He no longer knows concrete from carpet, asphalt from grass. When you get close to him, the sour smell washes over you in a wave.
“Okay, old soldier,” my husband says. “Okay.”
Our dog strains at her leash, every muscle taut. But the old soldier doesn’t seem to notice. He wanders into the middle of our busy street, head cocked to listen to something we can’t hear, something other and more compelling than our voices, raised now in alarm, something other than the sound of horns and brakes.
He no longer knows human from machine.
***
They began arriving at our door the evening of the day we moved in, neighbors with covered dishes and baked goods packaged tightly first in a layer of plastic wrap, then aluminum foil. They arrived at our door before we even thought of it as “ours.”
They wanted to welcome us to the neighborhood, they said.
We were exhausted and adrenaline-scorched and we stunk, having packed up what was left of our home 750 miles away two days before, loaded a U-haul trailer all one sleepless night with what the movers couldn’t take; having carried two impossibly heavy televisions and three computer monitors down a curved staircase (dragging them thump-rest-thump-rest, step at a time, when our legs gave out) and four mattresses and many, many boxes; having left one angry teenager behind with her grandparents and loaded our younger daughter (more docile but no less emotional) and one big dog into two very old cars and driven and stopped and driven and stopped when we nodded off, crossed lines, snapped awake, heart pounding, to the other’s lifesaving horn.
Having arrived at 2 and risen at 6 to sign our lives and livelihoods away at 10.
We were exhausted and we stunk. Still, my husband’s eyes met mine with a kind of manic wonder: Welcomed by the neighbors! In our eighteen years and nine moves this had never happened.
So, my Kerry-Edwards sticker hadn’t repelled them. How silly my liberal Yankee defiance, my fears seemed now.
Cornbread and chili, brownies and tuna casserole. I almost wept.
***
We had never had a lawn before, not one of our own. Yet, here we were, a 40-something couple acquiring a lawn at an age when others, kids grown, were divesting themselves of same. Not a yard, you understand, but a lawn. Not only had our ninety-year-old condo in a collar suburb of St. Louis bought us twice as much space here in Georgia, but it had got us this lawn. A lawn among lawns!
What the hell were we thinking?
***
“You should be ashamed,” the man said to my husband, who was bending to pick up our dog Karma’s contribution to the ecosystem. We walk our dog on a leash twice a day, we carry bags and use them, we are careful and respectful. Where we came from, that’s what you do.
“What?” Mark said.
“Letting him do that—you ought to be ashamed!”
“But I’m picking it up,” he said. “We always pick it up.”
We had often admired the Zen aesthetics of the man’s house and lawn, the way everything was balanced, shape and line and color. We had even, in what embarrasses me now, noted with satisfaction that the couple with that beautiful house were black, African-American. Surely here our kids would finally live an integrated life, not like before, where the black children were imported for the day and then promptly returned to their city neighborhoods, but a real life, a true life. One with color.
The man stood there, glaring, hands on his hips. “You ought to be ashamed,” he repeated.
“You know what?” my husband said, as he finished his maneuvers, tied the bag, and pulled Karma away from that lush green carpet. “You know what?—you’re a jerk.”
An isolated case. That’s what we thought.
***
There is a dog, it seems, in every backyard, a dog barking and barking and barking out of boredom and frustration. Dogs behind fences, dogs lying in the driveway waiting, waiting for something, anything, to relieve the tedium of their lives on hot cement, lives that stretch out day after day after day.
They must have electric fences, we said to each other at the beginning (how else could these people leave their dogs out like that?). And then the barking dog would spring to its feet and run to the end of the driveway and follow us, barking, for blocks, cars whipping by at 40 mph, the drivers giving us no margin.
“Go home!” we’d shout, trying with all our might to pull Karma away. “Please go home—“ And then another car would round the blind curve at the top of the hill, slam on the brakes just in time.
“Oh, please, please just go home.”
***
Even the most impeccably groomed lawn in our neighborhood can’t compete with the Augusta National, which is only ten minutes away, though it took us several months to discern its carefully camouflaged entrance, its Old Money boundaries. Not that we’ve been inside, you understand; like the rest of the world, we’ve seen its azaleas and emerald fairways only on television, which does not require an invitation. A few blocks away from “the National” is the Sandhills neighborhood. In Sandhills, there are no white faces. It is where, we’ve been told, “the caddies used to live.”
Here, poverty has a different feel.
In the urban Midwest, the brick buildings—what might, in the East and in another time, be called tenements—are crowded close to the street and are nearly identical in their squat brown squalor, block after block after block, cars parked on either side, snout to ass, like dogs checking ID.
But here, the streets narrow suddenly, are suddenly overgrown. The trees, separated by a broken ribbon of asphalt, nevertheless effect tangled union just above the street or reach out to brush your car, as if wanting in. And the houses. Not houses, but shacks, really, smack dab in the middle of the city. Two miles from our neighbor’s Zen-ish temple there is a shotgun, falling-down grocery store overtaken by Kudzu, the letters on its ancient sign fading away.
Driving through, I can’t escape the feeling of being watched.
***
Walking Karma, I can’t escape the same feeling. We are wrong, somehow, my family, we cross lines, break rules we never knew applied. And we are bewildered.
Occasionally, I run into someone else walking a dog on a leash, and when I do, I find myself talking a mile a minute, as if to keep them from their walk for just a little while. “Yes,” I say, “we’re new here. And you? Have you lived here long?” In this way, I have made several acquaintances: Marie, warm and gregarious walking Beau; Susan, who once had a much loved Golden Retriever she can’t bear to replace; Jane and Fred, an older couple who don’t have a dog, but are unfailingly kind when our morning walks converge; and our next door neighbors, transplants like us, who took in a second dog about to be abandoned when its family moved away.
Mostly, though, the dogs in our neighborhood are left to wander the streets ungoverned and unprotected —like eccentric, slightly mad relatives. Like someone’s slow cousin who just got it into her head one day to mosey on down to the Tastee Freeze in her nighty, and what can you do, she was just born that way.
***
We have been admonished for simply allowing our dog to sniff someone’s grass. We have been lectured for allowing our dog to step onto the curb from the street when cars are coming. On every block there are at least four lawns we don’t dare breach, no matter the traffic, no matter that there are no sidewalks. Private property. What at first seemed an opportunity to get to know our neighbors has turned out to be just that.
Finally confronted, the Old Soldier’s owner says, in his defense, “he don’t have much time left, anyway.”
***
There is a Jesus fish on every other car. There’s a church on every other corner. There is a flag in every other yard (lest we forget what country we live in). There are pickets at Planned Parenthood and so many fetus-fetishizing letters the local paper no doubt can’t print them all (though I’m sure they try). There are vigils and there are protests on behalf of cells and clumps of cells and potential clumps of cells.
Private Property doesn’t seem to apply.
And there is a dog wandering every street—skinny and homeless, with visible bones and demeanor way past stoic (I’ve seen those eyes as I stop to let them pass, their total lack of expectation) or fed but turned out to wander, deluded by the erratic comfort of home. There are dogs unsecured in the beds of pickup trucks going 70 on I-20 and there are dogs dead along that same highway, so many I have learned to keep my eyes trained on the road ahead. There is a shelter where, last year, more than 13,000 animals were “put down,” their bodies carted by truck to the public landfill and dumped in heaps of multi-colored fur and slack muzzles and fixed, clouded eyes.
And there are these neighbors, the ones who now return our waves with scowls, blaming us for the piles of shit our dog didn’t leave.
They don’t seem to know that our job is to pick it up and carry it, to carry it home.
***
We have three dogs now: the second rescued by a local group from the kill shelter, a puppy with the misfortune to be born, one of five, into a family on the brink of a violent divorce; the third, one of ten born to a heartworm-positive mother rescued by another organization.
“Oh, honey,” the sweet young vet tech says to me, putting her hand on my arm when I let it all pour out. “Oh, honey,” she says, shaking her head, “Welcome to the South.”
“Okay, old soldier,” my husband says. “Okay.”
Our dog strains at her leash, every muscle taut. But the old soldier doesn’t seem to notice. He wanders into the middle of our busy street, head cocked to listen to something we can’t hear, something other and more compelling than our voices, raised now in alarm, something other than the sound of horns and brakes.
He no longer knows human from machine.
***
They began arriving at our door the evening of the day we moved in, neighbors with covered dishes and baked goods packaged tightly first in a layer of plastic wrap, then aluminum foil. They arrived at our door before we even thought of it as “ours.”
They wanted to welcome us to the neighborhood, they said.
We were exhausted and adrenaline-scorched and we stunk, having packed up what was left of our home 750 miles away two days before, loaded a U-haul trailer all one sleepless night with what the movers couldn’t take; having carried two impossibly heavy televisions and three computer monitors down a curved staircase (dragging them thump-rest-thump-rest, step at a time, when our legs gave out) and four mattresses and many, many boxes; having left one angry teenager behind with her grandparents and loaded our younger daughter (more docile but no less emotional) and one big dog into two very old cars and driven and stopped and driven and stopped when we nodded off, crossed lines, snapped awake, heart pounding, to the other’s lifesaving horn.
Having arrived at 2 and risen at 6 to sign our lives and livelihoods away at 10.
We were exhausted and we stunk. Still, my husband’s eyes met mine with a kind of manic wonder: Welcomed by the neighbors! In our eighteen years and nine moves this had never happened.
So, my Kerry-Edwards sticker hadn’t repelled them. How silly my liberal Yankee defiance, my fears seemed now.
Cornbread and chili, brownies and tuna casserole. I almost wept.
***
We had never had a lawn before, not one of our own. Yet, here we were, a 40-something couple acquiring a lawn at an age when others, kids grown, were divesting themselves of same. Not a yard, you understand, but a lawn. Not only had our ninety-year-old condo in a collar suburb of St. Louis bought us twice as much space here in Georgia, but it had got us this lawn. A lawn among lawns!
What the hell were we thinking?
***
“You should be ashamed,” the man said to my husband, who was bending to pick up our dog Karma’s contribution to the ecosystem. We walk our dog on a leash twice a day, we carry bags and use them, we are careful and respectful. Where we came from, that’s what you do.
“What?” Mark said.
“Letting him do that—you ought to be ashamed!”
“But I’m picking it up,” he said. “We always pick it up.”
We had often admired the Zen aesthetics of the man’s house and lawn, the way everything was balanced, shape and line and color. We had even, in what embarrasses me now, noted with satisfaction that the couple with that beautiful house were black, African-American. Surely here our kids would finally live an integrated life, not like before, where the black children were imported for the day and then promptly returned to their city neighborhoods, but a real life, a true life. One with color.
The man stood there, glaring, hands on his hips. “You ought to be ashamed,” he repeated.
“You know what?” my husband said, as he finished his maneuvers, tied the bag, and pulled Karma away from that lush green carpet. “You know what?—you’re a jerk.”
An isolated case. That’s what we thought.
***
There is a dog, it seems, in every backyard, a dog barking and barking and barking out of boredom and frustration. Dogs behind fences, dogs lying in the driveway waiting, waiting for something, anything, to relieve the tedium of their lives on hot cement, lives that stretch out day after day after day.
They must have electric fences, we said to each other at the beginning (how else could these people leave their dogs out like that?). And then the barking dog would spring to its feet and run to the end of the driveway and follow us, barking, for blocks, cars whipping by at 40 mph, the drivers giving us no margin.
“Go home!” we’d shout, trying with all our might to pull Karma away. “Please go home—“ And then another car would round the blind curve at the top of the hill, slam on the brakes just in time.
“Oh, please, please just go home.”
***
Even the most impeccably groomed lawn in our neighborhood can’t compete with the Augusta National, which is only ten minutes away, though it took us several months to discern its carefully camouflaged entrance, its Old Money boundaries. Not that we’ve been inside, you understand; like the rest of the world, we’ve seen its azaleas and emerald fairways only on television, which does not require an invitation. A few blocks away from “the National” is the Sandhills neighborhood. In Sandhills, there are no white faces. It is where, we’ve been told, “the caddies used to live.”
Here, poverty has a different feel.
In the urban Midwest, the brick buildings—what might, in the East and in another time, be called tenements—are crowded close to the street and are nearly identical in their squat brown squalor, block after block after block, cars parked on either side, snout to ass, like dogs checking ID.
But here, the streets narrow suddenly, are suddenly overgrown. The trees, separated by a broken ribbon of asphalt, nevertheless effect tangled union just above the street or reach out to brush your car, as if wanting in. And the houses. Not houses, but shacks, really, smack dab in the middle of the city. Two miles from our neighbor’s Zen-ish temple there is a shotgun, falling-down grocery store overtaken by Kudzu, the letters on its ancient sign fading away.
Driving through, I can’t escape the feeling of being watched.
***
Walking Karma, I can’t escape the same feeling. We are wrong, somehow, my family, we cross lines, break rules we never knew applied. And we are bewildered.
Occasionally, I run into someone else walking a dog on a leash, and when I do, I find myself talking a mile a minute, as if to keep them from their walk for just a little while. “Yes,” I say, “we’re new here. And you? Have you lived here long?” In this way, I have made several acquaintances: Marie, warm and gregarious walking Beau; Susan, who once had a much loved Golden Retriever she can’t bear to replace; Jane and Fred, an older couple who don’t have a dog, but are unfailingly kind when our morning walks converge; and our next door neighbors, transplants like us, who took in a second dog about to be abandoned when its family moved away.
Mostly, though, the dogs in our neighborhood are left to wander the streets ungoverned and unprotected —like eccentric, slightly mad relatives. Like someone’s slow cousin who just got it into her head one day to mosey on down to the Tastee Freeze in her nighty, and what can you do, she was just born that way.
***
We have been admonished for simply allowing our dog to sniff someone’s grass. We have been lectured for allowing our dog to step onto the curb from the street when cars are coming. On every block there are at least four lawns we don’t dare breach, no matter the traffic, no matter that there are no sidewalks. Private property. What at first seemed an opportunity to get to know our neighbors has turned out to be just that.
Finally confronted, the Old Soldier’s owner says, in his defense, “he don’t have much time left, anyway.”
***
There is a Jesus fish on every other car. There’s a church on every other corner. There is a flag in every other yard (lest we forget what country we live in). There are pickets at Planned Parenthood and so many fetus-fetishizing letters the local paper no doubt can’t print them all (though I’m sure they try). There are vigils and there are protests on behalf of cells and clumps of cells and potential clumps of cells.
Private Property doesn’t seem to apply.
And there is a dog wandering every street—skinny and homeless, with visible bones and demeanor way past stoic (I’ve seen those eyes as I stop to let them pass, their total lack of expectation) or fed but turned out to wander, deluded by the erratic comfort of home. There are dogs unsecured in the beds of pickup trucks going 70 on I-20 and there are dogs dead along that same highway, so many I have learned to keep my eyes trained on the road ahead. There is a shelter where, last year, more than 13,000 animals were “put down,” their bodies carted by truck to the public landfill and dumped in heaps of multi-colored fur and slack muzzles and fixed, clouded eyes.
And there are these neighbors, the ones who now return our waves with scowls, blaming us for the piles of shit our dog didn’t leave.
They don’t seem to know that our job is to pick it up and carry it, to carry it home.
***
We have three dogs now: the second rescued by a local group from the kill shelter, a puppy with the misfortune to be born, one of five, into a family on the brink of a violent divorce; the third, one of ten born to a heartworm-positive mother rescued by another organization.
“Oh, honey,” the sweet young vet tech says to me, putting her hand on my arm when I let it all pour out. “Oh, honey,” she says, shaking her head, “Welcome to the South.”
I wrote this four years ago, after moving to Augusta. We now have not three, but four dogs, and I am involved in rescue transports. Please let me know what you thought of this post...which was essentially an initial reaction to dog culture in the South.
ReplyDeleteYou write beautifully of an atmosphere so typical of too many areas of this country. I don't have dogs, but cats--including the old guy tom sleeping on the bed behind me. He started as a stray among the many that ate the crunch I'd put out on my front or back step. We became friends and now he visits inside on occasion, much to the chagrin of the inside cat.
ReplyDeleteI admire your strength and your ability to put the words down in such a way, but know that rarely those same words come forth without a lot of sincere feeling for the subject matter they describe.
A newer post of yours was highlighted by someone who works with rescued horses in the St. Louis area. I'm glad she did, so I could read it and then the older posts, including this one. Do keep up the attitude and the writing.