Come Live With Me and Be My Dog

with apologies to Christopher Marlowe.

Come live with me and be my dog,                     
I need a little bat-eared hog,
We'll frolic, pounce like crazy girls,
Annoy the birds and chase some squirrels.

Around the house we'll play and hide
Across my hardwood floors you'll slide,
Your optimistic doggie eyes,
Will beg off so much exercise.
           
And I will buy you Alpo chunks,
Forgive you when you catch those skunks,
Or in the park and neighbors' yards,
You leave your little calling cards.
               
A jacket of the finest wool,
A leash that stretches when you pull-
O wrinkled grins! O happy fools!
We both shall hate obedience schools
       
A vet trip or just flea-tick lotion
No cost shall limit my devotion.
And should you hurt past any mending
The Gentle Sleep shall be your ending

I miss my lover's snores at night,
But, unlike him, you'd never bite.
If all my time and love you hog
Then live with me, and be my dog.

I created this parody sometime ago to deal with my infatuation with my french bulldog.  It is time I pulled it off Deja Net and reposted it.  
                       
    
       

Home

     For fifty years, my parents' farm in Mexico, New York was home.  No matter what flat I occupied, I knew that I could drop by, find a meal and to a limited but warm acceptance.   The pantry was converted early on into a dining room with curtained windows.  I relied on this view in all seasons, and it was through these small windows that I developed a sense that this home and land would remain my touchstone of security. 

     Winters were bitter and the deep snow rose up and beyond those windows, on one occasion opening to let in my brother's white Samoyed pawing to come in for warmth.    By February, I would crunch my boots on crisp snow following the trail of buckets to deliver a thermos of hot chocolate to my father as he boiled sap into maple syrup in a sugar shack collapsed long ago.  My fingers were often burned by the thick liquid, as they brought unfinished sweetness to my mouth.   

     Each spring, May flowers rose and quickly died in our woods and soon after tulip and daffodil rose and exploded into bright colors.  Further beyond the window, I once lost a new red leather shoe in a mud hole created by hidden springs and the heavy hooves of our Holstein cattle.   And in that same field, my mother once pointed out a rare stag cautiously step out of the mists.  Closer to the house is a tiny gully where my brothers and the neighbors' children arranged rocks into great castles of the imagination.  It was on this land that I developed a sense of adventure as well as an appreciation of the very real fruits of hard labor.  
     
      Beyond those windows, we tossed heavy hay bales on hot summer days onto an unpainted wagon pulled by an aging, still reliable tractor. The children tired quickly, while my father and his hired hands had to continue to work in a race against the weather.  With pure joy we would scamper on top of the haybales for a triumphant ride to a red barn whose upkeep fell to my father, decade after decade.  As Butterfly Creek evaporated, we failed to notice its flow become a slow stagnation.   And in the dawn of my earliest memories, I once asked my father why a rare, tired old black man on his last odyssey napped in our roadside ditch beneath a maple tree felled long ago. 

       Autumn brought orange school buses, brilliant leaves and moments of contemplation.   As I played in piles of fallen raked, dry brown leaves my first sense of impermanence awoke, no matter the bounty of each harvest.  Yet on my lowest of days, I would cross the road alone, crossing the small bridge over the swelling creek  -- up, up, field beyond field, to the highest point on the farm and turn around.  I looked toward the window through which I envisioned so much -- and wept for the end of my Eternity.
   
     

Mundivagant

Within dry, cracked leather album covers white corners with the scarcest trace of adhesive hold each black and white image feebly in place.   Decades of family photographs fill the tiny trailer that my mother has retired to since my father’s death.   Corner stickers have long fallen out of favor, replaced by two sided tape, adhesive dots and slide-in photo albums.  I wonder how well they will hold photographs in fifty years’ time?  Mother urges us to flip through her albums and take home the ephemera and artifacts of a distant childhood, although our homes already are overflowing with tchotchkes acquired from our own messy lives.  

The few times that we do take the time to browse through her albums, Mother supervises, hoping to impose her interpretation of events on our own recollections.  Most images show a sunny but predictable childhood.  A few are departed elders posing unsmilingly long after old camera technology required unmoving grimness.   Despite my own tattered, fading memories, there is one small image that holds truths that I will never share in discussion -- things that have been both a cipher and a beacon throughout my life. 

A two year old waif walks along the side of a gradually rising rural road.  A small kerchief, tied hobo style to a long stick, rests on her shoulder and holds a few possessions – a special order Mighty Mouse doll, a crushed molasses cookie, a snakeskin found drying in the sun.  A teddy bear held firmly under the other arm is pursued by a cat and dog who smell crumbs.  Both are puzzled by the fact that they are not in the soft comfort of the usual armchair in the living room.  The small girl resolutely (albeit temporarily) is running away from home.  This image crystallized a long held suspicion that my mundivagant nature was forged early in life.   More memories pour out of that single snapshot.

A tall, well-kept red barn rises before me.  Within it my father tends to the dairy cattle or cleans the milking parlor.  When I enter, he will patiently allow me to milk a cow or to wash part of the milking machines.  Such small effort earns a moment of approval – my father’s gruff, unguarded smile.  Throughout my childhood I seek out that rarest of rewards.

My mother’s recollection of the photograph she took long ago would likely be that her toddler has been caught reacting momentarily to the attention transferred to her newborn brother.   My inner child would in part jealously agree.    But in counterpoise to the push of a needy, newborn brother, yet another motive for these early meanderings is the pull of shiny stainless steel machinery, well worn hand tools, and dozens of black and white bovines whose drooling, cud-filled mouths and engorged udders provide wonder and just a hint of danger.  My father, busy at his life’s work, remains nearby for any needed reassurance.  

This equilibrium of unregulated exploration and precious parental affection gave me the ability to fearlessly wander through fields, woods and quicksand filled wetlands, join Grammie's  visits to my unknown ‘Bahston’ relatives, argue politics with my father's ultraconservative friends, beg to become an exchange student, and attend college in far-off Washington, DC.   It also got me into great trouble in late teen and early adult years, expressed by a pronounced inability to remain at one job or relationship until well into my thirties.   And after twenty-five years in the increasingly unsatisfying field of public education, exhausted by familial obligations and lacking attention from a husband who rarely leaves his media-filled life, I have taken a cue from the little girl in that photograph.  

I am running away from home again.  I will leave emotional chaos behind and despite poor eyesight and a thoracic aneurysm that could blow at any moment, I will visit India, teach English and design curriculum for low caste gypsy children.  I will earn a bit of income and barter places to stay from online LinkedIn contacts – editing Nepali papers on aid and democracy and tutoring a bit of online English to the Chinese affluent classes.   Reestablished relationships with Asian college friends from long ago provide a touchstone of approval if I run into trouble.   I walk towards the unknown along a new path of my own making.  

My bohemian adventure requires minimal clinging to material goods.  I cashed in my retirement IRA and used part of it to finish our basement and turn it into a small apartment.  This will both provide a small source of income while I am gone and gently force my husband out of his man cave.  Perhaps we will again become intimate since, now across continents and oceans, I provide him with the distance he so craves.  Without my presence my daughters will find their own paths through rocky choices and challenges.  And I myself will deal with intolerable heat, frequent power outages, chronic bureaucratic paralysis, challenging situations for the independent woman and a hope that I may be of use for often imperceptible small change.  

I carry an old photograph of a small child in my weak but happy heart and, as I walk alone down unpaved roads, I will try not to look back. 

Sierra Leone at the Millenium

Kumba never sleeps anymore.  The night sounds of the bush that once comforted her – the whistled tututututu of the owl, the chchchchch of crickets, even heavy swaying of unknown creatures in the branches above – are silent.  Now there is only the certainty of sporadic gunfire and screams of women in far off blackness. She closes her eyes in guarded exhaustion, matching the breathing of the pikins surrounding her, also pretending sleep.  Even Miriama, her cot-mate, no longer makes her laugh by snorting and grunting like a sow with her piglets.  All action – all reaction heightens fear.  Listen and be ready to run. 

She thinks for a moment about crawling off the cot and slithering to the ground to steal the other children’s food stores.  The bigger ones have taken her food often enough.  But by now, there is none secreted away.  Hungry rats snatch up any remaining crumbs.  A snake might be waiting for a more substantial meal so the little pikin stays put.  And just breathes. 

Hearing “De soldier de coming” was terrifying the first time.  Now it hardly matters – RUF rebels, government forces, adult soldiers, child soldiers – all bring beatings, torture, gang rape, arson, death.  Tonight the soldiers will not find any food among the pikins.  Auntie caretakers and their own children have food and eat it with aggressive pleasure in front of the orphans.  Kumba has long watched such base survival instincts.  Her father is dead, her mother is missing.  Fight or flight only makes sense when there is immediate violence and anarchy.  For now, she does neither and freezes.  Her fighting instinct will arise at a wrong time and place years later.

Kumba no longer remembers her mother’s face though she once bragged that she had the lightest of black skin.  Krio speakers absorbed European terms and attitudes.  Freetown residents still have that sense of superiority today.  Many words ‘fair’, ‘light’, ‘bright' -- distance each person from being merely 'black'.   Mariatu, Kumba’s mother – uses them all to describe her two daughters.  She deserts them for long periods of time to drink palm wine, earning money with her body from the miners and soldiers.  Kumba remembers candlelight-lit black shining eyes that return home late at night. 

Maman changes locality and patrons with regularity.  In the manner of migrating gypsies, her identities and aliases change as well.  Mariatu’s beauty finds opportunities near the mines and sluices outside industrial Makeni.  At times, Kumba is put in the yard to sleep with the dogs.  Her small arms hug them as fiercely as she will later hug Miriama on a cot.  The dogs warn her of danger and keep her warm.  The rebels finally shoot the dogs but she clings to them tightly, even as hungry tics and fleas detach themselves from corpses to feast on her living blood. 

Kumba remembers when she was her mother’s gold mine.  More accurately, her diamond mine. Kumba‘s mother, pregnant, tied herself to the father, a diamond miner panning in the muddy rivers and creeks in the north.  Kumba watched the overseers with machine guns who watched her father panning.  They were quick to seize any sparkle in the pan, tossing him a few worthless CFA or a bottle of beer.  She remembers a man tall, darker than her mother, and strong.  He switches the backside of Kumba's legs when she vexes him, but sometimes lifts her up with a smile and she chortles in uncontrolled joy.  But now her memories are red, lying on the bank of the river.  Whatever he was – miner, husband, father, lover, pimp, child molester – he is now just raw meat in a hail of machete and hatchet blows.  She does not remember which side killed him, if she participated.  Her friend, Fatu, still awakens at night, hearing RUF soldiers ordering children to beat a certain person to death, or they will be next.  Soon Kumba's mother flees with Older Sister,  less a liability and able to earn money on the streets.  With new names, Saafi and Aisha, they disappear and are never seen again.  

A woman claiming to be Kumba’s grandmother hands her over to a Christian group, perhaps out of love, perhaps for a bit of free rice.  It helps the community to turn over the damaged, homeless nuisance to the Western run orphanage.  Official declarations and death certificates appeared quickly although all bureaucrats had fled to the capital and beyond with their own families.  The old woman, too, disappears into the chaos of a war that soon destroys all remaining records. 

The orphanage burns down -- for the second time .  Kumba, now four, walks with the children of two agencies toward the capital of Freetown.  The caretaker Aunties ride in a jeep with their sons, including the one who touches Kumba when she tries to pee in the bush.  But soon, on the side of the road, soldiers stop them and carry one Auntie away into the bush.  Kumba must now carry baby Abraham and his hand carved leg of dark red wood.  He always pees on her.  She carries him along bombed out roads into Freetown.   She swallows the remnants of anger and crushes the sadness. Resting for a moment with baby Abraham on her lap, she swallows the last drop of bitterness and begins to eat his rations.