14 May

Update: Hannah Gets Sexy

by Jon Katz
Hannah Gets Sexy

After a day or so of being coy and fussy, Hannah has decided to go with it, and have daily sex with Knox. Word is both of them enjoyed it, and that Knox was a gentleman. Robin Gibbons would not let Hannah have an unpleasant experience. This makes the odds good, but not guaranteed.

I think the breeders call it gettied “tied,” but I like to avoid jargon. In a month, we’ll know if Hannah is pregnant, and if she is, she will give birth to some Boston Terrier puppies two months later. We might have a puppy on hand for the October Open House, or close after.

So the news from Hannah and Knox is good news, subject to the vagaries of this process. We are optimistic and look forward to getting another of Hannah’s offspring, male or female. There is nothing more to  update about the pregnancy until a month has gone by, but I’m sure I will be  writing more about the small dog experience. Wish us luck.

14 May

Lunch With Ed. Getting Some Work In

by Jon Katz
Lunch With Ed: Ed In His Lair

Every day, I text Ed and ask if he wants to go to lunch.

Sometimes he can, sometimes he can’t. Since he was diagnosed with brain cancer a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been trying to work out what my role is as a friend. I don’t wish to be a hospice volunteer or a man with a therapy dog, or a social worker or amateur doctor.

I just want to be a friend. I just want to listen. I’d like to be there.

I took Ed to lunch today for the second or third time this week, and I  realized when I sat down with him at the Round House Cafe – he loves the BLT sandwich there – that Ed and I had hardly ever been alone in our friendship. Most of the time, Maria and I went together to visit him, and when we went out to eat we were a foursome – me, Maria, Ed, Carol.

When we went to Bejosh Farm, we’d go and look at his art, and when he came to visit, he would trek with us out in the woods. I wondered how this lunch would be. It was quiet wonderful, in fact, I am beginning to think we are just becoming close friends in one sense.

In the strange way of men, we had never  really made time to be alone together. To build up the very special bond the comes with intimacy and trust. And there is no more intimate  experience that the one Ed is going through. We never really got to talk much, we are talking now.

We are often alone together now, and it was special – open, honest, warm and easy.  I see what I love about this man, his generosity of spirit, his openness, his honesty, his deep sense of values.

Ed talked about his brain cancer and his upcoming trip and  how Carol was taking things. It felt like we have been friends for a long time, the trust and openness was right there, we didn’t have to pull it out.

I asked him why he had  stopped farming so abruptly after the diagnosis, he said he simply wasn’t going to do any farming any longer, he turned it over to his children and said he was done with it. I said this startled me because he was so much a farmer, he seemed to me to love every minute of it.

We went back and forth over this, and I watched Ed closely, he seemed better than he was last week, he seemed clear and accepting, and quite lucid. I told him he seemed fuzzy last week, I thought I saw him changing. I didn’t feel that way today.

We talked again about his absolute turn from farming. I knew he couldn’t work at the pace he once did, but why abandon all of it so completely and quickly?

He thought about it, wiping the sandwich out of his beard and hugging friends and passers walking by.  Good friends listen to one another.

He said he thought it was probably because he was fearful when he got the news. He didn’t want to know much about the disease and  how it would work, he thought he would handle it as it comes. He just had no idea what would happen, so he decided to be safe and do nothing.

But thinking about it, he said, he thought he was just terrified:  the reason was that he thought if he did any labor of any kind, he might just keel over and die. He actually did not know how the cancer would work on him, and he was afraid if he did much of anything but sit around and talk and write, it would kill him. The doctors, as usual, discussed symptoms and date and procedures but forgot the part about life – what would happen to him now?

I told him that I had read a great deal about this kind of tumor, and talked to a doctor about, and I urged him to do a bit of reading and talking about it. I said brain tumors don’t work that way, it’s not like having a heart attack, it might progress quickly or slowly, but either way,  he would know it when things were really changing, and so would the people around him. Carol would know.

Did he want me to tell him?, I asked, and he said yes, he would like that and appreciate it.

He shouldn’t just sit around if he got bored, i said, maybe go out and do what he can for as long as he can. Do what feels good. He said he liked that idea, he would try it. I think he will.  I stopped giving advice, he doesn’t need any more.

We both had the shared experience of doing what we loved every working day of our lives. That is r are.

He said he never farmed for money or milk production, “more than anything I wanted to have happy cows, and if the cows are happy, everything will turn out right. And that’s what happened.” That’s a classic Ed’ism. Make the cows happy and everything will fall into place. Lucky cows.

We had the nicest time talking, Ed said he was also worried about me, he wondered if I was doing too many things, and wasn’t stopping to smell the roses. I said I was surprised to hear that, it seemed to me I wasn’t working hard enough.  But I thanked him for the concern and said I would think on it

We went back to his house, and we sat in his new lair, where Ed writes poems every day and writes pieces for his blog, and  sits with his cats and dogs and holds court with his never-ending stream of visitors an well-wishers. Ed has become a philosopher of the spirit, and of mortality as well.

What’s happening with Ed is sad, but not only sad. There is much beauty and meaning in it, for him, of course, for me.

He loves sitting on a sofa in the room he built, writing poems deep in the night, listening to the sounds of the farm, the radio playing Yankees games,  the lowing of the cows, the wind in the drafty old farmhouse, leaving  scribbles on notebook paper for Carol to post on their blog..

“I’m at peace,”  he said, “I really am.” If I don’t go to Albany tomorrow, we’ll have lunch again. He’s going on a car trip with Carol at the end of the week. The first destination is Indiana.

Ed and Carol love to receive letters and messages. If you wish, you can write them:  Bejosh Farm, 10 Chestnut Hill Road, Eagle Bridge, 12057.

14 May

Me And My Mother. Me Too.

by Jon Katz
Me, My Mother, and Me Too

To my knowledge, this is the  only photo that exits of me with my mother. I found it in a folder she kept of newspaper clipping of me when I had my 15 minutes of fame.

She was  quite proud of me and bragged about me to her friends and sisters. I don’t know who took the photo or where it was taken.

It seems to be an image of two people who are happy to be together, two people who love one another.

That was not the tenor of our relationship. I’ve danced around the subject of my mother for some time, and as I often tell my writing students, there is no point in being coy, it cheats the reader and corrupts the writing. There is nothing more liberating than being honest. Without secrets, I am finally free.

My mother was brilliant, creative, and driven to be independent and successful.

With me, she was incestuous, abusive,  and cruel. My sister and I lived in terror of her moods and vicious tongue and explosive moods.  My mother could suck the soul right out of you.

She also, I have come to see, loved me a great deal and told me over and over again that I was creative and gifted and could be anything I wished.

I have never been able to reconcile these different parts of her, and avoided her for much of my adult life. I did not see her at all in the final years of her life, and did not see her before she died more than a decade ago. I did what I needed to do. Sometimes you have to let go. Family does not always prevail, that is sometimes cruel myth.

In the photo, which hangs on my study wall, my mother is smiling, and her smile seems genuine, but somehow forced. You can see the immigrant in her face, the touch of Russian.

In the days before digital photography, photographs were expensive and took days to develop, they were often posed and not natural.  She rarely smiled.

The boy in the photo, me, looks happy to be there, he looks like the apple of his  mother’s eye.

I have only in recent years begun to understand the degree to which men in general and my father in particular, stymied,  dominated and ultimately destroyed her many gifts and ambitions – her art gallery, her gift shop, her choices about where to live, her efforts to help my sister, her very spirit.

He never physically harmed to my knowledge, but her spirit died trying to survive her life with  him.

They did not love one another, and fought bitterly and constantly. She never accepted being dominated, she never could break free of it. My father was one of those people who loved everyone more than his family.  He was a selfish man.

My mother lived mostly in a rage, but always looked for work, fought for her own identity, her own equality and dignity, and lost every battle every time. As a child, I could never understand the depth of her unhappiness and fury at my father, she complained about him to me constantly, and in the most bitter way.

I could always feel her anger, and her many grievances about it, but she should not, of course, put them on me, and I could not bear it, nor could I bear to let my daughter near her.

She told me many times that I was the true love of her life, the one thing that mattered. That is, of course, an awful thing to put on a child. Whenever I visited her as an adult, I barricaded the bedroom door with a chair. The truth is, I see now, that she had no one else to talk to.

Time is perhaps the greatest friend of forgiveness. I believe if she lived today, I would see her as something of a hero, a warrior for an open field in life.

I am grateful to the Me Too movement for several things, but one of them is that the movement – and the struggle for women’s rights that preceded it all through my life – has helped me understand the world she lived in, and the abuse and unfairness that she endured. I’m not sure why, but I think she made the ultimate sacrifice for us – she stayed.

The Me Too movement has reminded me again that women don’t have to be physically assaulted or  raped or beaten to be abused. Men have damaged destroyed or smothered woman’s lives in many different ways for all of human history, and that surely sets the table for abuse of all kinds.

There are somethings worse than death, I think.

My mother knew this was all wrong, the way she and other women were trearted, she felt  it in her blood and bones, but there was really nothing she could do, she was firmly in the grip of a culture that saw women as always being subservient and inferior to men.

My mother was a victim,  her very soul was crushed again and again by the power that men in her world had over her, and over so many other women. There were few good options for them.

I’m not into squawking about the young, but I do believe many younger women have no conception of the kind of world my mother lived in, and perhaps there is no good reason for them to.

They have the right to tell and live their own story, make their own history. The high school principal called up my grandmother to beg her to let her daughter – my mother –  go to college, she was one of the brightest students he had ever seen.  He was sure she could  get a full scholarship.

My daughters will never go to college, she told him, they will get married and have children. My mother never went to college, and the die was cast. She became a secretary and waited for someone to marry and have children with. The idea was not to be  happy, but safe.

I asked my mother a hundred times why she didn’t just leave my father, she resented him so much, and she said she couldn’t, she just couldn’t. It was just inconceivable to her, we had all heard the horror stories of what happened to women who left their husbands, they were shunned, left with nothing, shamed. Nothing in her life had convinced her she could do it all by herself.

It just wasn’t done, it wasn’t ever even talked about. My grandmother, her mother, would have died of shame, she said. Just think of a world where your own mother would rather you be miserable and unfulfilled your whole life rather than be free and happy and loved. It was heresy.

As we learn on the news every day, women are still persecuted, often violently, and in so many different ways by then. But things have changed.

My mother did not have the benefit of a women’s movement, or the support of other women, or the idea of female political or business leaders.  She did not have a website to turn for help or guidance or support. In her culture, marriage was a sacred obligation, a bond that transcended her own life and wants and needs. Men were simply omnipotent, they always won, they always had their way.

She could rail about it, but not run away from it.

My father was much-loved in our town, he did a lot of good for a lot of people, and my mother said she couldn’t bear to speak ill of him outside of the home, she was faithful and loyal to his public persona to the end, the dutiful wife masking the enraged and suffocating and spirited woman who wanted her own life, and never accepted that she could never have it.

That would make somebody crazy and furious. If she lived in our time, she would have been in the Women’s March for sure, working for the women running for office, or maybe even running herself. She would have had an outlet for her frustration.

She wold be supporting the women who turn to a website for justice and  affirmation, and licking envelopes for them. She might well have told my father she wasn’t moving because she loved her gift shop, and wasn’t abandoning it.

She could have said she wasn’t moving because she loved her life, and her own family, she wasn’t going to permit his dragging her off to a strange world, and choking off everything that was important to her.

I don’t think she would have been so angry then, or so frustrated or needy.

I think our story together would have been different, because it is clear to me now that she did love me.

She also gave me the great gift of wanting to create a new narrative for me and wife.

When I married Maria, I swore to myself and to her that I would always support her and encourage her and do everything I could possible do to help her to feel strong and entitled and empowered.

I swore that I would never demean or stifle her creative spirit and fierce individualism.

When I died, I wanted her to think of me as someone who always helped her to live her life, not as someone who thwarted and undermined it.

I’m not dead yet, so I won’t know what she will say of me when I’m gone.

But I think she will not speak of me in the way my mother spoke of my father. So history can change, and is changing,  and I am sorry my mother did not live to see it or benefit from it.

I thank the feminists of today and the Me Too movement for helping me to love my mother, and to forgive her. I can stand a bit in her shoes.

My mother had no one to support her, not even her best  friend Beulah, who told her over and over  again to stop fighting reality and accept things the way they were.  You can’t fight the world, she said. Go along. My mother never did go along, and I have to love her for that.

Beulah told me at my mother’s funeral that she believed that  you got pregnant when you kissed your husband at the  wedding. She had never heard the word penis, and got the shock of her life on their wedding night, she said.

Your mother never accepted things, she said, it made her miserable.

I do love my mother for that.  People can squawk and whine all they want, but I am ever grateful that there is a Me Too movement. I know what happened when there wasn’t one.

14 May

Helping Saad: The Iphone 6, Connecting With The World

by Jon Katz
Connecting To His World: Photo by Amjad Abdulla.

Our program to help Saad continues in earnest this week, he traded in an old and nearly inoperable old phone to a cell phone company offering a special trade-in deal and got a new Iphone 6 for $200. With his old phone, he had extremely limited usage, both in time and range, he could not call home, or even make many calls here.

Saad’s isolation is pronounced, he has been cut off from all friends and family members and in need of a place to live. Last week, we paid the deposit to get him into a senior citizen facility just outside of Albany, and  today, he got a phone with global range and we raised enough money to pay the monthly fees for a year.

He has unlimited calling on the Iphone, and the first call he made was to Iraq, where his family remains behind. Saad was targeted by religious extremists and fled to a refugee camp run by the United Nations. Because he worked at the U.S. Embassy during the war, he managed to get a visa to the United States and  was taken to Los Angeles and left on his own.

Saad could hardly believe that he can call home anytime he wants. Obviously, the phone will also help him communicate here, and he insists he wants to find work, even though he has heart disease, diabetes, low blood pressure and 15 different prescription medications to take. He told me he hopes to be an Uber driver one day, but his doctor says he should not work. Saad is in his 60’s. And his health would almost certainly disqualify him.

There may be other kinds of jobs where he can work.

He could not afford to live in Albany. The crowded room where he lived in central Albany with others was sold, he made his way to Albany because he heard there were other refugees there and some support from RISSE, the refugee and immigrant center. He is taking English classes there.

In the winter, he often appeared in the mornings at RISSE, cold and hungry. One hand shakes almost continuously with some kind of palsy.

Saad  was forced to leave the small apartment in Albany where he was living with another refugee. He could pay the rent, but not the deposit for a new apartment.

Saad speaks almost no English, and is receiving a small monthly stipend from the city of Albany. He receives enough money from New York State  to pay his $144 a month rent in a building where no one speaks Arabic.

He lives now in a one-bedroom apartment with a bed, a table, a sofa and a lamp and nothing on any of the walls.

We gave him $400 to help move him into the apartment and pay the deposit. He has almost no belongings.

He knows no one in his building or nearby.

He has no car and travels only by bus. We are getting him a special bus pass for  seniors.

Saad’s isolation there was disturbing, both to Ali, who brought him to me, and to me.

The new phone will help considerably, he can re-connect to the people and family he knew and loved in Baghdad, including his eight children, who have so far been denied permission to join him here in America.

Saad was a successful  businessman in  Baghdad after the war, but his business was confiscated by the government to help pay for their war against ISIS. He has absolutely nothing left.

We will also be bringing enough groceries to last for the next month or so. We furnished his apartment through the generosity of several local churches. Ali visits him regularly to see  how he is doing.

On Wednesday, another step towards helping Saad establish himself in America. I’m bringing him a new radio, a new 32-inch screen television, an Arabic-American dictionary, two original water-color paintings donated by Rachel Barlow, a well-known Vermont artist, and some pots and pans, and a linen wall map of the Arab Peninsula.

Four framed wall prints are on the way for his apartment.

The television will also help his isolation, there are several Arabic channels he will be able to listen to. We’ve decided against getting a computer for him.  He doesn’t want one, and hasn’t used one, and the Iphone will connect to the cable system we are purchasing for him.

We will monitor Saad and check in on him throughout the year, but after this week we will change our focus to another refugee family in urgent need More about that later.  Our philosophy is help people with small and manageable problems, we work on a small scale.

Thanks to the Army Of Good for your support.

If you wish to help this refugee work, you can send a contribution to The Gus Fund, c/o me, Jon Katz. P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected]. We commit small acts of great kindness, we keep good alive.

14 May

Mary, We Have To Talk: Did I Diss My Granddaughter On Mothers Day?

by Jon Katz
We Have To Talk

As I do every year, I decided yesterday to write a short piece about Mother’s Day focusing on my complex and painful relationship with my mother.

I could not really imagine writing anything less controversial, but I will say it was a difficult piece for me to write, I am still trying to come to terms with my mother, and am beginning to run out of time. You know how that goes.

Curiously, I wrote more about Gus’s mother Hannah, than about my mother. Alas,this is America in 2018, and there is nothing simple or innocuous that is ever published in our new world of social media, where boundaries and manners are cast aside, and every one’s life and thoughts are on the line. Social media is a place were ideas often go to die and be trampled, they never get a chance to stand up or breathe.

Within minutes of my Mother’s Day reflections, I got a message  from Mary, I will not give her full name, it was simple and to the point: “I am wondering why I am not seeing any pictures of  Robin or Mothers Day wishes to Emma,” she said, seemingly annoyed with me for overlooking these two wonderful woman.

I will say I am rarely surprised by any message I get online these days, or ever, but this one brought me up short.

I replied with my usual poise and thoughtfulness and tolerance, ( yes, that was a joke.)

“Keep on wondering,” I said, “I don’t see why this is your concern.”

I understand that my e-mails tend to be blunt, one reason is that I get so many of them, another is that I don’t really like conversing through e-mails and I keep them as short as possible.

When I push back on people who intrude on me or, worst of all, tell me what I should be saying or writing, I have noticed a curious thing. Every time I reply or challenge the message, I am told the writer is always, always, a devoted and loyal and long-time reader of my,  and is invariably disappointed or sorry at my response. Usually, they storm off in a huff, happy to challenge,  but horrified at being challenged.

(Yes, yes, of course I ask for it, after all, I share my life..what do I expect? A MacArthur grant?)

And the next morning, there it was.

“I  have been a follower of your writing since “A Dog Year,” and I have enjoyed both your insights and humor. I have also enjoyed your honest when writing about family relationships. I  was very happy when you reconnected with Emma and had your first grandchild whose photo you frequently shared with your followers. I am sorry that this is no longer the case. I also am fairly certain that I am not the only one who has asked about Robin and Emma.”

Mary, we  have to talk.

I am offering you insights today that you do not seem to like or enjoy, but I will be honest, and I am very sorry that my personal decisions about what to write on Mothers Day are a source of sorrow to you.

I am even sorrier to tell you that no one else  in the entire ecosphere of social media asked me why I didn’t wish my daughter a happy Mother’s day (ironically, I had just gotten off the phone with  her when your letter arrived, we both had a good chuckle about Mother’s Day). I think most people really do realize it isn’t any of their business. Didn’t our mothers  teach us about minding our own business?

Perhaps I just forgot, or didn’t need to include every mother in my life and world in a piece about a dog and my birth mother. Maybe Emma wouldn’t wish me to. Maybe, like Maria, she doesn’t like to be referred to in that way. How could  you know? Why do you need to know, or even more important, why do you think it is your right to know?

I admit to have my ego dinged when someone writes to say they have been following my work for years but seem to know nothing about me or what I believe. That is a true failure of writing. Very few people who actually do read my insights would send me a message like that.

I’m wondering wish insights of mine you have enjoyed since I wrote “A Dog Year” and you found me worth following?

Was it the one about sharing my life but not surrendering it to other people? Was it the one about how social media was destroying the boundaries of good manners and privacy, and the very idea of thinking for oneself?

Was it the insight musing about how Henry David Thoreau would have hung himself at Walden Pond if he got messages from Facebook and the Internet questioning and asking him to justify  everything he ate, did or thought?

Or maybe it was the one about how I don’t take orders when writing or taking pictures, I write for myself and hope it’s of value, I don’t write on demand to entertain people? And do you remember the one about how I feel about people telling me to write? Or the one about how crazy I am?

Maybe it was this insight: how arrogant it is for people to make assumptions about what I am feeling or intending? Isn’t that my job, and if you value my insights, why not wait to read them rather than tell me what they are?

Mary, if you really value my insights, you would not, of course, have ever sent me that message, and I wish I could sugar-coat it in a s soft-spoken way, but I’m afraid that would not be me, and another insight you seem to have missed is that honesty is not about my explaining every personal decision I make on the Internet to a total stranger. The truth is, this is not your business, and I am truly sorry you don’t see that what you wrote me is inappropriate. You are not responsible for my ties to my family.

It is your problem, not mine.

This is not “Search For Tomorrow.” My life is not on display for your amusement. My life is a serious business, and yes, I do love humor and am obsessed with insight. But I am not laughing when you suggest I have dissed my granddaughter and daughter and have decided to stop writing about them. That is false, and yes, hurtful to me.

There are hundreds of thousands of people out there, and your assumption that you are part of some sort of Emma and Robin guardian tribe is false. If Emma has a problem with me or what I write, she will let me know. She and Robin do not need protection from me, she has no reservations about setting me straight.

I will share photos and images of Robin and Emma when I wish to, it’s really about as simple as that.

I really do share my life, I really don’t surrender it to other people. I really do set boundaries for myself, I hope you can do the same.

If you wish to continue this conversation, feel free to e-mail me. If you really care about me and my work, you will want to get this right. If you don’t, then you will storm off in a huff and cluck about what a nasty man I am. In either case, peace and compassion to you.

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