Day: November 10, 2011

Lulu, Fanny, and Simon

Oh, Steve. I felt a lot safer when you were around, even though I knew you were sick for years. I’ve written every published word of my life on one of your machines,  and I’ve gone from synching calendars, contacts, messages to life in the Icloud, where my data vanishes up into the sky. I’ve got all sorts of cool and stylishly designed cables hanging out of plugs all over the house and things ping all day.  I’ve always dreaded your passing, first because you were so exciting to follow, so anti-corporate and ferocious in your individuality, and for selfish reasons, because I always feared exactly what happened to me this week.

My Iphone went blank, taking all of my addresses and appointments with it, and my Ipad2 would not restore its data after absorbing Ios5, and my MacBook Pro would not receive e-mail, and then my main computer suddenly would not download  software updates from Apple World Headquarters and claimed I wasn’t connected to the Internet, which I surely was, and then froze and so I had all kinds of cool new machines that weren’t working for me, and to be honest, I was beginning to freak out, because my entire creative life and work was somewhere up in the ICloud and I couldn’t write, blog or e-mail and I was down here not able to get it. Suddenly, a life-long advocate of technology and creative, I had become a Luddite Poster Boy, a character in a Mary Shelley novel about the hubris of technology.  I tried calling Apple Tech Support,which has answered my calls for 25 years,  but they were overwhelmed with five million new phone users in love with Siri, the new personal assistant (I am in love with Siri and have not yet met her), and there were long waits, and then an atypically grumpy tech supporter (Steve, you would have strangled this guy, had you been around) said it was not the computer, but the Satellite company, and suddenly I was in Southeast Asia being told it was Apple, not them.

I hired an underground freelance satellite tech and he came after two days, took $100 and said he had no idea what was wrong and he knew nothing about Apple Computers. Maybe the router. Back to Apple. Not the router. I tried calling the Apple store, but you can no longer make an appointment on the phone, you have to go online, which is hard to when your computer can’t get online. I called up pretending to be a giant corporation (don’t care give the name) and I got right through and made an appointment with an annoyed sales rep who tried to send me off to the phone tree but I caught him.

The bottom line is this. I finally got to the Apple Store in Albany. They fixed my Iphone in two seconds, at no charge. I hauled my big desktop through the mall and used their T1 line to download my software. Found the bug in my MacBookPro. They were harried, brusque, reluctant. Overwhelmed. Everything is working now, and well, and I am loving my machines again. But Steve, I have always loved you, despite your well-documented flaws, and you have always taken care of me,  and I know you are up there raising hell and annoying angels and  using the afterlife software program you designed to keep an eye on things and filter mail from earth and I just read your biography, and I know that if this keeps up you will come down here and kick some corporate butt. I didn’t call Tech Support for 20 years, and now I can’t even call them on the phone. I know the bean counters will eventually turn Apple into just another company, but not now, not so soon, surely?

You have just recently passed, and I miss you already, and I feel a bit lonely down here.

 

Saying goodbye to Fall, which begins with October light, and ends in the gray of November.

 

Fall is fading, rapidly. The leaves are off the trees, and even though the ticks are still around and the temperatures have been balmy, winter is closing in. The heating oil company came and put more than $600 in the oil tank. We will use it wisely.

I love Fall, a time of change, book tours and new beginnings, and I was sad, on the path, to see it leaving.  Maria and I are spending Thanksgiving on the farm, and we are giving thanks for the many good things in our lives, including and especially, or quite amazing journey together. We are grateful for each other. I hope to write something to mark the day, and to thank the animals, the farmhouse, the barns. I will miss Fall and thought has sent me into a mild melancholy. Funks are nice sometimes, cleansing and healing.

I talked with Animal Communicator Jeannie Lindheim last week about Simon, my third communication – we’ve done Frieda, Rose (and briefly, Toots). I am very comfortable with Jeannie. People tend to measure animal communicators in spectacular and contrived ways – do they know things they couldn’t possibly know? But I don’t measure Jeannie that way. I don’t feel she is literally exchanging sentences with my animals, I think she is absorbing my questions into her very intuitive perspective about animals and extracting something in a very spiritual way. I don’t know how it works, nor do I really need to know. It isn’t a circus act, or fortune-telling. No tricks requested or performed.  It’s an exchange of images and feelings, an intuition sometimes, a perspective, a way of thinking.

Jeannie understands the animal mind, I believe. She has a sense of how animals think in the real world, and does not emotionalize or trivialize them. She is clear, direct, confident. Helpful would be the word that comes to mind.

She did a communication with Simon, and as usual, I was excited and my questions full of human-style drama. Simon was not excited or dramatic. His neglect was a big deal to me, not really to him. It was part of life. Animals are free of human style emotions, I believe, and so, I think, does Jeannie.  I asked him about his suffering, near-starvation and neglect, and he said he always knew he would endure, would survive. He did not think much about it, or remember it much.  It was cold, wet, he was hungry.  He never thought he would perish. When he first saw Bedlam Farm, he said “wow. ” Open sky, grass, things to see, other donkeys. He said he felt as if he was lifted up on a cloud. She said he was very grounded, very secure, full of himself. He saw himself as a huge, handsome, powerful creature. When he came to farm, he was expansive, opened up. He felt as if he could breathe again, and he grew stronger every day. He knew from the first he would stay. This, he knows is his home. He is grounded to the place, to the earth, to Lulu and Fanny. He does not like the dogs.

An image that kept cropping up was of another man, before that awful time on the farm. A man who was said, who came to say goodbye, who was crying, who hugged him. Simon remembered  being surrounded by many children, and they were sad, hugging him, also saying goodbye. My guess was that Simon was recalling his time on his original farm, with the farm family. I believe Simon was on a farm with a family before, as he loves people so much and that Jeannie was pulling that memory out of him. The sad man man crying would have been the original farmer, I suspect, in his original home. He had no recollection of the people on the second farm, where he was neglected. I have heard rumors that a donkey like Simon was the beloved pet of a Vermont farm family which went under and he was sold or given away or perhaps dropped off temporarily,  to the farm where he suffered.

Simon said he loved his walks with me, but he wanted to walk side by side, not with me in front of him, or behind his head. He wanted me to walk alongside of him. He loved being with me, doing things with me. He wanted me on his right hand side. She said he loved braying, it felt wonderful, it came out of every part of his body. He is very pleased with himself, sees himself as large, strong powerful. He knows every inch of the barn, where all of the food is kept.  He is very strong, very sure of himself. He loves to eat, be brushed, have his ears rubbed.

Of all the things Jeannie told me, I was most affected by his stoicism and acceptance, the hallmark trait of animals, much as we would project our stuff into their minds. And by his memory of the sad goodbye with a man who seemed to have loved him deeply. I was struck by his memory of many children being around him, as Simon loves children, and is drawn to them. He does not like dogs, and challenges them when he sees them, as I suspect they were not in his experience.

Simon is now fused with this place, part of it, Jeannie said. Nothing else in is life really matters to him much. The next communication, tomorrow, is with Orson.

— Saturday, 2 p.m. Barnes & Noble, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Talk and Signing, “”Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die.”

– Monday, noon. Talk, Adirondack Community College, Scoville Auditorium.