Month: December 2013

For much of my life, I’ve looked for a way to make sense out of New Year’s Eve, our most loosely defined and ephemeral holiday, I think. I’ve never been able to do it. If you are a social party type, New Year’s Eve is easy, just get some liquor and good friends and whoop it up. In our increasingly puritanical and up-tight culture, even that is increasingly frowned upon. I understand Thanksgiving, that’s about finding great discounts on new technology, and Christmas, as we all know, is about feeling bad about your family. When I  lived in Greenwich Village some years ago, I did troop uptown on the subway to stand in Times Square and watch the balloon drop (before 9/11 and all those barricades) but once is enough for me, I froze my butt off, dodged drunks all night  and went home at 3 a.m. wondering precisely what I was celebrating.

I did meet a wonderful young woman on the subway home and we did ring in the New Year in a wonderful way, ending up at dawn on the Staten Island Ferry.

New Year’s Eve has not yet been completely corporatized and monetized, I don’t think, so it is still ours to try and make sense of. Most of the people I know like to stay home and watch TV. I like to plan things, I love ritual, the marking of occasions.

During my last couple of years at Bedlam Farm, we hosted some friends and we all make plans for the New Year and shared the common experience of wanting to change our lives. One couple wanted to move to Vermont, another to Maine, one friend wanted to find a partner, Maria and i wanted to sell Bedlam Farm and move to a different kind of farm. Such goals were interesting, and looking back on it, we had mixed results.

Our Vermont-seeking friends haven’t moved yet, the couple who wanted to go to Maine did go and seem happy there, our friend is still looking for a partner, and Maria and I didn’t sell Bedlam Farm, but we did move. I don’t think such goal-planning is really the stuff of true friendship, it is too external. I think New Year’s gatherings – all gatherings – work for me when there are good friends to like to sit and talk and where nothing is expected other than trust and comfort and companionship. Such friends are rare.

I am allergic to games and no good at chit-chat, so I’m excited about this year’s plan – two or three good friends getting together for a Tarot Card reading, talk, making a fire outside, food. I’m going to make two of my multi-grain pizzas there, nobody else wants to cook and I love cooking, I’m thinking one of the pizzas will be goat cheese and chopped clams, the other tomato sauce and chicken sausage and kale.

I’m not into resolutions, I think goals and wishes evolve on their own, they come out of life rather than wishing for me. I always want the same thing. I want everybody I know to be happy. I want to write great books, publish a great blog, take great photos, watch Maria grow and prosper, have sex until the day I keel over and die, nourish my good and growing friendships, learn more about the animals I love with, and give them good and proper lives.

I am achieving some balance in my life – work, love, creativity, growth and chance. My goal for this year is to learn how to be me, to live with me, to accept me. For the first time in my life, I don’t really want more than what I have, I want more of the same. I don’t think I can improve on that, except perhaps to score an international best-seller that would give me enough money to take Maria to Florence for a few weeks. Barring that, Disney World in February. It turns out I am a simple man after all, I just never knew it.

Tonight, I want to plan my recipe,  watch “Blazing Saddles,” the Mel Brooks Western spoof, and call up the people I love and wish them Happy New Year. It turns out Maria is a move goofball, she loves dumb comedies, and so do I, we sit on the sofa and laugh like some fraternity shitheads at a beer party.  I also have to prepare my New Year’s pizza ingredients, I love being in the kitchen at parties, I don’t have to make small talk.

At breakfast, my sister patiently creates her raw diet dishes for her dogs, while these gentle giants gather around her and wait patiently for their food. No one barks, pushes, growls, they simply sit in rapt fascination until she is done. My sisters home is organized for these big dogs, the furniture in most rooms is pushed to the sides, it is a house for dogs, not people or visitors.

There is much talk in the dog world about unconditional love, I think the idea of unconditional love – something we all crave and need – is one of the primary attractions of dogs for so many people in our disconnected society. Speaking for myself, I don’t care for the idea of unconditional love, either for people or dogs, I think it is projection of human need, not the reality of animals.

I don’t believe any true love is unconditional or should be. I think love is hard work and needs to be earned. I need to be loving, gentle, empathetic, supportive and encouraging to earn the love of my wife, those are big conditions. Dogs have great affection for people, it is one of their most important survival and adaptive techniques, the reason dogs get fed every and sleep in warm houses and raccoons don’t. Dogs also easily transfer their love, the millions of re-homed animals in America waste very little time in mourning or pining away, they figure out who is feeding them and they love them without many reservations.

This does not diminish the love for me, I have always believed adaptability is a trait in dogs I love very much. Unconditional love means we have no obligation to behave well or thoughtfully, or even humanely, so love without condition has little meaning for me and diminishes the great connection dogs have had for humans for thousands of years. The most powerful relationships in the human-animal bond spectrum come in my mind from people who open their emotions up to animals like dogs and connect with their extraordinary instincts. I always want to earn love, and I ask things of my dogs in exchange as well: that they enter my life, are safe around people and animals, respect my work and my home, listen to me when I ask them to do something like stop or lie down. Conditions everywhere.

My sister asks a great deal of these big lumbering and loving creatures – like sitting calmly while she prepares breakfast. In exchange they get constant love and attention food and space to run, toys and appealing and healthy food. Nothing unconditional there either.

There are fewer things more interesting to me about the animal world that different responses different kinds of dogs provoke in human beings. We get the dogs we need, they are mirrors of our lives, needs and emotional histories.  My sister Jame loves what I call “Big Love Dogs,” Newfoundlands, Bernese Mountain Dogs, Leonbergers, St. Bernards, they are the woolly sofas of the animal world, big and smart  working dogs bred for centuries to work with people, be around them, weave themselves into their lives.

Dogs can provoke the most powerful emotional responses in us, I have noticed that some people attach powerfully to border collies, they can project all sorts of things unto them, some are drawn to big dogs that are affectionate, soft and capable of great calm. The big working dogs can do a lot of things, but because of their coats and size, they can be capable of great stillness and calm, they can be hugged, touched, used as footstools, the inspire big dog love in people. Some people love big dogs, some love small dogs, it is interesting to me that my sister is very drawn to big love dogs, as well as complicated dogs in need of rescue.

Like all working dogs in the hands of patient people, my sister’s dogs are very calm, very good citizens of the home. She took out a packet of dried salmon bits – she has the most exotic treats- and these huge dogs (any one of them could have knocked her over in a flash) sat calmly waiting for their turn. In my experience, animals calm down once they understand they will get their fair share, and once they are asked to be calm about what they eat and do.

When you visit my sister, you are greeted by a pack of big dogs, curious and loud and big. Dogs are supposed to bark at strangers, and I had not met any of these dogs before. My sister Jane cannot say no to a dog in need, and she has also become a first-class dog breeder, so there are all kinds of dogs in her huge fenced-in yard. Inside the house, I was sniffed and licked and inspected like a ham in a butcher shop, I was allowed in.

A few months ago, I told my sister Jane that our family had long ago given up asking each other for anything, I said people who love one another need to ask for things, and a few weeks ago she called up and said she had been thinking about that and had something she wanted to ask me: would I come and visit her over the Christmas holiday?

My sister and I have always had a close and powerful connection, we clung to one another through some very terrible times, but life has pulled us apart, we have only seen each other a few times in the past 20 or 30 years. Jane never asks anything of me, nor I of her, she often tells me she doesn’t buy hard-cover books.

I wanted to come and see her, I was grateful for the invitation, Saturday Maria and I drove out to Western New York where Jane lives on six acres in an area much remote than my part of upstate New York, she has a small split level house and lives with six dogs – three Newfoundlands, two Leonbergers and a black mixed-breed rescue dog.  Leonbergers and Newfoundlands are big, hairy things, huge and lumbering. They floated up and down stairs and across rooms like ethereal beings, quiet and self-possessed, as huge animals often are, there is little to challenge or threaten them.

When I saw my sister at breakfast this morning, I told her I sometimes wondered if we were completely alike or completely different, and she laughed and said perhaps a little bit of each. Perhaps so. We have taken different paths, but that does not always make us different.

Jane and I started in the same place, but ended up in different places, yet….perhaps not so different as I might think. We both changed our lives relatively late in life, set out in very new and radically different directions. I set off to write about animals and rural life, was on the hero journey to figure out who I really was and wanted to be. Jane moved farther west than I did and also chose to live a life with animals. At first, she got some donkeys, chickens and goats as well as dogs, then narrowed her animals down to rescue and purebred dogs, she had “heart” puppies, puppies doomed to die from arterial disease, lately she has taken up breeding Newfoundlands.  Her life centers around her big and beautiful dogs, she talks to them, revels in them, brags of them.

Jane chose her house because it is good for dogs, every room is designed for their consideration, she built three huge fenced-in running and kennel areas for her dogs, she has a dog door on just about every door leading in and out of the main floor and the basement.  Visiting the house, I saw quickly that it is not a house with dogs, it is a dog house, the point is the dogs. The dogs are welcome on beds and sofas, the house has been arranged almost entirely for them, mats everywhere, open spaces cleared, visitors have to squeeze themselves onto rumpled and smelly sofas, if the dogs haven’t beaten them to it. The dogs can go outside and come in wherever they wish, and go anyplace in the house they wish as well. They move like a school of manatees, large, dark, quiet, there is a pond for them to swim in right down from the house.

I was overwhelmed by these gentle giants, they are big, affectionate, smelly, drooling and curious. They were used to being on laps, they were constantly trying to climb onto ours, they drooled and licked. Then they settle, like big mystical creatures.

Jane feeds her dogs raw diets only, she can recite the birth and death of every one of her dogs. Breakfast this morning was fish oil, beef hearts, ground beef (she meets a supplier every few months at a New York State Thruway rest stop), turkey liver, chicken neck, coconut oil prepared individually, served in bowls.  The people had steel-cut oatmeal.  Jane’s life is filled with breeding dramas and trials, animal rescues, horrific surgeries and recoveries.

We watched TV last night, a Disney movie about an adopted Chimpanzee, and a Monty Python video, it was warm and surreal in the dark room, humidifiers spouting mist,  the big lumbering dogs coming up one by one, licking my hands and legs, trying to climb into my lap and Maria’s, the big HD screen taking us deep into the jungle.

Dogs and animals are a part of my life, too, but it is different, they are not as central to me, much as I love them, they are a part of my life, not my whole life. I flirted for a bit with a life on Bedlam Farm just with me and animals, but I always knew what I was really looking for, even before a bunch of therapists reminded me.

Jane has made a profound choice in her life, I think she had quite enough of people, and was drawn to the love and trust of dogs, and I saw that for me and for her, the visit was about acceptance, we have always loved and cared for one another, we share a powerful experience, a bond that can never be broken. As close as we were as children, it has always been difficult for us to accept one another as adults, I think we are getting there, the thing is not to quit.

Jane is a brave, strong, ferociously independent and loving human being, I see so much love pouring out of her for her dogs, she simply lights up at the sight of each one of them, never minds being snuggled, bumped, licked and nuzzled, she cannot do enough for them. In her life, she has suffered much and struggled much, she is ready for peace and meaning on her own terms.

And she is happy for me, too, I think, she and Maria were so easy with one another. I found that the love in me needed a human outlet, that is what I always wanted, that is, in a way, where my dogs led me, they showed me how to love, I think, until I could find what I felt in  my heart was the real thing – Maria. Perhaps this is the real message of my family, so my love looking for a place to live, to be.

I was unnerved at first during this visit,  I felt overwhelmed by these dogs, they are huge and take up almost all of the space in the house. Jane loves her dogs so much she can’t quite comprehend my discomfort, I’m not sure she even saw it. I don’t think I could live with them in my small farmhouse or any house, it was simply too much for me in that small space. But it is not too much for Jane, and it has worked well and happily for her,  there are many people reading this post who will understand her life as well or better than me, and relate to its deep meaning. It is a pure life with animals, this house is about her and them. A love of unconditional love and nurture. A life where trust and connection can put down roots and grow again. I’m not sure I can do that, not even a brother, not even a witness.

On this visit, discomfort and wariness gave way to acceptance, I appreciate the great love and heart in my sister, I admire her courage in setting out to find the life she wanted, she has a bad knee and poor sight in one eye, nothing seems to slow or deter her, and she lives  without apology or explanation, sorry for her mistakes, determined to move ahead. “Are you okay about visiting”,” she asked me, “sure, I said, I’m okay.”

It was not a simple visit, it never is, it never can be. We are learning to get comfortable with one another, it only took us about a half-century. I gave Jane a pile of books and I hope to visit her again soon. Acceptance is a growing notion in my mind these days, I think it is the pathway to true love, knowledge, peace of mind, a spiritual life, of the beginning of an, understanding of what it means to be a human being and to live a human life.

Jane and I share an unbreakable connection, we are sacred witnesses to one another’s lives, for all of our worries and twists and turns and judgements, here we are, after all this time, brother and sister, bound in the great dance. It was always there.