I call Fate “Demento,” especially when her tongue is hanging down, her blue eye starting at me, so eager to chase after the sheep but not bother them much or ask them to do anything.
But now, the sheep have her number, they used to chase her away, they no longer bother. She is just that strange dog who loves to run circles around them, but like Ferdinand the Bull, doesn’t want to push any living thing around. I kind of love her for that.
Fate is a wild thing, it was 19 degrees this morning when we went out, and she ran around and couldn’t wait to jump into the very cold rushing stream down behind the pasture.
My wonderful friend breeder Karen Thompson thinks I somehow messed up the training of Fate, she is, after all, from Wales and a very strong herding line. It could well be true. Fate was too much dog for me in a way, I could never quite control or channel her explosive energy by the conventional training methods I knew.
I think I freed her of that, she mushroomed into a happy, lively, loving creature, although somewhat useless on a farm. I am glad I released her to be herself, she never did seem to have the heart for challenging the sheep too much, all she ever asked was to run around them a lot. That she does, several times a day.
Fate is a lover of life. She loves to go anywhere and do just about anything – ride in the car, walk in the woods, chase sheep, chase balls, sit in Maria’s studio, sit in mine. And run. She loves to run.
I have never had a happier dog. She loves her live and lives it to the fullest. I think “Demento” is a good name for her.
Froggie is coming back to me, in more ways than one.
I have so very few connections to my early life. Trauma and abuse have blacked most of it out for me, my mother and father are dead, my sister is the only member of my family that I speak with regularly and am connected to. I have no friends from that time, few memories and little interest in revisiting that part of my life.
I learned in my therapy work that there is little point to going backwards and relieving what was lost, life begins anew every day, and what matters is what I am doing today, not 60 years ago.
So here, sitting in my study, staring at me, reminding me that the wheel turns or turns, is an avatar from my earliest years, a concrete figure of Froggy The Gremlin (Plunk Your Magic Twanger, Friday!) one of the mainstays of a bizarre and infamous children’s program called Andy’s Gang, starring TV and film star Andy Devine under the sponsorship of Buster Brown, the dog who lived in a shoe.
I don’t mean to complain, but the only word I can offer about my childhood is dark and terrifying. One of the brightest spots of my life, if not the brightest, was Andy’s Gang on television every Saturday morning, there were different elements on the show, including Gunga Ram and an eerie cat, but the character I loved the most was a bizarre little wise-ass frog named Froggy, he was a self-described gremlin and trouble maker.
At first, he looked odd and stupid, but he was a genuine rebel, one of the first I’d ever seen.
He could vanish in a puff of smoke, and was frequently exhorted by Devine to “Plunk Your Magic Twanger, Froggy”, which caused him to appear in a puff of smoke, usually to taunt the stuffy grownups he humiliated by putting false words in their mouth and watching them huff and puff.
Froggy was fearless, he would take on everybody he met.
For Froggy, magic twanging meant exposing authority figures as pompous fools, and manipulating them through some undisclosed magic into revealing themselves, to the shrieking laughter and glee of the very young children in the live studio audience. He was our Liberator.
Froggy and Daffy Duck, another wise-ass incorrigible of the time, were my favorite Saturday morning characters and I waited all week to see them. How odd to say they gave me hope, their defiance of rules and decorum thrilled me in my angry middle-class holding cell.
These were simple days, and those broadcasts were shockingly primitive by today’s standards, but also purer.
They were irreverent, perhaps reflecting the outcast Hollywood writers – many of them intensely political – who wrote for those shows. In the pre-corporate era, writers could get a way with irreverence, they could go up the line, and once in a while, go over it. That was the magic of Froggy, a liberating figure to kids like me, trapped in small and miserable lives.
To my parents, he was just a stupid frog puppet. To me, he was Thomas Paine.
Imagine today if some character appeared on commercial television to show off his “Magic Twanger,” Twitter would light up like a Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, and Congress would melt down with hypocritical outrage (some things never change.).
We were young, but we got the innuendo, one of the reasons we all laughed so hard. I knew exactly what plunking a Magic Twanger meant. Froggy was a secret signal to me to be subversive, to undercut the Puritanical and mindless austerity with which we grew up in the 1950’s, when rock and roll was considered the world of the devil, and Elvis a spawn of Satan.
In my young life, that was culture, that was all we had until we figured out how to secretly listen to Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry.
This was our culture before cable TV, smartphones, online gaming, Facebook, Snap Chat, Reddit and Instagram. You will never hear me clucking about kids today, they are smart and engaged and free in a way I could only dream about. I believe they will save our world – look at the Parkland, Florida, kids, help is coming.
My generation, which is so happy to trash talk the young, failed miserably at saving the world or making it more peaceful and compassionate. Compassionate has died as a national idea, invoked only by hypocrites and greedy opportunists. It will return, that is part of the wheel too.
The discovery of my old, painted concrete Froggy at Outback Jack’s antiques and collectibles the other day has shaken me up, opened me up, and brought me a long ways back to a time I had pushed deep down in my consciousness. I had forgotten about Froggy, now he is a concrete ghost, staring at me just a few feet away with those bug eyes, laughing at my posturing and musings.
I didn’t even recognize Froggy when I first saw him sitting on Jack Metzger’s porch.Normally I would not be interested in a painted old concrete frog, not even a big one with a tuxedo bow tie. I wonder what Fate had in mind when she saw him first and growled, calling him to my attention.
But something roared up inside of me and told me I had to bring him home, I had to have him near me, even if I didn’t know why. I know why now.
He was important to me once, and is important to me again. I haggled for an hour with Jack, he knew I was going to get that frog.
I admit he has stirred up some bad stuff as well, that’s the danger of going backwards, it is a can of worms sometimes, a Pandora’s Bos. But Froggy will make a good muse for me, I look at him when I sit down, and I feel all sorts of emotions I have not felt in many years. For a writer, that’s a gift.
Tonight, seeing Froggy in his corner in shadow, I can see him dancing back and forth, full of glee and mischief and subversion, I can hear him saying hello to me in the morning, “Hi ya!, Hi ya!, Hi ya!,”
When the poet Walt Whitman was in his 50’s he suffered a stroke and moved from Washington to New Jersey where he spent the rest of his life. In his mid-60’s, he wrote about the joy and satisfaction he found in life, despite his disabilities. The stroke was a part of his life, he wrote, not his life.
“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains? Nature remains, to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinity of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons – the sun by day, and the stars of heaven by night.”
I love the idea that after all of our struggles and yearnings and triumphs and disappointments, there is nature. For most of my life I was disconnected from nature, as most of our countrymen and women are. If you live apart from nature, it is easy enough to forget it.
Living in nature is not natural for me, I was born in cities and lived in cities most of my life. When I exhausted what there was for me in my other life, and found that none of them permanently satisfied me, i fled the familiar for the unfamiliar, for nature, for a life in the hills and with animals.
Nature satisfied me, it does not wear. In the morning, I listen to the donkeys crunching on their hay, their chomps are reassuring and grounding to me. I look up at the mists in the hills, as the sun streaking through the woods in the morning. Like everyone who loves nature, I fear for it.
Pope Francis calls on us to become painfully aware – in the face of arrogance and greed – to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.
I accept that call. I am aware of the dry ground, the washed out soil, the drying wells, the thinning creeks, the vanishing birds, the dying gardens, the vanishing bees, the dying trees. Nature is not a stranger to us, it is us. I can see what we are doing to it, every day, right out my window.
I wonder if it might happen that when we have amassed all of the wealth that there is in the world, and all of the power and come to see that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear, we will discover nature again and turn away from pollution, waste and the throwaway culture. And if so, I wonder of Mother Earth will ever forgive us and take us back?
The new RISSE Amazon Wish List is up and running again, this time a mix of arts and utilitarian things needed by RISSE – refugee and immigrant support group – in Albany. Emma, above, is one of the teachers who has access to the list, and she is pushing hard for the arts supplies – beads, origami, brushes and puzzles, batteries and the other things a desperately underfunded school needs.
Today, I’m buying batteries, threads and beads – $24. Thanks so much for supporting the list. I read today that 40 percent of Americans support the new administration’s policies on refugees and immigrations. We are now willing to bomb Damascus, but we won’t let any of the hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees into our country.
This only inspires me to work harder.
This is shameful to me, and causes me to redouble my own efforts to help these children, their parents and the many immigrants who are struggling to acclimate themselves to our suddenly hostile nation. A tough time, you are offering hope and love, and I thank you.
Here’s the list.
You can help support my work with these children and the soccer team and the new girl’s basketball team by sending a contribution to The Gus Fund, c/o Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected].
It seemed the perfect day for it. Dark, stormy and windy. Gus was coming home.
The ground has thawed in the past week, and we said several times over the weekend that we wanted Gus home. Since he died, he’s been in a plastic bag inside of a box in the freezer of the Cambridge Valley Vets.
In the country we, freeze the people and animals we love who have died in the winter. The ground is too hard for burial, so we wait and we dig holes in the Spring. I called the vet and said it was time to come home.
I had mentioned burying Gus online and several people wrote to ask me to photograph the burial or take photos of Gus before he went into the ground.
Maria and I were of the same mind about that, neither of had any desire to take a photo of Gus being buried. I have plenty of photos of Gus, and the sight of a puppy twisted into a frozen position with a bag of frozen fluid on his head and wrapped in a plastic bag is not something we wish to keep or share.
That’s not the final memory of Gus I want to have.
In America, we are used to dead bodies getting a makeover to look restful and at their best. We hide from death every chance we can. Death is inevitable, but it isn’t pretty.
Dogs don’t get that cosmetic treatment, at least not yet.
Maria and I took turns digging a hole in the Dahlia garden, and then she dug while I went to pick Gus up. Nicole brought him out in a large cardboard box, and I gulped. It was a lot bigger than Gus or our hole for him.
When I got home, I opened the box and Gus was wrapped in a thick bright yellow plastic bag with a name tag on it that said “Gus Katz.” The box was heavy, I knew he had been frozen.
Most people up here just dig a hole with a tractor and put the whole cardboard box in. The farmers dig a hole with their tractors and put the dog in the hole.
We couldn’t abide Gus going into the ground in a plastic bag, so we pulled him out of the box, cut open the bag and wrapped him in a linen blanket. He was frozen in an upright position, we couldn’t see his face. We would have to do some maneuvering to get him into the hole we had dug.
He would thaw in a few days underground, it was a good spot for him, at the edge of the Dahlia garden with a sweet view of the Vermont hills. The wind was picking up and the temperature was dropping.
Maria placed Gus deep into the ground, we put in a favorite bone and his favorite toy, a brown bear. We covered him in dirt and stones to keep him safe from foraging animals. He is way down.
The worms and bugs are welcome to him, he is a gift to the soil and the earth. We each spoke a few words and held hands a cried a bit. We had already said goodbye, I saw this as a chance to say hello.
I thanked Gus for his life with us and welcomed him home. We are glad to have you back here with us, I said, this is a lovely spot. You can mind everybody’s business from here and jump out and scare the hell out of Fate once in a while, maybe chase a rabbit again for a few feet, or grab one of her treats and hide it in the ground.
I told Gus that we missed him and that he was nothing but a gift to us. I apologized for not being able to save him. I know there was nothing else I could have done, but I did feel I let him down.
I told him we hoped to get the dog from Robin and her son Brian, he loved them and they loved him.
I told him I would rather celebrate a life than mourn it. We choked up once or twice, we did not cry.
And then, we tidied up the ground and said goodbye for now. The good thing is that he is here, and that feels better.
I went out a few minutes later and read this passage from Mary Oliver’s book:
“Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of grief… It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old, or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.”
There are other gifts we can’t give.
To keep them healthy, to keep them from dying so young.
In my mind, Gus is jumping up on my chest while I am asleep, dispensing licks fast and furiously, like a lawn mower growling up and down over the grass. He will bring me his pony, and dare me to throw it, and throw, and throw it again. He will growl and then look at me intently, as if to make sure this is okay to do.
Then, and quite suddenly, he will jump back up, spin turn on my chest and go to sleep along with me. When I wake up, he is curled against my chin, making his strange breathing noises, more like a snort than a sigh. I looked forward to taking naps with Gus, Maria always told me if he was a bother me I could put him in his crate.
But I could never say that I didn’t want to put him in his crate, I never could do it.
Dogs die too soon, all of them.
And to honor Gus, I will go and look for another dog to love just as much. The final gift of a dog, I suppose, if that we get to do it again. And again. Gus is not about sadness for me, he is about love and joy and that it is where I want to keep it.
Godspeed, our Little King. You were nothing but a strange and wonderful pleasure. You looked small, but thought big. I am grateful for every minute of it, good and bad, from beginning to end.
In Gus’s memory, we’ve established The Gus Fund, formerly the Children’s Refugee Fund. If you wish to contribute – I am receiving donations from all over the country every day – you can sent your donation to The Gus Fund, c/o. Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected].
