the ballad of marmalade jim

this is not a ballad. it's pretty much a regular story. just get over it right now and move on so you can read about jim.

marmalade jim was born somewhere in harlem somewhere after the turn of the century. nobody knows for sure how things went but eventually he took up with a man whose head was full of hurricanes and earthquakes. they lived together in a dingy apartment that smelled, more often than not, of electricity and fear. when jim could feel the storms inside the man's head leaking out, he'd curl up next to the man and press his honey-orange stripes against the hurricane winds and the rumbles of the earthquakes until they'd stop. the man, exhausted from the storms but grateful as he'd feel them leaving, would pet jim all along his stripes and they'd sit in the dark until they both fell asleep.

one day, the storms inside the man's head were stronger than they'd ever been and the hurricanes spun off tornadoes that shot ugly fire out of them. the earthquakes broke holes inside the man so big he didn't think anything would stop them up so he began eating. batteries. socks. nobody can say for sure why, but it seemed like the man was hoping they would somehow make the storms stop. the storms kept raging and the warmth of jim's fur against the man's body did nothing to help him either. the man needed much more. some kind people took the man to a new place where the storms begain to subside and the world became real again. but jim was alone in the dingy apartment that no longer smelled of anything.

the same folks who took the man to a safe place came back for jim and brought him to a new apartment, one with brightly colored walls and a tiny, angry kitten. there was a man and a woman and although the house smelled a bit of electricity and jim could tell there had been storms in someone's head, they seemed to have cleared out. from time to time he'd press himself up against the people in the house who didn't seem to need him all that much but who loved him just the same. he stayed with the people a long time, suffering constant abuse from the kitten who grew into a misguided and angry cat. in time the people brought a small dog home and although jim tried to calm his hysterical yippings as he'd so often calmed the storms of the man he'd lived with, the dog saw everything as play. when the people brought home a second dog, older, soaked in fear, jim snuggled up to the dog and could feel the fear falling away. jim spent years trying to understand this crazy family, the angry cat, the out of control dog and the quieter, always slightly aloof dog. he'd do what he could to allay their fears when he felt them reaching out of the animals, clawing at him. and the animals, all of them in different ways, became slightly gentler, just a bit calmer and maybe more connected to the world and each other.

and when the angry cat got sick and hid herself, jim couldn't help her a bit, but he sat on a rug near her, watching, knowing she'd never let him put his soft fur against hers, hoping whatever it was about him that helped others could reach across the few feet she kept herself away from him. months later when the old dog began to shake and shudder, seemed to be shedding his very self, jim moved toward him just as he had with the man. the old dog, like the man, sighed and went limp and fell into the soft orangeness over and over for a very long time, right up until the last days.

but jim had been thinking about a different sort of life during these days, a life that wasn't inside all the time, a life that allowed him to skulk around in tall grass full of crickets. he'd imagined, looking through barred apartment windows, a life where he rolled onto his back in the sun, the real sun, in the late afternoon while birds screamed at him from trees not too far away. and the people he lived with could see it and knew about it a long time, knew about it while he sat on a couch in their apartment, draping his fur over a shivering dog. and they wanted something better for him, larger, more real. so they asked around, hoping there was someone out there who would love a cat like jim, a cat who had worked so hard for so long to take care of others.

when the wonderful thing happened, it came about because the people had friends who knew jim and loved him and wanted to give him all those things he deserved. they had a life in the country they'd be willing to share with jim way down in southern maryland. southern maryland, crammed near to brimming with crabs and chipped beef, is a long, long way from brooklyn, mostly on spindly roads. and the people went, jim's people, they packed up jim in a pet crate, put the small dog on the seat beside him, fought their way through staten island to the mainland and on to maryland. at midnight they arrived to four chickens, two dogs, the people they all loved and the promise of a county fair. they weren't expecting the fair and hadn't met the chickens before so they stayed up well into the night visiting and plotting and planning. there was talk of goats.

jim found a new bed in the room where his people were staying. there were toys and treats and catnip in several forms. although it will be a bit of a while before he's outside lying in the sun, a while where jim is getting to know the new part of his family and the new places in his home, the sun is out there waiting with a patio and grass full of crickets.

guthrie goes

guthrie goes on long walks now, in the morning with the sweetie then in the afternoon with me. at first i was reluctant to go on these walks because guthrie lunges at bikes and people with carts and strollers. it's the wheels he doesn't like but nobody wants to see a dog leap toward their small child for any reason, even if his legs are too short to get him where he's headed. he'll go after dogs, too, innocently strolling down the street, looking to make friends. he'll ease up like he wants to say hello and then he'll chomp down right on the nose of his victim. usually a dog larger than he is. usually a dog larger than i am. he poses no danger to these dogs and they know it. they never bite back, but it's embarrassing. he is a wild animal, completely uninterested in the ways of the civilized world. he is james dean, cigarette dangling from sullen lips, strolling black and white along a rainy street, dripping rebellion, oozing refusal.

but with each mile guthrie stomps along something has been happening until today it all happened together.

we walk toward an intersection and wait for the light. a short yellow bus rolls by, overcrowded. a round child stands in a seat near the rear and crams his face against the half-open window. he raises his left hand and waves at us. i wave back but his face never shifts from seriousness until, just as he passes in his bus into the intersection, guthrie looks up. the waving in the bus becomes frantic and the boy's whole face liquefies into smile.

we move quickly through the parade grounds, baseball games and soccer games scattered on various fields. spectators, dads and friends of players, sit on benches or stand in clusters near the chain link. a woman walks toward us with one of those white fluffy little dogs. the dog noses guthrie and he leans in without even an attempt to destroy it. "is he a boy?" asks the woman with the fluffy dog. "yes," i say, proud of his even temper. "muy peligro!" she says to her dog with all the drama and menace she can muster. she tugs her dog along and i laugh, translating for guthrie who does not speak spanish. "you are bad news," i say, "dangerous". he trots along, uninterested in a dog who can't deal with a little danger.

we walk along the southwest side of the park, on a long and wide sidewalk lined with trees and park benches. guthrie likes this part of the walk best, i think. he knows where he is going and trots along as purposefully as a dog can manage. he likes the benches when they are covered with old men, clumps of them sitting or standing there, talking, laughing, swearing at each other over domino games or someone's inability to recall obvious information about a baseball game played half a century ago. when he comes alongside one of these benches, his little torpedo self keeps plowing straight on, but his head snaps around to the right, fixes on the old guys, stares them down for twelve or thirteen of his short-legged steps. they watch him go by. he doesn't bark or lunge. he just looks, like the boy on the short yellow bus, face blank.

there is a place where homeless folks stay, some in tents and some in cardboard, in a part of the park sort of protected and private. it is toward the end of our walk and one of the homeless men is usually out in the middle of the sidewalk there, clad entirely in black, yelling and gesturing. as people near him he leaps toward them, waving his arms in an attempt to convince them something in the world isn't right. and when we approach he is always ranting, but he eyes guthrie from the moment he notices us. guthrie marches forward like the marines, head up, ears flapping. it is the same every time. when guthrie shifts his attention their eyes lock. the yelling man does not stop his tirade, and although his eyes are on guthrie, guthrie does not seem to be the focus of his yelling. guthrie keeps his eyes on the yelling until we are well past and the yelling is following us more and more quietly. nothing about his body changes but the angle of his head. and usually, normally, that is it. but today i do not see the yelling man. i think maybe he will leap out from behind a bench or from behind a tree but he does not. we walk up to the bench he usually stands near and guthrie doesn't slow, but turns his head, just like always. he keeps his head focused on the bench, craning his neck as we pass and i begin to think he's losing it but i look over. the yelling man's black jacket is draped across the back of the bench, waiting.

guthrie rounds the circle of bartel pritchard square which has been, as far as i can tell, always a circle and always called a square. teenagers drape along the entrance to the park and a transit worker with a fancy hat hollers, nodding toward guthrie, that she has one at home. dachshund, i figure. she waves at him and says to us both, "those dogs sure do help you know you're living". even the teens, who seem to be melting off the park wall, glance over at him with a smile. he gives them nothing. that dog has no time for people who are subtle.

we are at the top edge of the park where women sit on the benches with strollers nearby. small children wobble around them, teetering dangerously near the edges of things. they fall toward him on legs that look like his, squealing things that sound a little like "dog". i notice he struts past strollers without even a growl. bikes swerve past us, making me jump, but guthrie stays on course. a woman with one of those rickety rolling carts comes banging and slamming down the sidewalk and guthrie does not even turn his head as we walk by. he strolls down our street, hops up the front steps and leans into the door, waiting. we are home.

goodbye max pants, unabridged

warning: this is a pretty long post and it's about how max died and how we buried him. i figure if i tell you up front, it's your own fault if you wade through it.

we spent so many hours of max’s last few months staring over him, nudging him, watching for the rise and fall of his stark ribs, i honestly thought i knew what to expect of his death. after all, we’d seen it a hundred times- small dog flattened out on his side, limp, eyes half open and body still. He’d done it over and over, as if practicing, until i thought maybe when it really happened we wouldn’t know. but our vet promised us his body would keep going long after what we knew as max had vacated the premises. we would have to name a time. he would not sneak up on us with his leaving.

there are few things as unsettling as deciding when another creature should die. we have an appointment to kill our dog. there was no bright sharp moment when we knew max should stop.

when we arrived for the appointment people spoke in low tones and kept their eyes soft and on pages and clipboards and computer screens. we were shown into a room downstairs with a shade pulled over the door. we spent some time alone in there with max who didn’t seem to care about much except being touched, being held. and we held him and we cried and we talked to him a while. he seemed to be soaking it in, just us, our skin and our sounds. he was too weak to do much else. so were we.

max’s vet came in, the same woman who, months earlier, stood with us while ruby’s angry body softened and stilled. and this woman has been the person max has come to every time he’s slipped or broken open. she looked at his skeletal self, failing so much more aggressively than a few weeks ago. she sighed and said his name and touched the spine of him, standing well above the rest of his body.

she told us it was time, that we hadn’t rushed him or left him to suffer, that we’d chosen a good time. a good time. she whispered to him, you’re a good boy, max and she explained that the anesthesia she was preparing would take between five and ten minutes to kick in, that it would relax him. she said he wouldn’t feel anything. she meant he wouldn't feel the dying. that would be for us to feel, i suppose. she left us with him. max lay on the table and we had our arms around him. in just over a minute we felt his always shaking, ever-vigilant head droop. he was heavy against my arm and the sweetie and i held him until his whole body slid into softness. we let him rest on his little towel and stroked his ears. his stripey sweater billowed around him and we watched the stripes rise and fall.

he lay there a bit with us talking to him some more, patting him and crying. he did not use this time for crying and instead he let me kiss him on the nose, which i took advantage of because generally he’s offended by such directness. when i looked down at his face i wasn’t expecting to see him the way he used to be. but there he was. his face, soft and still, looked like it did years ago. the pinched, shrunken edginess was gone and he looked more real than he had in quite a while. he was the dog we brought home on the staten island ferry.

when the vet came back she had trouble finding a vein in max’s leg that didn't fall apart when she touched it. when she finally found what she needed i glanced up to see a bright, candy-pink liquid in the syringe. i don’t know what I’d expected. an angrier color, i suppose. the sweetie and i both stood with her, with max, holding him gently while the pink fluid started. he was gone before the syringe was half empty.the sweetie watched his ribcage stop under those stripes. the thing we always feared we were seeing was somehow not what we expected when it actually happened. i watched his shiny eyes flatten and we both knew before the vet said anything. and usually this is when the person with the syringe leaves the room quickly and quietly. but she didn’t seem able to leave and she held his stubby paw in her hands and whispered to him that it was okay now, that he had been valiant. she stayed a bit and i was glad max had been so strong, that he’d been able to somehow just overwhelm folks with his strange little self and it was so hard to leave him, hard for anybody.

it is difficult to explain how a ten pound pile of bones held together by patchy brown and white fur with the skin showing through most places could be so absolutely beautiful to look at, but we stayed there a long while after the vet left, just looking at our quiet little dog, trying to get things straight in our heads about how much we loved him and how we would have to rework our whole lives to be able to get along without him and how we didn't think we'd really be able to do that.

now, most folks in brooklyn ask for the ashes of pets, small containers they can put on a shelf in an apartment. but we have a yard and an apple tree upstate and max certainly liked both. so we asked about taking him up there altogether and whole and the vet said that would be fine. the sweetie went in to pick him up and he came out frozen, wrapped in a black plastic, sitting in a shopping bag. the sweetie asked if there wasn’t a coffin, since we’d been told there was, and someone was sent to get one. dog coffins are little cardboard boxes with domed lids. max’s coffin had someone else’s name written on it in sharpie. we put the little borrowed dog coffin in the back of the car, situated guthrie in the back seat and drove toward the apple tree.

we arrived to a cool, storm-threatening saturday afternoon and the sweetie started off with a shovel. i pulled out rocks as he shoveled and we had a pretty good hole dug in no time. we opened the coffin and pulled out the black plastic bag. it was taped all around several places and i couldn’t recognize what might be max in all that. i wanted to bury him all by himself, without the plastic. the sweetie asked me several times, but i was sure. he didn't want me to see max frozen but i didn’t want him in all that plastic. i wanted him to be part of the apple tree. so we snipped off the tape and pulled off the plastic and there was our strange, frozen dog. he was not like we had ever seen him in life, but his bent pose, wrapped up on himself, didn’t seem at all out of character. nor did the next thing that happened. we picked up his frozen body and my thumb rested against his ear. and it fell off. really. it snapped right next to his head from the frozenness and slid across his face. and you would think this would have made me fall apart but it didn’t. that dog came to us with disastrous ears and i’d been expecting them to just break off for seven years while he was alive. i was surprised they’d stayed on as long as they had. and it was heartbreaking to see but it was tough to do anything but laugh a little at max’s very last attempt to remind us there’s no way to anticipate what he'll do.

we put the dirt on him in handfuls, powdery, red. halfway up we put a layer of rocks, the rocks we’d pulled from the hole. then more dirt with a little compost mixed in. we covered the top of the hole with the big rocks we’d pulled out, one in the center larger and heavier than max had ever been. and we’re letting him rest. but in spring I’ll be watching that apple tree, waiting for it to do something unanticipated. something max.

goodbye max pants

today our dog max is gone from us forever.

and although there will be words to say later, today there is an empty food bowl, too much room in the bed, two stinky, raggedy sweaters crumpled on the floor and an empty space in the world so big and awful you can't imagine a skinny little dog occupied all of it. but he did.

move

click photos to see things life size.

we got ourselves a new home. it's quite a bit different from the old one. instead of being an apartment on the whole first floor or an old house, seven rooms with windows on all sides (13, facing out onto leafiness) it is a 3rd floor apartment, one of sixteen in an old limestone row house, with a single window in each of the four small rooms. oh, and a strange window between the bedroom and living room. there is a fire escape. there is an intercom. there is a peephole at the front door. we are shifting from 1300s square feet to about 500 square feet. and at first this seemed scary to me but the more we pack (and the more we toss out or sell) the better it seems. there are quite a few plusses to the new place, including a half block walk to the most wonderful park in the country. and three nearby falafel places. and dub pies. oh, dub pies! but it's the small things that really stand out.

in the kitchen, we have a fridge that works. and over next to it is a sink that is sealed and properly plumbed. the counter, instead of being pieces of leftover marble decal on fiberboard is a real countertop. the backslpash is sealed to the counter. for real. i mean it. and then there's the cooking arena. there's a light above it. there's an exhaust fan, too. and i'm willing to bet that if you set it at 350 degrees that's exactly where it cooks, within 50 degress or so. that will be quite new. there's a dishwasher. i think i've already spent time on the glories of that. the cabinets, though few, are hung straight so they never, ever seem to be looming above a person ready to fall. there's also an awesome fire escape and right off the side of it is a real live clothes line. the whole back courtyard is right out of sesame street, really- fire escapes and clothes lines and a few skinny trees. down below there are patios with chairs and potted plants.

the living room is very simple. a rectangle with a window at either side, one to the outside world, one to the bedroom. it has molding, which is plain but pretty. it has electrical outlets on every wall. each has a face plate and each one works. there is also an overhead light right in the middle of the room and a switch at the kitchen door and another over by the hall to govern the working of this light. this is the sort of luxury we're used to only in a fancy place upstate.

the bedroom is smaller, nearly square with a little windowed alcove. it has many of the amenities of the living room, including those working outlets on each wall and the mysterious window to the living room (okay, it's for ventilation and is historically sort of interesting). the one thing that's missing is the sound of the q train roaring ten feet from our bed as we sleep at night and then the sound of the b train joining it at five minute intervals (that's two trains, two directions, for four trains every five or so minutes) during rush hour mornings. i don't know how we'll sleep through the quiet... there are no bars on the windows. our old landlord put bars on two sides of the house and then on the bathroom window (the highest window in the house) so this will be our first time sleeping in a room without bars in a very long time. there's got to be something symbolic in there.

the bathroom is tiny. so i ask you, what's there to do in a bathroom? how much space do you really want? in our old aparment, there is a recessed radiator that cannot be cleaned. there are dustbunnies older than either nephew scrunched up behind the thing. there is no whipped cream texture on the walls in this new place and the tub does not have huge gashes or scratches in the cast iron from a landlord's past attempts to repair something. the medicine cabinet opens. it closes. there are hinges of some sort, a magnificent idea. there are no sliding panes of mirror on tracks that don't work. there are no huge cracks in the glass. there are no holes in the whipped cream ceiling patched with metal plates. and it's pink. oh, i might have forgotten to mention that the seal between the tub and the tile above it sealed with something waterproof. we don't have that at the old place. that's sort of nice.

the doors throughout the apartment open and close. when you open them you do not need to put the whole force of your body behind your work. and when you close them, they stay closed. they seem to have this thing called a latch in the doors somewhere near the knobs. they keep the doors closed. that's pretty neat. we didnt' so much have that on doors here at the larger apartment. also, the windows all open. and then they close. and then they open again. each one has a screen. a screen that actually fits the window it's in. and then there are the views. if you walk out the front door you are in a wonderland of old, turn of the century limestone and brownstone buildings, leafiness and park. but we are in a back apartment, a courtyard one. and the view from our windows is mainly into a scene that is, to me, a country child, mysterious and hypnotic. fire escapes and clothes lines. the city at its most elemental. and so, like our last place, we have everything.

i know folks say you don't know what you've got until it's gone, but i suppose it's also true that you don't know what you were missing until you have it. we had no idea the relative luxury the rest of the world was basking in. we've had space, but not much else. i mean, the stove has a light on the inside and a window so i can see the food from the outside of the oven. from outside the oven! we will have our own mailbox and a mailbox key. and we have a landlord who actually hired a building manager. a person whose only job is to keep our building in decent shape. i have lived in this big old house longer than i've lived in any one place in my adult life, as long as i lived in the home my parents live in now. i will miss the space and will miss the neighborhood, especially a kind neighbor who offered his basement as storage for us if we needed it. but this new place will require a little work of us all, me and the sweetie and the dogs. it is high time we had a bit of a challenge.