13 February

What Rocky Sees

by Jon Katz
What Rocky Sees

 

I didn’t really focus on it until recently, but it is clear that Rocky cannot see well, if at all. I paid attention to this more closely today when I came bye to bring him an apple. When the car pulls up, he moves away quickly, into a stall in the rear of the standing barn. If I call out to him, he puts his head out and listens, and then darts back inside. It takes four or five attempts before he comes out and slowly approaches the sound of my voice.

I hold an apple out and he walked right into my hand, startling himself. I had to pull it away to avoid poking him in the eye. When I dropped the apple, he stuck out his nose to smell it, and then he found it and chewed on it. The family is discussing where Rocky will go, and there are a number of people willing to take him in. He has food, water and shelter. I didn’t realize that Rocky can barely see. I put up more photos of him on Facebook. He is a touching figure to me, a story of devotion and of the nature of life, and the ways in which animals mark the passages of our lives. I’ll stay in touch with the family and keep visiting him.

13 February

Loving Frieda

by Jon Katz
Loving Frieda

 

Dear Frieda. Happy Valentine’s Day.

I wanted to read this to you tomorrow, and to share it, because my love for you has become a special thing, different for me and very powerful. We have been through a lot, you and I. When we met, I thought you were going to take me apart and scatter pieces of me along the road. Your purpose in life seemed to be to protect Maria from you, and to keep me away from her.

We had quite a trip together you and I. I have just finished a book about it, “Frieda and Me, Second Chances,” which will be published next year, but I think how far we have come and how much I have come to love and admire your loyalty, courage and love. You had to live in a barn for a year while I  worked with you and assembled your story. I think of you abandoned in the Adirondacks for those years, and chained up in an auto repair shop yard day and night. And how it took them a year to catch them, and of how you saved those lives. All for the book.

It is difficult, looking at you know, to even remember those first days. You sit by my feet and guard me, day and night, and I am safe, I have to say. You still are a handful, still raise hell, still chase trucks, run off when you can, eat skunks and rabbits and  raccoons if you get the chance. You remind me always that you are a dog, but more than that you are a great and loving heart, and I am so flattered and grateful to have earned your trust. I appreciate the ways in which you have opened my eyes to the different ways in which a dog can be wonderful and for showing me more about patience and trust.  I could not have a more faithful and loving companion. Thanks for loving Maria and for protecting us. Happy Valentine’s Day. I like to say you are the only real man in the house!

13 February

Hey! I Love You!

by Jon Katz
Hey! I Love You!

 

Writers used to write about love all the time – my favorite, Gabriel Garcia Marquez does it beautifully and even grumpy Wendell Berry is always offering love poems to his wife. Today, the subject of much fiction is anxiety and depression, and that is a turn-off.  In our time, writing about love seems out of fashion. Life is seen as too cynical, too ambivalent, too sophisticated and we are preoccupied considering the endless reports of our imminent doom. We are supposed to be too guilty to feel love or deserve it. Or too sorry for ourselves.  If artists used to work to capture love, now they seem to warn us against it. I’d like to offer my own one-writer revolution and change direction. Today, artists and writers need to remind people that love exists, not that it doesn’t.

I am writing more about love, and I’m happy about it. With Valentine’s Day looming, I am peppering the farm with Valentine cards and notes, drawings and offerings, a sort of one-week love festival. In my mind, every day is Valentine’s Day. Having lived with out life, I am reborn, and determined not to let one day go bye again without remembering and invoking it. Love is everything, after all, and it needs to be reclaimed. And shouted from the rooftops.

I remember one evening a few years ago when I looked across the road from the farmhouse and saw a light burning in the Studio Barn, and I felt my heart flip right over. Everything in the world that I wanted was in that Barn, I realized. Money didn’t matter. Security didn’t matter. The judgement of others did not matter. Anger and argument and self-pity didn’t matter.  None of the things I worried about day and night mattered. But it wouldn’t be simple. I had to change. To open up. To take one leap off the cliff, and then another. And then, many more.

Sometime later, I went over to that barn and I shouted through the door, “Hey! I Love You!” and I have been shouting it ever since, because it is the real truth, the real faith, the real purpose. She put an arrow through my heart, and it is lodged there still, and forever, and this feeling is larger than a day, or a life, or a pain in the foot, or a mean-spirited remark, or some sad or tragic news, as will happen in or time or any other.  Once I got that, life changed, and this feeling will carry me through this world and into the next.

It is the point, after all.

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