Astringency

British writer Elizabeth Goudge published her novel, Pilgrim’s Inn, in 1948. It details the struggles of an English family to move from London to a country inn soon after World War II. The plot is at once nostalgic and forward-looking at a time when pre-war certainties have been obliterated by the conflict that decimated Europe. Seen from the early days of the twenty-first century, readers may be tempted to pity the naiveté of the characters struggling to come to terms with their spiritual, emotional, and physical exhaustion by placing their hope in the future while anchoring it to the past. But those readers would be naive to do so.

A central motif of the novel centers around a medicinal herb: Rue is bitter, with astringent qualities. According to Goudge, it has the folk name “Herb o’ Grace o’ Sundays.” Not coincidentally, that is also the inn’s name: the Herb of Grace.

Living at the Inn means different things to the novel’s various characters. For Nadine, a beautiful woman, coming to the Inn means discarding her previous life and the double-mindedness that finds her married to one man and in love with another.

“I’m happy,” said Margaret. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” said Nadine, pouring out her coffee.

“What is it that you haven’t got, Nadine?” asked Margaret bluntly.

“Some saving grace,” said Nadine. “Something that you have and I have not. Some sort of astringency. I don’t know what it is.” … An astringent grace. Not one of the flowing graces. Astringent, like an herb. Herb of Grace….

The common definition of the verb, “rue,” is “bitter regret” as in, “he will rue the day;” but before the word meant bitterness, it mean repentance.

I am struck by the astringent quality of repentance. After one deals with the shame of sin and–by the help of the Holy Spirit–screws up the courage actually to repent and not just hide from the consequences of one’s actions or inactions, then the astringency of repentance kicks in. Repentance is a grace, but often a bitter one, for while its astringency can cause our sins to shrivel, it must also tighten our resolve and our determination to live a life of penitence:

Without a word he went away and left her. She groped her way to the armchair and sat down. It was done. She had denied. It was over…. No, it wasn’t…. That was where she had gone wrong before. There was never a last step, but only one more step. Nothing is ever over; it is all a continuing process. Lying back in her armchair she shut her eyes and made her submission to the process; it seemed somehow a personal submission to a personal power, a reorientation of herself…. Yes, she said…. Well, what next? She had denied…. Now she had to learn to laugh.

Tightness. Tension. Even temptation. They never go away. Repentance is frequently a bitter choice: uncomfortable, unpleasant, even painful. It is hard for me to understand, even after all these years and so many Lents, that choosing the harder path, the astringent path, will lead to joy. I have dodged it so many times before. Yet I intend this time and this Lent to make a better, more astringent beginning.

Murphy Gets Busy

Several years ago, my wife, Julie, and I adopted a Kees from Peak to Peak Keeshond Rescue in Colorado. Originally, she had been a “Christmas present” purchased at a pet store in a Denver mall who’d got her from an Oklahoma puppy mill. That original home didn’t last long. Then she was sold to another family where she lasted less than a year. When we first inquired about her from the rescue website, she had been in a foster home for as long as she’d been anywhere else.

We were her fourth family. Her presenting issues were that she was “stubborn” and had “failed to bond” with any of her previous families. The woman who turned her into rescue had “thrown” her at the foster mom and had walked away without even saying goodbye. Having had a Kees mix before, my wife and I assumed that her earlier families had been treating her like a Labrador Retriever, which just doesn’t work for the breed. Either that, or they were all on drugs.

When we adopted her, she was nervous and afraid. She didn’t really know what was expected of her. Her nature was to love and be loved and (truth be told) to take over the home and manage it for her convenience and comfort. We cut her a lot of slack.

Our friends told us that we were “spoiling” her and that she would take over the household. We thought to ourselves, “What’s the downside to that?”

We’ve had Murphy for almost five years now, and she brings us more joy than just about anything—including our college-age son—and she doesn’t’ cost nearly as much as he does.

Her most recent escapades involve our garden. For years now, she has set herself the task of keeping the yard Safe From Squirrels. It’s gotten to the point where we only have to whisper the word “squirrel” and she’s off to Save Us From Cute Vermin. More recently, she has been trying to eradicate mice from a retaining wall in our back yard, and therein lies a tale.

In the winter, we feed birds. The feeder in our back yard/garden is one of those tube affairs with several perches for small little neat birds; only problem is, not all our birds are either small or neat. A significant percentage of them fly onto the feeder and rip huge batches of seed out that falls on the ground where ground-feeding birds enjoy the bounty. There is even a flicker who’s been around for years that has come close to pulling the feeder off the pole. We call him “the chicken.”

Anyway, with all that seed on the ground, it’s not surprising that the mouse living in the wall on the other side of the path discovered the bounty. He’s been scurrying across the flagstones to the area under the feeder to feast for weeks now. When the weather was warmer, Murphy first discovered him sitting on the retaining wall and looking into the house. He was a sort of “punk” mouse, with a fur crest on his head that looked sort of like a Mohawk. Murphy saw him looking in at her and almost lost her mind. It’s a wonder we didn’t have to replace the double-paned glass; as it is, I don’t think some of the dried dog slobber will ever come out.

The past few days, it has been snowing mightily here, and only the bravest creatures have been daring the cold to find food. Including the mouse, who tunneled under the snow to the patch under the feeder. Murphy watched from the door while all this was happening and made moaning noises before spinning around in the family room and knocking magazines off the coffee table. (Are Keeshonds the only dogs who “spin”?)

When we finally let her out, she pounced immediately on the mouse’s burrow under the snow, then proceeded to chase him under the feeder and try to dig him out (evidently, he’d dug an escape route, or at least a hidey hole). We had a delightful afternoon watching her dig and sniff and sneeze and bounce and dig some more. Her ears were up and she was alert to every movement under the snow. My wife and I watched it all from inside and laughed and gasped and laughed some more. “She’s a busy little dog,” Julie said. “She needs a hobby.”

The bird feeder pole is listing due to Murphy’s excavations, but that’s a small price to pay for the fun of watching our little girl have fun in the snow, free to be herself and cavort. Later tonight, most likely she’ll come into the parlor and interrupt me while playing the piano. She tends to bite me on the foot using the sustain pedal. “To hell with Beethoven,” she says. “I’ll spin around until you get off that bench and rub my butt. You know I have displasia and this cold makes me sore.” 

June

It has been a cool June. Yesterday, Julie & I drove to Santa Fe to meet friends for several days of sightseeing, eating, and friendship. 

We drove “Mary,” our little red sports car, and for the most part, we had the top down. That was fine when we drove out of Denver on US 285, but coming down off Kenosha Pass into South Park, the weather got progressively colder the further we went down into the park.  The big thirteeners to the west still had a lot of snow on the peaks and filling in the cols and arêtes on their faces. And the wind blowing down from them was chilled from passing over all that coldness.

Even with the heater going full blast, we were glad to get to Fairplay and find a cafe to warm up and have breakfast in. They had a gas stove/fireplace, and we gravitated to it like moths to a candle. By the end of the meal, however, we were sufficiently warm to brave the elements again, but this time, with the top up.

Continuing down 285 and over the pass into the San Luis Valley, it started to warm up, and by the time we passed Villa Grove and headed down the state highway that borders the Great Sand Dunes, we were warm enough to take the top down again. Driving south past Antonito, we passed into New Mexico and traveled through high chaparrel before wending our way down into the Rio Grande Valley. 

Lordy, it turned hot in a hurry, and by the time we approached Española, we put the top up again–but this time to hide from the sun and turn on the air conditioner. 

Now we safely ensconced at the El Rey motel in Santa Fe, and I’m sitting out under a tree with birds objecting  to my presence up above.

It’s cool here, but it’s the cool of the high desert: you know that the pleasant temperature is an ephemeral thing  that won’t last long. It’s caused in part by the lush vegetation that the gardener admitted was “a lot of work.” And it’s artificial. Roses shouldn’t be blooming so lushly in this climate; the grass shouldn’t  be so green–shoot, there shouldn’t even be any grass.

It’s a very Spanish thing–or rather, I suppose, a Moorish thing, this impulse to make the desert bloom. Water is like liquid gold, and to have it flowing out of fountains surrounded by flowers and vegetation in an enclosed space holding out the heat and the dryness is a blessing. A smug blessing, perhaps, but a blessing nevertheless.

And I’m old enough to take my blessings where I can get them anymore. 

We stopped 

Springtime in Colorado

I’ve been thinking a lot about Wordsworth recently.

Oh, there is blessing in this gentle air…

…he wrote at the beginning of The Prelude, the introduction to his “epic poem” that he called The Excursion. 

When I was in graduate school, I almost died of terminal syncope reading The Prelude, but now that I’m older and crankier, I find that things I studied in school are coming back to me. Somehow, in spite of my determined resistance  to that  sort of flatulent romanticism, in spite of my materialism, my exposure to Wordsworth has come home to roost.

Oh, there is blessing in this gentle air!

And there is. The first time I noticed it this season was a few weeks ago when the warm days were warring with blizzards and other evidences of what one Denver television weathermen (a damn boobie) called “Challenging Meteorological Events.”

But that afternoon, sitting out under the gazebo (which we pronounce “gaze-boe” in a nod to a female shark trial lawyer friend who grew up in the south), I felt “gentle breezes,” and the just made me happy.

Today, a month later, it’s even warmer, and this evening I spent some time in the front of our house walking up and down the sidewalk and watching the light fade and smelling the air that’s a combination of the usual Colorado goodness along with Iris pollen and flowering trees and things that make me take antihisamines so that I can enjoy the vegetation while hallucinating.

But there is blessing in the air. I’m so glad and so grateful to be alive and to experience this most wonderful of seasonal change. The newly green trees obscuring the view of the mountains to the west remind me of another poet’s image of the “whinnying green horses walking warm onto the fields of praise.” All of this green and all of these perfumes in the air. It don’t get much better than this.

Dad’s Birthday

Had he lived, Dad would have been a hundred years old today.

As anniversaries go, this is not an earth shattering one. He died when I was a teenager, and I’ve lived twice as long without him as the years I spent growing up with him. Nevertheless, today is a day that I’ve spent in quiet contemplation.I loved him, and he loved me, and I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d been older when he died.I remember when Mark, my son, turned sixteen. In one moment, I found myself in uncharted territory as a parent. It surprised me no end to discover that I’d been using my father as a pattern for parenting my son.But as my son and I grew older, I discovered that Dad’s influence on me wasn’t limited to specific examples of “good” or “bad” parenting. It was remarkably freeing.I wish my dad could have known my son. They would have loved each other.

In Praise of Rescue

 

Fifteen years ago, my wife and I set out to get a “medium-sized” dog that would play with our young son. The occasion was the death of our last Chow, a sweet tempered creature who, nevertheless, refused to have anything to do with our Offspring. We had kept Chows for years before his birth, but as anyone who has ever had a Chow knows, they are  better at channeling the temperament of the lion statues at the New York Public Library than they are getting frisky with a child.

 

So after our chow, Timmy’s, death, we toodled off to the pound to search for Mark’s Perfect Dog.

 

Anyone who has ever searched for an animal at a shelter will tell you what a painful, heart-wrenching, and frustrating experience it is. Row upon row of sad, neglected, shy, despairing, angry, eager, desperate, bewildered animals. Our son finally picked out a handsome adolescent puppy that was, ironically, part Chow. In the meantime, my wife spotted another animal she wanted to “interview” in the little room where prospective owners meet new dogs. Due to a miscommunication (I gave the attendant the wrong cage number), instead of the dog she wanted to meet, we found ourselves confronted with The Largest Keeshond In The World. A mix of Kees and God-only-knows what else (something huge and wolf-like),  “Mieka” was five and, before we adopted him, had never been inside a house. In spite of his bad manners, he had bonded with one of the staff, and when she brought him in to meet us, it was clear that she was a Goddess. He adored her with that Keesie adoration we later came to know so well.

 

We had visited the pound on Friday after work, when my wife and son found these dogs. I didn’t like either, particularly, and so we went home that evening without a dog. Mieka’s age, size, and health (he had kennel cough) meant that he was going to be put down Monday if he wasn’t adopted that weekend. The shelter is a county-run facility, and while it wasn’t particularly high-kill, there is only so much they can do when they have an unsocialized animal with kennel cough the size of a Buick.

 

Well I remember that evening. My wife spent it talking about the dogs with a Japanese student living with us trying to learn English. Her vocabulary  got considerably expanded by Julie’s descriptions of this large, loving dog. It finally got to be too much for me, and I reluctantly agreed to adopt both dogs. Julie (my wife) burst into tears, and Yuri (the Japanese student) did also, though it was probably out of Japanese manners more than agreement with the decision. Maybe it was just relief that the sturm und drang was over.

 

The next day, Julie, Mark, and I went back to the pound and adopted the two dogs. At the time, we were as poor as church mice and were driving as our only car a Hyundai sedan. We put the kid, the Kees mix, and the the chow-mix puppy in the back seat where they proceeded to imitate brownian movement until we arrived home. I don’t think I ever managed to get all the dog slobber off the back window. The kid survived, however.

 

To make a long story short, it took the Kees mix, Mieka, two years to “get happy.” He had been turned in to the pound after a  divorce, and with his Keesie personality, was devastated by the abandonment. He peed on every doorpost in our house; he bit all of us at least once; and Julie was ready to turn him back in to the pound. By that time, I’d fallen in love with him. My response was, “No, if we can’t make this work, we’ll put him down in a loving way. This dog has been betrayed so badly that he’s not going to be betrayed again.” I renewed my efforts to convince him that he wasn’t the alpha male of our particular pack. We continued to be firm with him, and after the first year of sullen depression and the second year of “just existing,” about the third anniversary of his adoption, he suddenly decided to “get happy.” 

 

Mieka miraculously turned into a bouncing 130-pound Keeshond puppy. Every Kees trait came out in spades. The laughter, the sense of humor, coupled with some very strange “wolfie” traits from his other ancestors.

 

He began to howl. We  live across a creek from the police and fire departments, and during the summer when our windows were open, every time the sirens went off in the middle of the night, the dog would howl in his sleep. He would emit these sepulchral moans from the foot of our bed in the middle of the night that would wake Julie and me from sound sleep and we would find ourselves sitting up in bed with atavistic chills running up our spines. 

 

  The little red dog.

 

He also taught the Little Red Dog (our name for the chow-mix we adopted with him) how to howl. Shoot, he even taught our friends’ dogs how to howl. You really haven’t lived until you’ve watch a well-behaved senior standard poodle learning how to howl to the sound of church bells during a barbeque, with the poodle’s “parents” bewildered by the sounds their dog is emitting.

 

“Oh, my! I’ve never heard Roxanne making that noise! Did someone feed her a chicken bone?”

 

“No. Mieka is teaching her to  howl.”

 

Turns out that, once her pipes were freed, Roxanne the poodle enjoyed her new-found talent and started howling at everything (in a mutated poodle ”yip-yip glug-glug moan” sort of way). It caused something of a strain to our friendship with Roxanne’s parents, but they’re sort of new-age people, and once Julie convinced them that Roxanne “needed” to howl, they accepted her new found talent begrudgingly.

 

Mieka, with all his talents and new-found joy, went to the Bridge too soon. The Little Red Dog shockingly followed him not long thereafter from cancer, and we were left bereft of dogs.

 

That was when we contacted Peak To Peak Keeshond Fanciers, who specialize in rescue. We live in the Denver area, and found PPKF over the internet.

 

Any time an unknown person approaches a rescue organization, the organization must take precautions to make sure that people wanting their dogs are suitable and equipped to deal with  the quirks that may pop up–particularly with a breed that bonds so strongly with its people. Through PPKF, we adopted a young female Kees named Murphy. We were her third permanent home, and (in our opinion), all her quirks have to do with abandonment. We were told that Murphy was turned in to rescue because of a ”failure to bond.” Former owners had reported that she was “stubborn.”

 

The first morning after we had Murphy, after a stressful night when she barked at just about anything, she came into our living room looking lost and worried and exhausted, and I sat down on the rug. She came over and leaned against me. “It’s OK,” I told her, and scratched the special place on her chest. “Everything is going to get better.” And it has.

 

My family has learned a lot about adopting “difficult” dogs. They come to you wounded, but still on their own terms. They have unassailable integrity: They can’t deny their nature, even if it would  make being with you and loving them easier. Sad dogs have infinite joy inside of them–and infinite love, and infinite delight.

 

Finding that and freeing it is a gift and a joy beyond reckoning.