How to Read While Walking the Dog

When I try to describe this blog, I tell people first that it’s not self-help—I don’t want them to think that I can actually help them, like send them to some agency and their troubles will be assuaged. 

But here’s some self-help I can’t resist sharing. 

Late last spring I realized that I would be much more patient with the sniffing of Lulu, my basenji, on our walks if I read while she sniffed. For years I had spent her sniffing in an effort to be aware of my surroundings, but we take two or three walks a day, including a mile-long walk, and I needed something new. 

Footnote: Lulu and I do take walks in the woods—we’re regulars on the Columbia Land Conservancy circuit—and special walks, in the cemetery, for instance, so I can read the gravestones while she sniffs. Upon our arrival in Hudson we tried to explore the city on foot, but we discovered that each block is home to at least one Enemy Dog defending its turf in a way that made me nervous. Lulu has a Napoleon complex, and it’s up to me to keep her safe. 

I would love to walk down Warren Street looking in the shop windows and talking to people while Lulu sniffed, but Warren Street, with its noise and its people to talk to, makes Lulu nervous. Most days, then, we take our long walk on Union Street, with its occasional lawns, lots of hedges, and piles of leaves that may hide dead things. 

On Union Street one afternoon for the one-thousandth time, I was trying to make myself aware of the light and the sounds of the day and the season, while really what I wanted was to speed walk down to the river, but I left my job to take care of this dog, so some compromise was needed here, not texting or talking on my cell phone, but a compromise that worked for me. 

A book. 

I needed a book, a small book with a strong story line that I could read a paragraph at a time. I’m not talking about reading while actually walking, that’s too silly, but my reading during her sniffing. And no, I don’t need an iPod. This past Thanksgiving, as Lulu and I walked, the silence of Union Street suggested rest, a city momentarily at peace. On this mild day windows were open and I heard a child’s voice, and later, snatches of Spanish, and on the way home, a speakerphone conversation in the lilt of the islands. I know you wouldn’t want me to give that up.

Enter Stephen King. When I retired last fall D. kindly gave me How Fiction Works by James Wood and On Writing by Stephen King. Wood doesn’t allow for keeping half an eye on the dog, who has inserted her snout up to her eyes into some vegetative matter, but I figured King would write a narrative, whatever his subject. His book was a thick mass-market paperback, promising hours of happy dog walks. 

Now when I think back to last summer, with the searing heat that led Lulu and me to walk our mile early in the morning, I flash back to the street in a waking city. The Meyers Contracting crew is assembling as Lulu sniffs and I read the generous, wise, witty advice of Stephen King. I read the book from the first page to the last, no skipping around. I didn’t think I would care about his early life, but I did. His few examples from his own books still underwhelmed me, but the guy does know how to inspire. I wish I had read his book-writing process years ago; I’ve been doing it all wrong. But it’s not too late to change. 

Then summer was waning and I had finished On Writing. I had to move on. Wolf Whistle worked—a wild novel by Lewis Nordan centered around the death of Emmett Till. I had meant to read it for years—had packed and unpacked it twice as I moved. Now Lulu gave me the time. Lately, I keep up on my issues of One Story, a literary magazine that sends out one short story at a time. Good stories, well told, and at 5 x 7 inches, the perfect size for dog walking.

That’s it—that’s my advice for today. Enrich your life while walking your dog!

*Verse: Rupert Brooke.
  Image: Nancie Dunn, nanciedunncards.com

On Retirement I

A year ago I retired from the Publications Office at Bard College. C, a retired teacher, says she dislikes the word, with its dictionary definition of withdraw, retreat, recede, and I know what she means; my retiree friends and I have, rather, transitioned into a new life, one we looked forward to and planned for, a life at least as busy as the previous one. 

By using retire I am trying to face up to the word, as I tried to face up to the word widow. I guess I could say I left Bard College, but that’s vague, did I drive away or stick out my thumb? Or that I quit Bard, or resigned, but to me those words imply at least a huff, if not anger. I wasn’t angry, even though the punch line of my retirement was: 

If you ask me to choose between my job and my dog, I’m going to choose the dog. 

Obviously, not everyone has that option; I was, and am, extremely fortunate. 

Lulu Salarygirl

For years I was encouraged to bring the dog to work; then the college policy changed and dogs were forbidden on campus.  Bringing Lulu to work had allowed me to keep her. If, when Dan died, I had been employed almost anywhere else in the world, where you couldn’t bring your dog to work, I would have found her another home. Basenjis need a lot of exercise, and Lulu was particularly lively puppyhead. 

Lulu was helpful at the office, carrying my mittens 

Now it was too late for that. We were sidekicks. Banned from the office, she howled when I left in the morning. We managed that summer with a loyal midday dog sitter and long evening walks, but I couldn’t face coming home every night through the long dark winter to a wired dog.

That is, I had been planning to retire from Bard in June 2011 in any case, so I crunched the numbers yet again to see if I could bow out early. I typed up a list of my assets, which barely filled one page, and walked down the street to the office of my financial adviser (see "A New List," November 4, 2011). 

Again, R’s consideration of my financial status was practical and to the point. He looked at the one sheet of paper and said, OK, you can do it, with neither wild enthusiasm nor dark despair. What about the annuity TIAA-CREF was pitching? I asked. Should I do that? He looked at the ceiling for about four seconds and then said, No, don’t bother, you don’t have enough. With nothing more to discuss, we shook hands and I skipped home.

I have a friend who assesses her life annually, on New Year's Day. She and other friends consider each move carefully, as Dan did, basing it on hours of research. More often I make a decision based on gut feeling and then run with it, hurtling along without a lot of time to think. I’m going to try to develop here, before your eyes, and review and assess the last year.

Preparing for retirement, I made two lists, Concepts and Niggling Matters. I’ll start with Concepts:

Write. I do write more. I should write even more, and so I resolve, but even when I lived on nothing years ago, and wrote for three hours a day, I never felt like I had done enough. Still, I have a novel started . . .

Read books. This meant “don’t get so bogged down with newspapers and magazines,” read books. I am doing that, at the expense of magazines, and, less so, newspapers. Time is finite, I’m healthy, the chores are all mine. In fact, I came up with a way to read while I walk Lulu; more on that later. 

There are three more concepts—freelance editing, Literacy Connections, and yard work—but I’ll close this post here. I don’t ask you to read more than 700 words at a time, and I have a lot more to say.

Images: Ta-Da !!!! by Mary Engelbreit, maryengelbreit.com
             Lulu Salarygirl by Jamie Ficker

A New List?

“I like your blog,” said A, “even though I never comment on it. If I were to make a list,” she added, it would be ‘10 Dumb Things I Have Done since My Husband Died,’” and then, generously, “you can have that idea.” 

I love this idea as a follow-up to 10 Scary Things I Have Done since My Husband died (see various posts, starting with January 14, 2011). Perhaps this list could be more interactive, since it’s not one I’ve been keeping, and A didn’t give me any specific items. 

To start I’ll say that so far, I’ve been fortunate: my Dumb Things have been relatively minor, or at least not life-altering. This is because I have received extremely good advice. Twice this advice has come from Dan, shouting down from heaven, mostly about real estate, as in:

Are you crazy?! You can’t afford to take three loans! 

This while I was on the phone with a mortgage broker who was pitching three loans so that I could buy a new home before selling the one I lived in. Dan doubtless saved me from some foreclosure debacle.

And again, a few months later while I was looking at houses, I could hear Dan: DON’T buy a house if the one next door is a wreck and the one across the street is falling down! I could have paid cash for the house with those views, but I didn’t, instead taking a small mortgage for a house surrounded by sturdy homes and wonderful neighbors. Today, the wreck house looks much better and the falling-down one is closer to the ground. 

I’ll start the list. Really, we don’t have to keep it to ten, if we find a hundred dumb things, so it goes. 

Stopped reading the mail from TIAA-CREF because it makes me too nervous. Because I didn’t open the TIAA-CREF mail for months, I missed a payment check of several hundred dollars. By the time I remembered it, more than 90 days had passed, so I had to call TIAA-CREF and ask that it be reissued. I know they have my age on their computers, and the stripling who took my call probably thought, boy, she’s slipping fast.

Real estate and money—probably the best opportunities for dumb moves. I’m fortunate to have been well advised about money, too. It started when an officemate said, Are you trying to do that all by yourself? as I sought to untangle some financial matter with unproductive phone calls. You need a financial adviser, she said. 

So I e-mailed the wealthiest person I knew who would answer my e-mail and asked her for a recommendation. She replied promptly with two names. One of them was even wealthier than she, a self-made man whose wife went to my church. 

I can tell you everything I know in an hour, he said, which seemed reasonable. In fact, he needed only 45 minutes to reorganize entirely my minuscule estate, for which service he charged me a pittance (friend, wife, church). I went off to start saving, really saving, money, real money, toward my retirement. 

Now I would never make an important money move without consulting him first. When I wanted to retire early and he said you can’t, you don’t have enough, I sucked up my tears and found ways to save more. When I went back to him two years later we both had survived the crash and he said OK, OK, you have enough (he loves his work, doesn’t understand why anyone wants to retire), and only then did I go ahead.

But, enough about me. Got any dumb moves you want to share? Ideally, put them in the Comments. below, and we’ll take it from there, but if you’d rather send me an e-mail, then do that. 

Vanity Plates

Once, I said the words vanity plates to Dan. Probably I was cooking up some scheme to promote my first novel, Sisters, for which I made a part-time living out of movie options for five years, and I was thinking how classy that single word would look at the bow and stern of our tiny Honda. 

We don’t have vanity plates, Dan replied, gently but firmly. In my mind’s ear I can still hear his slight emphasis on we. He was so sure about this that I didn’t argue. A quiet, private man, he had, 99 percent of the time, impeccable taste (I did save him from one terrible plaid suit), while I am this sort of messy, overextended person who will risk making a fool of herself. As a book editor, Dan was always involved in marketing, but my novel had sex scenes and a character that was based on him; the local library had a copy, probably that was enough. Get a business card, take an ad, but we don’t advertise ourselves all over town; maybe we don’t want all our neighbors in Hollowville NY to read the book. 

If my second novel had sold, I might have tried again—Carolina would have looked so cool on the plates—but it didn’t, so I didn’t. 

But this year, last month, I could not resist. I have no Dan to keep me in line on good taste, to say no, you’ll hate those T-shirts when you get them home, or, that music is awful, you’ll give the CD away two days after you buy it. 

And I wanted plates with my blog address. 

I thought about it for months.

It was probably tacky . . . it would look so cute. 

Because of New York’s eight-unit limitation, the address would lack one letter . . . I’d get a business card with the address, give it out to anyone who asked.

I might regret it . . . so I’d change it again. 

And then one late-August day, I was walking up Warren Street in Hudson, our county seat in Columbia County, and there was the DMV office. Imagine it shimmering on the corner. I walked in. I would just ask about a vanity plate, just get the price. I wasn’t driving, so I didn’t have my license plate number, which I could never remember. 

The woman at the information desk was absolutely going to sell me vanity plates. With my driver’s license she easily found my car registration on her computer. The plates would cost $60, less than I had imagined. The woman at the information desk was a widow. I wrote out the blog address for her to take home. I needed this plate, those business cards. I had enough money in my checking account, and there was no line.

The plate didn’t go through automatically. Up in Albany, some computer questioned my taste. A telephone call was required. Dan would not approve, said the computer. But . . . but . . . I mean no harm . . . there’s nothing salacious about this . . . he doesn’t have to drive the car . . . he’s safe in heaven . . . the computer relented.

Then I waited, checking the mail eagerly for “four to six weeks.” Actually putting on the plates was another adventure, and yes, I was out there in the garage with what I dreaded most, the new plate on the back of the car and the old plate stuck onto the front. Chances were pretty good that I could drive the one mile in town to the shop where I get the oil changed without being arrested and there be a source of amusement before I paid someone to change the plate. I kept working with the WD-40, putting my whole weight against the screwdriver, and finally I did it. 

I have vanity plates. I put them on myself.

People smile at my car.   

Generations

I’m sitting with two friends in the “community room” of the new library, waiting for the program to begin. It’s a pleasant room, exciting even, with the feel of a small, well-designed airport; a wall of windows lets in a spring sky mottled with drifting clouds, promising in its own way. 

And I realize, sitting on a plastic chair, waiting for our flight of imagination, that among us, I’m the oldest generation of widow. D is inching up on two years, while A’s loss is still fresh; D has brought A here to distract her, and when I greet A with a hug, her face crumples. She’s not a sentimental woman, and her pain is a good lesson for me; I’d forgotten how raw it could be. 

Some time ago, at a dinner, I sat next to a woman who did financial planning. Since the world is full of widows who need financial planning, she had many of this kind of client. She said she had noticed that after two years, a change has taken place. The active grieving seems mostly complete, the widow more ready to face whatever her new life might hold. Had that happened to me also, she asked kindly, and I said yes, it was a fair assessment. 

I mean, I didn’t wake up two years later on August 29 and say, well, time to move on! Depending on the day, I may still think of Dan a dozen times, but that’s down from a hundred. A month before the first anniversary of his death I flew out west to visit friends (see Scary Thing #7). That fall I went to Italy, a trip I had wanted to make all of my adult life. When I got home, I started the kitchen remodeling, a project Dan and I had been mulling when he fell ill. 

I still didn’t read obituaries, too aware of the pain that each death had caused each family. An ancient parent lost, a spouse or brother caught in midlife . . . a child, an infant . . . I turned away. 

And newspaper horoscopes  . . . forget it. For years I had checked them out, for Dan and me both, just in case they held any clue. But they had known even less than I did. 

Eventually, I started the obituaries again; I had always read them for their stories. Today I’ve even forgiven horoscopes; they aren’t meant for the dying, I guess, and “love is in the stars” can be interpreted a lot of ways.

Looking back, I am mildly amazed at how many I preceded as a widow, in a few years. Larry lived longer than Dan, but not much. I never expected John to die so soon after Dan. Ed dropped dead. Then there was D’s Michael and A’s Grant.

Helen died too, leaving Wayne, and Jim lost Anna before he died. 

But that’s it. Two widowers to . . . 

I meet three friends for dinner at a restaurant. P. is divorced, and she looks at the three of us, and says, “You’re all widows!”

We range in age from late 50s to mid 80s. We are legion. 

When you don’t have children, you never know how old you are. So I have no context in time except to see myself as, not the leader, but the forerunner of this little band of survivors.

And I’m not even that. “Really enjoy your blogs,” DB wrote recently, “and relate to them—even 23 years after the fact—it never really leaves you.” 

August 28

Today marks the arrival of Hurricane Irene, or its remnants, in Upstate New York. It is also the anniversary of Dan’s death. I like to think that he enjoys the cosmic irony of this. 

I wrote Dan's obituary. Since I had had no control of anything for three months, I took control of his obituary. Here is most of what I wrote for the newspapers: 

The cause of death was primary central nervous system lymphoma, with which he had been diagnosed in June. 

 . . . graduated from Saint John’s in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and attended Columbia University on a full academic scholarship . . . 

. . . worked from home as a freelance book editor, specializing first in U.S. history and more recently in textbooks for emergency medical technician trainees  . . . also the “quizmaster” for “Time Classroom,” a publication of Time, Inc. . . . chaired the Zoning Board of Appeals for the Town of Claverack and served on the board of directors of the Rip Van Wrinkle Basenji Club. 

Among his many interests were running, hiking and boating. With Michael Makynen, a friend from his Saint John’s days, he canoed the entire length of the Connecticut River, from the Atlantic Ocean to Canada, over the course of two years, in weekend trips. 

. . . also a superb avocational chef, who studied with Virginia Lee, Diana Kennedy and David Lawson . . . enjoyed the arts, particularly music and dance, and was an avid filmgoer who could remember details of movies he had seen years before. Until the onset of his illness, he did the New York Times crossword puzzle daily, in ink, in 10 minutes. 

In addition to his mother and sister . . . survived by Debby Mayer, their two basenjis, Cooper and Lulu . . . and many friends who sustained him and Ms. Mayer during his illness.

Mr. Zinkus was a generous donor to several local nonprofit organizations; those who wish to remember him are asked to make a donation to a charity of their choice. 

What I e-mailed to friends was this:

He’s raising a glass with Walter . . . 

He’s reading poetry with Linda . . . 

He’s cooking and arguing politics with Joani . . . 

He’s running with Bambi . . . neither of them falters, neither of them falls. 

The Little White House by the Side of the Road

OK, I’ve not been swamped with requests, but there have been a few, along the lines of what L. said, that as a non-dog person, she would have liked to see a photo of the house that I moved from in the last post, rather than yet another photo of the dog. 

Somewhere amongst my papers I have a small photo of the little white house by the side of the road when Dan and I bought it, but I can’t seem to find it, and this blog is about moving on, isn’t it, not about rummaging around looking for old photos. 

So here’s what I offer for the house I moved from in Scary Thing #1. I took this photo as a record of the yard renovation I was having done, adding gardens to the front in an effort not to mow so much (joke on me, gardens take much more time than mowing lawn). At the left is part of the attached garage, an amenity I now lack. The white building that can be partly seen through the trees on the right is the home of my neighbor who bow-hunted (still does, I assume) (see last post). 

The front part of the house was originally the one-room schoolhouse until the districts were consolidated in the 1960s. Only one family had owned it before us, and they had added onto it, including the half-story upstairs. As I said in the last post, we redid practically every inch of this house and the outdoors too, but we could never figure out how to get that @#* eagle off the front, which the sellers had bequeathed to us, so we just left it there. 

At Christmas I took to wrapping the little front porch in chili pepper lights—never mind. Here it is, what is no longer mine. 

Scary Thing #1

In which I finally arrive at the scariest thing I have done since Dan died. Numbers 10 to 2 are in earlier posts.

Sold our house. 

Despite all its implications of dismissal and rejection (don’t need you anymore!), despite all the smart financial reasons for staying (I paid off the mortgage and then put that amount into my retirement fund every month), I moved on. 

I didn’t expect to. I loved our house. Dan and I had replaced everything, from top (roof) to bottom (septic tank). We had recreated the bathroom, enlarged windows, added a screened porch and deck. By myself, I had the kitchen remodeled. The house stood “finished,” needing only the continual maintenance every house requires. 

I loved our pretty, quiet road that didn’t go anywhere. I knew the neighbors, and if they were odd, or imperfect, so are we all, and their presence still provided assurance. 

In the field beyond our fence were two posts where our basenjis were buried. On the posts were engraved oval plaques, one commemorating Bambi (“Huntress, Gourmand, Wit”), and one Cooper (“Dignity . . . Always Dignity”). I had mixed a little of Dan’s ashes with Cooper’s, and I hadn’t thought I could leave those graves. But by now the physical remains had blended with the earth, and I could take the plaques with me, tokens of their spirits.

So long, country life . . . 

Because the house, its gardens and field, its three acres of woods, were all in the wrong place. Once, I was pleased that Lulu (the remaining basenji) and I could take a two-mile walk without seeing a soul, not even in a passing car. But with Dan gone I grew tired of driving for every single thing I had to do, and I yearned for more human contact. Visiting Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, by myself one August, I walked each night after dinner for an hour or more, on sidewalks, under gentle streetlight. On the second night I saw several of the same people. We recognized each other in the dark with a “good evening!”  and I thought, that’s what I want. To say hello, to pass the time of day.

One night that October I let Lulu out into the yard. She raced around the fenced perimeter, disturbed by something, and wouldn’t come back into the house, so I joined her outdoors. By the light of the harvest moon I could see that my neighbor, who bow-hunted, had got a deer and hung it from a tree limb in his backyard. He stood silhouetted next to the vertical deer, so I waved. 

“Good work!” I called. 

“Yup!” he said. “Got one.” 

“Lulu tipped me off!”  

He chuckled. “Yeah, them dogs, they know.” 

And I felt a pang of fear. We had moved here, Dan and I, in part because we wanted to live in a place where everyone wasn’t exactly like us. Where I now wanted to live, I wouldn’t have even one compost pile, and I would never have that conversation. 

 . . . Hello, city digs!

Was I making a mistake to yearn for a world of sidewalks and streetlights? It was very scary. But that’s the American way, isn’t it: you light out for the territories, and then years later, Mama wants a house in town—a sign, as the poet Frank O’Hara wrote, “that people do not totally regret life.”*

That same October, I dreamed about Dan. We were inside our house, preparing to leave. As we moved to the door, he said, “I’m glad I was here.”

I was glad to be there too. But now I wanted a place where my walks with Lulu weren’t filled with memories so much as new sights. My solo exploration skills were honed. Accustomed to the branch I had found myself perched upon, I was ready to move off it, onto a higher one.

*“Meditations in an Emergency”

July 11, 2011

Today would have been Dan’s 65th birthday. 

I don’t think he would have been happy about it. Looking back, he wasn’t at ease with our aging. For me, growing old is inevitable, so I try not to worry about it. 

And all things being equal, I bet Dan would have looked the same at 65 as he did at, say, 55. He would still be running, still be taking the dog for a long walk. On the same day. 

He would have a smartphone, and he would love it. His Skype would work. He would have drawn the line at a Kindle, however, and I can’t believe he’d pay to text-message.

As for this blog, he was a private person who was accustomed to my writing about him. He was tuned into marketing; he might have thought of ways I could try to get more readers.

7-11. It has a good ring to it, and it’s supposed to be lucky.

Happy Birthday, Sweetie.

On memory

An e-mail from D: It is common not to remember things, she writes. For months, all I could remember of M was his illness, and that may be why I didn't want to write about it. Now I can remember other, much nicer things, like certain cute facial expressions.

Unlike D, I found it necessary to write about Dan’s illness. I took my good auditory and visual memory and wrote down everything that had happened to us. I recalled kind, helpful medical staff, and strange, uncaring things other hospital staff said to us. I remembered times when friends had saved me, times when other friends had broken my heart. That way, I didn't have to keep remembering it. It would be there, if I ever needed it, but I could stop thinking about it.

And then it was May, nine months after Dan’s death, and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts was opening at Bard College, where I worked. We staff members were comp’d with tickets to a couple of performances, and my friend M went with me to a concert. 

Sitting in the larger of two theaters, waiting for the concert to begin, I found myself thinking of how pleased Dan would have been with this place, and how fascinated. M and I were content to sit and look around us at this new theater, to watch people coming in, finding their seats, greeting one another. Dan would have been skittering up and down the stairs, checking out each balcony level for future reference. He might have tried the elevator once, but otherwise he would have walked, long strides that took him to every available corner. 

Then he would have reported on it all to me, and the “old” Dan would have been excited at what this new venue offered. The later Dan, the one whose brain was being attacked, “like a defenseless monastery on the shore,”* would have found something wrong with it, as he did with me, with everything, in the few months before his illness became visible, and he lost speech. 

But I wasn’t remembering that. I was back with the real Dan, the one who was interested in everything. Dan would have loved this place, I said to M, and she looked sad. No, I said, it’s OK, it’s a happy memory. 

I had changed right there, that night. I could once again remember happiness. 

*”Picnic, Lightning,” by Billy Collins.