Go Towards

The other day I saw a white poodle puppy across the street. It was with people but not on a leash. I knew if it saw Lily it would run toward us into the busy street. So I stood for a moment on my high front stairs, obscured by the bushes, knowing the dog hadn't spotted us yet. When the street was clear, I descended the stone stairs and stepped into the road just as the dog darted toward us. In her enthusiasm, Lily flipped the poodle on its back in the middle of the street. The cars saw us and stopped. I walked the unharmed poodle back to its owner, explaining that I had crossed the street toward the dog because I knew the cars wouldn't have been able to see it. The man who owned the dog looked me in the eye and said, "Thank you!" I said, "This happens to me all the time. When I see a dog I go toward it to make sure it doesn't get hit by a car." I feel responsible knowing the dog could get killed crossing the street to meet us. I go toward the disaster to prevent it.

Sandbag Retriever

This morning I took Lily for a run up the hill which warmed me up, we walked towards the sunshine to Cass park baseball field. I chased Lily to keep her running rather than start hunting for goose poop. When I turned around Lily was running with the first base sandbag marker in her mouth! I wish I could have filmed it.

Mahatma Gandhi

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Jolly Vacuum

I don't know why but whenever I feel really good I want to vacuum. Since this isn't very often the job is huge and involved but quite rewarding. It's like painting the carpets and floors. Each drag of the vacuuming magic wand makes stripes of clean, restoring the original colors and corners of my home. When I feel good, I want to bake a cake or a chicken, and while it's baking I will think about how much I love everyone and everything. This is all in sharp contrast to my thoughts on a melancholic day. That my thoughts change so reliably with my mood is quite fascinating to me.

Stage Magic

I was thinking all week about the RI politician who told the visiting president to "shove it." We are all performing in our various roles in life, and it is dangerous if we forget that. We are better off waking up to this fact in order to become better actors and more conscious of where the boundaries of our roles are. We do not become omnipotent when we fill the role of doctor, preacher, politician, rock star, visiting artist. We are playing a role, and need to consciously play it well.

When I say acting I do not mean being inauthentic. I mean being more authentic by understanding that we are always playing many roles, in our families, in our professions, in our neighborhoods, when blogging, walking the dog, buying groceries, trimming hedges. I remember running into my painting professor on the street in Providence. He was "off stage" and very uncomfortable, as if he didn't even know how to say hello. I once saw my dentist at a party, and he too wasn't entirely sure of his role outside his office. They were good actors in their professions, but had not thought about how to act in other roles.

I am frightened by the preacher, the doctor, the policeman, the politician, who forgets he is performing and falls in love with the power and admiration to the degree that he loses his way. At least an actor usually knows he is acting. When he is really good at it, the audience believes he really does kick the cat and sleep with teenagers, they really think the guy is like that. But no, he's just a really good actor. We need to believe the mirror but also remember it is a mirror.

Reading Faces

I walked Lily up to the north end of town for a change. I saw a little boy in his yard playing with a miniature orange basketball, bouncing it off four white cement steps. When he saw Lily he ran out of the yard to pet her. The boy was not afraid of her at all. I sat Lily down so she wouldn't jump and squatted down beside her, holding her collar just to make sure. Lily was the same height and probably twice the weight of the boy. He petted her, and looked up at me and smiled. His face had dimples and a pointy chin. He reminded me of a boy who used to live on our street. Two seconds later the boy whose face I was remembering came out of the front door to say hello! They are brothers, and they have another brother who came outside too. This brother is the middle child, and he did not look like the other two. He petted Lily and said, "She smells like a dog." "Is she stinky?" I asked. "Yeah she's stinky," he said. "She had a bath two weeks ago, but she probably needs another," I said. "How does she get a bath?" the boy asked. "With the hose, outside in the yard. I wet her down and then wash her with dog shampoo. In the winter I wash her in the bathtub." Their father was raking leaves in the front yard, and I wanted to tell him his children were adorable, but I could see from his face that he was in a bad mood, so I said goodbye to the boys and kept walking.

Saturday

This morning I am washing all of the fleece pullovers, coats, jackets, gloves, hats and scarves that acquired a musty smell from being piled up in the cellar all summer. I am a little crabby about doing the job but it works. After the clothing gets washed in the machine the mustiness is completely gone. 100 years ago this task would've taken all day. I am grateful that this only takes a few hours and I hang the wet clothes next to the boiler to dry.

Give to Saint Dracula

I walked by the All Saints Church on my street and saw the big sign announcing a blood drive on Sunday. Do they realize Sunday is Halloween? Are the blood takers going to be dressed as Draculas? If so I'll have to go.

Launch into Song

This morning when I was walking Lily we passed the locksmith's parking lot. Lily pulled me toward a man standing beside his pickup truck in the lot. "He's a handful!" he said. "No, she just wants to say hello," I replied. "I'll say hello," he said, and Lily jumped up on him. "Gentle, I'm old," he said. But he looked like he was my age. Then he started singing.

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday. The regular crowd shuffles in. There’s an old man sitting next to me, Makin’ love to his tonic and gin. He says, son, can you play me a memory? I’m not really sure how it goes. But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete When I wore a younger man’s clothes.

"You know the Piano Man, Billy Joel?" he asked. "Yes," I said, "thank you for singing!" "My name's Tom," he told me as he climbed into his truck. "I'm Emily, and this is Lily." I was thrilled to have a perfect stranger launch into a song because Lily jumped into his arms!

The Farm is Nearby

The cow farm is nearby and that's a comfort to me. At any moment I can start walking to the farm and arrive an hour later. Once, I bicycled up there at five thirty in the morning and scared the farmer nearly half to death. He was feeding the cows and I stepped into the old white barn to pet them. "What are you doing here?" he growled. "I had to pet a cow!" I replied.

Today

I wanted someone else's coffee and someone else's kitchen table to drink it at. The weather was too darn hot, 70 degrees for late October. I saw a young woman exit the cemetery wearing super short shorts and a skimpy spaghetti-strap tank top. She was walking a short and stocky yellow Labrador. She was plugged into an iPod, the white wires dangling down from her ears. Half a block behind her was a young man walking an orange-colored Pomeranian. His eyes were nearly popping out of his head as he caught up to her. I wasn't ready to admit it was hot today. I carried my sweatshirt for security. After all, you never really can trust the weather in New England - it could hail on a 70-degree day, and I was hoping it would.

First Grade

I was a guest at Woonsocket Harris Elementary school yesterday for Stephanie Roberts' first grade class. I drew with a stylus on a big screen in their school library and narrated a day in the life with Big Lily. Then I invited the kids to draw their pets on paper. It was fun.

Puzzling Puzzle

Today I walked Lily down Rathbun Street. When I turned onto Ethel Street I saw the City of Manhattan, made out of paper, in three dimensions, about eighteen inches tall, sitting on the sidewalk. There was a piece of lined loose-leaf notebook paper taped to one of the towers. "Free NYC Puzzle" was printed on the page in black magic marker. I stood there and admired the city I was born in from above. I noticed the Twin Towers were intact but the Chrysler Building was bent at the top. I continued on to the park and played fetch with Lily in the ball field. On our way home I looked down Ethel Street but didn't see the puzzle. Oh good, someone adopted it, I thought. But as I continued I saw that someone had simply moved it across the street. Poor Manhattan paper puzzle, I hope it gets a good home.

President Obama is Coming to Woonsocket!

President Obama is coming to Woonsocket tomorrow. The last president we had visiting our city was Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

Update: I just found out that William Howard Taft visited Woonsocket a century ago. Three presidents have visited Woonsocket!

Broached Chicken

Where I live there are a few restaurants famous for something called broasted chicken, which as far as I can tell is a word invented to mean boiled and roasted (till-it-falls-off-the-bone) chicken. It's also called family style chicken. Wright's Farm and a place that used to exist called Ma Glockner's were the two most popular places to sample this down-home delicacy. River Falls has been recently advertising on billboards around the city that they now serve Ma Glockner's berched chicken, which is chicken boiled then seared with a heavy weight on it (heavy like a building, says my friend). This morning I was talking to Bill and I confused the chicken names in the exact way that my Grandma Sophie always scrambled words. I asked Bill, "What exactly is broached chicken?" When I realized what I had said I laughed, and decided to define it myself. Broached chicken is chicken that the chef has sampled before it's served. Or maybe it's the chicken left over that a mother eats off of her children's plates.

Torn

Today I saw a boy I recognize from the area. He was driving in reverse down the narrow driveway that belongs to my neighborhood parking lot. He was having difficulty navigating, and bumped into the cement wall just as we were driving in, so he decided to drive forward up to the row of garages and turn around. He thought he had put the car in reverse, but instead he bolted forward, crashing into the steel garage door. Then he backed up and drove away as fast as he could.

Two years ago just after I adopted Lily, I was standing in my yard with her and she spotted a cat. She jumped the fence and was off and running before I could stop her. I chased her, shouting her name while trying to catch up to her before she reached the busy street nearby. I was more and more frantic with each ignored call of her name. I was terrified that she would be hit by a car; her life flashed before my eyes. It was a crisp February day. My shouts echoed off the buildings. Suddenly a kid stepped into the street, a boy I recognize but hadn't seen in years. He was checking out the commotion. Lily stopped running, turned around, and trotted towards him. She wagged her tail and jumped up to say hello. He petted her as I ran over and put her leash on. "You saved her life," I told him. It was our good fortune that he had been visiting next door and had heard me yelling her name. Now whenever I see him I say to his friends, "He's a hero, he saved Lily's life!"

This is the boy who drove into the garage today. Just after the crash and escape, the owner of the garage stepped out into his yard next door. I was heartbroken, but I knew I had to tell him what I had seen. The police would be involved. The boy didn't seem to have much control of his car. I hope he's OK.

Has To Talk

The other night at the Stop and Shop checkout a short bubbly buxom cashier was talking to the person in front of me about how her mother phones her four times a day and she can't talk. "I'm either working or with my three kids. She calls and I say, I can't talk mom, here, talk to the kids," and she hands Grandma in cell-phone form to her kids. "They put the phone into their toy trucks and drive Grandma around while she's yakking away, she doesn't even notice! She just has to talk, she doesn't need to listen."

Louise Erdrich

As a North American writer it is essential to me that I try to understand our human relationship to place in the deepest way possible, using my favorite tool, language.

-Louise Erdrich, NYT

Man Hunt, or A Day in the Park

Yesterday afternoon Bill and I walked Lily to the baseball field for a run and then we continued along to the pond. It was a beautiful day. We kept seeing people out walking their dogs, but we couldn't speak with them because they were all on the phone. When we got to Edgewater Drive we saw flashing red and blue lights reflected in the water, and police cars on the other side of the pond. "That can't be good," I said, and laughed because our friend on Edgewater Drive says that.

We met up with with Milo, the very handsome young chocolate lab who loves Lily, and wiggles and moves like a cartoon. The kids in Milo's family were on the street with their mom and the neighboring kids eating fudgicles. A helicopter flew overhead. One of the kids was petting Lily, hiding his fudgicle behind his back. Then the other mom came over and said, "My neighbor just told me that she heard on the police radio that there's a manhunt going on, and the guy has a gun!" We saw the helicopter hovering overhead, staying in one spot like a gigantic dragonfly. Both mothers panicked and began hurrying their children into their respective houses, saying "We're going inside now." "Why?" the kids asked. "There's a very bad man on the loose," Milo's mother said. One of her daughters asked, "What about Daddy?" He was out on the street power washing the mud off of his RV. "Daddy will hit him with the power washer if he comes near," she said.

We kept walking and passed a man with chaotic gray hair who was standing in his driveway beside his black pickup truck. The truck door was open and he was on the phone. I noticed the Veteran seal on his license plate. He snapped the phone shut and looked at us. "It's the Staties," he said, meaning the State Police. I told him that we had just heard from a woman on the lake who had heard about it on her police radio. "They're looking for a guy," I said. "I just saw police racing down Rathbun Street," he said. The man was squinting at the helicopter. "Can a helicopter really have a view of a person on the ground?" I asked. "Yes, they can see really well from above. They can tell if it's a man or a woman." "Really? Do they use binoculars?" "No, they can see. He's only 1,000 feet up," the man said, gesturing up. The sound of the helicopter made me think of war. I watched the helicopter, imagining the pilot seeing us; two men and a woman and a dog on the ground looking up at him. I grabbed Bill and called up, "It's not him!"

We continued walking. Bill said they're probably trying to flush the guy out of the woods. "How can they do that?" "They have police dogs, and guys on the ground, along with the helicopter." I could only imagine it would be really easy to hide from a helicopter, especially in a city. Couldn't you just curl up into a ball under a shrub or a couch, or hide in a tree house or a shed?

When we got home I decided to give Lily a quick shampoo under the hose while the air was still relatively warm. My neighbor came into the yard to pet Lily. "I need a dog hug," he said, not minding that she was sudsy and soaking wet. "I completely understand. Did you see the helicopter?" I asked. "I heard it," he said. "They're looking for a guy, it's a man hunt," I explained. "Great, that's wonderful," he said, rolling his eyes.

Harvest Figure

It's a gray sky this morning and it makes the colorful trees seem even brighter. My bread dough rose slowly overnight and has been shaped into four oblong loaves and set to rise under a kitchen towel. Lily and I walked through Oak Hill Cemetery for the first time in months. There are acorns everywhere. Walking over them is like roller skating. The hydrangea blossoms throughout the cemetery resemble the heads of sheep. They were big and white in the summer, but now they are rose-colored, and the hydrangea leaves have partly turned from green to yellow. This annual rose-green-yellow color clash makes me laugh.

The neighborhood is crisp and quiet. The window screens are in various undecided states. The outdoor potted plants have been hit with frost. Pumpkins are optimistically perched on people's porches. Yesterday I saw an authentic home-made pumpkin-head harvest figure on my urban street. He slumped on his stoop beside the front door. I admired the simple hand-carved pumpkin-head, and was envious of his pristine black jeans and navy cotton sweatshirt.