Sometimes when I look out into the pasture, I see a scene that seems timeless to me, something of a painting. This morning I looked out to see Simon and Red out in the pasture, Red was watching the sheep, Simon grazing. It could have been anywhere, anytime. But it was here, in my time.
My surgery was on July 1, and today, Maria and I went to Albany for a post-up check-up from my cardiac surgeon, Dr. Adanna Akujuo, she is as radiant and nice as she is competent and accomplished. I was very fortunate to get her to stop my heart and crack open my chest and move some arteries around, looks like she did a splendid job.
My check-up went beautifully for me. The X-rays were great. I have permission to start driving again and I can use my big camera as much as I want. Dr. Akujuo, who is from Nigeria and trained in New York, actually took it to a scale and weighed it, I had the right lens on, it was just under 10 lbs. Good news for four weeks out of surgery. My heart looked great she said, I do still have some fluid in one lung, I have to deal with that, but it is not a major issue, I was cleared and cheered, and I am sorry to say I will not be seeing Dr. Akujou again (hopefully, I guess.) That smile is very genuine, she is a sweet human being.
I suppose this ends this phase of my tell tale heart, the surgical phase. Quite a month. I have some recovering yet to do, Dr. Akujuou says it will be a few months before I really feel the effects of the surgery on my heart. Still, much to celebrate, much to be grateful for.
My heart and I are building quite a history. I remember really feeling it when I was living at the first Bedlam Farm in West Hebron, New York and I got divorced and then fell in love with Maria and we got married. My heart was very much alive then, quite excited. It’s ironic, but around that time I began to feel some fatigue, began to have some trouble walking up hills and paths I had walked up easily before. i began thinking i was getting old, my walking days were numbered. I felt fatigue at the end of the day, I was feeling it for years. I took shorter walks, went up fewer hills.
In the last two or three years I was so tired sometimes that I began to think I was going to die soon, I began to get ready in my mind. I could not see myself being on the earth for too many years, I was getting resigned to it. Old people talk really can kill you.
Walking up any hill was a struggle, my heart was heavy, I was short of breath and heavy in my chest. I was thinking about my daughter, and I thought a lot about Maria, and my wish for her to remain an artist and not be saddled with my debts or bills. I believe I was getting ready to die, making plans, looking back on this experience, I see now that my heart was crying out to me for much of this year. I did not hear her crying.
I was struggling to walk with Maria and the dogs. I was preparing to leave the world, reviewing my life, trying to settle things in my mind. Nobody lives forever, I thought, it is getting to be my time. It never crossed my mind to get an EKG, I never thought of my struggling heart, gasping to survive.
Since my surgery, my life has been turned around, so has my heart. Now, I see, I have to get ready to live, not die. The doctors tell me I have added many years to my life if I take care of myself, and I intend to be very aware of my heart and love and respect it. It is much more meaningful to plan for life than for death, but it has also turned things around in my head as well as my heart. It is time to think now about staying in the world, about how I will live, what I wish to accomplish, create, represent. I will be fierce in my determination to stand in my truth, to be creative, to open my beating heart to Maria every day I am alive.
I have even more decisions to make, things I wish to resolve, get in order. But I am thinking very differently already, my heart has changed my view of things. It is leading the way to a new beginning. It is singing a new song, I hear it all over my body. Maria and I have a lot of ideas about life, about living spiritually, living meaningfully, living simply and peacefully. How different, how wonderful.
Dr. Akujuo is not especially sentimental, she shook my hand and said goodbye, I could tell this was fairly routine for her, she does it all of the time. It was not, of course, routine for me. I could not really express what I felt, I simply thanked her and she just nodded and we shook hands and she left the room. What an opportunity for me, to be ready to live instead of die. How to get my head around it?
It is clear now that my surgery went well and I can begin the process of moving forward. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote that we are not born once, but that life requires us to give rebirth to ourselves time and again.
I am reborn, I am ready to live.
My daughter, who lives in Brooklyn, was visiting me recently and she asked me about the carriage horses, she was curious that I was so drawn to the subject, especially since I do not live in New York City. I asked her what the thought about the mayor’s drive to ban the horses from New York.
She said she didn’t care, really, she had always had this sense that the horses were being abused, she had seen that accusation so often online she assumed it had to be true as no one ever challenged it. If it wasn’t true, she said, and she was coming to see that it wasn’t, then the horses were no one’s business but their owners and drivers, and the mayor had better things to do. Still, she said, she saw the carriage horses as an expensive entertainment for tourists, they didn’t really have much to do with her, it wouldn’t affect her greatly whether they stayed or left.
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I am an animal lover and I write about animals, so the issue has special meaning for me on many levels. But I told my daughter I thought the issue was important for everyone who cares about a moral government or the workings of a healthy democracy. The nature of government – it’s power and purpose, affects everyone in a democracy, and if a wrong is done to anyone, it is done to everyone. This issue is not just about horses, as many people are beginning to see.
What the mayor and his millionaire friends are doing to the carriage horses can be done to us. And most likely will be, if history is a judge. Some millionaire might wake up next week, decide my having a border collie who works or three donkeys who guard sheep is abuse – they should all be out roaming in the wild – and give a lot of money to the governor New York for his re-election campaign. I could be facing an angry mob of people – none of whom would ever speak with me or come see my dog or donkeys – protesting the existence of my farm, and lobbying for a ban on my work and livelihood.
I am surprised and sorry to say that is more or less what has happened to the people in the carriage trade. Has democracy failed them?
My guides to moral democracy are the people who created it in our country, most especially John Locke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson. They understood the dangers of arrogant government and grasped the need for defining its power and purpose.
“A wise and frugal Government,” wrote Jefferson, “is one which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” This, he wrote, “is the sum of good government…”
I prefer Jefferson’s definition of moral government rather than that of Steven Nislick, the founder of NYClass, the private organization spearheading the drive against the horses. He threatened to punch a New York Daily News photographer in the face because the paper has opposed his efforts to ban on the carriage horses.
By Jefferson’s definition, good and wise government is failing in New York City, a city which professes to care deeply about justice and fairness.
Government has not served the carriage trade. In New York, the city government has made no effort to curb or control the relentless, and often dishonest and cruel, attacks on the people in the carriage trade, or protect them from cruel slander or harassment. The hundreds of people who work with the horses are not being left free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, quite the opposite, their work and livelihood is gravely threatened without cause, due process, or any kind of open hearing, debate or discussion.
The people in the carriage trade have broken no laws, committed no crimes, there are no charges or complaints against them from the five different city agencies responsible for regulating their work and the the horse’s well beings or from the public. The mayor’s clear intent – without ever once speaking to anyone in the carriage trade or visiting a single stable – is to take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is not in response to the popular will or the public well being, or any accusation of wrongdoing. It is almost entirely a response to the private and intensely controversial views of one millionaire who calls himself a supporter of animals rights and who gave the mayor enormous amounts of money for his campaign, and his small but angry legions of fanatical supporters.
Even though 66 per cent of all New Yorkers, nearly three out of four, say they wish the carriage horses to remain in the city, the overwhelming sentiment seems to have no effect on the outcome. The mayor has said those figures do not matter to him, the City Council is moving ahead to try and take away the legitimate work of hundreds of people and seize their property regardless of the public’s will. He means to enact his ban on the horses, which he has described as one of the most urgent priorities of his administration. It is not clear whether or not he will be successful, the people in the carriage trade are tired and worried.
The philosopher and writer John Locke invented the idea modern democracy, he was one of the strongest influences on Thomas Jefferson and the founders of the American experiment. “All mankind..being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions,” he wrote. “Every man has a property in his own person,” Locke wrote. “This nobody has a right to, but himself.”
Locke also said this: “Government has no other end, but the preservation of freedom and of property.”
Are the members of the carriage trade being treated as equal and independent?
The mayor often speaks to the people in the organizations seeking to ban the horses, he has taken their money, attended their fund-raising dinners, and plots in secret the strategy behind the move to banish the horses. He will speak to millionaires about the carriage trade any time, but he will not speak to the people in the carriage grade, visit their stables, negotiate with their representatives, attend their functions or meetings, or even share the reasoning or nature behind the secret proceedings nowunderway in the City Council and meant to shut down their work.
In fact, the members of the carriage trade are treated as less than human, not entitled to the considerations given most the wealthy or other members of the so-called moral community.
Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, the author of “Common Sense,” the pamphlet that helped inspire it, wrote that “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for it he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” This, I told my daughter, is why she might care, and why you might as well. Paine might well have been speaking of the carriage horses when he wrote that “when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”
All over New York and in many parts of the country, thinking people are embracing the privilege of thinking, awakening to the distorted morality and corrupt origins of the long campaign to banish the horses. It is not right, it does not bear thought or scrutiny, it speaks to the failure of democracy, not it’s proper and moral workings. It would also be a grievous setback for the idea that animals like the horses can remain in our world and be safe with us if we will find the will.
I told my daughter that it would be a good exercise to take the statements of Jefferson, Locke and Paine, architects and angels of our democracy and imagine the three of them sitting on a jury that would decide whether or not the carriage horses would be banished from New York. They seem as well qualified as the New York City Council. And all three actually knew something about horses.
I believe these three brilliant men would instantly grasp that this issue is about much more than the horses. Their feelings about the duty of government are quite clear. This controversy is about how government and democracy work, whether government can be just and fair, whether government will protect our freedom and property rather than join in the mobs of the moment that sometimes appear seeking to take it away.
The controversy is also about whether the men and women of the carriage trade are our equals, after all, entitled to the rights of hard-working citizens who pay their taxes and obey the law. It is about whether they are free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, not to have the taken from their mouths the bread of labor that they have earned.
You can read their own words and think for yourselves. It is still possible to do that, even in the age of hysterical blogs. Hundreds of people – neighbors, animal lovers, veterinarians – have gone to the stables to see for themselves how the horses are being treated. The mayor won’t go. Every single one of them – myself included – sees horses that are healthy, safe and well cared for. Abuse is a tough thing to hide in a big draft horse, no one, not even the city’s inspectors, has found any in the stables.
If the visionaries who created our democracy – Jefferson, Locke, Paine – were deciding, the carriage horses would remain in New York, the freedom and property of the human beings in carriage trade preserved.
Tomorrow, an important day in the recovery. We go back to the hospital to see my surgeon for the first time since she stopped my heart, cracked open my chest and rebuilt my artery system. Perhaps saved my life as well, and surely improved it. Dr. Adanna Akujuou shocked me when she appeared in the doorway of my hospital room, she was a vision, a dream, not what I expected. A tall, strikingly beautiful African-American women from Nigeria, trained in New York city, she had a wide smile and shoes that were the envy of many of the hospital nurses. When I met her, she was wearing five-inch heels, she was nothing like the other surgeons, they mostly looked like homicide detectives, all men in their white shirts, crewcuts, ties and shiny shoes.
She was confident and charismatic, a vision. I had an instant crush on her which I confessed to Maria. I told her I trusted her with my heart, she said the operation was not a big deal for her, it was the valve surgeries that were creative. Maria said she understood (she usually doesn’t.) Meeting her, I did not again worry about the surgery.
I last saw Dr. Akujuou two days after my operation, she warned me against using my big camera or moving my arms much or lifting things for months. They kicked me out of the ICU and sent me home before I could say goodbye, so tomorrow I will thank her and, perhaps, say goodbye. If all goes well, I will be turned over to a cardiologist and not see her again.
Ironic for someone who changed my life so much. Tomorrow, she will check me out, look at an X-ray of my chest, looked at the bloodwork, ask me a lot of questions, listen to my heart. I will ask her to clear me for driving and for permission to carry my camera, again, which I will bring with me. I hope she will let me.
I hope she likes what she sees, I will tell her I am feeling good, doing well, I walked more than four miles today and am storming hills all over the county just like Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American war. One friend dropped off a treadmill, another brought over a stationary bicycle for the winter, I will try both of them out. In the meantime, I am a walking fiend, and I am loving it, although it often tires me out.
I see tomorrow as an important day, the end of this phase of open heart surgery – the struggle to walk, the diagnosis, the hospital, the surgery, the recovery. I believe I am healing well, I understand it is a long progress and it will last for months, even a year or so, but I am ready for the next phase, it is time. I am working through most of the day, I feel strong and eager to resume life. Unless I sneeze or cough, I am in little pain and am beginning to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. I still crash most afternoons and sleep the deepest sleep sometimes. It is a little bit better every day.
So back to Albany, back to the hospital. I admit to not being eager to return there. But I want to see my surgeon again, and thank her for returning my heart to me. It might be a routine thing for her, but she changed my life, and she needs to be thanked.
