Day: March 21, 2018

When I wrote about Gus’s death the other day, I got many – hundreds, actually – of messages about my idea of myself as a steward, my belief that my moral responsibility was to consider  his welfare about mine, and end his suffering, if I could.  I owed him dignity.

I seemed to have struck a deep nerve.

The piece I wrote went viral and many people – hundreds – asked me to write more about the idea of the steward, especially as it relates to animals.

As a steward of dogs and also some people, I plan to write about stewardship theory and how it has entered my life with animals and with dogs especially, but not only dogs. Stewardship is not a theory, it a seminal idea for me and my place in the world. It replaces the agony guilt and anxiety, and even grief.

Stewardship theory also applies in many ways to my work with the refugees and the Mansion residents, and of course. It guides me, drives me informs and clarifies the decisions and choices I have to make.

Lots of us have trouble making choices for pets and dogs in particular. They can’t tell us what they want, so we have to decide, as much as we balk at that power.

As a culture, we have failed to be good stewards for the elderly, we keep them alive, but we often take away their dignity and choice and self-respect. We often fail as stewards for our dogs, acting selfishly for us, rather than for them.

When we make difficult decisions about animals and people, we often feel alone and confused, we are prone to guilt and self-doubt. The steward’s ethos is moral and clear. We support virtue and dignity.

I have been reading about stewardship and studying it for some time, and gradually and slowly living by it. It  was so helpful to me in dealing with Gus’s illness and the decision to euthanize him. If the process was painful and difficult, the final decisions were clear.

The idea of the steward is an ancient one. The first stewards were Adam and Eve.

Stewards took care of the business of Kings and merchants, they acted as surrogates, especially by managing property, financial affairs and estates. Stewards often ran the country in the absence of the king. The idea of the steward evolved in early Christian theology, as so many other important ideas did.

When God entrusted the earth to Adam and Eve and their offspring, they became stewards of the earth and its resources, charged with protecting the earth and the environment. The early Christians – and some today – considered themselves stewards of the earth and of the spiritual graces given by  faith and by Christ, his life and resurrection.

They committed themselves to advancing the Kingdom of God and the welfare of people.

In recent years, the idea of stewardship has gone beyond any single religion and become a philosophy, a moral and ethical way of caring for children, animals, even businesses.

The doomed expectation God had for Adam and Eve became the secular expectation of the self-appointed stewards outside of religion: to be  collective, in that it forms a whole; to respects the purpose for which things exist; and to respect and promote the dignity of each person we encounter.

For example, the steward rejects the idea of ownership. Nothing really belongs to us, not even animals. Everything we have is a temporary possession.

Gus was not mine, he did not exist for me. He was his own self,  his own soul, and so I could detach my interests and confusion from his life, and safeguard his welfare, and especially his dignity, with clarity.

As Gus began to starve and was unable to keep food down, and we considered the alternatives many people chose:  custom-made chairs that forced him to sit up and eat upright for every meal for varying periods of time, we also observed his discomfort at being upright and spitting up and vomiting so much of his food.

He was always hungry, even ravenous, and the disease began to take over his persona, no matter  how much he ate. He was  losing himself.

To lose a soul is an awful and degrading thing to me. He was losing his dignity, his ability to live his natural life as a dog. There are much worse things than death, as much as we flee from it.

Gus was uncomfortable so much of the time, and so much of his life was devoted to surviving, I began to see that as a steward I was obliged to consider his dignity and suffering as much as my own desire to keep him alive. i also needed to put aside my own ego – the belief that I could save  him. That was about him, not me.

in addition, I have come to embrace the importance of self-respect. In a world where so many people feel free to tell other people what to do, I choose to take responsibility for my decisions. I choose self-respect. I need to satisfy only one person – me. That is what a moral choice is about.

Stewardship asks us to consider the resources and opportunities at our disposal that others do not have. It asks us to take responsibility for helping others, it is collective in that it asks us to find ways in which we can collaborate with others to make our resources – or those we can amass – work for some good.

We should take care of our own needs and keep what we need,  but I have a new idea of ownership than I once had.

Very little, if anything, is mine. In the Kabbalah, God often spoke to the prophets about stewardship, he was trusting the people to take care of Mother Earth, and he warned of awful consequences if they failed to protect her and care for her. The people were the stewards of the earth, just as Pope Frances has suggested in his writings about the environment.  She is our mother and our sister.

Stewardship is one of the earliest and most powerful spiritual ideas.

Thomas Merton also wrote  about the idea of the steward as it related to what he called “Christian Humanism,” a philosophy that seems to have faded amongst some modern-day Christians who have injected themselves into politics and abandoned Christian theology and the teachings of Christ. Christianity is not merely a religious system which attempts to explain evil,” wrote Merton in Love And Living, “it is a life of dynamic love which forgives evil, and through forgiveness, enables love to transform evil into Good.”

When the steward abandons the idea of merciful love, Merton wrote, “there can no longer be any claim to an authentic Christianity.”  We discover our true selves in love, he wrote.

I am not a Christian, but the practice and theory of stewardship is especially relevant in the lives of the animals we care for. We practiced merciful love in accepting the spittle and vomit we contended with every day for many weeks as Gus declined. We never made him feel guilty or ashamed.

What are the most basic principles of stewardship?

We do not own people and things. They are only temporarily in our possession.

We are responsible for how we treat people, our animals, the earth.

Stewards are accountable: anyone who manages the life, welfare of profession of another is accountable. We are all stewards of the resources, abilities and opportunities that we have been given, we will all be called to account for how we have treated the things in our care.

There is no reward: The early Christian stewards believed the would be rewarded incompletely in this life, but fully in the next.

My belief is that there is no reward but the act of stewardship itself.

Stewardship is holistic, and includes every area of my life.

A 15th century mystic – he or she’s identity is unknown – wrote that it is the steward’s responsibility to help work for a realm of understanding unity and peace where people communicate with one another, live and die with dignity, and cooperate with one another in being merciful and in feeding the hungry millions, and building a world of peace.

I like everything about stewardship, it fits my life and purpose. If I can’t handle dogma, I can easily embrace this.

I believe it  helped my dog to die in dignity, and it helped me to look in the mirror and be proud of what I saw.

Wayne is a sweet man, full of grace and gentleness. He has been at the Mansion only a few months, but is much loved there, especially by the staff. He adores Red, and hopes one day to have Red sleep over. I’m thinking about, not sure it’s a precedent I want to set.

Red came to the Mansion with few clothes or books, and now he has plenty of both. Yesterday, I asked him what he needs, and he said he would love some books about animals, picture books or hardcover books, he said it didn’t matter. In a place where people often complain or squabble, Wayne does neither.

He is always happy, always smiling, he accepts what he has and is grateful for it.

He is a faithful attender of our Friday Bingo games, someone has to sit with him and help him slide the red markers over the letters called. He loves to win, and always threatens to fire me if I I don’t call out letters that he has. He smiles and lowers his head and then raises an arm, and says “you’re fired!”

Then he laughs.

You can write Wayne c/o The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge,N.Y., 12816. He loves to read animal books.

I was taken aback when Emma sent me this photo of Robin, my granddaughter. I saw it just after Gus died, and I drifted off into that old cliche, death on one end, life on the other, that is the nature of things, the challenge that we must accept and respect.

I’m doing fine with Gus, just feeling a little drained and melancholic. I am told I need to be gentle with myself.

I hardly know Robin, and she would not recognize me if we bumped into one another. Life often doesn’t cooperate with our desires. Between snowstorms, Gus’s illness, my pneumonia, and work, train delays, finding a room,  I have not been able to get to New York to see Robin. I have a big sack of nice books waiting to bring her when I go.

This is tricky to navigate, there’s no room for us – or me – to stay in Emmas apartment, so I’ve got to find a place nearby. I’m getting closer. Once the cough is finally gone, I’ll get down there and have a chat from this sunny and lively kid. Maria wants to come.

I still have my pneumonia cough, it is fading a bit every day, but I still don’t trust it with Robin. I would hate to give it to her or Emma. We’ve been getting a storm a week, but that has to end one day, and as soon as I can, I’ll get down there to visit her.

I am reconciled to this reality, but I think we would like each other and have some fun. Maybe in the summer. My daughter is also heavily engaged with life. She’s left Sports Illustrated and taken a job running the baseball coverage of a new website called Athletic. She’s running the baseball coverage, and it’s a great opportunity for her and a very well put together website.

It’s also doing well, funded by some Silicon Valley fat cats. Sports Illustrated was taken over by some people from the Midwest, it is struggling to come into the new media world. Em landed on her feet, and then some.

She will stay in Brooklyn, work from home and rent a part-time office nearby when she needs some quiet. Emma has built a solid life for herself, well-balanced and busy. My philosophy of parenting has always been that the judge of a good parent is how little needed they are when their kids grow up.

I am not much needed.

On the whole, I don’t think I was a very good father, I was too messed up in the head and eventually fled my life for the country once she was in college. Emma is grounded and gifted, she lives on her own track, as she should, and manages her life with little of the drama that always surrounded mine..

It is doubtful we will ever live near one another, or that I will ever be an integral part of Robin’s life. I accept this.  And truly, I don’t wish to be one of those grandparents whose life centers around the grandkids. We each have our own lives.

But it’s also time to get down there and get a look at this engaging person who has suddenly sprung up magically. And see my daughter.

Robin is no longer a baby, that’s for sure. It didn’t take long.

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats it’s children.” – Nelson Mandela.

On Saturday, at 2 p.m., Maria and I will be marching in the March For Our Lives march, we will be on Main Street of or town, Cambridge, N.Y. Many other marches are planned all over the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Miami, Denver, Boston and almost every other city in America.

Maria will be carrying her Crochet Gun sculpture on a post she built during the march. She speaks through her art. i speak through my writing. We will speak together, each in our own ways.

The discussion over guns and gun violence has been shrouded in hatred and argument, and stuck in an awful place. Like the Parkland students who organized this march, I have no interest in banning guns or altering the Second Amendment, I am a gun owner, almost all of my friends have guns, and I refuse to join this in this scripted and paralytic argument. Like the poor soldiers in World War I, we are stuck in our trenches, lobbying empty rhetoric and cant at one another.

Every friend I have  here who owns a gun – farmers, hunters, hobbyists, homeowners, Republicans and Democrats – is in favor of some reasonable form of gun control. So do 90 per cent of the American people. Our political leaders are morally bankrupt and seem unable to help.

It is not for me to say what the solution is, it is for us to step behind our frozen ideologies and talk to one another and figure something out.

I do this for my daughter, for my grandchildren, and all the other children in America.

They deserve to be protected.  Saturday, they will demand to be protected in a powerful, visible and passionate way. They have broken through, ignored the many vicious attacks on their motives. They are taking charge. All they are asking me to do is contribute, march, sign their petition and vote accordingly. I have done and will do all that.

The marchers will not only be joined by other students, but by the children in Chicago and Baltimore and other cities who have been dying from gun violence for years.

I know I may not be around to see the end of this struggle, but I believe the children will prevail. The future belongs to them, not me. The spirit is with them, destiny is on their side.

The Parkland students have broken through the iron wall, the rhetoric and constipated and predictable argument.  They are articulate and passionate and young, they are not easily diverted or dismissed.

They were there, they saw what happened, they lived gun violence and saw their friends bleed and die.

It’s time we do something different, my generation has failed completely to keep our children safe and stem the bloodshed. More than 30,000 people a year die of gunshots in America each year, vastly more casualties than the terrorists have come close to inflicting on us. Almost daily, children are murdered in their schools.

I was a police reporter, in Washington, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and I have seen what bullets to do people, and also to the police officers who patrol the streets. We are a broken society, beyond redemption, if we can’t protect our children and citizens from this slaughter.

This is a crossroads, a turning point for our country. Our children have taken the lead, and I will follow them anywhere they ask me to go. Lots of people in my town are marching in Albany, but Maria and I want to march here, in our town, down Main Street, at 2 p.m. with some of the students at the high school leading the way.

We are not marching for anger, vengeance or argument. We are marching for the lives of the children, and for our brothers and sisters in America, who deserve better than this. Somehow, we have to take back our country, and do our jobs, and stand up for our children.

When I was quite young, we had a dog named King. My father picked him up at a shelter, he paid a $5 fee.

King had a very different life than our dogs have. He slept in the basement, and never set foot in the main house. My father let hm out in the morning, and then let him in the basement at night, if King was home by then. If we were already asleep, he slept in the garage or on the front porch.

Mostly, King wreaked havoc on the neighborhood all day.

He fought with other dogs,  chased and bit the mailman and came home with  some postal uniform pants in his mouth. The milk man ran for his life in order to drop off milk in the morning and  make it back to his truck. There were no complaints,  no talk of lawsuits or loss of service.

During the day, King found female dogs to have sex with – there were little Kings all over Providence – and ate as much of the neighbor’s garbage as he could get. He was a strong dog and could knock cans over and tear them all over other lawns.

He ran back and forth across busy streets all day. We had no fence, it never occurred to my father to contain him.

One of my tasks was clean-up, I was dispatched with a trash can when the neighbors called. My father did not follow King around with a plastic bag to clean up his poop,  nor did he ever walk him on a leash or take him to a vet. He was never fed dog food, vaccinations, never came on vacations or rode along in the car.

King ate what we left behind for dinner if he was lucky. We would put a plate of scraps in the basement at night In cold weather, on holidays my father gave him a bone in the basement, you could buy them at the butchers.

He was on his own for water, there were streams nearby.

King would never have been given a human name, that would have horrified my parents as disrespectful to people.

One day King  didn’t come home, we heard later that he was  killed by a garbage truck, and the trash men tossed him in with the garbage and took him to the dump, his final resting place, a gift to the crows. My mother wondered for a day or so where he was, and I pestered my father about it, but he said he didn’t know and we never spoke about it again.

Some days later, my father went to the shelter and paid another $5 – he grumbled about it – and brought home a beat-up Bassett Hound already named Sam. He wasn’t “adopted” and we never  heard the term “rescue” ever applied to a dog. No one ever suggested that he was abused.

Sam was an ill-tempered dog, who was allowed in the house, but not on the sofa.

He was always on the sofa looking out the window when my mother came home from work, and she would whale on him with a newspaper, to which he paid little or no attention. Sometimes at night, he would climb into bed with me and push me out onto the floor so he could stretch out. If I tried to get back into bed, he would growl at me.

My mother loved him, even when he grabbed a turkey or roast right off the table and ran off with it. I loved him for that. Today, of course, my father would probably have been arrested for animal cruelty, threatened by the postal service, sued by neighbors and milk men and few shelters would have given him a dog.

King lived an independent life, he knew where he lived, and I think he might have loved us, but he lived the life of a dog, and we were only a  part of it.

Until fairly recently – around the 1950’s and 60’s when dog food became popular, and dogs became profitable, they lived on the periphery of our lives, in the background. They weren’t the center of our emotional lives, they usually weren’t even part of our emotional lives. People still thought of them in terms of their usefulness, they barked at strangers and played with the kids.

They didn’t sleep in our beds or get human names or cost much. The people who loved them and pampered them were considered to be crazy – poodle people, we called them  –  and nobody had small dogs except for lonely older women, the rich, and royalty.

Times have, of course, changed. In his ground-breaking book “Pets And Human Development,” psychologist Boris Levinson predicted in the early 1960’s that Americans would be turning more and more towards pets for comfort and emotional support as they became disconnected from one another by new technologies like TV, new highways that pulled people away from their families, the decline of religion as a moral force, the breakup of families by divorce, the growing disenchantment with the political system.

As Americans no longer drew comfort and connection from the institutions that had always sustained them, they fulfilled Levinson’s prophecy and the new work of dogs became the emotional support of people. Few dogs had any real work to do any longer, their work was now us. American society was becoming fragmented and polarized, a sad reality that has worsened in the last couple of generations.

Dogs have little, if any, interactions with the wider world. People think they are evolving becoming more like us all the time, but the truth, as biologists know, is that they are getting dumber all the time, they have decisions to make, no need to think. We do their thinking for them.

One reasons border collies seem so smart is that they have to make their own decisions every day, they are out there with the sheep and they have a lot of thinking to do

But few dogs get that chance. They have adapted. They are here to minister to us.

The news might be horrid, and we can hardly agree on anything, but when we come home, a dog will be there to love us and help us to feel grounded and smile. That is no small thing.

Our dogs no longer have an independent life, they are depending on us for everything.

We love our dogs more than ever, and for all kinds of reasons, most of them to do with what we need. A friend of mind assured me over the weekend that dogs think much like we do, grieve like we do, think much like we do. Only clueless people doubted it. She is offended at the very suggestion that they are different from us.

I hear it all the time. We get the dogs we need, and we project what we need onto them.

Dogs are no longer simply acquired, they are either purchased or “rescued,” and something that is “rescued” rather than purchased has a whole different emotional context. As you know, our dog Gus died on Monday, and once again, I had the opportunity to consider how dogs do or don’t grieve. People are always insisting that their dogs grieve when other dogs die.

Why have I never seen it? I’ve lost a lot of dogs, and I’m sure they notice the absence of one of their pack. But I’ve never seen one so much as skip a meal.

Red does not seem to have noticed, and Fate, who played with Gus all the time, didn’t skip a beat either. She is simply playing with his toys by herself, flipping them up in the air, chewing on them, running around the yard,  having a jolly good time, lapping up more attention.

We see what we need to see. I think of the hundreds of thousands of Katrina and other disaster dogs, all re-homed, and not a single one is known to have perished from grief or ever missed a meal over grief.

This is, in fact, why I love dogs, because they are so different from neurotic humans. They are practicable and adaptable, and they don’t waste their time in sorrow or lament. They get on with life. My heroes.

Unlike King, who had a very happy life while it lasted, our dogs never get to run free, are legally bound to be on leashes most of the time, and they are very expensive to keep. Shelters charged $400 or $500 now, and it’s a rare vet visit that doesn’t cost a few hundred dollars.

Dogs are a multi-billion industry, and very few dogs live on scraps. Dog food costs on average $45 a bag, and the new ethos around dogs is that we are bound morally to keep them alive by any means at all costs.  Many people measure love by how much money they spend. For me, love is often just the opposite.

The death of any dog is often considered a social crime. Someone is always to blame. It’s a good thing God isn’t sensitive, if he exists.  People are proud to have abused dogs and eager to identity them that way. People put “rescue dog” stickers on their cars. I do worry sometimes that the “rescue” is more important than the dog.

I can’t imagine anyone telling my father how to get a dog, people tell me all the time.

It is actually considered controversial now to buy a dog, even from a good breeder striving to preserve their best traits in body and temperament. Within minutes of Gus’s death, I got my first e-mail begging me to “rescue” a dog rather than pay for one, a staggering cultural evolution just a generation or two removed from King. Is this really anyone’s business, I wonder? Is it everyone’s? Could it possibly be true that there is only one way to get a dog?

I know of many.

Poor and elderly people are routinely declined dogs from  shelters because they don’t have a tall fence or work a lot, or can’t run after them. And many poor people can’t afford rescue dogs any longer, they cost a lot of money. No one ever asked my father if we had a fence. The dog was his problem, his business.

Getting a dog is an emotional experience now, for many people our only source of trust, emotional support and unconditional love. Speaking for myself, I don’t care for unconditional love. I want it to be conditional. I want  my dogs to love me because I am  a conscientious steward of their lives, not just because I want them to.

This journey of mine with  the dogs of today requires that I ask the hard questions of myself.  My father had a very different idea of stewardship. He offered King scraps and a dry basement at night. The rest was up to him. He did not grieve for King when he vanished, he just went out and got a dog.

So why did I love Gus so much, he was an ugly little thing with no work ethic at all, and no purpose other than to eat, love, cuddle and commit mayhem? He was no bigger than a full-grown rabbit, and of no practical use at all. But that’s my short-sightedness, this has become central to people in our times. Including, I guess, me.

Small dogs like Gus replicate the experience of having a baby, they are tiny and adorable and can be held and rocked and cuddled like a baby. Being so small, they draw out our nurturing and protective instincts, and as dogs do, they have figured out how to  push the right buttons. That’s why they get to sleep inside and raccoons don’t.

I loved to play with Gus, and he figured this out in minutes and every morning, when I came downstairs, he was on top of the sofa, waiting for me to play tug-of-war with his teddy  bear. I laughed the whole time.

So looking in the mirror, what can I learn about myself and my own need of dogs? I am a nurturer, I need to do that, and acknowledge it, and  have had little chance in my life, either to nurture or be nurtured. I rarely laugh out loud, and I laughed out loud a dozen times a day with Gus.

It feels good to laugh. It was missing from my life.

Gus was a character, a gift to a writer, and he always gave me stories to write about and photos to take, important gifts for a writer and photographer and blogger. Lots of people loved him who had never met him.

Like many men, I sometimes take this tough and detached stance. I was a reporter, I know how to do it. Smug men have this holier-than-though stance they take when it comes to admitting emotion. They think they are above it. For many men, emotion is the province of women. Gus called me out and exposed me, the people who read my blog saw it right away.

it seems those big men in trucks with dogs are not so tough after all.

I need love and I need nurture, coming and going. This is another stance to drop in the search for authenticity. I never seem to run out of things I must learn about myself, and it is rarely me who does the teaching or learning by myself.

So I will continue to think about me and Gus, and why he was here, and what he means to me. The border collies live to work and love the person who brings them to work, it’s as simple as that. Their hearts and souls are outside of the house, not inside its walls.

The small dog is something else, he cuts to the core of the emotional experience of dog love. His work is people, and he has no great desire to run around all day in nasty weather. Or to work.  The house is his palace. He brightens it up.

We are far from King, and I often think we are going to some extreme and unhealthy places with dogs, for them and for us. I try to keep perspective. The leading cause of death for dogs is over-feeding, not abuse.

It is not enough to “rescue” a dog, or “buy” a good one, or dote or project our needs onto them.

A good steward must look at  himself as well as the dog, and ask, “why do I love this dog?,” and what, exactly, do I need from him or her?

The good steward must also ask, and what it is that he needs from me?