Dog talk

Hoffbrau and I finally had a chat. 

I had had enough of his incessant high-pitched bark: yap-yap-yap, yap, yap, yap-yap-yap, yap, yap, yap, yap-yap, yap-yap-yap, yap-yap, yap, yap-yap, yap yap yap, yap, yap-yap.

Hoffbrau, the neighbor's dog, suffers from separation anxiety.  The moment my neighbors leave for their kids' little league game, he barks his little canine head off, begging and begging for them to come back.

I've considered asking my neighbors to keep Hoffbrau indoors when they leave, but our relationship has been cordial and I've not wanted to create embarassment.  They've always returned well before 10:00 p.m.  Shouldn't I be able to put up with occasional barking if they are able to put up with me starting the car engine next to their bedroom window well before their waking time every morning?  Good relationships deserve small sacrifices.

Not that I am entirely saintly.  I have entertained fantasies of feeding Hoffbrau a Benadryl-laced biscuit. I have cursed him in three languages.  I've wished him laryngitis and the dog flu.  I've yelled at him from the kitchen window and complained about him to my children and boyfriend.

Tonight, I just walked to his pen. 

- Hey! What's the matter with you?

I could tell he was confused.  I crouched to take his picture.

- I'm going to write about you.  Everybody will know you are a barker.  Is that how you want to be remembered.  Uh?

He turned his back.

- Go ahead, tell me.

We stared at each other from across the chain-link fence.  I snapped his picture.  Maybe it was the flash or maybe it was my accent: Hoffbrau retreated to the garage.  I haven't heard of him since.

Anybody needs help with a barking dog, call me.  I'll show up with my camera.

Love Lucy

                                               Lucy Wainwright Roche best said it at the end of her opening performance for Over The Rhine at the Warehouse Live Studio in Houston last night: "You didn't come to see me, which is always awkward."

Very true. I didn't know who she was and didn't expect much of this young female singer in a green hoodie.   She stumbled on stage clutching an accoustic guitar, explained that her luggage had been lost between airports, and that she was tired and frazzled.  She didn't seem to remember all her lines at first.

Then I listened.  To the story of her long trip from California, the road life, the aborted London date with a fellow musician, the false rumors of having written a hate song about her sister and what it is like to be a high-school band member.  She was funny and kind and engaging.

In between the stories I listened to songs that caught me off guard with their well crafted poetry.

"We come to you on our knee", Wainwright Roche sang about the London emergency room where she'd ended up with a very ill date on that fateful Saturday night.  The song was the opposite of the funny story she'd just told of going out for pizza with a guy she hardly knew, only to have to call his parents later, and inform them of their son's serious condition.  In her song, the depiction of the emergency room and its unwilling guests was as fragile as a glass vial of injectable antibiotics.  It carried the same hopeful promise of healing tempered by the uncertainty of life.  I found myself singing along to words I thought I had never heard but must have carried inside me since my first scary trip to the emergency room some twenty years ago.

Lucy Wainwright Roche is not a singer but a magician.  She reels you in with a laugh and spins you blindfolded around the room.  You think she's singing a lullaby but when you finally opens your eyes, you're seventeen again.  She's deposited you on the football field, the lights are shining in your eyes, your parents are fighting for their middle age lives and you must pick up your snaredrum and march with the band.  You do.

And when the song stops, you look up to Lucy Wainwright Roche and ask: more.  Please more!

Scared pigless

My nose is dripping and my knuckles feel swollen.  It must be the swine flu.    I bet I am going to keel over and die any minute now.  Yahoo News says so, as does MSNBC, The New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Obama administration and my mother.

- "What is going on?" she says in our weekly phone call.  "The TV says Texas is infected.  I've been worried sick about you." 

It's my mom's job to worry about me.  She's been very good at it for many years.  It's my job to reassure her about my predicted longevity.  I rattle the facts: two confrimed cases in a state of twenty million people, stockpiles of antiviral medicine, state-of-the-art hospitals.  What are the chances?

- "Wash your hands," she says with her first-grade teacher voice.  "And don't anywhere near people."

I don't remind her that I share an office bathroom with sixty other women, that the only way to get food is the supermarket, that the daily Starbucks trip is still a must and that I can't afford to stay home all day.  I'm going to have to take a chance like everybody else.  If the flu hits our house, I'll have to call the doctor's office early instead of letting things take their course as I did this winter.  With a bit of luck, we'll get the medication we need and all of us will survive.  The alternative is too unthinkable to consider.

First the hurricane, then the economic crisis, now the pandemic: is this a test of our wills?  Did we really need something else to toss and turn about at night? 

I am tired of scary news.  Now would be a grand time for exhuberant good news, a wild celebration of life maybe,  a spoonful of sparkle.  I've already bought my party hat.  I'm ready.

I saw dead people (at the Marlene Dumas exhibit)

 I am not sure what brought me to the Marlene Dumas's exhibit at the Menil Museum.  I had promised myself I wouldn't go.  Titled "Measuring your grave", the exhibit promised grey-green portraits of dead people.   I had thrown away the announcement: bad mojo.

Thank God a friend's rave review changed my opinion.  Yes, there are two rooms of dead people in the exhibit, and lots of gaping holes (not all of them from bullets), but the portraits are stunning.

I loved the two full walls portraits: 112 faces of black people in one room and what looked like 60 faces of prostitutes in the other.   And I loved the large size babies in the next-to-last room.

But I ran away from the hanging child, even if she was "Imaginary 4, 2003", I didn't want to know anything about her.

"Measuring your own grave" looked like a practical idea to me.  The woman in the painting seems to be doing just that, the way she hangs from what looks like the edge of the earth, giving us a full view of her black tights and shoes.  She seemed to say: "Four feet, yes, this will do" and seems resigned to her end.

She reminds me of a picture of the holocaust I saw in a French history magazine.  A group of Jewish women, stripped naked is  standing by the side of what is to be their grave, old women who are past nakedness and young mothers holding babies and small children.  The soldiers are about to shoot. Some women are looking away, others are staring at the hole below them, measuring the size of their grave.

I never forgot that picture.  I don't think I'll ever forget the Dumas picture either.  Sometimes the rawness of a picture isn't about voyeurism but quite the opposite: the need to carry the remembrance beyond the span of our own lives.

Edward the tree

Someone planted a row of infant trees in front of the Diamond Shamrock, corner of Shepherd and 11th.  I cannot remember whether or not there had been trees there before the hurricane.  Perhaps this is a beautification project of sorts, a courageous attempt to counteract the oversized asphalt parking lot and its encroaching tide of fast food litter.

I hadn't noticed the trees until I caught sight of Edward, standing by the bus stop.  All skinny trunk, with a mop of green leaves and two budding branches, it was the only sapling that was taller than a foot. 

It's not easy to be a tree, especially when you are left to fend for yourself on a narrow band of mangy strip-mall grass, at the mercy of the next draught.   Drunks might mistake you for a urinal or their long-lost mother.  Children might bend your trunk.  Adolescents might carve you to death.  You might succumb to frost or accidental mowing.  You might be attacked by beetles, snacked upon by a rogue woodpecker, sacrified for the sake of cable.  You might choke on gasoline fumes long before your first birthday.  And unless you root, and quick, you'll never make it to August. 

You'll end up a stick in the mud.  No one will remember your once tender leaves.

Unless you were named perhaps (Edward?) and photographed, and your progress chronicled in an occasional blog.  Who knows?  Like those mysterious prayer chains that are meant to work from afar, our combined awareness might give you just the half-cup of hope you need to thrive.

Let's root for little Ed everybody!