Sophie's last day. The prettiest girl in the room. The Mohawk Golden. The shyest dog I've ever know as well as the sweetest. The way she walked. The best pal to my best pal and Riley's pack mate. Gone. But always remembered. Her Jimmy Durante nose. Her Sphinx pose whenever I would say "don't look at me, Sophie, don't look at me." She would stare at the ceiling and smile. Her tolerance of small dogs, particularly her younger brother and cousin. Her loves of carrots. Her cunningness when it came to stealing food be it a stick of butter, a pile of roasted peppers, a turkey sandwich. For food she did not discriminate. 

Today is Veterans Day. This is my father in front of a Higgins boat at the D-Day Museum in New Orleans.  God bless America and our troops, then and now. 

How many people can say they had a bat in the house on Halloween? I can. 

It's Election Day and yesterday Starbucks announced that they would be giving out free coffee to anyone who voted. That would be on the honor system, all you had to do was tell your elite barista you voted.

Well, that's against the law. You can't reward people for voting. So today, free coffee for everyone. Dolts. Don't corporations check with their lawyers first? Glad I sold that stock. Wait, I never bought it, so doubly glad.

As it turns out, I guess people were rewarded for voting. In record number. Historic. A first. 

Finally, we have a Hawaiian president.

Never thought I would live long enough to see it. 

This is in defense of curtains, blinds, and window coverings that keeps the sun out. Sleeping chambers, that's what we need more of.

The thing about eye contact is that just when you remember not to do it, it’s too late. And no matter how fast you avert your eyes, the damage is done. In my case, the damage was a speeding ticket. 54 miles an hour in a 40 mile per hour zone.

I saw the cop on the right side of the highway, straddling his Harley-Davidson, facing oncoming traffic. Even though we were both wearing sunglasses, his shifty aviators, mine whatever “Jackie O” pair I grabbed on the way out of the house, there it was. Eyeball to eyeball, from 50 yards away, three lanes deep. I pretended I didn’t see him but he wheeled out, u-turned and, with lights flashing and siren whooping, bullied me over.

The first thing that crossed mind was how to wiggle out of it. It wasn’t my car, how did I know it was going that fast? It didn’t feel that fast. Was I going fast? What the heck is the speed limit here? Wait a minute. I wasn’t really going that fast. Wasn’t everyone else going the same speed as I was? Or faster? Wait a minute here.

He ordered me to pull into the next side street. I hadn’t been pulled over in 20 years so I prepared a script in my head. 25 years ago I told the cop a joke about a guy who doesn’t stop for a stop sign in California. He thought it was funny, noticed a Bonnie Raitt poster in the back seat of my car and asked if that was me. “Yes, indeedy, officer,” I said, mustering up every ounce of femme fatale tone I could. He laughed and let me go.

But that was 25 years ago. The tone I could still muster, maybe not so much the fatale. It didn’t matter anyway because by the time this cop sashayed up to my window, he had the ticket half-written. I watched his approach, walking that motorcycle bowlegged walk. He was shorter than I expected. “I have the same boots!,” I almost blurted out just as I realized he wasn’t going to be as much fun as the New York cop a quarter of a century ago.

Maybe I should cry, I thought. That would mean I’d have to lower my sunglasses and actually look him in the eye. And if I cried then my eyes would get red and then he may think I’d been drinking. But it’s 10 in the morning, who drinks at 10 in the morning? Hey, Pollyanna, I say to myself, wake up, there are lots of people who drink in the morning. I don’t cry, I don’t say anything; I’m too tired to even try. But I don’t like him, he’s smug and acts as if he’s selling me a movie ticket. He seems annoyed at the work. Well, he should be. Aren’t there real criminals out there? Isn’t this sissy cop work?  Isn’t this about collecting money? When we’re done he actually thanks me for my cooperation, tells me how to negotiate the ticket down and says, “ have a nice day.”

Wait a minute. I don’t speed. Ask anyone. I get chastised for driving too slow. “What’s the hurry?,” I ask people who step on imaginary gas pedals on my passenger side floor in frustration. “Watch, we’ll get to that red light the same time that guy does.” “Watch, that guy’ll get pulled over any minute.” I don’t pay attention to speed limits. I’m not even sure what arterial speed means. I really should pay more attention.

But wait. I’m the conscientious driver. It’s all those other people who never signal, tailgate and slide through stop signs. I yield to bike riders and walkers. I watch for “pedestrian crossings” and wait my turn on entrance ramps. I even pull over and pick up lost dogs.

What about all those (other) people breaking all the rules? Where’s a cop when you need one?

The other day I was in the library. I was sitting in one of their wicker rocking chairs looking out over the park. I was rocking, quietly reading my book. I had slipped off my summer sandals. I felt a tap on my shoulder. “You have to wear to shoes in the library,” said the man librarian, pointing at my feet. Feet that were clean, manicured and neatly planted side by side under the rocker. “Huh?” I said, startled. “Your shoes, you need to wear your shoes in the library.” I looked around at the empty sitting area to see if perhaps my bare feet had offended someone. My immediate indignant reaction was obvious to him, although unspoken. He softened his approach. “It’s a safety issue,” he said. “A book may fall on your feet and the library would be libel.”

“HUH?”

I can be sitting quietly in the library, a million miles from the world and the law will still find me. I can even do it bare footed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The smell of leather was too great to ignore.

There's a quiet little park near my house with a colorful plastic playground, a couple of rusty grills cemented into the ground, a little brick building with toilets and some swings, slides, walking paths and benches. And now, apparently, a small village of homeless people. These folks are new to the neighborhood. Tonight there were three men and two women and they were just starting to prepare a meal. They had four cans of minced clams, a loaf of wheat bread, two boxes of Triscuits, a gallon of what looked like apple juice and a bag of charcoal. One of the guys went off into the trees and came out peeling leaves off some twigs. One of the blood-shot eyed women smiled at me, only after I smiled first, and the sun ricocheted off her gold tooth. 

I imagine that all the people that are in the park at that instant will live together for, well, a while. Like a deserted island. I look around and try to pick out the leader and vote internally that it will be me. I'll decide what to do with those clams. I'll pick where everyone sleeps and how the park will be run. 

A young girl who had already been too forward with my dog was climbing on the picnic table the homeless had claimed as theirs. The girl's father just watched, he seemed unconcerned. All of the sudden I was surrounded by little kids - an Asian one, an Indian one, a Slavic one. They were all poking at my dog, all speaking different languages. I remembered that sign on I-5, heading to Portland, that screamed out political messages posted by the landowner. "This Is America --Speak It," it read once. I kept saying, "gentle, gentle," as they inspected the dog. The little Indian boy said, as he reached under the dog's belly and touched his little, furry penis, "What's that? His spelunckle?" I laughed and told him he, "wouldn't want anyone touching his spelunckle, would he?" 

As we're leaving the park I meet this guy who has a black Cocker Spaniel that's missing half its hair. Unprovoked, the guy tells me the whole dog's story. He starts with its lineage, it dates back to the Depression. I tune the guy out but when I tune back in he says, "So that's how he got this Vitamin E deficiency." I'm lost. The dog is so ugly I can't even look at him. He looks like a giant, dry slug with splotches of flaky fur. The dog takes a dump and I say, "um, your dog, it's, um, going." They guy nods "yeah," does nothing, and keeps yapping about how the dog jumps into the bath with him for relief from all the itching. I'm about to lose what little lunch I had. 

Death With Dignity

There was a banner flung over a freeway overpass this morning that read, "Death With Dignity." It's about a Washington state initiative, #1000, I believe, the "suicide" law, the right-to-die regulation, the euthanasia enactment. As I drove under it, I thought about a woman who died last week, without much dignity. 

Last Thursday, on this same freeway, about a mile north of the banner, I was walking on another overpass as cars whizzed by below. A half an hour before my walk, a woman was stabbed as she sat riding in the front passenger seat of a green SUV. The vehicle was headed south in the left lane as a guy in the back seat reached around, grabbed the woman in a choke hold and then stabbed her in the neck and chest. Many times. 

I stared at the car below me surrounded by six orange traffic barrels strung with yellow police barrier tape. There were a dozen or so police and state troopers wandering around, wearing plastic gloves and grim faces. Some were working the scene, some were directing traffic, some were  doing nothing. It was obvious the car had stopped quickly, it was angled off the road and I wondered what it must have been like in the car at the moment it happened. Did she even have time to react? Was it a carjacker? What provoked such a savage attack? I saw the shaken driver of the car, sitting on the freeway divider, his head in his hands. He looked like an regular guy, and I felt such sorrow for him. He was so distraught. The stabber had already been taken away as had the woman, to a nearby hospital, where she later died.

There was no blood, no skid marks, no sign of a struggle and when the whole scene was cleared up it was as if nothing happened at all. That's the way it is, I thought, when all is cleaned up, it is over. Traffic returned and the millions of people that will drive over that asphalt will never know a woman's life was taken in one swift, maniacal moment. 

I thought about bringing flowers to the spot where it happened for the women who died with no dignity, but I didn't. Other calamities have taken its place. I'll forget about this one.