madmuser

Rudy Came Running

A week ago I wrote about a sweet little mule named Rudy. Rudy has been at our barn ever since I got there some six years ago, a timid little creature that darted off in terror at the slightest advance of humanity and was at the bottom of the hierarchy among the three minis with whom he pastured. Little by little over the last year I have offered him bits and pieces of grass, hay and hands-full of oats. The process was long and tedious, requiring great gobs of patience and hope for this beautiful, sweet and soft-eyed fellow.

Then we discovered Ginger Snaps! I’ve been treating my boy Buzzy with Ginger Snaps for years now and he gobbles them greedily and with great gusto. I decided to see if Rudy had the same reaction. He did, and he finally he came forth, albeit arching his neck to keep his body as far as possible so he could stretch and get the Ginger Snap out of my hand. This boy is as gentle as they come, taking the Ginger Snap ever so carefully with his soft lips before running off, only now he doesn’t run off, and now he actually comes to the fence when he sees me or hears my voice.

Then yesterday – Rudy came running!! To me this was a reward and joy beyond words! I went to the gait to look for him, and he had just finished a muddy roll at the far end of the pasture.

“Rudy,” I called.

He looked, got up, sounded his musical mule bray, and came running to me!! I wanted to give him the whole box of Ginger Snaps but had to save a few for my Buzz.

I may never get much further with this boy, but to give a little ‘feral’ mule some love and a few Ginger Snaps fills me with true joy and happiness.

The Old Man Gardener and His Little Black Dog

I am an outdoor junkie, even if it means going for a bicycle ride or jog around my very-suburban neighborhood. Being the creature of habit that I am, I stick to three or four tried and true routes and I take comfort in watching the ebb and flow of people who live in the houses I pass. I have done this for all my adult life. I have been in my current neighborhood for 10 years and one of my routes takes me past the fields under the major power grid coming into our city. These fields are long and empty except where an old man has planted a perfectly plotted and aligned ‘farm’ filled with corn, tomatoes, sunflowers, pumpkins, zucchini, eggplant and so much more. Every time I pedaled or jogged past his farm, I’d see him, bent over – pulling weeds, or planting something new, or just plain playing in the dirt. He was shy, or maybe anti-social, but I wondered how someone who could create such mastery from the earth could be anything but special, and so I always made a point to say “Hi.” He always responded. And so did the little black puff-ball of a dog who thumped-thumped his tail in canine greeting.

Every year I look forward to spring when he tills the soil and begins the process of bringing the earth to life again. Every year I look forward to seeing him hunched over the dirt with his little black dog lying dutifully next to him. Only this year — the garden isn’t there anymore. Oh, well, the rows of dirt are there – empty. The stool he sat on is gone. The little dog, Thumper I got to think of him as, is nowhere to be seen. Instead, there is a hole, not filled with dirt or seed or plants, but a sort of empty pit inside of me that sorely misses my old man gardener and his little black dog, who once filled my days with the precious joys of simple pleasures,

Irresponsible Pet Ownership

Today we were victim to a sad situation, perhaps even a tragedy, depending upon the ultimate outcome, which as of this moment, we don’t know. My boyfriend and I drove his 17-year-old son to his mother’s house across town so he could talk to her, a very dysfunctional woman, now without a phone or any way of reaching people. While Dominic and I stood outside listening to their yelling and crying, her Airedale got out of the house, took off down the street, and attacked a Shepherd who was being walked by his owner. Her dog bit the Shepherd, drawing blood, which set off a barrage of swearing and threats by the Shepherd’s owner. The mother was oblivious to this entire drama, remaining holed up inside the house while her son grabbed the Airedale by the collar and dragged her home. In the meantime, the Shepherd’s owner continued spewing until his threats turned to action when he pulled out his cell phone and reported the incident to the police.

Here’s the sad part, for the Airedale, that is. She had previously and viciously attacked two other dogs, one of which lost its eye, thus, setting the precedent for a dog who needed an ultra-vigilant owner that kept the dog under control at all times. Didn’t happen. Sigh.

Later, I saw from the police blotter that a squad car was indeed dispatched to her house, and I don’t want to think the worst, but what else? The Airedale is a nice dog, fine with people, albeit unruly at times, and relatively young at five years. But she is vicious with other dogs and she needs a strong , experienced and responsible owner to give her a happy life.

This is what breaks my heart about animals, owners, and adopting – yes, this dog was adopted. But even if she hadn’t been, she has been laid victim by an irresponsible and careless owner who doesn’t deserve to have a dog, or any pet, at all.

A Little Mule Named Rudy

Yesterday was shots day at the barn. Spring shots – the yearly standards including rabies, flu and a few others. Our barn “Mom” (owner) gets the list together of who wants what, and when the vet arrives, we have our equines polished and preened such as we did with our kids when we took them to the pediatrician for their yearly physicals.

Our barn is home to a ‘feral’ mule; correction: a mule who was previously owned by an Amish farmer and while he was there, something happened that filled his little life with terror.

This boy, Rudy, has an exceptionally soft and gentle eye, except for when he is startled by something or when one of the minis in his paddock pick on him, and then soft brown turns to white flash. I fell in love with his as soon as I set eyes on him, but it is just in the last year that I made him my personal project. Our barn Mom welcomes my efforts, and helps me from time to time, but mostly she lets me do my thing. With Rudy, it’s not about technique, it’s about patience, body language, softness and consistency.

A year ago, Rudy would not come to take a treat and if I moved, even slowly, he bolted in fear. Now: he takes treats – he has become a HUGE fan of ginger snaps – from my hand. He is incredibly gentle, just brushes his lips against my hand, now with happy anticipation and a level of confidence we never thought we’d see.

Yesterday Rudy needed to get his shots, too. In the past, the vet had to tranquilize him just to do so. Not yesterday. Barn Mom got him into a narrow but open pen. I held his head and while the vet did her thing, I whispered sweet nothings into his big mule ears and plied him with ginger snaps. And then, I touched him! I petted him, and he welcomed it – probably the first human touch, besides shots, that he’s had since that Amish farmer did whatever he did to a beautiful little mule with warm, soft eyes, and a muzzle as soft and gentle as they come.

Brinkley’s “Woof”

Brinkley after his 'woof' serenade — Brinkley after his ‘woof’ serenade

My household is often filled with the sounds of dogs barking and birds whistling. But in the mornings, I am always greeted by my Boston Terrier Brinkley’s ‘woof.’ Actually, I have three BTs, all of whom I adore, but for those inexplicable reasons, I have a particular bond with Brinkley. Brinkley likes my company, and I like his. He is my ‘walk-dog’ because he trots along easily and dutifully, unlike Sasha who about jumps out of her fur with excitement, and precious little Timmy, our puppy-mill fellow, can only walk half a block without becoming exhausted and needing to be carried. Fortunately he only weighs 10 lbs. Brinkley is also my go-to travel dog because a. – he loves being in the car, and b. – he sits very contentedly on long rides, and c. – wherever we end up, he is easy! Not so with dear Sasha, my adorable female, who foams at the mouth and gets on the floor in the back seat and shakes uncontrollably. Timmy is also a ‘mover and shaker,’ minus the mouth-foam.

Back to Brinkley’s woof. Once the morning routine is over, I go down the hall into my home office to begin my day of grading papers, writing, and trying not to spend tons of time surfing and lurking on the Internet. In the meantime, the dogs remain in the kitchen to laze around with their bellies full of food. All except Brinkley. Brinkley parks his little butt as close to the gate as he can get and begins his woofing. It is very calm, relatively quiet, but VERY constant – just imagine, a continuous, perfectly timed in intervals, sort-of-subtle “woof.” I am admittedly not very good at resisting animals and so I end up scooping him up to join me in my office.

End of story, right? Wrong.

I of course have to have a second cup of coffee after I have spilled one quarter of my first on some poor student’s paper, and upon entering the kitchen, I am greeted by four very sad, seemingly tearful eyes that I simply cannot resist. And so, the gate opens, the stampede begins, and I am now operator of my very own doggy day care, all thanks to Brinkley and his woofs.

Privacy vs. Protection

One man, a single, previously unobtrusive young man, appears to have forever changed the course of intelligence and privacy (lack-there-of) in the United States, perhaps even the world.

Edward Snowden

Questions abound: is he guilty? Did he do something wrong? Is he a modern day hero? A trailblazer in restoring the freedom of speech, and just plain freedom, this country is supposed to be all about? Has our country, our government, gone too far in the name of protecting us against terrorism?

I, at least, was shocked at the extent of the invasions in the name of these ‘highly classified surveillance programs.’ How many of my phone calls have been monitored? Did government agents hear me expound when I spoke to my daughter about birth control? Did my text messages to my students advising them on their reports about terrorism get pulled into the pile of red-light risky communications? Was I, then, a victim of more intense scrutiny?

I recently wrote a book as a ghost writer about a cyber-war with origins in Russia. Several weeks later something quite similar occurred. My client was the one who mapped out the plot of this tome and when we were finished, he said all of the emails and communications he’d had with me on the project mysteriously disappeared. He was convinced he was targeted by a surveillance agency. At the time, I thought he was nuts. I don’t think so now.

Listening: A Lost Art?

To be heard: I think this is one of the greatest gifts we can receive. To have someone hear us, look us straight in the eye, without fumbling or doing anything else, and LISTEN!

I did a Google search on “The Lost Art of Listening” this morning and got 47,000,000 hits. Books, articles, and PDFs abound, evidence that this is indeed a hot topic. I wonder why? Have we forgotten how to give the gift of listening to one another? Dare I proffer an answer, it being YES?

As part of my college course curriculum, I talk to students about listening.

I ask them, how many of you feel like you are a good listener? Twenty of twenty-five hands go up. Bravo to you only brave and honest souls, I think to myself about the five who didn’t put their hands up.

Then I ask, how many of you ‘multitask’ when you are talking with someone else. Twenty-five out of twenty-five hands go up.

Then I say, how many of you hear? Some hands go up. How many of you listen? Some now look at me with confusion, others give me the “look,” as in, “you have GOT to be kidding…” and one asks, “What’s the difference?”

With this skillfully maneuvered segue, I proceed to talk to them about the fine art of listening versus the passive act of hearing and regretfully send them off on their merry way to their multitasking, multi-stimulated, and non-listening world.

I write about this topic because more and more I also find myself in situations with individuals where they spew words in a non-stop cascade and I quite literally cannot get a word in. If I am so lucky as to nail a small word-nugget or two, I am drowned again in another torrent. It seems that the majority of people I encounter these days very loquacious. I often wonder, is it that people are just talking more and listening less, or am I attracting big-talkers because maybe I am a good listener? Or maybe we ought to think about the importance of the elements of our most basic communication media: person-to-person, face-to-face, voice-to-voice.

One of my favorite poets once wrote:

“We do not believe in ourselves until

someone reveals that deep inside us

something is valuable, worth listening to,

worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch.

Once we believe in ourselves we can risk

curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or

any experience that reveals

the human spirit.”

– E. E. Cummings

(American poet 1894-1962)

Birds of a Feather

Oh for the joys of a lazy Sunday morning after a night of big booming storms. Now we relish the calm – and the coolness. So do my beloved cockatiels who are at last settled after a week of

being shuttled here and there. The poor creatures were relegated to the hallway as we rearranged the household while moving my 27-year-old daughter out (at last!!) and re-converting her room back into my study. My tiels stopped eating for a few days and my personal avian alarm, Frederika, quit her earsplitting screaming, which she does to demand my company, or alert me to the immediate need to have her food replenished. Her companion, my Freddie, stopped singing his rendition of London Bridge is Falling Down, which is really quite beautiful and definitely audible, even in the backyard.

But now they are now ‘home,’ they are now ‘happy,’ and they have resumed their alerting me that it’s time for their 4 p.m. bowl of popcorn.

Diane Schuler’s Ghost Lives On

What is it about this tragedy that occurred in 2009 that is so palpable these four years later most deadly accidents and their victims are forgotten just months later? Perhaps it is the fact that this was the worst accident in 75 years in Westchester County. Perhaps it’s because five beautiful children were involved, only one of whom survived. Perhaps it is the absolutely unfathomable fact that this ‘rock’ of a mother drove the wrong way down a major highway at 85 mph, drunk and high, and smashed head-on into an SUV, killing the three men in that vehicle as well.

It is, I think the fact that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, about any of this makes sense. There is her husband who relentlessly insists she was not drunk, her husband’s lawyer who mysteriously disappeared, the cacophonous contradiction between everything Diane was known to be and this horrific event and the toxicology reports that clearly and unequivocally reported the alcohol and cannabis levels in her system. Many of us continue to desperately put our heads around what happened on that July day, but sadly, must rely on conjecture and our mostly amateur detective work.

Though there is a sliver of a silver lining for this story, and that is that Jackie Hance, the mother of the three beautiful little girls in the car with Diane that day, the little girls that never came home, has since given birth, despite having had her tubes tied, to another beautiful, and now 17-month old girl. She talks to Anne Curry in this clip from an April Today Show segment. As she says, “there is a reason.” Isn’t there always one?

For The Love Of Boston Terriers

On this first really steamy day of the summer season, I am somehow compelled to share several episodes involving my dearest Boston Terriers of which I’ve had many over the years.

Story 1:

I guess this compulsion to write arises from an incident we had the night before last with our littlest (10 lbs.) and cutest BT. As do all three of them, little Timmy loves to snuggle in bed at night, but unlike the others, he likes to be ensconced at the foot of the bed and usually under the covers. The other night, though, he chose to snuggle himself atop the covers, nestled into a groove between the mattress and bed frame. (Can you see what’s coming?) Right. He fell. Okay, so he’s fallen off the bed before and it’s no big deal. This was a big deal. First, his little head was wedged in tight and Dominic had to lift the bed, which is very heavy, up so I could pull his head out from being jammed. Done. But a problem remained: our bed frame is so low to the ground that we still couldn’t get him out from under it. By this time I’m fairly hysterical because his little feet were cold, yet he never uttered a single whimper. Anyway, phase 2 of this project (mind you, it’s 1:30 in the morning) was to disassemble the entire bed – remove mattress, box springs, etc., so we could scoop our little guy to safety. I cradled him in my arms and rubbed his little paws to warm them up. But, the saga did not end here. “To hell with it,” said Dominic as he went to get our big, burly, awkward vacuum cleaner and proceeded to suck up the embarrassingly abundant quantities of dust bunnies and Jolly Rancher candy wrappers (mine). Moral of this story: Don’t let BT fall between cracks and make sure Jolly Rancher wrappers find their way into the waste can.

Story 2:

I had a fairly strong suspicion we were in for trouble when the transporter opened the crate and this massive bull-dog of a Boston Terrier came bounding out and proceeded to knock over everything in his path with foamy saliva from his mouth spewing everywhere. Welcome Buddy. For a while I was a foster for a Boston Terrier rescue group and Buddy was my very first foster. I was being broken in hard. Buddy barked constantly, Buddy was non-stop hyper, Buddy was adoring, and Buddy was work! When Buddy joined the pack, I had three other BTs and for some reason, two of them had some serious issues with Buddy. One in particular felt compelled to lunge for his eye and glom on so that significant damage was a real possibility. Thus, I had to keep them separate – this is a small house—it was mayhem. Buddy wanted to own me in the worst way, and this was probably the issue the other dogs had with him. He begged to be with me, 24/7 and it broke my heart when I had to cordon him off while I dealt with the others. Still, I spent as much time with him as possible. In fact, one day I had him on the leash and I was chatting with my next-door neighbor when I felt something warm — and wet – on my lower leg. My neighbor looked down in astonishment, then up at me. “Your dog just peed on your leg.” “Yes I know,” I replied as I nonchalantly swaggered off to Buddy for our walk with pee running down my leg as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Moral of this story: train dog not to pee on leg.

Sasha: could anything so innocent looking be so ferocious?

Story 3:

This one is short and sweet. Our female BT is the guardian of life, liberty and the pursuit of all happiness in our household. She lets us know who, what, when, where, and how for anything or anyone within the near vicinity of our house and yard. She is also my barometer of human character. There are certain people she does not see on a regular basis whom she greats with wagging tale and smiley-face. Then there are those that, well – she doesn’t. Actually, the case in point is a young man she was seeing almost daily – my daughter’s boyfriend – and every day, without fail, she barked, snarled, and hissed at him. Then, when he walked into her kitchen domain, didn’t she jump up and bite him in the ass. Furthermore, didn’t she do this more than once! Do you ‘spose this is there the phrase ‘bite me’ came from? Anyway, moral number 3: check out all daughter’s boyfriends with canine-based barometer.

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