All right, I’ll be honest. A number of doctors and nurses have cautioned me against being outside when the temperature falls well below zero. I have had open heart surgery and also angina, and severe frostbite from running around pastures chasing donkeys in the middle of the night in the middle of blizzards.
The cold can play tricks with the heart, I know that. But I shovel and rake snow off the roof all the time, i’ve had no trouble.
I am one of those people they mean when they say older people with certain conditions need to stay inside sometimes. i never do, and I never regret it. I did yesterday, and I did regret it somewhat.
There was a lot of wind and the temperature was well below zero, as in – 20, and I helped bring hay out and got Gus to eliminate and hauled water outside. At times like this I really want to help, I hate the idea of Maria doing all the chores along in that cold.
Maria was yelling at me to go inside, but what male listens to advice like that, men can be spectacularly vain and stupid sometimes, and being told what I can and can’t do makes me crazy under normal circumstances.
My fingers and toes started to throb, my chest started to ache, my very marrow seemed to be freezing inside of me as the temperature fell and the wind picked up – and this was when it was – 4 degrees at 10 a.m.
My glasses fogged up and I couldn’t see so I reached up to take them off, and they fell into the snow. I couldn’t see them or find them and took my gloves off to root around in the frozen snow. Then, of course I had to kneel down and dig for the glasses. Then, of course, I slipped on the ice and fell over.
The wind whipped my snow-covered face and I felt it turning to brass.
This polished me off. I got the glasses and retreated into the house, Red was ahead of me, hopping up and down in the cold snow. I started shivering and couldn’t stop. My frostbitten toes and fingers were killing me, I felt like a popsicle that couldn’t melt.
I just ran to the fire and stood there, stomping my feet and shaking myself off.
And I felt exhausted, I felt drowsy like freezing people feel. Maria came in, saw me, shook her head in exasperation, growled at me to lie down, wrapped me in blankets, brought me tea and hot chocolate. My teeth were chattering so loud the dogs came running in.
I was pale as a ghost and buried my face in blankets. My skin was frozen.
We have an understanding that we don’t tell each other what to do in these circumstances but sometimes that breaks down. Sometimes, we are each so willful it’s hard to watch. But I am dumber than she is, and that is a wicked combination when added to willfulness.
I was just spent and cold and fell asleep shortly.It felt like the life had just drained out of my body.
I didn’t know that Gus had hopped up and gone to sleep in my lap. Maria saw this and took a photo and asked me if I wanted it, and I said no, then I thought why not? I looked ridiculous, but I felt so much better and Gus stayed with me until I woke up, I think he must have added a bit to the warmth. I inhaled the hot chocolate.
(Red was at my feet, as always, Fate was with Maria.)
Did I learn my lesson? Are men rational? Do they listen? Do pigs fly?
I sort of learned my lesson. I was out there again this morning, but just for 15 minutes. And when my glasses fogged up, I just went inside. I will not hide inside during snowstorms, but I will dress carefully and be more self-aware. The doctors don’t live on a farm, and nobody lives forever.
We are all entitled to good and nutritious food for ourselves and our families. This is something many of the refugees I am meeting need but do not have.
There is something especially raw and especially powerful about getting to know the refugees I am meeting and writing about and hoping to help. In our country, the refugees are just another story, another controversy, something else to divide us, for politicians to exploit, and that list is now so long almost no one is thinking of the lives of the refugees at all.
Here, so many of us are refugees, often literally, sometimes in spirit, in many cases because of our family histories and experiences. The refugee experience is a very deep chord running through our national soul, I do not believe it will ever be destroyed or wiped away.
Here, we are all refugees in one way or another.
I am learning once again – I saw this in my own family – about the drama of the refugee, the endless anxiety, the despair, the delusions of normalcy and recovery, the struggle for optimism, the hard labor of adjustment, the sense of isolation and the staggering daily challenges of life.
And the awful trauma of losing everything and facing cruelty, death, starvation and ruin, year after year.
In America, we are just beginning to understand the awful toll trauma takes on our soldiers and the victims of rape and violence, we call it PTSD. To the refugee, almost all of whom have seen their loved ones slaughtered or perish, or left behind, trauma is life itself, it shapes their very existence., it is as regular as the sun rising.
Being a refugee is about the search for dignity, safety and opportunity; a search for a personal existence within a larger community that must fight for its dignity and right to exist every minute of every day.
In a sense, the refugee has nothing to lose because she has already lost everything, and is once a again punished, condemned to be a stranger for the rest of their lives. The husbands back home seem to die the most frequently and immediately, so few of these families have men at home.
The refugee is never safe, their tragedy and struggle never ends.
The great hope and faith of the refugee is for their children, many will say it is too late for them to ever have a normal and rational and knowable life again. The children have a chance, the mothers say, which is why so many refugees sacrifice again for them.
Having been driven from their homes and land in the most horrific and unimaginable of ways, they again confront indifference and outright hostility, this time in their new home. This cruelty is an ugly tear in the moral fabric of their persecutors.
The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee, wrote powerfully about the refugee experience in her famous essay, “We The Refugees,” published in 1943 after she was driven from her home by the Nazi’s.
It is true, she wrote, that refugees have to seek refuge, even thought ” we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical opinion. The refugees of today say the same thing in the same words. A mother of four, a refugee from the Middle East, told me no one in her family had ever uttered a political thought or committed a political act, they were almost all butchered or bombed to death.
“Our optimism,” Arendt wrote, “indeed is admirable, even if we say so ourselves. The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lot our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feeling.”
And they left their relatives and best friends behind, killed in the genocides and wars and coups that are the hallmark of human men. The private lives of the refugees are forever ruptured, there will never again be normalcy, life can never again be taken for granted, not even in the land of the free and the brave.
Nevertheless, the refugee is uncomplaining, and looks ahead. I have never heard a refugee complain or show any kind of self-pity.
“We start our new lives,” one mother from Syria told me recently,”and try to follow as closely as possible all of the advice given us. We are told to forget, and to pretend we are American now, and so we try. Among ourselves, we know we are exiles forever, strangers always. We hope and pray for our children, they have hope here that we did not have.”
It has taken me months to get to know the refugees, to be accepted and trusted by them, I have had to move more slowly and patiently than I ever have, and I have a long way to go yet. Many of them know me now, and i have given them no reason not to trust me. The more I move among them, the more I learn.
They are afraid to call attention to themselves now, to have their photos taken or to be quoted publicly, and there is no reason for them to take risks. They they believe it is dangerous for them and their children. But they are also in need, and so they speak up reluctantly and carefully.
If I had not been a reporter for years, inured to people who didn’t want to see me, I would never have gotten this far. I want to be in the middle of one of the great moral struggles of my life. I know where I want to stand.
Many of the things I am learning are hard to see. I know there is hunger in America, but I rarely see it up close. I know children who wear flip-flops to school in the winter, and who have white rice and beans for dinner every night.
The refugees have been abandoned by their old countries, and abandoned once again by their new country, where many people do not want them here, including many powerful people.
Their subsidies and grants and support are drying up quickly, ever thing is being slashed or canceled. Nobody wants to remember any promises made, or obligations that were once honored. They used to have time and support to adjust, not there is little time and no support. They get here, and in a few weeks, with nothing but what’s in their suitcase, they are on their own.
The most basic human right, I believe, is to eat and feed one’s family. I have not seen anyone who is starving, but there are many who are hungry and do not have enough money to eat well and regularly.
So my first goal is to ask the Army Of Good to help in the new First Week Refugee Grocery Campaign, I am starting with my friend Ali (Amjad Abdulla) in January. Each month, we are going to a market to buy $150 worth of groceries. The families cannot help us, they can’t afford baby sitters and work all the time.
This is a drop in the bucket. We will help a dozen families one time. But you have to start somewhere, and see if the Gods and their winds will get behind you and push on ahead. One step at a time.
So we will talk to them, find out what they need and bring it to them. Once a month, every month. This idea is a powerful one for many reasons. One is that it is needed badly. Another is that it is inexpensive. This program will cost about $1,800 for the first year, and I have half of that money in hand already..
I will not have to ask for much more for this grocery program. It is not really about money, we will never have enough of that, but about heart.
If you wish to donate, you can, to P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816 or via paypal, [email protected]. I have enough on hand to get started and I will meet with and photograph the families as we progress, you will get to see them and meet them also.
I will put some other projects and ideas aside, if necessary, no refugee who comes to our bountiful country should want for food or go hungry. I am already pestering a grocery store chain for a discount.
I am embarrassed that my country has admitted these long suffering people, and is now abandoning them, there is so much wealth here.
I am heartened that so many people are eager and willing to help them. I am focusing on the good, there are good people willing to help, we have identified the need and can address it.
We can’t perform miracles or wave magic wands, but we can fill some of the holes – and bellies – that the refugees know all too well.
Many of the people I meet have been brutally driven from their homes, often raped and assaulted and spent years languishing in refugee camps. To a one, they dreamed of coming to America, a land where their children can dare to aspire to better lives.
I propose to help them see that the American dream is real, and the American spirit of generosity and acceptance is very much alive.
One day a month, this is something we can do. And that is the way for to respond – one day at a time, one thing at a time. Small acts of great kindness. Thanks.
This morning, I got a quite remarkable and unusual message from Jennie in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
She is a long-time readers, she is worried about me, and was writing to urge me to be more like the President, Mr. Trump and use social media more effectively.
This startled me a bit, I don’t often hear that. I wondered if it was meant to be a joke, but Jennie appeared serious.
“Look how smart he is, using social media the way he does, he has 42 million followers on Twitter, how many do you have on Twitter or Facebook?,” she asked.
I was taken aback, I have no idea how many followers I have on Twitter, I rarely go there even though the blog feeds onto it. I am never attacked there, and so far as I can see, barely noticed at all.
I admit to being shocked – I think she was just trying to help – and sitting out there in Iowa, where the President is much more popular than I will ever be anywhere, she was just trying, as she put it, “to light a fire under your butt.” If he could do it, she said, why not me?
Jennie said she voted for Mr. Trump, and has read my blog from the beginning. She enjoys both of us, she said. I don’t often hear that, either.
“He just puts it right out there,” she said, “let the chips fall. Might be a lesson in there for you,” she suggested. “Be stronger!”
I told Maria about this and showed her the e-mail to make sure she believed me, and she was taken aback. ”
She said what?,” she said, quite bewildered.
The Internet is a mystical world, I told her. Write online often enough and long enough, and you will hear just about everything.
But Jennie had a point. They say that in America, anyone can grow up to be President, and that seems to be so, so why couldn’t a strange Jewish boy from Providence grow up to have 42 million followers online?
Blogs are very personal, you can use them for anything you like, within certain boundaries. You can use them for good, for money, for power, for vengeance, for political ambitions.
My blog began in 2007 on Memorial Day, and it was always meant to be selfish and self-serving. As publishing began to change, I needed a new way to promote my books and talk to my readers. If I got 20,000 or 30,000 likes on Facebook, my publicist told me, I could be a best seller. He lied.
I never even glancingly thought of using my blog for any kind of general good, or to get power and fame. I just wanted to sell enough books to live.
I was not, I often said, a charity, I was not the United Fund, it was not about doing good. Blogs are expressions of their creators, and the world changed, and I changed. I see my blog as a reflection of our times, of our world.
It took me awhile to think about how to respond to Jennie and of course, I thought I needed to share her message. Any one of us could do this, she seemed to be suggesting.
I could get started on a powerhouse blog by attacking people who attack me – I’ve done that a few times – but that did not draw millions of people to my blog, in fact, many people get annoyed when I do that.
They say I am asking for it by sharing my life, I should just suck it up. I do the same thing the President does when they say that: get lost, piss off, you are fake, go somewhere else.
But I am not rich or famous or powerful, my readers will not stand by me if I slug a little girl on the street.
Maybe my hair isn’t right or I need to work on charisma, or find a better slogan: Make Bedlam Farm Great Again! I’m not good at name-calling, and I don’t like arguing. I am not suited for public life.
I have more than 50,000 regular followers on Facebook, which was once considered pretty good for an author. There are four million visits to the blog online each year, which is very good. But I admitted to Jennie that I was not in the Presidents’ league.
Perhaps I am just not willing to do what it takes to get that big. And not able.
One difference is that Mr. Trump wants to lead and run the country, and the very idea would horrify me: power frightens me, which is a good thing, since I don’t have any. If 42 million people read my posts every day, I might just crack up again.
I have enough trouble running a 17 acre farm and getting a dog to sit down.
I told Jennie one way for me to boost my reach on social media would be to get the President to attack me. People he attacks get millions of followers almost instantly, as well as death threats and hate mail. I don’t really need to go there.
I am not interested in ragging on our President, lots of louder and smarter people do that every day. Since Jennie raised it, I think the contrast between our social media styles is worth exploring. And who knows? He might just call me up to chat about it.
I would tell him to get a donkey or a dog like Gus or Fate or Red. Or a human like Maria. People put up with a lot from me if they get to see them. But he doesn’t need any advice from me.
In the past couple of years, it has occurred to me that you can use a blog or a social media account for good. There are lots of people out there and many want to do good.
When I asked for help in paying the farmer Joshua Rockwood’s legal fees after he was so unjustly accused of animal cruelty, we raised more than $70,000 quickly.
This enabled him to get the legal help he needed, and he was ultimately victorious. Thanks to the Internet, justice was done.
I started out small, and am still small. I raised money for two older sisters whose cats were taken from them after complaints from so-called animal lovers that they had too many. They both lost their reason for living, and we got their cats back (they were well cared for cats.)
Most of you know the rest of the story. The blog has gone on to raise money for older people, and for younger people, for refugees and immigrants, for people with big vet bills, for people who need food and people who need clothes, and people who need to pay off loans they didn’t know they had, for carriage horses and draft horses.
All told, we’ve raised nearly $200,000 for people in need and causes that I believe are worthy. An Army Of Good formed around the blog and we have touched many lives and made them better and easier. I can’t imagine what we might do with 42 million people. What a blast.
It was a shock to me to see how a blog could be used for good, and that is selfish too, because it makes me feel good about myself and about the world. I have never felt better.
It would be great to see Mr. Trump grasp the power of his 42 million followers. Think of the mortgages they could pay, the tuitions they could take care, the burned out houses they could rebuild, the flooded homes they could repair.
Think if every day he and his aides found a worthy American in need – the family of a policeman or fireman killed on duty, or a victim of brutality or sexual harassment, or a child in need of surgery, a widow without heat, a farmer whose cows got sick.
The President could spread a lot of fairy dust around and get everyone’s day started. I could offer quite a list. In one day, Mr. Trump could get every refugee I know a year’s worth of groceries and a down jacket for the winter.
But this would be presumptuous of me, I told Jennie. Why should he listen to me?
But the very idea sort of boggles the mind. Think if everyone with a big blog did that. Jennie did get me to thinking.
The blog isn’t only for good by any means, I write about my dogs and my life and Maria and the farm too, I share my life.
But doing good is where I have found my idea of God, and where I have healed myself and feel strong and meaningful in a difficult time.
Thanks for the idea Jennie, and for your concern. I kind of like my blog just the way it is.
We all have to find our own way in the world, and I have found mine, and he has found his. I’ll just leave it there. I don’t want to disappoint me Jennie, but I think what you see is what you get with me.
And thanks for hanging in there with me all this time.
Since Gus was diagnosed with Megaesophagus, we have some new rituals. Either Maria or I have to hold him sitting up for between five and ten minutes. Nobody seems to mind this new task much, including Gus, who gets cuddly and mellow. He reminds me a sheep, when you stand one up on its rear, it goes still.
Fate, of course, has to know everything and be involved in everything. I think she would like to crawl into Maria’s lap as well.
Unlike Red and Fate, Gus has no great meet to go outside. It’s 11:15 and two degrees below zero. His new favorite spot is on Lenore’s couch, sandwiched between camera bags and light umbrellas, and right under a wallboard showing the great clown Lou Jacobs.
I have a space heater on the floor near him (and me) and two wood stoves going full tilt. Maria is very chilly in her studio, but gamely plugging away.
Dog have always been a part of my writing life, I’ve almost never written a word without a dog nearby. Red is at my feet, Gus is just behind, in the spot Lenore loved so much More later.
