Español
July 7, 2024
"The way in which you pay attention changes what you find." - Iain McGlilchrist
by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher
Graduating the University of Connecticut mid-year, a month later, in early February 1979, I was on a Greyhound bus out to the West Coast to explore schools of Naturopathic medicine. Settling on the one in Sonoma, California, with months on my hands before the start of school in September, I split my time, staying with friends, in Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz, a small town where the Redwoods meet the ocean, "where the real hippies are," is a bit more than an hour south of San Francisco. There, up on the scenic hillside campus of the University of California (UCSC, aka, Uncle Charley's Summer Camp), the morning after my impromptu leading of a large, student Passover Seder, I met and fell in puppy love with Dotty Gray. I was 22. She, at 29, was "the older woman."
Dotty had a two-floor apartment in the married student housing, even though she was very separated from her husband and not a student. At the time, I was one of three men in love with her, including her husband, Leslie, and a British chemistry professor named Lawrence.
University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC)
*
When, after our brief relationship, Dotty's obsession changed from political activism to kitschy fashion, her German next-door neighbor, Hermine, (also living in the married student housing without a husband) expressed concern over her mental well-being. Dotty was impossibly, intensely alive, a meteor streaking across the sky, towards, it seemed to Hermane and me, her own destruction.
Dotty and I had a lot of fun. This was my first instance of "crazy in the head; crazy in the bed." Up on that fairyland campus, it was a carefree time, which I later, more soberly, memorialized in one of my more poetic lines, "The foolish certainty of youth that now is all and forever."
Returning late that summer to the East Coast to collect my things before naturopathic school began, I mentioned to my mother that Dotty's cigarettes, French Gauloises, smelled better than hers. The Gauloises are purer tobacco, without all the chemicals of commercial American brands. But my mother brushed aside my testimony, opining, "You're just saying that because she's your squaw."
UCSC
*
A few years ago, here on our alleyway behind the Church of San Antonio, they built a tall house on a narrow lot just in from the corner. Painfully, from my rooftop, I watched it going up. The first two 12-foot storeys were bad enough, but then, on top of those, they added a third, quite extensive, ostensibly a cap for the stairway to the roof, thus blocking a sizable portion of my western vista.
The one happy result of this visual monstrosity was, and still is, that I can no longer hear the vicious, vocal roof dogs atop the house on the corner, except sometimes when I am exiting the alley on my bicycle.
Before this fortunate acoustic screening I was at my wit's end. Other neighbors, directly across Calle 20 de enero from the offending neighbors, with a clear line of sight and sound, called the authorities repeatedly to report the abuse of those animals, including that dogs were dying from neglect up on that roof.
Those poor dogs were brought to mind, again, at first vaguely, last Saturday Market when a man came up to me and, with barely a hello, asked, "How are those dogs doing?" Being a very minor celebrity in town (my unusual author's head-shot photo, below, is very distinctive), I'm used to people I don't recognize saying hello. This time, also, I drew a blank, having no idea to which dogs the man was referring.
UCSC
*
The subject was soon revealed to be roof dogs. After we spoke generally for a while, with him complaining about his situation with the species, my memory jogged (it's always in there somewhere) when the man's wife joined us, and, with a sly grin, mentioned hotdogs soaked in antifreeze.
Then, I recalled the conversation she and I had years ago, before my alley's architectural eye-sore ridded me of the problem, about the ethics of putting those suffering roof dogs out of their misery. (They're up there still, right now, as I write this, unsheltered and unfed, in the pouring rain, crashing thunder and flashing lightning.) A country girl, back on the ranch she used hotdogs marinated in antifreeze as a method to poison the coyotes.
Now, before you city-folk get all moral about it, ask yourself what you would do if marauding coyotes were eating your sheep one-by-one, without even killing them first. Up in Vermont coyotes do the same thing with deer; just drag them down and start chewing through them. It doesn't get much uglier than that.
There in the market, this husband had me repeat, for the benefit of his wife, a little of my home-spun wisdom: "Getting upset that the roof dog has woken you up at three o'clock in the morning does not help you fall back asleep." I went on to also suggest, just as had been the case with Dotty's French cigarettes, that "Your own dog's barking doesn't bother you in the same way."
UCSC
*
This lesson of perspective has recently been reinforced once again in regard to my deteriorating home front. Life in this former monastic sanctuary has been full of annoyances since my landlady returned from the hospital with her new hip, taking up residence here on the first-floor in what had been my office, generously vacated by me in favor of her convalescence.
The landlady's caretaker, T, came in, after an absence of two years, like a shark smelling blood, to secure herself on the deed to inherit the house. A crude, unintelligent woman, a bully, she found out the hard way that she cannot run entirely roughshod over me, because, as the major source of the landlady's income, things get untenable for the old lady when I withhold my rent.
The worst of it (worse than T's cutting off my hot water and contaminating my cold) has been having T and her henpecked, bumbling, but otherwise likeable boyfriend, parading through the patio, right outside my windows, on their way to and from the second-floor, the landlady's former abode, where they have taken up residence. And the worst of the worst is that their parading includes calling out to each other, amplifying their already loud voices to a yell, day and night, outside to inside, from one floor to another. With all of this happening at very close quarters, sometimes I feel as though I am living under a bridge. This place has gone ghetto.
I won't bore you with a fuller account of my trials and tribulations (the senseless destruction of my garden plants, the music left playing too loudly when no one is home, their lovers' quarrels...), but those and the subject of July's rent - T wanting almost twice as much as what I was paying before my landlady broke her hip - finally made it obvious that I had to find a new place to live.
UCSC
*
As Sherlock Holmes activated his "irregulars," street urchins, who kept their eyes open to help him on difficult cases, I called my network into action, messaging my list of contacts.
One woman, a business-owner, has an apartment available: a lovely, quiet, modern place, here in San Antonio that she is willing to rent to me for a combination of money and publicity in Lokkal. One terribly interesting man, a close friend, has offered to let me live rent-free in his spacious house.
With my new resolve, the power of perspective, as in Dotty's cigarettes or your own dog barking, has proven itself again. Now, with my escape all planned, T and her boyfriend's antics around the place just don't bother me anymore. Now that I've given up, I find the situation almost comic. The psychic space is cleaner. Even the pathetic whining and whimpering of the boyfriend's poorly-fed dog, trapped up on the third floor, only partially sheltered during thunderstorms doesn't devastate me the same way that it did before. (Still, if I could get through the gratuitously-locked, second-floor door, I would go up and give the poor creature the old cat food I've been saving.)
UCSC
*
All of this calls to mind, as more and more does, my father, and a story he taught me quite early on:
