacant duplex on my inner city street.  They’re twins, eleven years old.  The boys appear every afternoon around 3, slack-faced from sleep, and then dance around a portable hoop till long after dark.  Around midnight their mom appears and sits in a man’s car with the lights off.  Cars pull up slowly, stop alongside, and then drive off as raccoons slink in and out of the knee-high weeds of the duplex.

Darell is quiet and kind.  But Daquan…once a Hispanic kid down the block called him a name, and Daquan got a brick in his hand, marched straight up to the kid and smashed him in the face.  Next thing I know Daquan is handcuffed to a SB police car, threatening the cop and getting his head slammed on the hood.  With the cop yelling and Daquan’s head turned sideways to me all I remember is his blank, watching-television gaze.

Then one evening I’m sitting on the porch with my 13-year old daughter, and Darrell walks up.  “Borrow your mower?” he says.  Daquan watches from across the street.  Hmm.  Yes, I say, if you guys mow those weeds in front of the duplex.  My daughter watches them push my shiny red mower away.  Four hours later, after dark, Darell returns.  The mower is dirty, missing its safety flap, and the weeds at the duplex remain untouched.  “Where were you?” I say.  “A lady on Harrison needed her lawn mowed,” he said.

The next week, I see the twins pushing my mower down the street, three blocks away.  “Your wife said we could use it,” says Darrell.  “She did?” I said.  “Well, bring it back by 8.  Before dark.  That’s two hours.” Three hours pass.  After four I’m driving around the neighborhood.  No twins, no lawnmower.  I consider calling the police, but I don’t need the lecture: “You loaned your mower to who?  You didn’t know them very well?  How long you lived in this neighborhood?”

The next morning, the mower is back on my porch.  It’s filthy, the pull rope handle is missing, and the blade is dinged up.  But it had come back.  That’s when I had an idea.  A wonderful, white, middle class idea.  My daughter watched me explain it to the twins:  “$2/ hour to rent the mower.  You check it out on this clipboard for x hours.  If you’re late, I get extra rent.  I maintain the mower, you buy any parts you break.  Take care of it and you start making real money, buy your own mower, start a business.” I liked my plan.  So reasonable.  So empowering.  So…clueless.  The twins watched me talk with their television gaze.  Darrell just said, mm, and they walked off with my battered mower.

Late that night, he pushes it back up to my porch.  The air cleaner housing is missing.  “You’re late,” I said.  “A friend on Portage needed it,” he muttered, and handed me three wadded-up dollar bills.  “Did you make any money?  I asked.  He shrugged, and disappeared through the light of a flickering street lamp.

That’s the last I ever saw of the twins.  The battered basketball hoop stood alone a few weeks before it was stolen.  One evening I found two strange boys standing on my porch, holding up their pants.  “Use your mower?” one said.  “No,” I said.  “Hey, where’s the twins?  Darell and Daquan?” “They broke into Covaleski.  They’re in JVC,” one boy said, and they walked away through the waist-high grass of the duplex.

Next week I got home from work late and hung up my jacket.  My daughter says, “Hey dad, you see the lawn over at the green house?  “No”, I said, “Now what?

“I mowed it,” she said, as she walked up the stairs.

Broadcast by Jeff Nixa on June 19, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Community • Work • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, June 12, 2009

Grubbing in the Dirt

Grubbing in the dirt and thinking of my father: the two are inexorably entwined in my mind. My father was an ace gardener: a man ahead of his time, reading and putting into practice principles from Organic Gardening magazine and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring during those environmentally unfriendly DDT years. And, sometimes to my horror, he also wasn’t afraid to experiment with what then were considered-to-be-exotic plants. I was the first kid on the block, possibly in my whole neighborhood, to be treated to yellow tomatoes and spaghetti squash. Oh, joy! But, on good days for me, he would allow me to “help” him with simple gardening tasks and even allotted me a small plot for my own to grow annuals of my choosing. Although I was skeptical of his wanderings into weird-vegetable-land, on my knees beside him in the dirt I thought that I had died and gone to heaven!

In our allegedly adult years, my friend Patsy and I have talked about how, as girls, we much preferred spending time with our “Sainted Daddies” than with our mothers. With rearview-mirror vision, it is clear why. It wasn’t totally that Daddy/Daughter thing, although that probably figured into the equation. We didn’t love our mothers less and our fathers more. Rather, our mothers were inside the house cleaning, and cooking, and mending: those 1950’s-Mother things. It was pretty clear that we were going to be expected to have those items on our agenda for the rest of our lives. So right then, we wanted to be with our fathers in the yard grubbing in the dirt or in the garage messing with power tools. Which of these sets of activities was more interesting was a no-brainer!

Also, on really special days, there were field trips to the hardware store: purveyors of seeds, nursery stock and greasy, unidentifiable-to-us-then mechanical things. Built on those memories, I still love going to hardware stores. The vastness of the inventory is astonishing; just walking through and looking can fill an entire evening. Makes me a “cheap date,” according to Larry.

My father was far less chatty than I, so, as it works with those quiet people, when an opinion was offered, generally it stuck in memory. Not a church-going man, he once commented to me that he didn’t see how anyone who gardened could not believe in a higher power.  His observation embedded itself in my brain. Thus, having at least partially fulfilled my destiny of being in the house doing those “woman things,” one year I made him a sampler that bears a clump of stylized flowers and the sing-songy, poetic legend: “Who Plants a Seed Beneath the Sod and Waits To See Believes in God.” Might be a bit sappy, but his “little girl” had made it for him, so in that Daddy/Daughter-thing way, he was touched that I had remembered his remark. Following his journey to that big garden in the hereafter, that piece of needlework came back to me and now hangs beside the door that I often use on my way outside to work in the garden. I glance at it and it calls to mind my “Sainted Daddy” as I go outdoors to engage in far-less-skilled-than-he gardening activities.  (I couldn’t be programmed totally only to do that in-the-house-stuff, though. In addition to still grubbing in the dirt, and now that I know what a lot of them are, I sometimes mess with greasy mechanical things too. A maintenance person once said to me, “You sure know a lot about maintenance for a woman:” a tribute to my father and a proud moment for me.)

So, as Father’s Day and the gardening season take center stage, and we go outdoors to grub in the dirt, raise a trowel and give a shout out to all those “Sainted Daddy” gardeners everywhere.

Broadcast by Jeanette Saddler Taylor on June 12, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Home & Garden • Women & Men • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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April Lidinsky -- More essays by April

Jeff Nixa -- Lawnmower Boys / More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- Grubbing in the Dirt / More essays by Jeanette

Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather

David James -- More essays by David

Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth

Joe Chaney -- The Dogs of Europe / More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan