Before I met Maria, I did not know there was a Maria. I did not understand sweetness, or what it was or what it means. I did not know many people of such a pure heart, especially people who have not been understood or treated well, and who have every right to be angry and suspicious.
When we first met, Maria was very suspicious, she did not trust men or like too many. I understood intuitively that if I won over her dog Frieda – these were two battered two man-haters who were obsessively loyal and protective of one another – then I might win over Maria. Without Frieda, I didn’t have a prayer.
Maria possesses a sweetness of spirit that was not familiar to me, I had not encountered it close-up in my life, I am still surprised by it, still shake my head sometimes in wonder. This morning, I looked out the kitchen window and I saw Maria knelt over her Rapunzel chair, as she does faithfully every morning, in every kind of weather.
Minnie the barn cat was sitting on the chair, she has taken it over during the day. As Maria wove the baling string into the chair, she and Minnie touched heads, one of the ways in which they talk to each other, two sweet creatures finding communion with one another.
It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts, wrote the author Robert Goolrick. “The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.”
Maria says I am a nurturing person, but I am not a sweet person, and I imagine I will never be a sweet person. There is too much anger and wariness in me, although both are diminishing over time. I am older than she, I am a man, two strikes. Somehow, Maria was able to preserve the sweetness and generosity of spirit, I think she walled herself up inside a shell, like a turtle, and bided her time. When she emerged, her sweet soul was intact.
Life is like that sometimes, I withdrew into myself as a small child, and stayed curled up even now. Maria often says parts of me are closed up, parts of me are open. Maria’s spirit has suffused the farm with The Sweetness, it is a part of the place, and of our lives with animals.
It is hard to forget pain, but even harder to remember sweetness, I think. We have no wounds or scars to show from happiness. There are no statues to peace.
Walking in the woods with Maria and the dogs, I saw this tree and and the log that fell between the trunks and I said to her, “this tree reminds me of a vagina. It’s a Vagina Tree.” She laughed, she is a pagan and a witch and a fairy and she is not at all uncomfortable talking about vaginas, and she said, “but you probably won’t write about that on your blog.” I laughed this time and said, no, that might offend some people.
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, if course, I knew that I did have to write about it, I had to write a monologue.
But not to be offensive. There is nothing offensive about a vagina, it is not a dirty word. Rather, I needed to be honest.
If you are a man in our world, vagina is a very difficult thing to talk about. Men never, ever, talk about vaginas, I learned this early on, and when they do, it is in the crudest and most offensive possible way. Men, I have learned, are terrified of vaginas, just as many women think they are.
Young men never hear their fathers or brothers or uncles speak of vaginas, not unless it is in an offensive way. In all of my life, I never heard a man say a good or pleasing word about a vagina.
Many men find vaginas disgusting and somehow threatening, I don’t quite understand why.
They laugh, snicker, denigrate and descend into the most offensive kind of sexism and vulgarity, like presidential candidates. When men speak of vagina, it is almost always as a dirty word. They blush, mumble, mutter. I imagine that there is something very powerful about a vagina, or men would not be so fearful of it. Vaginas, central to life and love, are banned from the culture, never mentioned in media or most schools, considered inappropriate for conversation.
When I encountered my first vagina many years ago, it was a bizarre and alien experience, I had no idea what to expect. I was very pleasantly surprised. Vagina, I thought, is my friend. I see that many churches and political organizations seem to dread the vagina, it is banned from ceremony and life.
Like most writers, the idea of the “dirty word” makes me nervous. Words are not really dirty, only the minds of the people who utter them sometimes. I have always loved vaginas. To me, they are a door to another world, and it is rich, warm, beautiful and rewarding beyond imagination. Like finding a living entity of many mystical layers.
Vaginas have always been good to me, and I respect them and look at them with awe and wonder. I see them as a kind of living rose, a flower with power and glory that unfolds and moves and lives, that feels and loves, perhaps the most inviting place in the world.
The heart is capable of sacrifice, said Eve Ensler in the Vagina Monologue. “So is the vagina.” The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it’s shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. “So can the vagina.” It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. “So can the vagina.”
Beautiful words for me, but there, if course, another dimension to the vagina, at least for this man, who can never give birth. A vagina can welcome me and embrace me and connect with as no other living thing can do. It is sensuous and incredibly alive place, I think of it as a mystical world with nerves, pathways, twists and turns, layers and layers of feeling. It can be explored, but never fully known.
It can be entered, but never conquered. It is place of great power – we all come from vagina – but also of great love, and what else can make that claim? When men run from the idea of the vagina, it seems to me that there is something about power in their unease. Vaginas have power than men can only imagine and never fully comprehend. So we hide the vagina from public view and make mentioning it a heresy.
I hope this changes, I am happy to do my part by offering my own vagina monologue. Like death and mortality, things become less fearful and mysterious when they are brought into the open, mentioned, considered and discussed. I am pleased to have encountered my vagina tree, I will make it a point to write about it once in awhile, I doubt anyone will be offended. If so, they will learn that this is not the place for vagina haters.
The hamburger wars got underway in earnest yesterday two days after Fate ate some uncooked organic beef off of the kitchen counter next to the stove (scene of the crime seen through the door). It was supposed to be dinner.
Many people laughed and said their dogs did it all the time, I have to say I was pissed and resolved that our dog Fate would not do it again. I am big on having a sense of humor, but strong on the idea of training, rather than accepting obnoxious behaviors. Eventually, I laughed about it, but not for awhile.
“Why not just put food in a microwave and hide it,” somebody suggested on Facebook. “Why not train the dog not to do it?,” I huffed back. I laugh at Fate all the time, she is the Joy Dog, but I don’t like the idea of giving up training to enable dogs to be poorly behaved.
This is problem with Fate.
Dog training is tricky enough, but especially difficult when the dog is smarter than you are, as might well be the case here. Fate has never taken food off of any counter (nor have any other of my dogs ever) and she knows she isn’t supposed to do it. She never goes near the counter when I am in the kitchen or nearby.
She got the hamburger meat when I was listening to music on my Ipad with earphones on, I didn’t hear a thing, and there wasn’t a trace of anything – the dish was in place, the Worcestershire sauce was still on the plate, Fate was dozing on her bed next to Maria in the living room.
My best analysis – I LOVE to analyze dog training behaviors, it is my hobby – is that she was passing by, smelled the sauce (Maria and I have given both dogs leftover hamburger meat at times, we put it in their bowls, they are never fed anything out of their bowls) and was just too sorely tempted. Still…So how to break the habit.
Yesterday I put the burger on the counter, put sauce on it to replicate the smell and then went into the bathroom, closed the door and sat on the rim of the bathtub. The toilet seat seemed undignified to me for reasons that are not clear. I read a novel on my Iphone for about five minutes and listened carefully. I heard Fate moving slowly-tiptoeing, really, which told me she was being sneaky. I crept up to the bathroom door and peeked through the crack I had left open, I saw her tail sticking out, telling me she was at the counter.
I had a throw chain with me, and burst out of the bathroom and saw she was standing at the counter, paws up near the plate, nose almost to the meat. “No,” I shouted, “get off!” and I threw the chain against the metal cabinet near her, startling her with the loud noise and my loud voice. She bolted out of the room and sat under the kitchen table. I pointed to the meat and said “no” in a loud voice, I call it “doing the bear.”
My timing was lucky and perfect. It is imperative to correct a dog or reinforce a dog at the right moment, too soon or too late and you’re confusing them. I threw the chain just as she was reaching towards the food, and the way she took off told me she knew exactly what I was correcting. A dog this smart may well get that on the first try, a dog this willful may try it again.
I went back out to the living room, and Fate came over to the kitchen door and lay down, watching me. I sat out of her sight, but i could see her haunches and tail from my chair. I read for an hour and she never moved, even though the meat was right on the counter and she could see it. Every few minutes I praised her and reinforced her being still. She dozed, chewed on some rawhide, visited Maria, then me, and then went back to her spot.f
A strong round in the hamburger wars, I am not cocky, we have to try this a few more times before I declare victory. She is a very smart dog, and if it was just an impulsive grab, that will be that. If it’s something that recurs, we’ll graduate to mousetraps that snap.
I practiced visualizations also. They are simple, really, not that complicated. You focus and picture what it is you want, and the dog uses their senses – smell, sight – to read your emotions and intent and put an image of it together in their heads. I have used it many times (it is partially what my new book is about) and I did it yesterday also. We’ll see. What I wanted was to picture her staying away from the counter for the rest of her life.
Sometimes the good guys win, sometimes the good guys need to win for all of us. This is one of those times.
Lisa and Scott Carrino are the good guys, they have been fighting for community all of their lives, their landlord has put the building that houses their much-loved cafe up for sale, and they need to buy it. They are seeking $75,000 on the gofundme project they launched this morning to help them buy the building.
The good and fair question for anyone reading this is clear enough: why should you help?
This is a personal and individual choice, no one else has the right to make it or tell you what to do. But I am proud to share my own answer to the question. And I want to be upfront about it. Scott is my closest friend. I know him to be a good and honest and loving man. He and Lisa are the very best symbols of community one could find.
Why should you care?
In his very powerful book of essays, author and farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry writes about the abandonment of farmers and rural communities by generations of bureaucrats and economists. Since World War II, he writes, the governing economic, political and agricultural doctrine is that rural life is no longer efficient, there are too few people on small farms and towns to fit into the new evolving global economy.
They are no longer big enough to survive in a corporate nation.
This idea has sparked one of the most painful and significant migrations in history – millions of rural people moving from the country to the city, a wave that has not yet slackened.
This migration has left much suffering and economic ruin behind it, and no one in power seems to have noticed or cared. As people have left the country for the coastal cities, often for bad jobs working for people who have forgotten what people are for, the symbols and factories and businesses and institutions of rural life have followed them. Rural communities and businesses struggling to survive amidst dwindling populations and the devastating consequences of box stores and corporate franchises.
Scott and Lisa Carrino decided several years ago to swim against this tidal wave and create a warm and nurturing place for their community – Cambridge, N.Y. (my community also) to gather, see one another, eat fresh and healthy food grown mostly by local farmers.
The Carrinos have worked frighteningly long hours seven days a week and their cafe is successful. It is a bright, warm, vital place with fresh flowers, wonderful warmth and healthy food. We have an emotionally disabled man who walks the streets of our town, Scott spent many hours searching him out, even following him, and persuading him to have a free cup of coffee at the cafe when it was cold outside. He finally came inside when it was near zero.
I don’t think a franchise restaurant would do that.
It is not a failure, it is a success, a radioactive jewel that alters the history and destiny of our community. The Round House has reversed the tide, brought something beautiful and necessary to a community that has been bleeding for years, watching helplessly as local institutions – their small hospital, their independent pharmacy – vanish.
And our town, blessed with family farms, a nearby college and artists and poets and writers and other artistic refugees from New York, is luckier than many.
Now, Scott and Lisa are faced with an urgent dilemma. They don’t own the beautiful old bank building where their cafe is located, if someone else buys it – “For Sale” signs are going up on the building this week – they will be forced to try to find another place or go out of business. Their landlord is determined to sell the property.
Community is precious, it is something we all seek. In our town, we have fought long and hard to keep our independent bookstore profitable and viable, and it is. That is a small miracle. We are seeking another small miracle. And the great thing about crowdsourcing is that it is personal and democratic. It is also easy to do.
A large number of people sending small amounts of money can pull it off, I’ve seen that again and again this year – with Ken Norman, our farrier who faced surgery; with Joshua Rockwood, who saved his farm from unjust persecution; with Blue Star Equiculture, who saved a blind horse in Vermont from certain death; with George Forss, who was able to publish his great work of photographs. Readers of this blog have raised more than $100,000 for good and just causes this year, I hope we can do it again.
In this, many local people will join us, the Round House is much-loved here, I believe people will fight hard for it. We can help them.
So I am raising yet another issue, and hoping you can consider it. This is a righteous cause, it would be awful if we lose this precious symbol of community, if we permit our rural towns be left behind by uncaring and unknowing politicians and academics. Good things happen at the Round House every day, Scott and Lisa will never get rich in their cafe, but they have earned the right to their own building and a secure future. Community needs to live. If we can do it here, you can do it there.
While rural communities have emptied, our cities have had to receive great masses of people unprepared for urban life, often working in bad jobs for uncaring people, amidst great poverty, crime and dislocation. The absence of community is devastating, whenever it is lost. A century ago, rural communities were thriving, many people followed their callings, not bad and insecure jobs working for corporations. We can fight to get some of that sense of community back. The cafe is not a job for Scott and Lisa, it is a calling.
Help them out if you can. A $5 contribution is as welcome as a $100 contribution;
The great question that hovers over this project, that hovers over all of us is one we have ignored or forgotten in our rush to make money our national religion. That is the question of what people are for? Is the obsolescence of people and community and institutions now our national political and social goal? I believe it is not.
In our country, and especially in rural America, there is work to be done. This is the urgent and vitally necessary task of restoring and caring for our farms, our communities, for Mother Earth. We can start right here and you can join us by helping the Round House Cafe to buy its own building. And thanks for considering it.
