When we see that word “Family” most of us think of a relatively small number of people. Maybe when you saw it, you thought of your family of origin. Maybe you thought of your family of generation. Maybe you thought of the people who live in your home which may include some of each. When I was a kid, we had “Family Reunions” which included the extended family of my maternal grandmother. It did not extend to my maternal grandfather’s family nor to my dad’s relatives. Typically, there were 30-40 people who showed up. I know of “Family Reunions” which are much larger, involving hundreds of people. Years ago, when I wrote in this blog of “Family Matters” I mentioned a subset of people who attended my “Family Reunions.”
Occasionally, people think of humanity as their family. I have been lucky enough to visit a respectable number of countries (28) and I’ve met people from over a hundred and in every single instance, it’s very easy to see that they are basically like me both physically and mentally.
Like many people, I was brought up in a religious tradition that reinforced the idea that all of us are in this together. Beyond my personal experience, it is just plain fact that human beings share most of their history (4 billion years) before we began diverging slightly a hundred thousand years ago. Beyond that, we are all sharing the planet. While, borders may keep some people out (or more commonly, keeping them in), in the long run, the water, air, and pollution is shared world wide across all “boundaries” of religion, philosophy, or nation.
It may be difficult for some to accept that all humans are part of their extended family.
The truth is that our actual family is far broader and wider than the 8 billion people on the planet today. We share more than half of our “family history” with every single creature and plant on earth today. When you think about vertebrates, for instance, we have similar bodily systems. We mate. We eat food. We eliminate wastes. Even those who live in the water actually breathe air that’s dissolved in the water. We learn. We flee. We are curious. We are aggressive. We solve problems.
The earth is basically covered with living organisms. That is our family. It can be a source of inspiration and comfort if you let it be. And, you can love that family.
Sunshine was one of my reasons for moving to San Diego. It wasn’t the most important, but it was important and I appreciate the Sunshine. For the past week, however, Sunshine took a long-awaited vacation. Apparently, Sunshine was running some sort of scam on the weather forecasters, calling up and saying, “Hi! It’s Sunshine! I’m feeling so much better today! I’ll be at work as usual tomorrow. You can count on it.
And then, when daybreak arrives the next day, it doesn’t. That is to say, when it should arrive, it doesn’t because Sunshine has overslept. Again. I suspect it might be because of all-night partying last night on the other side of the world.
You would think that the weather forecasters would catch on. You might even think that they would have seen the famous “Charlie Brown” cartoon meme in which Charlie Brown’s frienemy Lucy, promises him, year after year, that she will dutifully hold the football and not pull it away—not this time. And, dutifully, year after year, Charlie Brown decides that this will, or at least might be, the year that Lucy finally does the right thing.
But of course, she doesn’t do the right thing. And, Charlie falls flat on his back every time. Lucy smiles.
So apparently, this week, did the Sunshine. Taking vacation elsewhere and not showing more than a stray ray or two in San Diego allowed for the deluge. Other places farther north had it much worse, in terms of rainfall and damage. Worldwide, what we now call extreme weather may, in many places, become more “normal” and extreme weather will become deadlier.
In any case, I am have been just as foolish as the weather forecasters and Charlie Brown. Every day, my phone app has said the rain would be over in a day or two. And, then, two days later…same forecast is dutifully presented. But not the promised reality.
Sadie, meanwhile has been very patient about the fact that our walks have been typically much shorter all week. She has also been patient about not being allowed to dig in the dirt. More accurately, she wasn’t allowed to dig in the mud. There was no “dirt” around. It’s not idle digging. She hears and smells gophers and goes after them. Unsuccessfully. Every time. She’s dug for gophers more than the San Diego weather forecasters trusted Sunshine’s repeated false assurances that tomorrow the rain would end; indeed, even more often than Charlie Brown has over-trusted Lucy.
She persists. She enjoys the process. Maybe the weather forecasters enjoy knowing that they made everyone feel hopeful that could play tennis in a few days (or have a picnic or mow the lawn or harvest their fruit in sunshine). Maybe Charlie Brown enjoys being the kind of person who would give another one more chance to be good, even if they never take that chance than to be more cynical and realistic.
I can’t say what the motivations are for Charlie Brown and the weather forecasters, but I am sure Sadie enjoys the digging. She certainly has little care for how dirty her paws get or whether she spews mud on my shoes. My philosophy may be a mixture of Charlie Brown and the San Diego Cabal of Sun Predictors. I believe Sadie should spend some time “just being a dog.” In other words, she should be in at least partial charge of what she does and be allowed to follow her “instincts” unless it poses a true danger and not just because, say, she tracks mud into the house.
As I was watching Sadie dig, and I was sliding sideways to prevent becoming inundated with wet dirt, it occurred to me that I too, had some years of “just being a dog.” My parents, I think, thought of it as time for my “just being a kid.” In some cases, I heard adults say, “Oh, it’s just boys being boys” when we played in the dirt, fought with sticks, or had “rock wars” wherein we literally threw rocks at each other.
Not all adults were on this plan 100%. My own parents would let me play in the dirt often times, but they did not want me to participate in rock fights or stick duels. Evading those restrictions was trivial. We weren’t trying to be bad. But we knew our friends would not to try to blind us with sticks or stones. We believed implicitly that since we weren’t intentionally trying to blind each other, it wouldn’t happen.
Though there were local variations in the strictness of restrictions, we were always able to do some version of “just being a kid” which truthfully, was not all that different from “just being a dog.”
I had just as little care about muddying my shoes or fingernails as Sadie does about muddying her paws. I’d say my “dog years” were mainly between six and thirteen. Before six, my parents or other caregivers wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to get in real trouble. I mean, I managed all the usual little things like peeing into electrical outlets, throwing stuff down the “registers” (heating vents) to see what would happen, and writing in books and on walls, but there was no opportunity to have rock fights or get muddy from head to foot.
From ages six to thirteen, however, I spent a lot of time outdoors unsupervised. Plenty of time to be a dog. A few years later, however, it dawned on me that girls might find me more attractive if I were less muddy. My mother might have planted that suggestion.
There’s no doubt that many of the “instincts” I had were not very effective guides. They weren’t as effective as the knowledge that science and society had developed over centuries. On balance, I still believe having some dog years is a risk worth taking.
I am alive and well. I haven’t blogged for a while. Here’s why: I’ve been taking a year-long course on novel writing. Yesterday, I sent off my book to the instructor for feedback. To me, writing a full-length novel has been more difficult than writing a Ph.D. dissertation. Writing non-fiction requires research, discipline, organization, and being willing to work hard.
Writing a novel requires all of those but it also requires keeping track of the implications of many little decisions. It is not only a cognitive strain but often an emotional one as well. It’s a never-ending series of choices. Science is often, but not always, a series of choices where there is an agreed upon better answer. Even when there isn’t agreement, there are a much smaller number of choices.
To me, writing non-fiction is like taking a long trip on existing roads. You may certainly face unanticipated difficulties such as construction zones, flat tires and bad weather.
Writing fiction is more like bushwhacking. No-one has ever trod (or will ever trod) your exact path. You may learn something by discovering or following the paths of previous writers. You might, for instance, discover that some writers go over logs that lie across their intended path. Others, may crawl under. Still others might go around the fallen log. Others might choose to back-track until another path is found. What should you do?
It depends.
And, that’s the nature of fiction. It all depends. It depends on what else happens in the book. How you choose to construct and describe one character depends on the others. Even what you name them depends on the other names. What happens in character development interacts with the plot. The plot interacts with the landscape and the mood. The mood depends on the tempo. The tempo, if it’s dialog must be consistent with the character who’s doing the talking.
Our dog Sadie and I have been co-creating and co-evolving games from the days she first came to live with us. Currently, we are playing a variant of “fetch.” Here’s how it works. One of us (most often Sadie) finds a squeaky ball. At some point, I get a squeaky ball from somewhere in the garden and say, “Get up on the deck! I’m going to throw the ball on the deck.”
Now matter where she is when she hears that, she sprints to the deck and awaits my throw. She sprints with spirit! I love to watch her run, not only for her grace and speed but even more so, for the whole-heartedness with which she runs every single time. I throw the ball up and she catches it in the air more than half the time. Even when she misses, she’ll scramble after it and proudly perch on the spot on the deck where I can see that she’s caught the ball. After elaborate and genuine praise, she sprints down the stairs to the lawn near me. Then, she will lie down with the squeaky ball in her mouth. After a time, she’ll move the ball away from her some distance. I walk over casually, as though I am not trying to “steal” the ball from her. When I get close to the ball, he quickly re-grabs it. After she’s had a few “successes” she will start hanging out farther and farther away from the ball. At some point, I’ll grab the ball and announce, “I’ve got it!” At that point, she again sprints up the stairs to go the deck where I will throw the ball up to her.
The part of this scenario that I think is most like writing the fiction is the part where Sadie is judging how far away the ball should be from her buzz-fast jaws. If it’s too close, I won’t even try for it. If it’s too far away, I’ll immediately grab the ball. Similarly, as an author, I want to keep the reader interested. If my writing is too predictable, it might be clear, but it will be uninspiring and dull. The reader will quit before they get to the end of the story. On the other hand, if I write too far from the reader’s expectations, they will quit because they cannot grab the threads of the narrative.
To me, the benefits of co-creating with Sadie (rather than “training her” to play the game in a particular and predetermined way) include that I can learn a lot by observing her. Another benefit is that it keeps both of our minds more flexible and more engaged (just as does good literature). Of course, there are two of us in this exercise and that is also true in the reading of fiction. Every author, including me, will make miscalculations about how far to stray from expectations. But whether you can follow across those miscalculations is not only a measure of my skill as a writer but is also a measure of your skill as a reader.
In the past, I’ve self-published my books on Amazon. These are mostly non-fiction, but one of them is a collection of fictional short stories. This time, I think I will try traditional agent/publishing. I am also thinking of putting together several more books, using the blog posts here as the seeds.
After a year long writing course, the single most important piece of advice I can give is:
“Get a dog.”
Don’t get me wrong. We have six cats and we love them dearly. The cats are smart, and I can certainly empathize with the cats. But their ability to empathize with me is either very limited or, as I suspect is more likely, they really don’t give a damn. On the other hand, Sadie is a pleasure to co-create with because she intuitively “gets” cooperation and collaboration. We accommodate each other and neither of us has any idea how the game will evolve.
By the way, I would feel I would be remiss not to share my secret of Holiday Gift shopping. There are literally millions of possible gifts! It makes choosing nearly impossible. Instead of putting yourself through that agony, simply go to my author page on Amazon and choose which book is most appropriate for which gift recipient. It’s fast, it’s easy, and you’ll have the thanks of at least on person which cannot be said for any other gift idea. And, in many cases, you’ll have two grateful people.
Sadie and I have been playing various games indoors with tennis balls since we were fortunate enough to have her adopt us. Anyway, my philosophy is not to “teach her” games that I make up in my head but to have as close to a truly collaborative process as possible.
Don’t get me wrong. It is fun to train a dog or any other animal. In some cases, it’s life saving; in others, it’s just a major convenience to train them. I’m not against it. And, we certainly continue to try to train her.
But when it comes to playing games, why not enter into a partnership of equals in collaborative invention. I try to be sensitive to her hints about what comes next. And she tries to be sensitive to mine. We’ve come to develop certain conventions around the playing of games. For example, if the ball rolls somewhere inconvenient, I let her try to retrieve it. She objects if I try to retrieve it first. That’s her job. But if she can’t reach it, it’s fine for me to reach it, first with my foot, or if necessary by getting “a tool” as I explain it to her. This is generally a crutch or a back-scratcher.
It turns out that Sadie has a pretty clear preference about the type of ball to play with. The clear winner is the tennis ball. They are all better than any of five other types of ball. The biggest loser ball was the pickle ball which Sadie completely ignores and beneath even the dignity of an eye roll. Anyway, one that she sometimes interacts with is what she named—or possibly, it was me—“The Lighty Ball” because it lights up when it bangs into anything hard enough or anything bangs into it. Generally, I realize that when I kick or throw a “mixed bag” of balls, she pretty much ignores all but the tennis balls.
So, tonight, I was playing with five tennis balls and the lighty ball. She was ignoring the lighty ball but I was kind of ignoring the fact that she was ignoring the lighty ball. I kept re-introducing it into the mix. She kept ignoring it. Fine. This is what it means to have a partnership. Sometimes.
She just wasn’t getting her message across. And, I’m not blaming her. Not at all. But how else can she get her message across?
To understand what she did, we need to take a short detour to the “holding pen.” As you read about someone in the their 70’s playing tennis ball games in the hallways, it might have occurred to you that this is asking for a broken whatchamacallit. But I take the view that “constant vigilance” should be practiced to minimize your overall chances of falling catastrophically or, in this case, dogistropically. Anyway, I do some things to minimize the risk. One is to shuttle the balls into a space between the wall and the bookcase. No-one will trip on them there. I call it the “holding pen.”
So tonight, I was playing this mixed ball game with her and I had to go feed the cats and then I came right back. Guess what? Sadie had put “The Lighty Ball” into the holding pen.
I think the moral of the story is, if a dog is smart enough to find more than one way to communicate, why should so many humans stick to one?
OK, I guess the first thing to admit is that I’m totally in love with our dog, Sadie. So, my perceptions are incredibly biased. But in the account that follows, I will try to separate observation from interpretation in at least once instance.
From Sadie’s first puppy days with us, Sadie and I have played a lot of ball, most often with a tennis ball. (Sadie completely destains Pickle balls, by the way). We have evolved many different games and variations. Perhaps at some future time, I might trace out the ontological tree of indoor and outdoor tennis games, played, at least for the most part, without a racquet by either of us.
For a time, we got in the habit of throwing a ball off the back deck early in the morning. Initially, the game was for Sadie to catch the ball while still in motion. She would begin dashing down the stairs of the deck in order to hit stride on the grass make a sharp right turn into the driveway and catch the ball, if possible, in the air. Eventually, the garden had a baker’s dozen of balls in various places along the edge of the driveway. This led Sadie to invent a new game. (Yes, Sadie. It felt to both Wendy and me that this was her initiative.)
Rather than dashing down the stairs so swiftly she see whatever ball was most recently thrown because it was still moving, she now would wait until the ball was either barely rolling or had already come to a rest. Then, she would dash to the far end of the driveway and determine by smell which ball had just be thrown. Having watched the ball, the human observer on the deck could see which was the most recently thrown ball. Sadie would trot up to a group of balls in roughly the same spot and sniff till she found the correct one and then come racing back with it.
A few weeks ago, our Doggie School teacher brought out a “squeaky ball” — a tennis ball, but one that squeaks. It isn’t as bouncy as a “real” tennis ball, but it has the same shape, weight, texture as a “real” tennis ball—and because neither one of them is manufactured by General Motors, they are both the same shade of the green that everyone else inexplicably calls “yellow.” (I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people are anomalous trichromats without knowing it. This would explain why my judgement is so often at odds with that of others).
Sadie has taken a couple of the “squeaky balls” outside. In the last week, she’s started a new behavior. She digs a hole in the dirt with her squeaky ball beside her; then she rolls the squeaky ball around in the dirt; don’t rinse; repeat; again; again. I found myself thinking she was making it harder to see and grosser. But of course, that’s only from my perspective. What she’s actually doing is making the ball easier to distinguish visually from the others, especially at a distance. More importantly, she’s making the ball more findable by smell alone and she’s making the ball more interesting and more personalized.
A person can train a dog (or other animal) to do amazing things. It takes patience and discipline. I’m not very good at either. But I’m also interested to see what emerges from a cross-species interaction where there is no pre-conceived “right way” or “end goal” that is envisioned and then imposed on the other. Don’t get me wrong. I’m perfectly okay with insisting she do her business outside and that she not eat the cats. But to me, it’s much more interesting to play ball with Sadie and see what emerges rather than “teach” her to play ball “my way.”
When I was a kid, we played “baseball” but it was rare we played on a regulation field and almost unheard of that we played with nine on a side. Typically, there were only somewhere between two and fourteen total. We invented all sorts of work-arounds. Sometimes, a team would have one of their own do the pitching and/or catching for the batting team. Sometimes, we would have to use “imaginary runners.” I get a base hit. The next batter walks. The next batter walks. Now, the bases are loaded! Yay!
The only problem: there are only three people on our team. Solution: The player on second would go to third to take my place and I would go bat. Now, if I got another hit and the real player who started on first made it all the way home, for instance, we could infer that the “imaginary runner” who started on second had made it as well.
We tend to think of the phrase “Play Ball!” As a unitary phrase. But it does have two components. Sometimes, I think it possible that we’ve become so competitive that when the umpire yells: “Play Ball!” We immediately think: Win! Go Team! I’ve got five bucks on this game!” And, in the context of professional baseball where it’s a multi-billion dollar business, that makes some sense. But in the context of kids (regardless of age) with dogs, or kids with kids, maybe we should hear: