Betrayal in My Youth

When I was very young — maybe just four or five — our dog —my dog, actually — had a litter of puppies. The puppies were adorable and they gave me a lot of joy. Maybe I felt some responsibility for protecting them. I was the oldest of seven kids (well, at this point, just four) and my parents were young and stupid. I probably would’ve benefitted from having gotten more attention than I got, or at least maybe Freud or Jung or Lacan would’ve said so; frankly, I’d agree with any such assessment. I was a sensitive child and I could be pretty passive and hesitant. Maybe all kids are this way.

It must’ve been spring or summer and it was nearing dusk, so we’d been playing outside. Of course, I was obsessed with the puppies, so I was spending a lot of time playing with them. They had a cardboard box in the middle of the garage and they were a few weeks old. They could bounce around:  little fuzzy globs of meat with too much skin, but they were uncoordinated and unaware.

We kept the garage door open so that we could run in and out, grabbing a basketball or taking a break to play with the pups or running inside the house to pee. But it was starting to get dark, so my parents decided that it was time for us to get inside for the evening. My sister stood by the inside and pressed the button on the wall to close the big garage door.

The garage door hung parallel to the ceiling in four wide wooden panels, each hinged to the other. I had put the puppies in the box for the night, and the first wood panel started to slowly descend from the ceiling, with the accompanying loud, low-pitched grind drowning other noise in the atmosphere.

The puppy was bounding toward me in short hops. I was more-or-less in the middle of the driveway, and I yelled to my sister, who was still standing by the button to the garage door: “Hey! Press the button again!”

“What?!” she said, so I repeated myself.

“What?!” She looked confused. Was she confused because she couldn’t make out what I was saying or because she couldn’t figure out why she should re-open the garage door? My sister could be obedient and deferential to my parents, and often treated me as a rival. I was getting frustrated, as I quickly made my way toward the garage. By this point, a couple panels were perpendicular to the ceiling, steadily descending.

“OPEN THE DOOR! THE PUPPY’S RUNNING OUT! HURRY! PRESS THE BUTTON!”

She just stood there, slack-jawed. I was running in fear, and the puppy was obliviously bounding toward the inch-and-a-half thick piece of wood that was sure to obliterate him. I was terrified, and I’d lost sight of my sister, so I couldn’t depend on her. My father was further afield, and I sensed that he’d come from the street or the yard, having recognized some trouble. He was a big, athletic man, but there was no way that he was going to make it the distance to save the day.

I got to the door as it was closing. Times before, I’d managed to prop up the door and keep it from closing, at which point the door would stutter and return to the ceiling. Was I too late? I quickly jammed my leg as far under the door as I could. It wasn’t enough.

My foot got halfway under the door, but didn’t supply sufficient resistance. The puppy was half on one side of the door, half on the other: convulsing, smushed. Moments before, my sister had finally pressed the damn button, but there was lag between the depression of the button and the response of the door, so now the door raised up to reveal the mess that the puppy left behind, wiggling in its last moments.

I was bawling. My father reacted quickly. My sister stood, stunned. I’ve never considered how she must’ve felt, but I was more traumatized by the puppy’s fate than I was angry at her. I’d never dealt with death before, but my father assured me that I wouldn’t have to. He was a salesman and a fast talker; he was good at making people feel good, even if his efforts could be dishonest. The puppy was going to be okay. Daddy was going to take him to the vet, and the vet would take care of the puppy. He was my dad; maybe he could make this happen. Was there life in this puppy? I was in shock, my ruddy cheeks covered in saline.

At the end of our street was a small wooded area. A few days later, my mother told me that dad had buried the dead puppy there.  The bastard.

18 August, 2016 — Espresso House Lund C, Sweden

I left the cafe to go check out the campus. It was one of those universities with fractures of campus strewn about town, but the architecture was old, and the landscape was green, even if the sky was grey. I walked about the Student Union, trying to find someone to talk to about doing grad work in this town, but relevant parties were absent, so I trekked back the couple hundred meters through a mild drizzle to retake my couch.

As I came down the spiral staircase, I saw an older man sitting in my seat, my things neatly displaced. But as I neared the couch, I couldn’t find the book I’d been reading. He peeked up at me, “Oh, are you looking for this?” He’d been taking in my copy of The Almost Nearly Perfect People, a contemporary book about Nordic cultures.

“Oh, yeah; thanks.” My level of irritation was going from naught to something just Nord of mild.

“Sorry about that,” he claimed.

“No, it’s okay,” I replied. His apology quickly dismantled my sudden mood. “Did you enjoy what you read?”

“Very much; yes. Thank you.”

I grabbed for my things before he started, “I’m not taking your place, am I?”

I waved my arm around the room like a game show host presenter, only without the commercially preferred female proportions and slinky dress, as I graciously pointed out, “There are plenty of other couches. Thanks.”

We smiled at each other, as I walked a few feet to the welcomed isolation of the couch on the adjacent wall. As I set my things in their appropriate configuration, I looked back at him and realized that he no longer had anything to read. I walked back. “If you wanna keep reading, I have lots of other books to read.”

“That’s very nice of you,” he replied.

“Yeah, it’s no problem.”

Society tells us that places like Las Vegas, Rio de Jainero, Tokyo, and the savannahs of Africa are the exciting places to go, and maybe that’s right; I don’t disagree. And when people think of where to live, America, Germany, Costa Rica, Australia, and France seem to be relatively hot choices.

The media inform us that Scandinavians are healthier and happier than we are, as they trade in taxes and diversity for dull, communal sensibilities and large, numerous public benefits. I think I’d like to move to boring Scandinavia. There seems to be tension between fostering people’s uniquenesses and creating social cohesion. This troubles me, but in the end, would I rather be healthy and happy or feel free to pursue my most narcissistic proclivities?

I’ll argue that individualism and competition share a close relationship, and in America, people see the evidence of this. Members of society often find society’s ruts, as they get waylaid by a system that asks for exceptional ambition in order to survive and grow. In Scandinavia, homogeneity seems to be the price paid for a smaller number of people slipping through the cracks.

Scandinavia could do better. Some parts of Scandinavia are surprisingly conservative. People really can be a little petty and judgemental, like in so many parochial societies. For all the advancements in things like gender equality, education, and environmentalism, Scandinavians can be victims of their own successes, failing to really push things forward where there are obvious shortcomings.

Still, perfection not standing in the way of the good, maybe better is still better. I hate the cold. Maybe there’s an obscure Norwegian commune in the Mediterranean (I doubt that there is). Life is hard.

I think kindness and altruism go a long way toward making people feel good, just as I appreciate the somewhat presumptuous, albeit sweet and crinkly, literary from the cafe. These things don’t come without costs, but for me, maybe the benefits are worth what’s being given up.

14 August 2016 — Between Slovenia and Germany

Riding the train through the Austrian Alps, reading the book of WWI poetry that Cleo gave me, I’m thinking of “The Sound of Music,” and it’s making me want to cry. I’m not kidding. Maybe I have a disease. I think that the German mother sitting across from me is starting to notice.

She and her husband patiently look after their one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. The daughter’s sleepy and hungry so she whines but only a little. The lady breastfeeds as she explains that the husband used to have a six-pack but that he looks better with a little bit of a belly. It’s all pretty adorable, really. He talks with me about Trump and global capitalism and we agree that the situation’s complicated and unfortunate.

I wouldn’t mind living on the side of one of these mountains. I really like Ljubljana, with its modern infrastructure, ancient architecture, and second-world food prices. It may be the best that former Soviet countries have to offer. These Slovenians go to sleep awfully early, though.

The snow wraps around the tops of the mountains, enveloping their frosty, jagged heads, cutting their tallest points off so that the mountaintops end in wavy, milky frontiers. In Ljubljana, I saw a sickel and hammer painted onto the side of a building, so I guess that the clouds are just keeping the mountains humble. Perhaps Zizek would approve. And so on and so on…

Two Serbias

Just beyond Belgrade,
a cornfield sprawls
from one edge of the horizon to the other.
Highways pass over it,
like anachronistic eggshell ribbons, hanging in the sky.

From the field,
farmers mostly ignore
the strips of serial art passing by,
as rancorous old trains transport Slavs back-and-forth
between the city and the North.

A few kilometers past the cornfield,
between other cornfields and uniform red brick apartments,
with their red clay roofs,
a bronzed, slightly greasy man,
wearing three-day old scruff and an ill-fitting t-shirt,
speaks with an old lady at a fruit stand.
His messy belly jiggles as he laughs,
while she clutches a pristine old Orthodox Bible in one hand
and a cane in the other.

Parts of Belgrade thrive;
ecru facades of modern, functionalist buildings,
with lighted Latin letter signs,
are erected between larger, more functionalist,
rusty, slowly-imploding Soviet relics, adorned by Cyrillic characters.

Outside the city,
Serbs eschew internet for bright yellow flowers
and familiar beers with lifelong friends and family,
as they wait for modernity to remember them.

A More Complete and Content Family

Today, storytellers in Latin America, Africa, former Soviet republics, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and “The West” are writing a redemption story. They’ll write tomorrow, too, because these sisters- and brothers-in-arms share the apparent delusion that the world and its constituents are good, and if only we can shine a light of intentional compassion, or maybe compassionate intention, on complicated agents, then all the world might share a glow of peace and love.

But we’re not picking daisies; no, our songs today are rebel cries. Our hands come together to form fists that punch upwardly, piercing the sky in solidarity with one another and with everyone who’s suffered some injustice.

We had various reasons for joining in this space, but what we shared was the seed of a revolution born of love, for the vulnerable among us, and it’s now grown into a seedling and we’ll feed it until it’s grown into a big, strong tree. This place, this transformative experience, made clear to us that hope is not a thing of preachy artists, Hollywood kitsch, or mere pretentiousness and esoteric ideals. We looked into one another’s eyes and saw the brave vulnerability that allows bold revolutionaries to say that they can spark a fire that consumes and rebuilds our world into a place that provides greater health, happiness, and love to its inhabitants.

We see that we have flaws, and we can imagine a more perfect set of circumstances, but this place brought would-be dreamers and heartened idealists into common and crossing paths so that we were able to see family where distant strangers had stood. And we saw the elements of ignition in one another and our hearts quickened and our eyes widened and our faces smiled at the prospect of spreading the thoughtful, inclusive freedom and justice of which we’d been dreaming.

In a land of so much beauty and such brazen ideas as peace and equity, I built the kind of family that one gets to choose, the kind of family for which I had long ached, and now I know that my family extends to the most remote corners and crevices of the oddly-shapen globe on which we reside. I am your brother, and I know I can yell it with confidence and pride. Thank you all. With love.