Cleo the Bedlington Returns!

Happy New Year and welcome back to the world of Cleo!  The lamb-girl and I are very glad to be here.  You may recall that the week before Halloween, I wrote to say that I would be taking a month off to get my book in order.  Okay, who knew?!  It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be to ready a book for publication.  So here we are, two and a half months later, but the book is published and available on Amazon. Here’s the link, in case you want to get it: The Educated Dog.  It is being sold only as an ebook, but if you don’t have a Kindle, here is an article on how to read ebooks without one.  If you like the book, I would so appreciate your posting a review on the Amazon site.  Anyway, I’m really excited to have actually accomplished this goal, as well as to be back writing the blog and sharing our stories!

So much has happened since October, both in the wide world and in the tiny sliver of Cleo’s world.  Anyone who was alive and aware in December 2012 will never again hear the words Sandy Hook or Newtown without experiencing a wave of grief.  For our school, exams had ended two days before that dreadful Friday, and our students had scattered to their homes and vacations.  I spent a lot of time that weekend alternately reading news stories and lying on the chaise snuggling Cleo, her head tucked under my chin, her little body warming my chest.  Even she eventually got fed up with being plucked from whatever activity she was engaged in to be wrapped in her mom’s arms and tightly held.  She squirmed to loosen herself, her pointy paws pressing into my neck and sternum, her elbow digging into my ribs, then hopped down to pounce on her moose which she carried back to me to present for a game of chase.  She was right, as always.  Playing with her was a much better palliative than lying around trying to fathom the unfathomable.  Action trumped inaction and eventually led us to join the 26 Acts of Kindness movement.  Building bridges between people by affirming our mutual humanity is the only answer I can think of to an act that so rends the fabric of society.

Once it got underway, we had a wonderful vacation.  John and I made sure that Cleo got to walk on her favorite trail every day, and several times took her to the park for an evening tear around the field or, if the stupid deer had taken over, the tennis court.  Ever since Cleo and I were out walking one day and a young doe ran down the path after us, she has recognized their silhouettes.  When she sees them on the field at night, she stands at attention, pressing forward, nose awiggle, tail ramrod straight and quivering.  She looks like she’s thinking how much she’d like to bite their ankles.  Or maybe I’m just projecting.  She probably wants to play with them.  It’s me that wants to bite their ankles.  Anyway, she enjoys the tennis court almost as much as the grass and was happy to show off for our son Jackson and his girlfriend when he was home on leave from his Navy training.  She raced around the court, easily outrunning and outmaneuvering all four of us, laughing as she taunted us by skimming past, just out of reach.

And now we’re back at school.  I’ve been making a point to take Cleo with me to meetings this year.  Usually, I take her blanket and favorite chew-object, an antler (no, my hostility is not subconscious), so that she has somewhere to be and something to keep her occupied.  Faculty meetings are held in the library, just downstairs from Cleo’s and my office.  The other morning I dropped Cleo off, leaving her to do her daily perimeter check (territory outside office windows free of turkeys, quail or other intruders; couch cushions inspected for left-over crumbs, toys or other objects and scents of interest; toys present and accounted for), grabbed her blanket and headed to the meeting, letting her know she could join me when she was ready.  In a minute or two, I heard little exclamations of greeting rippling through the group of assembled campus adults, then a happy face was grinning up at me.  I arranged Cleo’s blanket and showed her the antler.  She plopped down and started enthusiastically gnawing—crunch, crunch, grind.  Then she stopped, craned her neck and looked at me.  Up she got, a truly uncharacteristic lack of obedience.  The meeting started and I quietly put her back in a down-stay.  It lasted for less than a minute.  What was going on?  I knew she didn’t need to go out; she’d already done all that less than a half hour before.  Back onto the blanket.  A new teacher is welcomed and a returning one greeted, both with applause.  Cleo is up, feet on my lap, looking anxiously into my face.

Call me slow.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  You see, two days before, the boiler in the library had broken.  The repairman had the flu and couldn’t come fix it.  It wasn’t unbearable when we were in our office with a space heater cranked, but in the open library it was cold.  In fact, the California Central Coast is now going through the coldest winter I can remember since I moved here.  Temperatures are dropping into the 30s almost nightly and rarely breaking into the high 50s during the day.  Every human in the room, literally, was bundled up in winter coats, scarves, mittens, hats.  Some were even huddled in extra blankets.  Cleo, her hair clipped unusually short by a new groomer, was literally shivering.  She wasn’t being disobedient; she was succumbing to hypothermia!

I patted my lap and she jumped up, turned around and gratefully lay down, curled into a tight ball.  I lay my gloved hand on her side to help warm her up.  During the break, when she normally would have gotten up to say hello to her favorite people, she managed to open an eye and look around.  She did appreciatively crunch up a few Charlie Bears that one of the art teachers happened to have in her pocket, and happily sniffed the coat sleeves of her Aunt Kim and Aunt Charlotte when they scratched her ears (gloves on).  But she was not about to leave my lap.  As she warmed up, she uncurled a bit from the tight ball, taking more and more of my lap until I had to extend it with my left forearm and hand.  She sighed contentedly and stretched her chin so that it rested fully in my palm.  By the end of the meeting, my knees were stiff, my feet were tingling and my arm muscles ached.  But Cleo and I were both toasty warm.  Several folks stopped on their way out to tell Cleo how good she had been, then we made our way up to the office and dialed the space heater to high.

Autumn Leaves are Falling

For many people, the onset of fall is nothing but a reminder of the headlong rush towards winter, but I love this time of year.  Of course, that’s easy for me to say; I live in a part of the world where the temperature rarely goes below 40 degrees and snow is something we see from a distance.  As we drive clear, sun drenched streets, we can look towards the east where there are a couple of isolated mountains of enough elevation that their peaks are occasionally dusted with snow during the winter months.  It’s a cause for great excitement and considerable comment, as well as spontaneous “drives to the snow” to bring back snowballs, carefully preserved in coolers, for a seconds-long snowball fight or the general pranking of one’s friends.  Not for us the rapidly plummeting temperatures, the leafless, rattling tree branches, the desertion by hummingbirds and butterflies, or the retrieval from storage of ice scrapers and snow shovels.. 

In high school, my favorite English teacher once broke my heart when she groaned in an agonized tone, “I hate autumn.  It speaks of nothing but death.”  I had no idea what to say to her.  Even now, words of comfort or understanding would probably desert me.  At seventeen, I could only gaze at her with aching pity.  I wanted to graft my love of the season, whole cloth, into her brain.  Even that word—autumn—is beautiful.  It’s the taste of crisp apples, the smell of quiet earth and the soul-soothing touch of the lengthening angles of sunlight.

Here in Monterey, the season also brings with it our warmest weather of the year.  Many people call this Indian Summer, but that always seems a misnomer to me.  For someone who grew up in Pennsylvania and Vermont, Indian Summer was the warm period that followed a cool period that followed a hot summer.  Here in Central California, it doesn’t seem fair to call the one really hot time of the year anything but October.  When your summer is cold and foggy and your early fall is mild with the promise of sunshine, a week of 70s and 80s doesn’t really deserve to be called Indian Summer.

We are funny here, though.  We pine for warm, sunny weather for months, then two days into our warm spell, we’re all staggering around, sweaty and exhausted, poleaxed by the heat and humidity.  I really feel for Cleo.  I can pare down to shorts and a tank top; she is stuck in a fur coat.  The major part of every day this past week, she has spread herself out on the gel mat I stand on as I work at the computer.  It’s the only cool surface in the room.  Everything else is textile: the carpet, the couch, the cushions on the chairs.  She barely lifts her head as I straddle her, one foot on either side of her prone body, tapping away at the keyboard.  Occasionally, she’ll muster the energy to get up and greet a visitor, giving the hand a peremptory lick before once more flopping onto her side in heat-induced lethargy.  Of course, that means that in the evening, when the sun sets and the thermometer drops to a pleasant sixty-two or –three, she is ready for action, bounding into the backyard, barking a challenge and making the world safe for democracy.

A couple of times this past week, she rallied herself for daytime action.  At 10:18 AM on 10/18, many schools participate in the Great California Shakeout, an earthquake drill.  Cleo and I were in charge of the library, a beautiful, if impractical, open structure with soaring ceilings and outer walls of plate glass.  When the building was constructed, there was no thought for installing safety glass or, indeed, tempered glass of any kind.  Over the years, we’ve had occasion, thanks to chairs being too forcefully pushed out of the way, to replace two or three sheets of glass with the safer variety.  The cost of replacing them all would put us in debt for the foreseeable century.  So one of the things Cleo and I did last Thursday was to go around to the students sitting by the outer walls and quietly ask them, “What would you do if there were an earthquake?” 

“Oh,” responded one young man, looking with doubt at the towering window behind him.  “Huh.”

Huh, indeed.  That’s why we have drills.

We followed our earthquake drill with a fire drill.  Let’s just say, not Cleo’s favorite sound in the world.  With the county fire marshal in attendance, I wanted Cleo to be on her best behavior, so when she started barking at the alarm, I picked her up.  She quieted instantly.  And for an instant.  Then she redoubled her barking and upped the ante with some struggling, kicking and whining.  I put her down and headed for the mustering area, one of our athletic fields.  She strained against the leash the whole way, but once on the field, she got into line and sat politely, if anxiously, by my side.  Having Mom nearby helped her restrain herself, but once we were dismissed, she needed to get rid of that pent up energy.  In spite of the heat, she and I sprinted all over that field, chasing each other, chasing the crows, chasing a soccer drill thingie that flew like a Frisbee.  When she eventually lay down, panting, with her tummy pressed against the cool grass, I figured it was time to go in and get a drink of water.

Her other daytime outing was when Auntie Kim took her across the street to the Wilderness Lab.  I swear, though it’s only across the street, the Lab is always a good ten degrees warmer than the rest of campus.  Hot, dry, and full of prickly stuff, but also redolent of wild animal scat.  Cleo loves going over there.  This outing with Auntie was her first time without me.  When they returned, Kim was full of amazed compliments.  “Cleo was so well behaved!” she reported.  “A couple times she tried to sneak under the razor wire onto the BLM land, but the second I said, ‘No!’ she came right back.  She heeled all the way back to school.  Without a leash! Everyone was so impressed!” 

Well of course she did!  I’d love to say that it was because she is so very well trained, and to some extent, that’s true.  But the real reason she was so obedient was because without Mama there, she was afraid she’d be abandoned to the mountain lions and coyotes.  There was no way she was going to let her Auntie out of her sight. 

This weekend, the weather broke and we’ve had cool days, cooler nights and buckets of rain.  Sodden pine needles clog the gutters and storm drains.  As I write, I can hear cars swishing by on the wet pavement.  Clouds pile up above the Bay in frothy imitations of snow-capped peaks.  I’m snuggled up on the chaise, a blanket covering me, the world’s most perfect puppy warming my feet, her chin flung across my shins.  As I said, I love this time of year.

***********
Dear Faithful Readers,

Thank you for your comments, your readership, your good wishes for Cleo and me!  I wanted you to know that I will be taking the next month off to focus on revising and compiling the first year's worth of blog posts for collection in a book that will be ready in time for the holidays.  Perfect for gift giving!  We'll be back in December.  In the meantime, feel free to be in touch.  We always love hearing from you all.

All the best,
Joyce and Cleo

Muddy Outcomes

Sometimes it feels like every action we take comes with unintended consequences, whether positive or negative.  In foreign policy circles, this is called blowback, though I guess that term usually has negative connotations.  You probably wouldn’t hear a news anchor say something like, “Middle East peace was achieved today as a result of blowback from the Secretary of State’s most recent round of shuttle diplomacy.” 

But unintended consequences can be good.  Just a moment ago, in fact, as an unintended consequence of finally getting around to downloading IOS 6 for my iPhone, I discovered one of the coolest apps I’ve ever seen.  I’m keeping it a secret so it won’t get over-used.  Although, given that it’s one of the featured Passbook apps, that’s probably a lost cause.

John and I have been dealing with the unintended consequences of installing a dog door for Cleo.   Before we bought it, we carefully considered the dangers of unwelcome intruders (whether self-propelled or puppy-propelled).  A friend’s graphic story about a student of hers who woke up one hot night to discover a rabid skunk standing on his chest definitely gave us pause.  So far (knock on wood) we’ve been spared the entrance of anything untoward.  Last night, we might have been the closest ever to entertaining an unwelcome guest.  Cleo caught her first rat.  I wasn’t sure whether to be congratulatory or grossed out.  One thing’s for sure: She won’t be licking my face when she comes in from the backyard anymore.  Frankly, it was just a baby, about four inches long, but hey, when it’s in your backyard, a rat is a rat.  When I discovered her, she was a little confused about the whole thing.  I think she was as surprised as I was (let alone the rat) that she had actually succeeded in getting it, and she was trying to figure out what to do with it now.  I can just imagine her deciding that a good, safe place for it would be between the cushions on the chaise in the living room.  I could almost hear the characteristic, sneaky tick-tick-tick of her nails as she tried to tiptoe past me with her contraband.  I brought her in and locked the flap prestissimo.

What hadn’t dawned on us was that things besides the puppy might go out.  Or maybe I should say “in addition to” rather than “besides,” given that they are going out with Cleo.  I first became suspicious when I discovered an unusually dirty pair of John’s socks lying next to the refrigerator.  When I picked them up, I discovered they were damp and curiously earthy smelling.  Now, John would rather be barefoot than shod any day of the week, and even if he were wearing socks, he wouldn’t go tromping around in the mud with them.  Not long after this, his leather gloves (a perennial favorite of Cleo’s) disappeared from the coffee table.  We looked in her usual hiding places, but found nothing.  A quick scan of the backyard likewise turned up zilch, but later that afternoon, I heard Cleo rustling around in the narrow passage between our shed and fence.  Not long after that, she came through the dog door with a single glove in her mouth and a guilty expression on her face.  So I know where her hiding place is, but let me tell you, I am not planning to explore it!  Here there be spiders!  Besides, she usually returns whatever she’s stolen.  Maybe it’s guilt or maybe she’s bragging, I don’t know.  The second glove showed up a couple days later, wet and muddy. 

Sometimes we don’t even realize that something is missing until she brings it back.  It’s always been her penchant to steal socks in pairs; when there isn’t a lone survivor to call attention to its solitude, it’s pretty easy to overlook missing socks.  Luckily, she almost always returns them in pairs, too.  I was a little resentful when she spat my favorite underpants at my feet last week.  At least this time we were home alone rather than having dinner with friends.  Nothing says “Welcome!” like your dog bearing your unmentionables to the dining table.

At the moment, we’re waiting for the return of our bathroom doorstop.  As we brush our teeth at night, the door swings quietly closed, always stopping at just the right angle so that I bang an elbow into it as I reach for the floss.  “Where’s the damn doorstop?” I ask Cleo, who snoozes happily on, stretched out on our bed. 

And really, what’s a little blowback compared to a contented puppy dog?

Wishing You a Happy Voyage Home

“I didn’t really know much about military personnel.  I didn’t know much about their lives… I don’t think I appreciated them to the level that they deserved.  And that has changed…. I border on embarrassed at how little thought I gave military service until I got to know service members.”

Wow.  Stephen Colbert and I think alike.  Not the character Stephen Colbert, the real Stephen Colbert.  He said those words to Terry Gross during a recent interview on Fresh Air.  Of course, we came to the same realization from two different angles.  Colbert was talking about what he had learned from doing his show for the last several years.  In 2009, he spent a week in Iraq performing for the troops.  Since then, he and his staff have supported several charities which raise funds to help military personnel and their families.  My awakening was on a much smaller, though possibly more personal, scale.

Last week, John and I left Cleo in the care of friends and flew to Great Lakes, Illinois, to see our son (by blood, his son, by childrearing, ours) Jackson graduate from Recruit Training Command, the Navy’s basic training.

This past year has been a taxing one for our family.  Sometimes adolescents experience a gentle, constantly ascending arc of growth from childhood to adulthood.  At other times, the path can be a little rockier with lots of ups and downs.  And then there are the times when the path is not so much rocky as boulder-strewn, less up and down than veering straight over the cliff into a freefall tumble to the valley floor below.  It can be difficult or impossible to pinpoint any reason why one person’s adolescence is more fraught than another’s.  I’ve known young men far less capable, less socially intelligent and less kind than Jackson who sailed through their teens and twenties with nary a blip on the radar screen of distress.  John and I aren’t perfect parents, but I’ve seen kids fare better with far worse ones.  Suffice it to say that a year ago, we reached crisis point, and after much consultation and deliberation, John and I did the hardest thing we have ever had to do.  We gave Jackson a month to find somewhere else to live.

It’s a tribute to a resourcefulness he didn’t know he possessed, and to his emotional intelligence, that he pretty quickly lined up a couple places with friends.  He also parlayed a part-time job at a failing bike shop into a full-time position as a bike repairman for a thriving string of rental shops for tourists.  And for the first time, he started thinking about his future.   John and I were floored when Jackson called to say he had enlisted in the Navy.  “Why the Navy?!” I whined to John.  “If he had to enlist, why not the Coast Guard?”  When my oldest sister’s college boyfriend drew a number so low that he knew he would be drafted into the war in Vietnam, he enlisted in the Coast Guard as a safer choice.  That made a big impression on my fifteen-year-old mind, though these days, what with the war on drugs and the Coast Guard’s deployment to Iraq in the early days of that war, I don’t know that the “Coast-Guard-is-safe” canard holds water anymore.

Growing up during the Vietnam War, I never thought of the military as a career choice.  Don’t misunderstand: I was never one of those people who shouted epithets at soldiers in uniform or who went to the airport to yell “Baby killer” at returning veterans.  For one thing, I was too young to drive and my parents never would have given me permission to go.  For another, even as a callous teenager, I saw that these protesters were yelling at the wrong people.  So many of the boys returning home were barely older than we, and they would bear scars for the rest of their lives.  Yet even though I have nieces, nephews, students, friends and colleagues who enlisted in one branch of the service or another, I still thought of military service as something one would have to be required to do, rather than something one would chose to do.

We had six months to get used to the idea.  Recruitment was so high when Jackson enlisted that the Navy had no room for him until August.  And so it was that last week, John and I turned our faces towards Lake Michigan.  The graduation hall opened at 6:30 AM for a ceremony that started at 9:00.  We couldn’t imagine why we would need to be there so early, so we slept in till 5:30, had breakfast, hopped in the car and made the hour drive to the base.  Traffic was fairly heavy the whole way, but when we turned the corner onto the street leading to the main gate, with a mile and a half to go, it seemed to get even worse.  Avoiding the badly backed up right lane, we pulled over into the left where the going was a bit clearer.  “Man, that is just bumper-to-bumper over there,” I commented.  “They are not even moving.”

Silence.  We looked at each other.  Uh-oh.  “Naw!” I waved my hand to dismiss the idea.  We scanned the line of cars.  “Every one of those cars,” John stated ominously, “has what looks like a family in it.”  I tried to peer into the car next to us.  Dad, Mom, Grandpa, Sister?  By now we were a quarter mile farther along the road.  Clearly we were not the only ones taken by surprise.  Cars ahead of us were slowing and merging with the right hand lane.  John put on his signal and eased into the long line of graduation-goers, waving a thank you to the car behind us.  We sat, not moving.  Five minutes passed.  We sat.  Cars flashed past us on the left.  We sat.  In ten minutes, we had not moved a single car length.  Up ahead, every time some space opened up, a car from the left lane merged into it.  It was almost 8:00; the Navy had been very clear that the doors to the graduation hall would close at 8:45.  “We’re never going to get through this line in time,” I fretted.

“There is no way we’re going to miss this,” John vowed in his best Dirty Harry style.  He peeled out of the line and into the left lane. 

“What are we going to do?” I asked, a little quavery.

“Think outside the box.”  He gave me a grin.  “How are those shoes for walking?”

About a half mile from the gate, we dove into a residential side street, found a perfect parking place, stretched out the kinks in our legs and started a very pleasant trek.  We were the only pedestrians, and the two sailors detailed to check IDs at the walk-in gate looked thrilled to have something to do.  By 8:25, we were crammed onto the bleachers with the majority of what would ultimately become a crowd of over five thousand.  It turns out that Jackson was one of 1001 graduating Sailor Recruits, the second largest class of the year.

Flag corps

The Navy puts on one of these graduation ceremonies just about every Friday of the year, and it is quite the show.  There are videos (“We know in just a little while, your recruit will have plenty of stories to tell you from the last eight weeks.  Before that happens, we want to show you our side of the story!”), speeches, special awards and honors, a totally hip drum corps, several tunes from the marching band, a chorus, and lots of impressive marching (the Navy has such a relaxed style of marching—very chill and self-possessed).  At the outset of the ceremony, before the divisions of recruits arrive, a flag corps displays each of the fifty state flags arranged in order of entry into the union.  As the state’s name is announced, the corps member dips the flag and the attendees from that state cheer and applaud.  “Delaware!”  One lone voice from the far left of the audience lets out a whoop.  A similarly small contingent from Rhode Island.  Giant cheers from Illinois, Texas, California.  Some states may have had more recruits than others, but in this graduating class, every state in the union was represented.

Honestly, I don’t know if I would necessarily call myself patriotic.  I’m not sure I know exactly what that word is intended to mean anymore, not as it’s commonly used, anyway.  I do know that I love my country.  Despite its flaws, I believe it affords more opportunities than any other country currently on Earth.  I love Americans.  We are an ornery bunch, but we are also resilient, brave, inventive, imaginative and caring.  I also love our national anthem.  Yes, some people object to it because they claim it’s war-mongering.  It’s not; it’s about surviving.  One night, when Jackson was five or six, John and I were getting ready to read him to sleep.  Jackson sat between us, his warm little head leaning against my arm.  For some reason, I started telling him the story of our national anthem.  An exhausted soldier, embattled and besieged by enemy attacks that have gone on all night, looks up to the ramparts.  In the light of exploding shells, he sees his country’s flag, tattered and smoke-stained, but still flying, still in place.  From that sight, he gathers the strength to press on to the end, to survive.  I’ve never been able to hear that part of the song without tearing up a little.

“And the rockets’ red glare,

The bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof, through the night

That our flag was still there.”

As we sang the national anthem at Jackson’s graduation, I pretended it was the stratospherically high range of the melody that kept me from singing those lines, but the truth is, I was too choked up to get the words out. 

By the time the ceremony was over and the newly hatched sailors were granted liberty, we had about five hours with Jackson before he had to be back to stand watch.  Plus, he was leaving for his “A” school in South Carolina at 1:00 the next morning.  We decided to drive down to Chicago so that he could see the city he’d been an hour away from for the last two months.  As we walked across the base and back to the car, as we drove, as we walked the streets of Chicago, as we ate lunch, as we explored the Skydeck at Sears Tower, this formerly monosyllabic young man talked.  He told us stories, he described his division-mates, he explained terms and drills and the lessons he had learned.  These things mattered to him.  He had an adult perspective on why he was expected to set his cap just so, why it was regulation to take ladders one rung at a time, why it was important that he had learned to fold his clothes precisely: Attention to detail could save his life, and the lives of everyone around him, one day.   He understood why recruits are not permitted to say thank you, why this reflex instilled in kids every day by their parents is actively discouraged.  Thoughtless words, wasted words, can, quite literally, get you sunk.  You better mean everything you say.

It was a fascinating thing to see, everywhere we went, people openly gazing at him.  Granted he is a good-lookin’ boy (I can say that; my genes aren’t involved).  And he is impressive-looking at six-two clad in his sailor’s whites, carrying himself with an ease and a confidence we’d never seen from him before.   There was a lovely, sweet humility about him as he returned their looks with a quiet smile.

On our way into Chicago, we stopped off at a Starbucks to caffeine up.  We each ordered a cup of one kind or another.  At the last moment, I grabbed a little tube of trail mix.  “That’ll be a buck seventy-nine,” said the bepaunched man behind the counter.

John looked confused.  “For the nuts.  What about the rest of it?”

“Whaddabat the rest of it?” returned the cashier, somewhat defensively.  “Lemme tell you a story,” he went on.  “When I was a kid, a recruit, I went into a bar.  The bartender hands me and my buddies a drink and says, ‘The guy at the end of the bar bought you this.’  So I look at the guy and I say, ‘How come you bought us a drink?’  And the guy says to me, ‘When I was a recruit, some guy bought me a drink.  I’m returning the favor.  I’m only goin’ to ask you this: When you’re in your fifties, buy some recruit a drink.’  So here I am.  I’m in my fifties and I’m buyin’ you a drink.  I’m just gonna ask you one thing.  When you’re in your fifties, buy some recruit a drink.”

Jackson and the cashier looked at each other, sharing a moment of reflection that John and I were not, never could be, a part of.  Then Jackson reached out a hand and with grave sincerity said, “Thank you, sir.”

But that wasn’t my favorite moment.  My favorite moment was in the parking lot when we had taken Jackson back to the base and it was time to say goodbye.  I reached out to him and he folded me into a hug, wrapping his arms tightly around me, and held on.  And he did not let go first.

In his interview with Terry Gross, Stephen Colbert said, “I work hard to keep [a consideration of military personnel] in mind without fetishizing military service.  I think there are great ways to serve the country that are not military service.  It’s not the only thing you can do.”  The path that Jackson has chosen is not right for everyone, but for him, it’s something that he is committed to and believes in.  The transformation in him didn’t all happen in an eight week period.  It was taking place over the last year, a year when all three of us had time to reflect, learn about ourselves and grow.  I know there will still be ups and downs as the years go by.  There are in every life and in every relationship.  But when the ties are strong, we can weather a few rough seas.

Jackson on the Skydeck

Wild Blue...Yonder!

It’s good to know that the spirit of exploration is still alive and well in the United States.  This desire to know what lies over the next ridge has always been one of our most attractive traits, whether the “ridge” in question is the Blue Ridge Mountains, gravity, the human genome or our own neuroses.

On Friday, my book group got together to discuss our latest read, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.  Full disclosure: I didn’t finish the book.  I found myself constantly torn between impatience on the one hand and admiration on the other.  The impatience sprang initially from a mild disgust at the complete mess Strayed makes of her life after her mother dies.  Maybe the sting was envy.  I mean, I’ve experienced many deaths, but I was never allowed to fall apart as completely as she did.  There was always someone depending on me to hold things together.  Yet Strayed’s response is to launch herself on a solo trek of the Pacific Crest Trail, the west coast’s sister of the Appalachian Trail, only longer and more arduous.  Of course she was stupidly, dangerously ignorant about trekking and unprepared for the rigors of the PCT, but she stuck with it.  She had the guts not only to think about such a journey, a woman alone in the wilderness for hundreds of miles, but to actually take it on.  That is something I could never do, and not only because I hate camping.

When I was a girl, ten or eleven, I had a dream of riding a horse across the country.  Like many adolescent girls, I was horse-mad.  I would regularly attach a “bridle” to the newel post of our banister and take off on mad gallops through the countryside or long slogs up the sides of mountains.  Since I grew up in Pennsylvania, the mountains I was familiar with had been tamed somewhat by the effects of time and erosion.  Still, my imaginary rides were full of excitement and horse-girl companionship, but never any serious danger.  As the youngest child of a mother who was seriously ill during my toddler-hood, I got a lot of attention from my sisters and father, but no one ever had the time to drive me to riding lessons.  Horse-mad I might be, but horse-poor I would remain.  I did get a cat I adored.  And the full set of Doctor Doolittle books one Christmas.  No movie version, whether Rex Harrison or Eddie Murphy, can hold a candle to the original books.

Despite my boldness on the banister, the reality of my personality is that the most adventurous thing I’ve ever done is move to New York City by myself to go to acting conservatory.  But that doesn’t mean I’m a complete coward. 

A friend in my book group commented that she related to Strayed’s impulse to get out into the wild and get away.  When she was facing a difficult time in her life, she said, that was all she wanted to do—turn away from the trouble and start to walk and walk and walk.  But she didn’t.  She stayed and did the harder thing; she examined herself.  I will tell you, my friend learned more about herself in three weeks time than Strayed has ever learned (at least according to what my book group reports about the end of Wild).  There are plenty of folks who can set off without a qualm to explore the most remote of territories, but who quail from the territory of the mind.

Coincidentally, also on Friday, the Space Shuttle flew over Monterey as it made its final trip to an aeronautical museum in Los Angeles.  Although I openly scoffed at people who said they planned to watch it pass (including my own husband), when I heard that we’d be able to have a good view of it from the deck of the school’s science building, I made my way over there, then across the street to a high ridge in our outdoor lab.  A cluster of twenty or so students and teachers stood in the sunshine looking out over Monterey Bay.  As one of our tech-savvy teachers followed his Twitter feed to determine how close the Shuttle was (“It’s circling San Francisco!”), I found myself (“It’s still circling San Francisco!”) getting more and more (“Oh, come on!  It’s still circling San Francisco?”) excited and (“It’s over Palo Alto!”) anticipatory.  Even so, (“It’s over San Jose!  It’ll be here in minutes!”) I was surprised how emotional I became when we heard the distant rumble of the low-flying 747 with its fighter jet escort.  Then it came into view.  Of course, I’ve seen any number of pictures of the Shuttle atop its transport, but somehow seeing it in person brought home just how tiny it is compared to its more earth-bound assistant.  It was breathtakingly white, gleaming and majestic as it coasted, only twelve hundred feet above sea level, over the Monterey Bay Aquarium, then south into its future.  It had carried explorers into space and safely back home, how many times?  Because of its development and engineering, humanity has been immeasurably enriched, from the small digital cameras that our faculty and students were using to snap photos as the Shuttle passed to memory foam mattresses and LED lights.  I realized I was foolish not to recognize that this was a moment that needed to be honored.  The Space Shuttle is the embodiment of the spirit of American exploration.  Truly, the Endeavor is aptly named.

At the same time that I was watching from a hilltop at school, a former band mate of John’s, now an arborist, was high in our hundred foot pine tree trimming dead branches.  Since our house is one mile directly uphill from the Aquarium, he had one of the best Shuttle views of anyone in town.  I hope it helped make up for the fact that his chipping crew failed to materialize, so he had to spend hours stacking large branches in our side yard to get them out of the way until Monday.  It has, I will tell you, created one of the most wonderful adventures for Cleo. 

Late Saturday evening, I realized that I hadn’t seen the puppy for an unusual length of time. I searched the house.  Nothing.  Beginning to get worried, I went outside and checked the gate to the street.  Safely shut tight.  Where the heck was she?  Nowhere in the backyard.  I stood on the back deck, peering down the length of the side yard.  No telltale blue Bedlington glow.  Suddenly, I heard a rustling from deep within the head-high pile of branches.  Oh, yuck, a rat?!  Cleo burst forth from one end of the pile and shook herself from the tip of the nose to the end of her tufted tail.  She saw me and leapt onto the deck, paws reaching high.  Her mouth agape in an exhilarated grin, her fur sticky with pine sap, her entire face stained a vivid green from the boughs, she was every inch the great explorer, returning home with newfound knowledge.

For some of us, it’s the call of the stars.  For others, joy is here on earth.

Choice of the Whole Frontier

Because our school contains a hundred plus acres of wilderness land which flows seamlessly into thousands more undeveloped acres of the former Fort Ord military facility, we have the great good fortune of regular wild animal sightings.  As we attend our periodic assemblies, we can look out through a wall of glass to a canyon where hawks and buzzards circle on the updrafts, and quail scratch and skitter, their top-knots waggling as they zig-zag in search of juicy morsels.  Tiny bunnies venture cautiously from the underbrush to nibble at the grass.  During my final approach to school last week, I had to slow the car as a turkey hen and her brood crossed the road in front of me.  It gave me a chance to reflect on the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin who recommended the turkey as our national symbol rather than the bald eagle.  It is, after all, indigenous to North America.  It is also beautiful in a subtle, understated, non-braggy kind of way.  As the hurrying group filed in front of me, I tried to get a good look at each of the mid-sized poults.  I wanted to help bear witness to their presence in the world, however brief.  Humans aren’t the only carnivores that like the taste of turkey meat.  Though there were six or seven last week, the hen will be lucky if she raises two to adulthood.

In the last month, our environmental science teacher has started one of the best projects ever at our school.  She and the tech team have installed two critter cams in the area we’ve come to call the Outdoor Lab.  The very first twenty-four hour period returned gold.

Handsome Bob

This bobcat apparently regards the Outdoor Lab as his personal territory because we have regular sightings of him, both by day and night.  The critter cams have also caught a coyote, multiple deer and a mystery animal which may have been a running mountain lion.  The image is too blurry to say for certain, but cougar sightings (the four-legged variety) are not uncommon around Monterey.  My personal favorite critter cam catch appeared on the school’s blog under the heading “Some wildlife is more wild than others.”

Wildlife in the Outdoor Lab

That shot was taken on a day when Cleo and I were helping the envi sci teacher collect the photo cards from the cameras.  Cleo is in her typical outdoor stance: nose aiming towards the ground scenting something while her back leg is held in the characteristic “Ow, there’s something stuck between my pads” position.  Whenever we walk in the “wilderness,” by which I mean anywhere that’s not paved, Cleo adopts this stance almost instantly.  It’s accompanied by a pathetic little hop that has John and me calling her Chester.  That’s a Gunsmoke reference for you under-50 crowd.  Um, Gunsmoke was a television show back in the day when we had only three channels to watch.  I know.  Hard to get your mind around, huh?

Not all the wildlife is over in the Outdoor Lab, though.  Years ago, the school adopted two desert tortoises which were first named Fred and Rosie.  Now, before I tell you this next part, you need to understand that it can be something of a challenge to determine gender where desert tortoises are concerned.  A couple of years ago, certain, shall we say, behaviors on Rosie’s part led us to believe that we’d gotten their names reversed.  We decided that to try to remember to call them by each other’s names, perhaps more gender-appropriate, would be so confusing that it just wasn’t worth it.  It’s not like they come when they’re called, anyway.  Turns out it’s just as well.  An art teacher joined us this year who happens to be a desert tortoise specialist.  Fred and Rosie, it seems, are brothers.  Somewhere in their thirties, they’re about the size of dinner plates.  I can confidently tell you, they are not afraid of Bedlington Terriers.

I don’t know how it is that Cleo never noticed them before a couple of weeks ago.  Indoors, they live in a kiddie pool in the prep area of the science building.  She has walked by that kiddie pool several dozen times in the last two years.  On warm days, they move to their outdoor enclosure, a large dog pen on a stretch of dirt between the science building and the parking lot.  Cleo and I were on a mission a couple weeks ago when I spotted Fred and Rosie outside and thought she might like to meet them.  Not one of my better ideas.  From the first sniff, she has been tortoise-obsessed.  She is the poster-child for the joke, “What’s the difference between a terrier and a terrorist?”  Answer: “You can negotiate with a terrorist.” 

The first thing that happened was that Rosie yanked his head into his shell while Fred charged Cleo.  It might seem funny to think of a tortoise “charging,” but I’ll tell you, I was glad the wire mesh of the pen was there to keep them apart.  I had images of that tortoise beak clamping down on Cleo’s nose and doing some serious damage, especially because Cleo wasn’t daunted at all.  She danced around the enclosure, trying to look at Fred and Rosie from every possible angle.  I was finally able to drag her away from them, but every chance she gets, she’s back up at that tortoise pen.  In fact, the next day, she actually ran out of the library, something she’d never done before, and made a beeline for the tortoises.  Over the next few days, I made a point of showing her that the pen was empty every time we went by.  I was hoping that she’d come to understand it wasn’t worth running over there because nine times out of ten, they wouldn’t be outside.  I know, I know.  I give her too much credit for logic.

So last Wednesday, Cleo and I were taking our afternoon leg-stretch, and I saw that Fred and Rosie were, indeed, outside.  Okay, I thought, maybe what I need to do is get Cleo so used to seeing them that she doesn’t care anymore.  Go ahead, laugh.  I’ll wait till you’re done. 

Ready?  Okay, so over to the pen we go.  Fred and Rosie were eating, so chose to ignore Cleo completely.  For Cleo, it was like seeing a squirrel scampering around a tree, a possum standing on the backyard fence, and an alien invasion all at once.  Barking furiously, she started alternately trying to dig her way under or hop her way over the metal barrier.  She pawed at the pen, slammed it with her shoulder, raced from one side to the other.  Fred, standing closer to the edge, turned a baleful stare on her and continued chewing.  I’m not sure which of us was most startled when Cleo shoved her face through one of the square gaps and closed her teeth on Fred’s shell.  She didn’t have enough of a purchase to hold on, but there was an audible clacking noise and a telltale damp semi-circle on one edge of his shell.

At this point, I decided it would be a good move to leash her and attempt to get her to exercise some self-control.  For a couple of minutes, she continued to bark, lunge and try to bite through the fence.  Eventually, I got her to sit, quivering, and just look at them.  But by this time, she was so agitated and over-heated that as she sat staring at them, she started listing to one side.  She caught herself, then began to slide the other way, slumping against my leg.  Fighting down a little panic of my own, I stepped away from the tortoise enclosure.  Cleo readily followed me, but hadn’t gone two steps when she staggered and sat down again.  All I knew was that I had to get her out of the sun and away from the tortoises.  I scooped her up and all but ran back to my office, her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth for much of the way.  But even before we were back in the library she was asking to be put down.  Once in the office, I set her in front of her water bowl and opened the windows for a good cross breeze.  She tanked up, then stood extra-patiently as I picked grass and twigs out of her tassels and paws.  By the time I’d finished grooming her, she seemed perfectly fine and was ready to play again.

Cleo was a good reminder: It’s not the life we encounter that challenges us, but how we react to it.

A Weekend in the Country

Over the long weekend of Labor Day, John and I piled two suitcases, an amp, numerous guitar pedals, two guitars, a travel crate and, of course, Cleo into the back of his RAV-4 and headed, once again, into the middle of nowhere.  Specifically, we were on our way to Downieville, a tiny gold rush town in the Tahoe National Forest, so that he could jam with a group of people he had met once, several years ago, and I had never met.

Frequent readers of this blog might remember that I am a self-described shy person.  The idea of hanging out all weekend with twenty plus strangers, all of whom have known each other since high school and before, doesn’t just make me uneasy, it causes cold sweat to trickle down my brow and back.  The draws were the mountain air, a rushing river, and a long weekend away from all forms of 21^st century technology.  Plus the possibility of a bear sighting.  My plan was to hole up in the hotel room with Cleo where I could write and read to my heart’s content while John spent his time at the cabin playing music.

We set out for the six hour drive on Saturday morning at 1:30.  Yes, AM.  John had a gig Friday night that got him home at 12:30.  By the time he’d unloaded, packed and reloaded, an hour had sped by.  Let’s just say that traffic around Sacramento, normally highly congested, was not a problem.  We didn’t catch much scenery as we headed north, but the nearly full moon was stunning and we loved listening to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for the third time.  Cleo, the normally anxious, panting traveler, eventually curled up and went to sleep; that D.A.P pheromone spray is a god-send.  I’m not going to lie, the last hour-and-a-half of winding mountain roads between Nevada City and Downieville was a tough stretch, even with the sun rising over the mountains and the majestic pine trees. 

Our Inn, on the right

It was a huge relief to tumble out of the car into the crisp, cold morning air, to grab a couple bites of homemade zucchini bread from the inn’s continental breakfast bar, struggle up the narrow Victorian staircase, fall into the bed with the cast iron headboard, and pull the double-wedding ring quilt up to our chins.  It would have been even more blissful if our room hadn’t faced the town square where a Labor Day Weekend reenactment of a gold rush shootout was taking place, every hour on the half hour, and where a street fair went rapidly into full swing, complete with recorded barroom piano plinking out favorites from every decade of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  At first, we couldn’t figure out why anyone would be shooting off fireworks in the middle of the day.  The announcer describing the events over a very loud loudspeaker eventually tipped us off—not fireworks, blanks.  I can now reliably tell you that Cleo does not care for gunfire.  Not that she’s frightened by it.  No, she just has to tell everyone how much she dislikes it, loudly and at length.

We gave up on sleeping after a couple of hours pretending that it was even possible and staggered groggily along the street until we came to a Mexican restaurant with veggie burritos and dark, aromatic coffee.  We ate at a picnic table on a warm deck overlooking the Downie River, and John managed to talk me into driving out to the cabin with him.  I don’t know, maybe it was sleep deprivation. 

Oddly enough, even though I’d been stressing about nearly every aspect of the trip, not once did it occur to me that Cleo might be an unexpected addition to the party.  I am always appalled and judgmental about people who show up to friends’ houses with their pets in tow, just expecting that everyone likes dogs, cats, goats, whatever as much as they do.  Literally, it was not until we were letting Cleo out of her crate that I realized with horror that we’d never asked if it was okay for her to be there.  It was the sight of an Australian Shepherd bearing down on us that shocked me into common courtesy.

There have been so many times in my life that I have regretted wasting energy on worrying.  You’d think I’d have learned the lesson by now. 

I’ve written many times before of Cleo’s shyness with other dogs.  Whatever the reason—the warmth and welcome from every individual in the world’s most beautiful riverside cabin, the adventure of wading through a chilly river to sit on warm rocks and talk with engaged, funny people, the gentle kindness of two mellow and adoring Aussies—Cleo was relaxed and at home in less than an hour.  She followed the other dogs around like a doting little sister, even taking a long walk with them and their mom and discovering (and fully inspecting) a large pile of bear scat. 

Anyone who lives with a Bedlington knows that the tail is the emotional barometer.  It is a clear indicator of a wide range of moods and emotional states.  The angle of each vertebra in a Bedlington tail communicates an array of subtle information.  Sure, you have the standard set: tucked=scared, straight out and rigid=aggressive, gently curved and waving=greeting.  When Cleo is relaxed and happy, her tail extends on a plane with her spine, then just about midway, it curves up into a spritely crescent.  It was the evening of our first day at the cabin that John turned to me and said quietly, “Look at that tail.”  As Cleo followed first one dog, then the other through the kitchen and out onto the veranda, her tail clearly expressed her happiness.  It was the next night that really amazed us, though.  We sat at one of the tables eating dinner with several folks, laughing, chatting, telling stories.  As I moved to recross my legs, my foot thumped against something.  I peered under the table.  The fifteen-year-old Australian Shepherd was curled up less than six inches from my toes.  Penetrating the shadows, I made out another bulk.  It was the other Aussie not six inches from her.  And making the third point in the under-the-table triangle, curled up in a much smaller ball, head on paws, lightly sleeping, was Cleo.

We felt easy all weekend, she and I.  We were warm and welcome, enjoying our new friends, listening to music, lounging and playing and finding it enough just to be ourselves.