Suebob's Red Stapler

These guys are my friends. They know I carry snacks in my pocket. I call them “Old Man” (the big dog) and “Killer” (the tiny one, who has a big bark).

My little dog is a social beast, and she makes friends everywhere she goes.

Dogs that used to try and tear Goldie apart through the fences stop and wag at Abbie. She charms them by standing with her head dipped, wagging easily until they crack and become friends.

This includes Max, a giant of a deaf German Shepherd with bad hips, who barks at almost everyone. She also charmed JR, another old guy on my block, who hated Goldie as well.

There are two massive grey pit bulls with cropped ears who have fallen under her spell, standing goofily at the fence, grinning at her cute face.

I have named all the dogs in the neighborhood, though my names tend toward the obvious – there’s a Chesepeake Retriever I call “Brownie” and his neighbor, “Blondie” and a Bichon, “Fluffy.”

The only dogs Abbie hasn’t charmed are the tiny hounds of hell – a whole yard full of snarling Chihuahuas that race to the fence and slam their tiny bodies against the bars, spitting and biting.

For those guys, we cross to the other side of the street.

I decided to pick a random photo (with my eyes closed!) and write about it.

This is El Capitan State Beach, on the Pacific Coast of California just north of Santa Barbara, California, and close to where I spent the first years of my life in Gaviota.

The fog is typical of summer weather there. Yeah, not exactly Baywatch material, is it? But it was the beach, and it was close to home. One summer, we packed up our little travel trailer and went camping there for a few days.

Being summer, we had a friend with a plum tree and the usual overabundance of plums, so we had a big shopping bag of plums, all ripe and sweet and sticky. So, so, good.

Do you know how many really ripe, sticky, sweet plums a hungry five-year-old can eat?

Too many, that’s how many.

Public service announcement: plums are high in fiber.

So now it is impossible for me to think of El Capitan State Beach without thinking of plums and their surprising aftermath.

I always envy those women who carry teeny tiny little purses that look like they hold maybe a folded hankie and a quarter for a phone call.

I call my purse the Mary Poppins bag. It isn’t black, but it holds an endless amount of everything. It must be like the TARDIS – bigger on the inside than on the outside.

I want to be someone who can be a minimalist, but it’s just not me. The real me insists on having a pen and a back-up pen. And a Sharpie just in case I need to label something. A couple of pairs of earplugs in an old prescription pill bottle. A little flashlight. A tin box of various kinds of medications – Advil, Beano, antihistamines, and Tylenol just in case a friend can’t take Advil and needs a pain reliever. A nail file and nail clippers. Probably a little pair of scissors, too. Plus all the usual hair brush, makeup, phone kinds of things.

It goes on and on, and sometimes it’s so annoying, having a purse that weighs as much as some carry-on bags.

It’s not annoying, though, when I can swoop down and save the day. My friend needs a throat lozenge? Why, I believe I have one right here! Hand sanitizer? No problem, my friend, your germs are now dead!

So tell me, which are you? The person with the tiny purse or the wallet with only one credit card, or a Mary Poppins like me? And if you’re Mary Poppins, what’s the weirdest item in your purse? C’mon. You can tell me.

I’m happy to report that the second attempt at training classes for Miss Abbie is going much better than our first.

There are several reasons for this:

1. She’s a little bit older and wiser
2. Her new class is at her favorite place on earth, dog day care
3. She goes to day care, then has class, so she’s nicely tired and can pay attention
4. There is no Horst to tell me that she needs to be yanked around by the neck
5. The new trainer uses positive reinforcement methods, and Abbie really, really loves a snackie

So I’m happy to report that she is a GOOD girl who can SIT and DOWN and WAIT pretty well. Next we’ll work on those things for me.

I actually got to see a little fall this week in Indy! That never happens here!

People were talking online the other day about the worst holiday. Opinions varied, of course, from Valentine’s Day for its sappy manufacturedness to Christmas because OMG does Christmas ever end?

My personal vote would go to Fourth of July. Not only does it mess with the possibility of me getting a hotel room near the beach on my birthday, but the combination of drunks and explosives strikes terror in my heart. 

Someone said “Can’t we just have a Blank Day, with no expectation that we do anything or go anywhere? A real day off.”

“Yes! Yes!” I thought. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to constantly check things off my to-do list, and that list is never-ending. Even on vacation, I’m strategizing about how to pack more into a day.

After this week’s travels, I hit the wall. It was enough to make me take the idea of Blank Day seriously. I went to bed about 10 pm last night and got up close to 8 this morning. Then I let myself have no obligations. I did walk the dog and go to Farmer’s Market, but only because I really wanted to. When I saw Ish on Main Street, I let myself plop down in a chair beside him and yammer on until he had to leave.

Other than that, I have been fotzing around the house all day. I got stuff done, but in a random fashion, starting and stopping whenever I felt like it, not pushing for anything. A friend may stop by later. That’s all I’ve got.

This is my new favorite holiday. Happy Blank Day!

Every morning when I leave the house for the first time, I touch my hamsa (the photo is my hamsa) and say a prayer. It’s my only consistent spiritual practice, and actually, it’s two prayers – first, the Prayer for Protection from Unity:

The light of God surrounds us,

The love of God enfolds us,

The power of God protects us.

Wherever we are, God is,

and all is well.

I follow it with the words of a sage, Pops Staples, from one of his songs:

Thank you, God, for another day.

Help my brother along the way,

and please

bring peace to the neighborhood.

I don’t know why I picked those two prayers. The Prayer for Protection ends every church service at Unity. The Pops Staples song was from a CD of Curt’s that he left when he moved out.

That song caught in my memory as a prayer and stayed, especially that last line, which has been much on my mind lately. This week, three people have been shot in the neighborhood. Two did not survive. Only one was someone I knew a little.

I woke one morning to a brief item on the local newspaper website. It said a man had been shot and seriously wounded two blocks from my house.

I took Abbie on our usual walk route, which goes down that block. She smells everything, of course – she’s a dog. At one point I looked down to see her sniffing a puddle of dark red on the sidewalk and my heart squinched up in my chest. I knew – that’s where it happened. Right there, a man’s blood at my feet.

I was at first angry that someone didn’t clean it up, but then I thought, who would? If someone you knew got shot, who could go out and scrub up their blood as if it was just something dirty to be gotten rid of? Who could do that? So there it was.

That morning, the street suddenly seemed like another country, like a place I had never seen before, though I have walked down the block each day for years. The street sounds seemed quieter, but a weird energy flowed by in a rush. I looked and saw knots of neighbors pulled together in groups, whispering, jaws tight.

The next day I walked down the same street again. It’s Abbie’s path, and I didn’t know what else to do. I heard one of the men on that street saying to another, “They decided to stop life support.” I didn’t find out until the next day that the man who was shot – probably by gang members – was the manager of one of the many recovery homes in that area, and he was a man I had said hello to and who had said hello to me and Abbie.

His name was Zack Lee and he was killed in a gang shooting. That’s easy to shrug off – oh, another gang shooting, as if it isn’t real people involved. But from all reports he wasn’t a gang member – he was 43 years old, and was out running an errand for a friend.

I wonder what he was doing, how it went down – did he know those people? Had they had words before? Did he tell them to stop hanging out in his driveway? How quickly was that line crossed, from them noticing him to deciding to take his life?

Now Abbie and I walk by the sidewalk memorial – first there were dozens of candles, and programs from his memorial, and flowers. The flowers faded and were replaced. A framed photo and a note from his mother came and went.

Someone cleaned the blood off the sidewalk, but the candles spilled red wax, so that spot on the sidewalk will always bear a stain. Maybe that’s good, a marker – someone was killed here, someone who was just alive, someone who didn’t have to die. His name was Zack.

Please bring peace to the neighborhood.