Saving Simon

by Jon Katz

  FOURTEEN

  The Tao of Red

  In the same way that I never would have noticed Rocky if it weren’t for Simon, I doubt that I would ever have agreed to take Red if it hadn’t been for Simon. I find that men do not open up easily, and I surely spent too much of my life in a tight and closed knot. Opening up is risky. It means accepting new experiences, considering other possibilities. Simon helped me to do that.

  I tend to divide my life into two parts—closed and open—and I am still shocked at how the process of opening up released a floodgate of good and meaningful things, things I have always wanted in my life but could not find.

  As I approached sixty, my life came apart. An accumulation of ignored or neglected problems finally worked together to break me down—perhaps the most effective means of opening up that there is.

  When you are living in panic, your life going to pieces, then suddenly there is the necessary motivation to open up and get to work. Simon made my true path clear, quite unintentionally. He began an era in which I started doing things I formerly thought impossible. Like taking in a donkey that was at death’s door. Like deciding at age sixty-one that I wanted love in my life again. Like befriending a blind pony. Like meditating again. Like getting a dog from a woman who said, “God wants you to have him.” It’s a long and important list.

  So my experience with Simon was, for me, about deepening the miraculous process of opening myself up to the possibilities of life, of taking emotional risks and chances. The dangers are considerable, I learned, the rewards unimaginable, especially in our fearful and fragmented world.

  In recent years, I’ve come to believe in the idea of spirit animals. They enter your life when you are ready; they leave when it is time. Such was the case with my two border collies, Rose and Izzy.

  I woke up one night in the winter of 2011 with a powerful and frightening feeling that something was wrong with Rose—that she was in trouble. I dressed hurriedly and went downstairs. I went room to room and could not find her, and, more alarming, she didn’t answer my call for her. Rose was always by my side in a flash when I said her name; she was always eager to get out and work, like most border collies. I searched the living room, my office, the family room at the back of the house, and then, as an afterthought, went out to the mudroom behind the kitchen, right by the back door. This is often where I found Rose waiting to be let out to go to the pasture.

  I knew the minute I saw her lying on the floor that she was dying. This animal had been by my side through so much, from my first day at the farm. She was so filled with energy and intelligence and determination and pride. When I saw her lying on her side in a pool of vomit, glassy-eyed and trembling, I just knew she was letting go of life.

  I will never forget that moment. I heard Rose speaking so clearly to me, saying in a matter-of-fact voice, “Help me, help me.” I knew she wanted to leave the world in dignity—that her work was done and she was pleading with me to help her go.

  We got to the vet that morning, and she agreed that Rose was very sick. Neither of us wanted to subject her to the invasive and painful tests that would tell us more. That’s the thing about animals, really. They are never static, at least not for long. Their comings and goings are never really explicable to us, as smart as we think we are. Simon should have been dead, but he was not. Border collies live forever, and Rose was healthy, happy, and active. The vet was stymied. Rose just seemed to wither. It might be something neurological, she said. It was hard to say without a lot of tests. I didn’t want to do that to Rose, and I felt her telling me very clearly that she was done. She was tired. She was ready to go, and I decided to honor that. I chose not to be selfish. I wanted her to leave the world in dignity, she was so proud and dignified and brave a dog. A few days later, she was gone, euthanized on the floor at our vet’s office, having led a full and glorious life.

  Izzy was different. I don’t think he wanted to go; I don’t think he was ready. I saw him struggling to walk on the path one day, and felt the lumps growing around his throat. I knew it had to be cancer, and it was: advanced lymphoma. The vet did a biopsy and said he had a few weeks to live at most, and, if we allowed it, he would live those weeks in pain. So six months after Rose died, we put Izzy down.

  Izzy was a different dog than Rose. He was a lover, not a worker; a people dog, not a sheep dog. He and I became hospice volunteers together just after my divorce, when my life seemed so bleak and empty. Izzy and our work together brought me back from the edge. We helped people on the true edge of life leave the world peacefully and in comfort.

  It was a shock to me to lose two such wonderful dogs within a few months of each other. I expected them both to live for many years. I had this recurring feeling that as my life changed—I was no longer alone on the farm; Maria had entered my life—and as I became saner and more grounded, that Rose’s mission had to change. My idea, maybe it was a fantasy, was that she had decided to go live and work with someone else, someone needier.

  In the days and weeks after Rose died, this idea became more focused in my mind. I believed it to be true. I think Izzy just got sick and died. I never felt he was ready to leave. He loved his hospice work, chasing sunsets with me as I photographed them, and his time with Maria on the farm. Izzy was a creature of great joy, and sometimes life simply happens. I think of Rose and Izzy often, not in grief but in gratitude. I am grateful to have had two such dogs, grateful that they both got to live their lives as dogs as fully and freely as it is possible to do in our world.

  And again, there was Simon’s spirit in my head. I can’t speak for what’s inside of his genial consciousness, but I can speak to what was inside of mine. From the first, I was struck by what I saw as the great trait of acceptance in Simon. People always spoke of him as being abused, rescued, or neglected, but I saw no sign that Simon thought of himself in that way. Simon immediately got down to the basics of life—eating, walking, pursuing the girls, getting his ration of carrots and apples, getting brushed and fussed over.

  He got on with life. He did not waste his precious time being angry at the farmer or complaining about his fate. His call to life was very real. He seemed to me set on enjoying every second of his time here.

  Unquestionably, this affected my view of the loss of Rose and Izzy. I do not adhere to the idea that “it’s just a dog” when a beloved pet dies. Rose and Izzy were as important to me and my life as most of the human beings I have known. They affected my life. They changed it.

  But Simon helped me understand that the joy of life is more important than the loss of it. I honored Rose and Izzy, mourned them and cried for them, but like Simon, I was not going to spend my life lamenting what I did not have. I wanted to appreciate and enjoy the many riches I did have.

  Grief is a personal, highly individual thing. Everyone experiences it in their own way; everyone heals in their own way.

  After these two wonderful dogs died, I started thinking about another one, as I tend to do when I lose a dog. Many people tell me they are so heartbroken over the death of a dog that they can’t bear to get another one. That always makes me sad, especially when so many millions of dogs languish in shelters awaiting homes, often for years.

  I began a casual search. A border collie kept coming to mind. I always seem drawn to border collies. They seem to think and function like I do. They’re a bit distracted, their multi-track minds always racing; they could probably be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. I like their enthusiasm for life, their work ethic, their intelligence, and their craziness. All border collies and their owners are a little bit crazy, I find. It works for both species.

  I trawled through breeders’ websites and left some phone and e-mail messages. Just sniffing around. My favorite way to get a dog is through a good and experienced breeder. Although border collies are often in need of rescue, for a working farm dog, I need to be certain of temperament and genetics. I was in no rush. We had plenty of animals to take care of and we had two wonderful dogs, Lenore
and Frieda, both of whom were enjoying all the attention they were getting.

  In the spring of 2012, I got an e-mail from Dr. Karen Thompson, a much loved and respected border collie breeder in Virginia. She got right to the point. She had a seven-year-old red-coated border collie from County Tyrone, Ireland, she said. He had had a rough time—had been brought to the United States and had come to her. Those were all of the details I was to get at that time. He was a fine working dog, she said, eager to please, generous of nature, professional, and well trained. His outruns were a bit on the wide side. She loved the dog and had not been able to part with him. She had driven him to a home in the South and then, unable to sleep for days, she drove back and brought him home. He was much loved, she said, and no one who knew him wanted him to leave.

  But, she said, she knew of my hospice work with my border collie Izzy since she had read my book Izzy & Lenore. She believed Red was a natural for that work. She knew I had some sheep, and that would be great, but she wanted more than that for Red.

  She wanted him to have a rounded life, a balanced life, one beyond the pasture. She worked him regularly with her sheep, but there were a lot of dogs coming and going on her farm, and she couldn’t give him the life I might be able to give him.

  “God wants you to have Red,” she said. “He wants him to be your dog.” I was surprised by this and taken aback. I wondered if Karen was a little strange. God had never been involved in my choice of dogs, at least as far as I knew. The idea made me nervous.

  Karen sent me a video of Red working the sheep. A rocket dog, I thought, watching him shoot out on a spectacular outrun around some sheep. He knew his stuff, and he seemed to be an eager, responsive dog. I was impressed and intrigued. I thought about it for a long time, and eventually told Karen that I would take Red.

  I have had dogs for much of my life, but my true life with them began when I bought a cabin in upstate New York to write a book there and I brought two yellow labs, Julius and Stanley, with me for company. They were as much a part of the process—more, really—than my computer. Together, we had all kinds of experiences on that mountaintop, but when I returned to New Jersey, where my family was, our lives together shrank—walks, the backyard, time in the house.

  Julius and Stanley had walked with me on the mountaintop; my day had begun with them. They sat by my feet while I worked. They eased the loneliness of a long, hard winter, making it bearable, even meaningful. They were never, for me, a substitute for human beings, but still, they were a living and loving force that anchored my creativity and grounded me. I opened myself up to them, and they to me. This is what happened, too, on a different, more spiritual level, with Simon. The dogs opened the door; Simon walked through it.

  And now here was Red, a creature from Ireland, a quirky and soulful little border collie who just fused with me as if we had always been together. A working dog and farm dog, Red had never lived inside of a home before and struggled at first with some of the details of domestic American dog life. He didn’t quite get glass and ran into the window frames around our doors. When he tried to jump on the bed, he would misjudge the distances and go sailing over the bed and onto the floor. He was terrified of linoleum and didn’t recognize it as ground. He would freeze when he came to it, then rush across.

  He sometimes heard commands and strange sounds in his sleep, and if I was running a video of any kind, he’d go into his border collie crouch and start doing outruns around the living room floor. The wind obsessed and disturbed him, and he would stare up in the skies looking to see where it came from. I often said to Maria that Red was not like the other children. Perhaps this is why I loved him so much and identified with him from the start.

  Red is often so eager to jump into the backseat of the car that he misses and plows into the open door, bouncing off it, shaking himself off, and trying again. If he wants to see me, and Lenore or Frieda is lying in front of me, he simply jumps on the other dog and sits there or walks right over her. This doesn’t sit well with Frieda. She roars at Red, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  Red is an amazing working dog, instantly responsive, smart and reliable. And he has a heart and soul as big and generous as any dog I have known. Red will often appear to be peacemaking, helping another animal out. Perhaps he views this as just another form of work. Perhaps he is reading my mind, as he has an intuitive habit of doing. Red is not like Simon. He is obedient, attentive, and eager to please. Simon is eager to please when he is in the mood, not so eager when he isn’t. It’s odd, but true, that I love Red because he wants to please me, and I love Simon because he often doesn’t care to please me.

  Red was confused and distracted when he came to me, and I often thought of his long journey from Ireland to Virginia to me. I was told he had been brutally beaten, and I could see he was often anxious and very wary of sticks.

  Could I deepen this idea of partnership with this dog? Could I replicate the sense of exploration Jiménez had with Platero, and that I had with Simon?

  The morning after Red arrived, I took him out to the pasture. As we approached the gate, he went into a herding crouch, froze, and stared at the sheep. I opened the gate and realized I didn’t know the herding commands he had been taught. I called Dr. Thompson on my cell phone and she told me to stand to the right of Red and say “Come bye.” I did, and he took off like a guided missile. He made a sweeping and spectacular outrun wide of the sheep and drove them right to me.

  When he made his way back to me, he was transformed. He was looking straight into my eyes. His world had returned to its proper order. He was adoring me in that particular way border collies have of worshipping whoever takes them to sheep.

  Until he came to my farm, Red had either been out working sheep or in a crate. He was not housebroken. Dr. Thompson’s hope was that Red’s life could be broadened, and it was my wish, too. Of course, I ended up being broadened as much as he was, possibly more.

  From that first day, Red went everywhere with me. He walked into a farm stand nearby, found the girls behind the cash register and, while I stuffed my corn and vegetables into bags, Red was getting pats and kisses. He figured out my local bookstore quickly, greeting shoppers as they came through the door, visiting the owner in her cubicle, finding a mat by the door to lie on. He loved to ride along with me to the gas station, the hardware store, even the dentist’s office. He had never been on a leash and I never put him on one, either.

  I am fortunate to live in Washington County, New York, a beautiful agricultural area where many people have animals and where dogs are as commonplace in the hardware store as they are in backyards. Red was eagerly adopted in my small town of Cambridge; there was almost no place where he was not welcomed.

  When I took Red to a book reading at a local library, he went from row to row, as if he had done it a thousand times, greeting every person in attendance, and then came up to me, curled up into a ball, and went to sleep.

  It occurred to me that there were so many boundaries around where Simon could go, and so few around Red. Simon’s life was lived entirely within the pasture fence except for the walks we took up and down the road and into the woods. He loved people just as much as Red did, but our culture makes no allowances for animals like donkeys to be a part of our world, even though they would adapt easily to farmers markets, downtown parks, and school playgrounds. It was never going to happen. People did not cuddle up with donkeys; they are so large and most people are a bit afraid of them. Simon would often approach people who came to see him and seemed puzzled when they backed away or treated him gingerly, as if he might explode.

  But Red opened a number of new windows on mercy and compassion for me. For one thing, he needed a lot of calm understanding before he could acclimate himself to my world. It took me less than a week to housebreak him. I put mats and carpets down on the floors until he could get used to smooth surfaces, I made sure I was giving him herding commands that he understood, and I lavished him with praise and attention when he got it right
, which he invariably did.

  I called a nursing home in Granville, New York, where Izzy and I had done some hospice volunteer work. I told them a little about Red, and they said they would love to have him visit the home. We went a few days later. We walked through the doors and right up to a woman in a wheelchair. She was astonished and delighted to see Red. She called him “Charlie,” and he approached her and put his head on her knee as she patted him. The smile on her face was worth the trip, and I saw that Red had the same gift as Izzy—he could enter any space and be gentle and appropriate. You might have thought he had been doing it for most of his life, even though he had never been in a nursing home or any building like it. Mostly, he just wanted to be with me.

  Dr. Thompson was right. Red was meant to be my dog, just as Simon seemed destined to be my donkey. It felt from the first as if I had lived with him for years. He became instantly popular. He had girlfriends everywhere—Lyle at the hardware store, Karen at the farm stand, Connie at the bookstore, Dawn at the dentist’s office. They all kept treats for him and greeted him with great affection and enthusiasm. Soon, the dog that had never been inside of a building was inside a lot of them, every day.

  And he had sheep right out the back door and got to work every day. He needed us, and we needed him, too. We had to move the sheep two or three times a day, keep them away from the donkeys’ feeders, and get them inside the barn for visits from the vet. Red did the job.

  The only cloud on the horizon, ironically enough, was Simon. He did not like dogs; he had not liked Rose, and he did not like Red. Donkeys are guard animals, and they see dogs as no different than coyotes. When Red came into the pasture, Simon’s ears would go down, and he would lower his head to charge. Red, whose concentration when he was around sheep was laserlike, did not even notice or glance at him. That made me nervous. The first few times Red entered the pasture, I would stand between them, hold up my hand in front of Simon, and just say “Stop.” Thankfully he did.