I like your snap, Ken, so honest to so many not always pleasant
intersecting realities and agree with Andrew about the fine turn of the end,
>What is wrong with him, I sometimes wonder? He does not thrive on
>anger. He is forgiving. He is not human.
>Love does that.
a real questioning of being,
best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:32:01 -0500
>From: Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: "Power"/too late to be a snap, oh well
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>POWER
>
>Grant this: the love of animals turns us into the audience for Old Yeller
>or So Dear To My Heart,
>and there are no apologies here save to the insulted and the injured.
>
>Chain your intellect to the fencepost and let it bare its teeth at
>sentimentalism. Know you are wearing a neck chain and your teeth will not
>reach.
>
>This is a dog story, but the dog is not shaggy, he combines Rottweiler,
>Shepherd, and jerk,
>which makes him no more or less a mutt than most human beings.
>
>He is the woman's dog, but I have lately adopted him to the heart.
>He is not an Ours because when it comes to this dog there is no Us.
>In the presence of this canine there is no human love because humans can
>use their brains.
>Apologies to Saint Paul, but love is best experienced by the mentally disabled,
>by animals, and by their caretakers.
>
>The dog is not community property but two dogs: he is hers and mine in
>different ways.
>
>The core: to start a weekend, an evening, facing three days of only me and
>him, I struck him across the shoulders with his own leash.
>
>I can justify all day: he did not want to take his needed walk with me, he
>slipped his collar when I tried
>to put it back on him, then clamped those jaws onto my hand.
>
>Although he drew no blood, for he had offered me his version of a warning,
>it hurt like hell, and in a flash I envisioned a weekend of him
>shitting on the living room floor, pissing in the corner, reverting to the
>level of
>an Alzheimer's patient in a nursing home.
>
>No: I envisioned myself as I was, control freak defied by an animal, and I
>had to
>establish my topmost place in a food chain I descended in half a second
>when I hit him, then violated another taboo of human and dog by staring
>into his eyes and telling him in a soft voice not to do that, ever.
>
>I who philosophize disgrace: I can say "you have to show the hound who's
boss,"
>"it was only his shoulders" (solid muscle), "I didn't hit him that hard," and
>"the look on his face was shock and not anger."
>
>Perhaps all true, but at that second I knew we'd both lost, and that is when
>I put my arms around his thick Rottie neck, kissed the thick skull
>beneath which are the invisible portals where the human power of amend
>can penetrate--words, the vocabulary and syntax of sweetness beyond all
else--
>to tell him I love him, pet his back where the leash struck--and he reassumes
>the collar and goes out with me not because I hit him but because I stopped
>and embraced him.
>
>What is wrong with him, I sometimes wonder? He does not thrive on
>anger. He is forgiving. He is not human.
>Love does that.
>
>KW/1-13-05
>
>-------------------------------------------------
>
>
>Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
>
>
>"This is the best of all possible worlds only because it is the only one
>that showed up."-- Russell Edson
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