Elegy for a Dog

I used to say that I loved Heidi so much because no one else would. She wasn’t the typical golden retriever; she was high-strung, neurotic, loud, bossy, at time cantankerous. She had a penchant for rolling around in the lush green lawns of our neighbors and for leaping into puddles. She was obsessed with Frisbees and tennis balls, although she had a peculiar idea of what fetch meant—she was convinced it involved her chasing after the tossed object and then dropping it at her own feet, demanding one of her humans to pick it up and launch it again. She also had a peculiar habit of climbing on my head during thunderstorms. She spent exactly one night in the veterinarian-recommended dog crate, because she cried so pathetically that I couldn’t stand the idea of locking her in a cage—from then on, she roamed the house freely. She was kicked out of obedience school for talking back; every command the instructor gave her, Heidi responded with yips, barks, and yowls.

I was always happy that she never became obedient.

Heidi had personality. She was spunky, feisty, bossy, recalcitrant.

She was sweet and incredibly attuned to our emotions. I remember the morning my grandmother died. I came downstairs to eat breakfast before school, and I immediately noticed my mom’s red eyes, her tear-stained face. I asked what was wrong and she choked out, “Grammy died.” She started crying again, and Heidi, an anxious look on her face, ran over to my mom, jumped up to put her paws on her hips, and stretched her neck in an attempt to lick my mom’s face. Heidi did provide some comfort that morning, making us all laugh.

She was my golden girl, my Heidi dog, my goofball.

She didn’t know when to stop. She would swim at the lake until she was absolutely exhausted and slept for three hours when we got home. When she was two years old, my dad and I took her out in the back yard to run around in the snow. She played fetched for well over an hour, tossed herself into snow banks, and her reddish gold fur looked like lambskin by the time we dragged her inside. At some point during the outing, she tore a ligament in her leg. I have no idea when, because she would have continued playing if we hadn’t called her in. She had surgery, and that entire spring, I walked her up and down the steep cemetery hill to make her spindly leg strong. She often resisted and was afraid to go into the cemetery too near dusk, but twice a day, every day, for months, I walked her and for years, I couldn’t tell which leg she injured.

She seemed to think that I wouldn’t notice her trying to climb up on the couch if she moved very, very slowly. One paw on the cushion—sideways glance at me—the other paw up—quick, nervous glance at me—lean forward, not too fast, no one will ever notice. Within five minutes, she’d be sprawled across my lap.

She didn’t try to sneak her way onto the couch when I was sick. Heidi was sure she could cure me by staying by my side every second. Scratching those curly ears did make me feel better. I wish I could have been there for her at the end, to give her some comfort.

Heidi minded it when I left her. She was five years old when I left for college. She stared at my piles of bags and blankets with a despairing look: “How can you leave me?”
I came home a week later, just for the weekend, but Heidi greeted me with such joy that suggested she thought she would never see me again. I’m afraid I broke her heart every Sunday for four years, though.

Heidi, do you know how you’ve broken mine now?

I will miss her greetings and her unrestrained exuberance. Thump-thump-thump: tail spinning against her dog bed as I came in the door at midnight after dropping Jarrod off at the train station. The clicking toes, and sometimes sliding paws, as she ran to me when I came home for the first time after almost two months in Buffalo. The slower greeting I received this Easter, the last time I saw her, when I first realized just how sick she was. She was too tired to jump up, and had been sleeping in my parents’ room for most of the day, but when I said her name, “Where’s my Heidi?” her tail still rotated around and around, thumping against the dog bed. She still seemed to know when I was leaving that Sunday.

I didn’t know that would be our last goodbye. So I want to give you a better goodbye now, Heidi.

I’ll miss you, my friend—your antics, the way you never got used to Jarrod’s sneeze, your firm belief that offering your paw would make amends for any wrongdoing and instantly grant you the treat you were seeking, your perseverance. You always were one to defy the odds, from the allergic reaction to your first vaccine to these last months of hanging on well beyond what the vet expected and what I dreaded. That dreaded time has come now, and neither of us would ever be ready for it. I’ll say goodbye the way I always did. You be a good girl, Heidi. You always were.

Summer, hurry up!

I am SO anxious for this semester to end. I have one paper due on Monday, then another due May 16th, and then I am freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Jarrod and I are going down to Washington, D.C. for a few days before heading back to Massachusetts for the summer, and I can't wait! We've both been so stressed this semester that we could really use a vacation. And it will be amazing to be somewhere warm! I'm usually not that into sticky summer heat, but after ten months in Buffalo, I want to wear shorts and flip-flops and swim in the ocean.

Gah, I need to focus and get these papers done!

Homeward Bound

I'm going home this weekend to celebrate Easter with family and friends! I have really missed New England, and all week, I've been thinking of places I want to go around my hometown, going to Mass with my nieces and then seeing Jarrod's family for Easter lunch at his grandparents' house. Although I have the specter of two final papers to write hanging over me this weekend, nothing can dampen my spirits. I can't wait to go home.

Home has a more complicated definition for me now, though. I've been in Buffalo for over nine months. While the city itself doesn't exactly feel like home, and can never feel like home the way Marlborough does since it contains my entire childhood, I realized last week just how much my apartment has become home to me. I spent Thursday through Sunday morning in another person's house, pet-sitting, and I was a little surprised to find how much I missed my apartment. Jarrod stayed in the house with me, which made it better, but we both felt displaced. It was more than just not having our things around or not knowing the layout of the house. It just wasn't our home, and I appreciated more deeply that our apartment is our home, not merely a place where we keep our stuff and sleep at night.

When I first moved here, I anticipated feeling the same way towards my apartment as I did towards my college dorm rooms; a place to stay, a space which becomes comfortable and welcoming, but which isn't really a home, just a pseudo-home, a temporary resting place. We will probably have a different apartment next year, somewhere closer to campus so we can save on gas money, so in that sense, it is similar to my college dorms. One year occupancy, then move on to another place. But this little second-floor, one-bedroom apartment feels more mine than my dorm rooms ever did, and I can't quite explain why. I do know, however, that spaces become meaningful because of the people that animate them, the memories that linger and follow you.

Memory absolutely fascinates me; I write and read a lot about nostalgia, perhaps because I'm very prone to this emotion. I'm interested in the ability to move yourself back in time emotionally, but only in part, returning to the same place and mental state, yet impossibly remote from it. Tonight I'll probably share my room with my sister for the first time since she got married six years ago. It will be a lot of fun and we'll probably stay up way too late, laughing and talking like we always have. But we're such vastly different people from who we were the last time we shared a room. There's something beautiful and sad and joyous in that, all at once.

Free Lunch

Buffalo is a very poor, segregated city with many homeless people. A lot of them flock to my neighborhood, which is in the wealthier, gentrified section of the city, and stand outside of the stores on Elmwood Ave (the main shopping area), begging. I encounter at least one or two every day, and I'm really torn on how to respond to them. Is it better to refuse the homeless person there before you in the flesh and donate to a charity or a shelter instead? I'm uncertain of that mentality, because it seems too abstract, even if it ultimately does more good than to give to an individual; that individual still matters, that person right before you, appealing to you for help. The endless obligation to the other, when confronted with the other face-to-face. The face-to-face matters, the reality and individuality of the other is far more demanding, and more difficult to respond to, than the abstract vision in the mind when donating to an institution. I feel really guilty when I refuse that, but I often do refuse. Most of the time, I apologize and say that I don't have any cash on me, which is true; I very seldom carry cash. This was the case yesterday; I was walking to the corner store to buy some oatmeal for breakfast, when I saw a woman leaning up against the side of the building. I've seen her multiple times before; mid to late 40s, heavy-set, disheveled hair, the same clothes every day, flagging down every person who walks by and asking for cash. She's not aggressive or threatening, like some of the other visible homeless who regularly frequent the area. I've given her cash before when I've had paper money on me. As I approached the entrance of the store, she asked me if I could spare any money; I only had my credit card on me, so I started apologizing as I thought of maybe asking for cash back when I purchased my oatmeal, when she asked if I could buy her food. I was a little surprised, because just a few days ago, Jarrod and I had talked about people begging on the street and how our responses are really constrained. Both of us wanted to buy something for the people-- food, a sweatshirt, something-- but didn't know how to offer it. The act of begging is inherently uncomfortable in the overt recognition of class differences, a stark demarcation of those with excess and those with nothing. There's instantly a tense dynamic between the beggar and the other, an accusation of being selfish if you refuse to give some of your excess, an accusation of being wealthy. Granted, as a grad student, I don't have much excess, but my very position as a grad student designates me as privileged.


I agreed; she asked me if I could buy her food and I said, sure and she followed me into the store, clearly surprised and pleased. The dynamics of this encounter weren't aggressive or threatening, but it was still strange. She disappeared into the aisles of the store as I went for my oatmeal, and for a minute, I thought she had gone back outside and was expecting me to choose her meal. Then I thought about it, and she was probably embarrassed by my acceptance, even though she was clearly happy that I had agreed to buy her a loaf of bread and sandwich meat. I was self-conscious myself, looking around for her, wondering if she was going to thrust the items into my hands and leave the store. I thought of the reversal of the physical discrepancies between the privileged and the poor in the 21st century; this woman easily outweighs me by 60 lbs, but heaviness no longer indicates wealth and the ability to feed oneself to excess. It's because she's forced to eat convenience store food, buying bags of Doritos and 99 cent donuts with the spare dollars she collects, while I walk another block to buy fresh produce at the local co-op. I rounded the corner and headed towards the check-out line and noticed her standing off to the side, holding a loaf of bread and a package of bologna. I made eye contact, and she placed her items on the counter before me. The cashier, a grim-faced older woman, asked me gruffly if I was paying for her things and I said yes. The homeless woman requested a separate bag, I paid, and headed for the door; she thanked me again and I just nodded and said no problem.


Did I handle this well? I obviously helped this woman; the loaf of bread and sandwich meat would probably make 10 sandwiches, so maybe she wouldn't have to stand outside and beg for the rest of the afternoon. I didn't look back to see where she went; she was still inside the store when I left, and I sort of didn't want to know what she did after. I had the impulse to disengage, to slip back into anonymity and have no one else confront me, recognize me, ask of me. I think I did something good, but am I obligated to do this every time I encounter a homeless person? Is it my personal responsibility to triple the cost of my order to buy food for others when I'm rationing that container of oatmeal so it lasts for the last month or so of the semester? I'm not sure if there's any good solution, if it's my responsibility to take on, but I also feel like I couldn't have refused. In total, it only cost about $10 for my food and hers, giving her $7 that she just didn't have, $7 that I could spare. Perhaps that's the difficulty of all of this-- what, exactly, can you spare?

One paper down, one more to go

I finished my paper on Kierkegaard and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Now I only have to write one more major research essay (plus a three-page abstract for my Greek drama class) before May. So it's time to start thinking of some potential paper topics.

The class is on mediation and dictation, and all of the literature is from the modern period with a heavy emphasis on Irish literature. I think I want to write my final paper on The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien. This novel was originally written in Gaelic and parodies the Irish obsession with reclaiming a Celtic identity. The Poor Mouth was first published in 1941, and this especially intrigues me; I wrote my undergraduate thesis on post-WWII British literature, and love Irish literature. Ireland's neutrality in WWII is also interesting to me, and I think I understand it better now after reading The Poor Mouth, even though the novel never mentions WWII directly. The obsession with a mythicized Celtic tradition, of Irish lords locking themselves in a stone tower to wait out the Viking invasion, untouched by the foreign aggressors, played a big role in Irish neutrality, and that spiritualized national identity is mercilessly lampooned in this novel. Another aspect of Ireland's neutrality was its self image as a small, poor nation; the Irish prime minister at the time stated that small states like Ireland should stay out of the affairs of the grand powers. Ireland was a very poor nation, especially in the south; I don't dispute that, but what The Poor Mouth elucidates is the peculiar approach to poverty in Ireland (by the upper classes, of course), the pride in abject poverty, the identification of poverty and parochialism with true Gaelic-ness.

I loved the acerbic wit of this book and I'd like to read it again (it's short, only about 180 pages) and think more about the fetishization of the Gaelic language, referred to in the book almost exclusively as "sweet Gaelic," contrasted with bitter English.

Grad Life

I had an unexpected day off today; the one student I usually advise on Thursdays is travelling with his sports team, and my professor cancelled class. And as I was clicking through fashion blogs while eating my oatmeal this morning, I realized that I seriously don't get dressed when I don't have work or school. And it would be hilarious if I started a fashion blog myself. You'd see that I many, sundry patterns of pajamas and put the sweaters Jarrod doesn't like to good use.

Evidence:

This is from St. Patrick's Day, during spring break, and an accurate representation of what I wear around the house. Yes, I'm wearing leggings. I put those on when I figured that 3 PM was a little too late to still be in pajamas. Hey, at least I don't leave the house like this.

Oh, grad school. Eating a banana with peanut butter because you're out of bread. Substituting coffee for adequate hours of sleep. Leggings count as pants. Lowering standards all around.

My Spring Break: Dutchmen and Danes

It's spring break wooooooo! In my grand tradition of taking tropical vacations and getting drunk off my face for spring break, I am writing an essay on Soren Kierkegaard and Washington Irving. (For the record, the bit about drunken spring breaks... in the past few years, I have spent spring break: taking the MTEL, preparing to defend my senior thesis, and visiting prospective grad schools. Yeah.)

Anyway, I wanted to write down a few of my main ideas for this paper, kind of sort things out here and then get cracking on secondary research.

While Irving predates Kierkegaard by a few decades, and there is no evidence of Kierkegaard regarding Irving as an influence on his writing or thought, what first got me thinking about reading these two in conjunction with each other is their use of pseudonyms and fictional sources. This is interesting to me in terms of authorial distance and textual authority. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous "editor" of Either/Or, Victor Eremita, is very careful to emphasize that he did not write these papers and functions in the text as little more than a reader, interfering as little as possible with the papers he "found" in a second-hand writing desk. Similarly, Washington Irving's narrator Geoffrey Crayon frequently references the posthumous papers of Dietrich Knickerbocker as the source of much of the New York Dutch folklore in the Sketch Book. Like Victor Eremita, Crayon regards himself primarily as a reader and an observer, not as the authoritive voice in the text, but a facilitator of a conversation between many texts. Rather than an all-seeing, detached, authoritative author capable of giving final meaning to the text as a whole, in both Irving and Kierkegaard, we get a multiplicity of voice, numerous and contradictory points of view that are impossible to reconcile. For Kierkegaard, this is very much the point, to have irreconcilable differences between texts so that the reader is forced to make an ethical choice between two mutually-exclusive absolutes. I think Irving employs numerous authorial voices and points of view to evade choice, so as to preserve the cultural multiplicity that he saw was dwindling in nineteenth century America. Irving counters the idea that there needs to be a single narrative for the nation; instead of the great American novel, he gives us a series of sketches that stretch across the Atlantic and across hundreds of years. Irving fights against homogenization of American culture by weaving together fragments of other cultures; he is especially fond of Dutch New York, perhaps because the Dutch were the first European settlers in America and he disdained the anglicization that began after the Revolution.

Geoffrey Crayon and A, the author of the first section of Either/Or, both refer to folklore frequently. Folklore and fairy tales are not authoritative texts; they come from the voices of the common people, coming to us from the indistinct, remote past. No one can identify a precise origin, a single author, in folk tales; rather, they are the result of multiple authors, each changing the myth slightly every time it is told, yet preserving something as well.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard describes the poet as the spirit of remembrance, and this is a very apt description for Irving's Geoffrey Crayon. Part of what makes Rip Van Winkle so comical is that he only slept for twenty years, yet in merely a generation, everything has changed so drastically that it is no longer recognizable; his community is alienated from the past, and as such, the individuals in it are alienated from each other. Rip Van Winkle, however, serves as a gathering point as the spirit of remembrance; he preserves the past that everyone has already forgotten. Rather than leaving a legacy of wealth for his own children, Rip Van Winkle leaves his stories to the community's children; he is not a father in the particular, insular family, but a patriarch of the entire community, initiating the liminal (children and travellers) into the society through his stories.

Authorship requires some distance, then; in order to be a storyteller, Rip Van Winkle abandons his domestic and work duties. He is not a man of business. Victor Eremita's name implies his distance from society as well; eremita is Latin for recluse, hermit. A also writes that he does not spend much time in society. Instead, he swoops down and retrieves pieces of it from time to time, bringing these scraps back to his nest to weave a tapestry of them.

There's a lot more that I'm going to write about this, but I need to do some more research first. I'm really enjoying this paper so far, though!