Makes Me Happy

I'm actually accomplishing the February Photo Challenge, though sometimes that means posting a bunch of photos at once that meet the criteria, rather than one per day. And sometimes that means posting a picture of the moon instead of the sun... Making myself follow through on something is the whole point though, so I guess I'm succeeding.

All three of the kind souls who read this blog have most likely already seen all my photos on Facebook, so I'm not going to post them again here. Some of them are kind of ugly anyway. But today is different. I took this photo of my desk after reading that today's topic was "Makes Me Happy." I immediately looked up an thought to myself, "Why, this Tibetan butter tea makes me happy, I think I'll take a picture of that!" And as I prepared to do so I realized that it was sitting amidst a bunch of other things that also make me sublimely happy...

National Geographic - If you know me at all, you know I love animals and nature and words and pretty pictures, and also that I am a nerd and obsessed with my own idyllic childhood. Therefore National Geographic is one of my favorite things in the entire world. I've subscribed to it since I was perhaps 10, thanks to my encouraging parents, and I look forward to it every month. Even though I can now read it on my iPad as well, there's some sort of magic about that yellow rectangle promising hundreds of beautiful pages within that just can't be replaced.

Butter tea - Have you ever had Tibetan food? Unless you are my neighbor and have tried Cafe Tibet, I'm guessing the answer is no. If you ever have the chance to, however, I recommend the momo and/or sha baklap dumplings, and lots and lots of butter tea. Mmm... There is nothing like this hot, salty, savory drink to get rid of your chills. Apparently in Tibet it's actually made with yak butter, but due to the limited population of yaks in Brooklyn, this is less than authentic... But delicious nonetheless.

Black pen - My mother got me addicted to the Pilot Precise V5 rolling ball pens when I was just a kid. They bleed easily, though, so I've stained many shirts, sheets, purses, and carpets by leaving them uncapped thoughout my life. It's worth the risk though. One day I made the switch from Fine to Extra Fine and never went back. They are the only pens I will ever use, as they facilitate my cursive handwriting rather gracefully...

Postcards - I was trying really hard for the first week of February to mail postcards to friends and family as another kind of challenge, and I did okay for a little while. I've fallen behind, even after I bought some weird Wild West-themed cards, but luckily I just unearthed some beautiful ones I bought in Ireland, so I'm motivated all over again. I also finally decided who is going to receive the postcard of "The Peaceable Kingdom," so that makes me sublimely happy. I had to save it for someone who was a serious animal lover. She will be quite pleased, I think...

My Computer - I got this MacBook for my 21st birthday. It needs some serious work and I worry that its days are numbered. Is it possible to feel affection for a piece of technology? Apparently so. That's all for now, I don't want to jinx it...

Sir Reginald le Crocodile - I found good old Reggie in high school after he was discarded by some uncaring child, took him home with me, and promptly scared the hell out of my cat with his ridiculous squeaking. He has traveled across the country with me on the dashboard of my car and lived with me in many apartments throughout my college years. He's been in Brooklyn ever since and spent the last few years keeping watch from atop my TV, until we cancelled cable and packed it away. Now he hangs out with me every day and helps me write. He's a rather dedicated little reptile...

Photo of Baby - I guess because I grew up an only child, my little dog Baby features more heavily in my memories of childhood than any other creature in the world. I will most likely never get over her loss and I'm certain that no dog will ever come close to replacing her. This photo was taken by my dad just a few days before we had to put her down and in it, you can see my shadow as I stand just outside of the frame. I was never too far from her in her last days. I think she looks rather noble and accepting of her fate, even though it came too soon. I'm glad I could be with her when she left this world.

Photo of Mema's house - Another photo taken by my dad is of my great-grandmother's house. The view from the back was the one we all knew the best, and he must have been standing right near where there used to be a few wooden swings hanging from the limb of a maple tree. It's a view I remember well. Pearl was 99 when she passed away and she left a long legacy of kindness and goodness and beauty and warmth that continues to inspire her family and anyone who knew her. I can never eat an apple pie without comparing it to Mema's... They're just never as good.

Much like all the trinkets on my desk at work, I guess it's the little things in life that make me happy...

Dream Dogs

I had a dream last night about being back in my childhood home, running around with two of my dogs. These animals are now deceased, but playing with Baby and Allblack in my dream was so real at the time, it was like I got to visit with them again. It was wonderful.

I was somewhat conscious that it was a dream, because I remember really appreciating the fact that these dogs were dead, that I was a child again, and that eventually it would have to end but that I should enjoy it for now. I don't really even recall what we were doing, just that Allblack (as usual) was being goofy and neurotic and was terrified of a thunderstorm... And Baby (as usual) was being adorable and sneaky and prancing around like she owned the place.

Baby was just that, my baby. I picked her out of a litter when I was 6. She was a little mutt, half purebred Cocker spaniel, half godknowswhat, but we assumed some sort of terrier mix due to her feisty nature. She was little and yellow and long-haired and floppy-eared with white feet and freckles on her nose. She was adorable and awesome. Totally fearless and terrifically fierce. She was the alpha female 100% of the time and wasn't afraid of other dogs, no matter how much bigger they were than her. I once watched her go after a Great Dane when she was just a puppy. The larger dog was unfazed, but she had set a precedent of domination that she would uphold forever.

My dad used to refer to her as "The Bubs" or "The Bubbers," although her official name from my 6-year-old brain was Baby's Treasure. I'm sorry, it's true. I was a weird kid, but I was lucky enough to have an amazing dog to grow up with. When I was 18, I had to put her to sleep due to a rapidly growing tumor in her stomach. I was holding her when it happened. I felt I owed her that much. She went long before her time and I'm still broken up about it. She was officially my best friend and the dog to which I will compare all other animals for the rest of my life. Yup, Baby was just that cool.

Allblack was a different story altogether, and a sad one at that. He was rescued from a neglectful situation by my dad when I was about 9. He was at the time around 5 years old, we're really not sure. Or maybe a vet told us but I just don't remember. I do remember that he was a painfully skinny, scraggly, shy black Lab with a skin condition, a voracious appetite, and a fear of raised hands. He had essentially been abandoned by his owner, who owned the house next door to my friends but had moved out and left his dog behind. Allback (or Spike, as he was called back then) used to roam their neighborhood looking for food. While he mostly stayed away from us kids, we were scared of him because he was a stray and we didn't know what to make of him. I didn't really pay him much attention.

Then my dad came to pick me up from my friends' house a few times and, having lost his black Lab (the original Allblack) a few years before, took note of the poor creature. One day my dad knelt down, put his hand out, palm facing up, and coaxed the dog to come over to him. He got the story from my friends' mom and decided that he'd take the dog home. We learned that he had spent an entire winter, one of the coldest that Maryland had ever seen, chained up on the back porch. He was only saved because the little old ladies who ran the post office would walk over to bring him table scraps. When we got him to the house, Baby quickly asserted herself as the alpha dog and we gave him some food. I have never seen a dog eat so much, so quickly.

Within a few days, my dad heard the owner was home went down the road to talk to him. As the story goes, he knocked on the door, told the guy he had taken his dog home, the guy got a little defensive until my dad made it clear that he was criminally neglectful and that he did not deserve to own a dog, and finally the guy handed my dad the dog's collar and feigned regret. He apparently said, “I’m really gonna miss him,” to which my dad retorted, “No you’re not.” Spike was officially rechristened Allblack II and he was our dog from then on.

Allblack was a beta dog if there ever was one. Hell, he may have even been an omega. He was totally submissive to Baby, to all other dogs, and to humans. His lack of training in his first few years was evident every time we tried to get him to sit, lie down, stay, etc. He was not dumb, but he was definitely a bit damaged and neurotic to the point of being obnoxious. He was also extremely gentle, so he was one of those dogs that a kid like me, totally comfortable around animals, could never be fearful of again. He never quite got "drop it" through his head and I would have to pry his jaw open with my little hands to retrieve whatever potentially harmful object he had scooped up hoping for a snack.

A few years later we adopted Max, a middle-aged yellow Lab, from some family friends. He too was totally beta and together he and Allblack were generally known as "the big dumb Labs." Oh, they weren’t completely dumb and they were sweet and slobbery and just wanted to be loved. They were also totally neurotic and submissive and couldn't quite get basic commands through their heads, and they were both petrified of thunderstorms. I remember being home alone at some point in high school during a raging storm, and I was sitting on the kitchen floor trying to comfort two huge, drooling, whimpering Labs as they both tried to crawl into my lap. Baby just dozed calmly through the whole thing and kept looking at them with a judgmental glare.

I guess a thunderstorm is what did Allblack in. I was about 16 and he was getting old, with hip dysplasia, cataracts, and the beginnings of deafness. During a bad thunderstorm my mother went outside a few times calling to him, trying to bring him inside since she knew he would be scared, but she couldn't find him. Sadly, he ended up wandering a mile away from our house and was hit by a car. The guy was nice enough to pull over and call the vet, who of course had to put him down. It was not a good way for him to go, sad and scared and alone in a storm. For all his suffering, though, I'm glad my family was able to give him a good home for most of his life. He deserved it.

This post was supposed to be short. It was supposed to be about a brief, fractured, yet sentimental dream. But now I can’t stop thinking about my dogs and how it felt to be running around with them, to touch Baby’s fur one more time, to give Allblack a well-deserved scratch behind the ear. I miss my dogs. Perhaps one day I’ll have one again, but for now I guess I’ll just have to make do with memories.

Things

It's 12:01 a.m. and I should be in bed. Not just IN bed, but asleep. Not reading, but sleeping! I could have just curled up with a book (right now it's Run River by Joan Didion), but noooo. I felt the need to express myself.

I accomplished something on my list from the other week. I sorted through my jewelry! I got rid of a ton of stuff and filled an entire shoebox of things that I never wear and will soon send them off to my dear friend. These are not terrible things. They are things I used to love. Things my mother used to love. Thing I never wore. Things I forgot I had. Things I can't believe I ever bought in the first place. Things I got as gifts so I have an excuse for not liking them so I shouldn't feel bad about getting rid of them. Things I don't like. Things I don't need. Things, things, things. Now I've gotten to the point where I've repeated the word "things" to the point that it sounds weird and has lost its meaning. And I'm not just talking about jewelry now, am I?

I mean STUFF. Whew... For the most part, it's just that I don't have time for all of it... I don't have space for these things... these objects... materials.... I don't have physical, mental, or emotional space. There's only so many things one can be attached to, but how to choose? It's hard, so I don't choose. I cling. I have a difficult time letting go. I'm a hoarder! No I'm not, but I probably could be. I watched a show on animal hoarding tonight and, among other things, it made me want a bunch of tiny kittens and birds and puppies. That's NOT the point of the show. It made me think of my deceased pets and I got sad. Moving on...

When I was cleaning up my dresser and getting rid of stuff and forcing myself to throw away bobby pins rather than save them (but you always need them!) because they were mixed in with clothing tags and those little plastic things that clothing tags are attached with and dirt and other random bits of stuff, I thought of my childhood bedroom. It was always a mess, but it was my glorious mess. Much like my room today, except that I share it with a guy and he probably hates his life. Anyway, at one point in my childhood I decorated my window with CANDY WRAPPERS. This is not a joke. Someone gave me a pack of some sort of delicious, fruit-flavored, European hard candies that came in these magnificent little classic looking wrappers that made me feel like I was picnicking in the Italian countryside or sitting in some little Parisian cafe. So I saved the wrappers in a box and stumbled across them a few years later and finally one day, flattened them all out and taped them down the side of my window in "rainbow order" of course: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. And that's where they stayed until I moved out of there at age 17.

I look on my bookshelf and see books that I have owned for years, books I never really had an interest in reading since I got them as gifts or secondhand, and then one day decided to pick up... and I loved them, so now of course I can't let them go. And still, there are books I have owned for years and I still have no interest in reading. It's just that I hope one day I will. And so I think I keep all of these things for hopeful reasons, thinking that one day this piece of clothing will suddenly come back into style or I will shrink down to fit into it again (they've both been known to happen), that this piece of jewelry I never wore will suddenly seem beautiful (it's also happened), and maybe one day I'll actually light that candle or put flowers in that vase or draw in that sketchbook or put that picture in a goddamn frame. More likely I won't. But the hope is there.

And until that hope dies, as it thankfully did for everything that sits in that shoebox this evening, I will be mired in things. In stuff. In materials. In confusion, mostly... But at least I will always have something to read. Or wear. Or give away... Which is probably the best hope for me at this point. Any takers?

My Library

I just found an interesting little snippet in the New York Times. It cites a study proving that children who grow up in a home with a library have an academic advantage -- a three-year advantage, to be precise. Regardless of the education level of the parents, kids with access to lots of books at home are also more likely to finish college.

My first thought was, DUH. Of course kids who are exposed to literature and information will do better in school! When children are surrounded by the potential for intellectual exploration in their own homes, of course it's going to help them in school. I mean, would I have read Romeo & Juliet in fourth grade had the book not been on my shelf at home? Of course not! And would I have graduated college as an English major had the book not been available? Hmm... Well, most likely. I think nerdiness is just in my DNA.

The point is, this article further justifies my penchant for buying and hoarding books. I have always planned on having a library in my home. I simply can't wait for the day that, from the comfort of a big old armchair, I can gaze around the room and see books lining every wall, sunlight streaming in onto the pages of my current literary obsession. My goal to own every book I've read, and those I haven't read yet, is really just an investment in my children's education, right? Won't it be nice to say, "Go read a book. We have 2,000 of them," when confronted with a bored and bratty kid? And all without having to leave the house...

As much as I love libraries, and even as I start to consider more seriously a Master's of Library Science, I don't use them very often. I just got my first library card from the Brooklyn Public Library after living here for more than two years, but I have only been to the tiny library on Cortelyou Road. I have yet to explore the main building by Prospect Park, which I hear is sprawling and beautiful and I have only ever seen from the windows of a cab. Of course, I still strongly believe in the value of public libraries -- not everyone has the money or space or even the desire to own hundreds (or thousands) of books. Plus, there are plenty of terrible books out there, and who wants to keep those books around the house? So although I recognize the social need for libraries and may quite possibly make a career out of them, I still want a library of my very own...

As a child I used to get lost in libraries and never want to leave, but what I enjoyed even more was buying books -- I wanted to see my books sitting on my shelves, knowing that in the inside front cover I had scratched my name in childlike cursive. Sounds selfish, but I really just wanted to be able to revisit certain beautiful passages and interesting characters on a whim. I absolutely hated to return a book I loved -- it saddened me to drop a book that I had fallen in love with through a slot, knowing I was relegating it back into obscurity on the shelves. The only thing that gave me comfort was thinking of the others who had read that book before and would read it again.

In college I loved to wander through the Fordham library finding the strangest books imaginable. I could sit for hours in the linguistics section, delving deeper into the intricacies of language and mind, desperately trying to find some way of including my newfound text into the essay I was currently ignoring. I became an expert at finding books, and I can't tell you how many times I showed fellow students, often those I was tutoring, the magic of discovering what lay in those seemingly endless stacks and how to find exactly what you were looking for. The search itself was, of course, part of the magic.

Of course, I can't imagine that I would have this strong love for libraries and a strong desire to have my own had I not been surrounded by books as a child. Some of my earliest memories involve my mother reading to me -- apparently I requested Goodnight, Moon so often that she hid it from me for a while since she was so tired of it. While she read to me more often, I always loved it when my father did, because he was the one to give the characters distinct voices, as dads tend to do. We didn't have thousands of books or a terribly organized "library," if you can even call it that, but there were always books in the house for me to leaf through.

I also remember when we got our set of encyclopedias, before they were made obsolete by the Internet. I was so excited to leaf through the heavy, alphabetized texts, bound in forest green with gold lettering -- it seemed like I had all the knowledge in the world at my fingertips, and I would just read and read, mostly about exotic animals or historic women. Speaking of women, I also remember spying a copy of The Second Sex on the shelf, which terrified and intrigued me. Upon picking it up I immediately realized I had no idea what Simone de Beauvoir was talking about and quickly put the book back in its place.

I might buy a lot of books, but my new rule is that I buy only used ones. Therefore, the Strand is now my new best friend. And should I dislike a book so that I find no need to keep it on my shelf, well then, back to the Strand it shall go. I only really buy paperbacks (the more beaten-up, the better) because they're light and easy to carry and cheap, so that I don't feel bad when I dog-ear the pages. The only new books I have decided to buy will be The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which will be leatherbound, goddammit. And someday, I will purchase a comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary, which I will need a magnifying glass to read.

And all those little paper books that I have read and loved and reread and recommended, I will keep forever. They'll stay on the shelves of my apartment, the shelves of my parents' home, in boxes if need be, and someday they will come out and sit permanently on shelves built just for them, and they will be beautifully organized. And I will give my children a three-year advantage on their less well-read peers, and they will never, ever be bored.

Goodnight Moon

I just got home to Brooklyn. I took a surprisingly relaxing, uncrowded, late afternoon train, during which I started and read almost half of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joan Didion -- this book is destined to become one of my favorites, I can already tell. As soon as I got to the city I cabbed it over to Cask for a Book Club meeting, where we somehow got very tipsy on only 2 drinks each. Hmm... Anyway, the next book we're reading is "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," which promises to be just lovely.

Speaking of books, I started to reorganize my bookshelf at my parents' house this morning, and I've vowed to reorganize the one in my apartment as well. I love organizing books... Nonfiction by subject, fiction by author... Beautiful. I also found my old copy of "Goodnight Moon," which will probably always be my favorite book in the whole wide world. Now I'm tired and must go to bed... So...

Goodnight, dish. Goodnight, spoon. Goodnight, cow jumping over the moon.