Saving Simon

by Jon Katz

  Jiménez writes of how he found Platero lying on his bed of straw, eyes soft and sad. “I went to him, stroked him, talking to him and trying to help him to stand. The poor fellow quivered, started to rise, one forefoot bent under.… He could not get up. Then I straightened his foot on the ground, patted him tenderly.”

  I read this passage over and over again, because it perfectly replicated the first evening Simon spent on my farm, fighting for the strength and breath to stand. I didn’t want to let go of that memory, of that bond, and there was no reason to.

  I was surprised at how much I had come to love our donkeys, how much they had come to mean to me. In the new farm, the pastures closely ringed the farmhouse, and wherever the animals were, we could see them, and they could see and hear us.

  This was a wonderful new dimension to our lives with them. They heard us get up in the morning, and Simon would bray whenever he heard me walking around the house. This was unnerving at times, but I got used to it. Without thinking, I would call out, “Hello, Simon,” and I would see him peering in the window by my office, or sometimes outside of the bathroom when I got up in the middle of the night.

  He is a sweet soul, Simon, as loyal to me as he is to his ladies.

  One night, I wrote him a poem and read it to him:

  Simon, you see me, do you not?

  Is it not true you see the water running through

  the stream, clear and cold?

  Do you not see the deer running through the woods?

  The children running playfully down the road, calling

  out your name as they dance by?

  Simon, you do see me.

  In the misty sunrise,

  In the cloudless dusk,

  I hear your bray,

  Your call to life,

  We are walking together,

  Through life.

  You do see me, don’t you?

  How you have opened me up,

  I was so closed.

  And I see you.

  I see more clearly now that Simon is a magical helper, a spirit guide sent to guide me on my hero journey, to help me on my way. He is a teacher who appeared in the form of a donkey. So many animals teach us important lessons if we let them.

  And what did he teach me?

  To open up, not just to him, not just to animals, but to the human experience. To love, to risk, to friendship. He helped me come so much closer to an understanding of mercy and compassion, something I had been pursuing my whole life.

  We are in so many ways a vengeful culture; we are quick to punish wrongdoers and slow to empathize. Simon helped me to see that the farmer was just as piteous as he was, just as damaged. He helped me to open my life up to Red. He brought me closer to Maria, who shared the powerful experience of healing him. He helped me to see that compassion for animals does not mean only keeping them alive but sometimes means letting them go.

  He reminded me that mercy and compassion are not only for good people, but also for people who horrify us, upset us, and challenge our notions of humanity. He softened me and my sense of judgment, of righteousness.

  Saving a creature is a powerful experience, as so many people who love and support animals know. But the act is most powerful for me when I remember that it is about the animal and not about me. Simon did not ask to be saved, nor does he even understand what that concept means. I do not believe he was grateful to me—he would hardly have driven Rocky into the fence posts if he were—nor does he have any reason to be. By opening myself up to him, I saved myself, taught myself, and challenged myself to think about my life and my world.

  Simon’s story is not rare; it is all too common. The history of the donkey is rich in cruelty, abandonment, abuse, and neglect. Donkeys are nearly disposable in so many countries, sacrificed to overwork, heat, the lack of food and fresh water. There is something long-suffering about them. Even as I write this, I know that thousands of donkeys have been abandoned in the United States because farmers and others can’t afford to care for them. The unusual thing about Simon’s story is that he is alive, not that he was mistreated. His great suffering seems so long ago. He is so grounded in his life and at ease here, the king of our little hill.

  Simon and I talk once or twice a week now, and we are old soul mates together. He knows what I will do before I do it—he holds his head up to receive the halter when I present it—and I know what he will do before he does it. I pause by the leafy maple trees on our walks so he can eat some leaves.

  Red joins us on all of our walks. The two are now as comfortable with each other now as Red was with Rocky. And so the circle of my little triad has closed again in its own way.

  I tell Simon of my triumphs and disappointments, and we observe the world together. How ironic, I told him on one recent walk, that I—a boy who grew up reading about strange men walking around with donkeys—should have become one of them.

  Simon was not impressed. He was transfixed by a giant white butterfly who rose out of the maple tree and circled around and around over his head.

  TWENTY

  Open Houses, Open Lives

  They came from so many different places to see Simon, more than two thousand of them, from California and Canada, Mexico and Maine, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Colorado. They came in their big cars, trucks, and minivans, in their work boots and fancy shoes.

  They lined up by the hundreds outside of the big barn to come inside and touch Simon, hug him, give him carrots and cookies, and pepper me with questions about him. For two days I never left the barn. I would ferry one group in to see him and another would form at the gate. Simon, I told him, you are a rock star.

  It was humbling to see the wonder, adoration, and affection in their faces, to see the elderly women pushed into the barn in wheelchairs, young and wide-eyed children from New York City and Toronto and Chicago step nervously toward Simon only to discover that he loved every single one of them, loved being touched, hugged, handed cookies and carrots.

  His gentleness, especially with children, was poignant. He never grabbed at an apple or carrot, never frightened anyone, never nipped a hand or backed away from being touched or rubbed.

  He was the sweetest thing. He was the biggest ham.

  For almost all of my eight years there, I had refused visitors at Bedlam Farm. A therapist told me the farm had become a fort, a place to seal off the world. I did not permit visits. I did not welcome the steady stream of cars driving up and down the road, pausing to stare in at the farmhouse, to ooh and aah at the dogs and take photos.

  I fully subscribed to the writerly notion of isolation and withdrawal. You wrote your book in peace, came down off of your mountain to do some readings and sign some books, and then you returned. No, I said, this isn’t an amusement park. It’s a workspace, a private home; we do not permit visitors. It upsets the people, and it upsets the animals. I thought it was rude to be stared at, invaded.

  Our first open house had changed all that, and Simon had been the inspiration for it. This was where the opening up that had begun a year earlier in the very barn where Simon was now greeting his adoring fans had led, widening and deepening and altering my life.

  Thanks to the photographs and stories on the blog, Simon had a powerful new story. He was alive and well and thriving. He had walked back from the edge of death and was living life happily and fully. He had me, Maria, Lulu and Fanny, pastures to roam, and people all over the world who loved him.

  Six months after we moved, we held another open house at our new farm. Maria organized an art show in her studio, as she had done at the first farm. Simon had long lines of people once more, many of them repeat visitors. He was happy holding court, but the surprise was that I was just as happy. I love showing him off, telling his story and that of all of the donkeys in the world.

  With Rocky gone, Simon’s reign was complete and unchallenged, his journey a triumph of determination, courage, and the power of love to heal. The creature who had run a blind pony into a fence would stand
quietly over children as they kissed him, smacked his nose, and pulled his hair. Compassion takes many forms and shapes, some of them unrecognizable.

  Simon’s days are filled with ritual and opportunity. He has a pole barn to keep him and his girls, Lulu and Fanny, out of the sun, rain, and snow. He has three pastures filled with the brush, apple trees, streams, and ravines that donkeys love to wander in and explore. We visit him several times a day. Maria brushes him and sings to him in the morning. I bring him equine cookies, apples, carrots, bread, and pasta, which he loves. Every morning, Lulu or Fanny—sometimes both—kick him in one side of the head or the other; it doesn’t seem to bother him. He has gotten over his difficulties with Ken Norman, and submits to having his hooves trimmed.

  Simon’s twisted legs are the only remaining sign of his many injuries. I think cold weather is hard on his legs, and I sometimes see him lie down in reluctant resignation, something healthy donkeys rarely do.

  Although he is best known and well known for his mistreatment, there is no sign that he recollects it in any way, or carries any behavioral scars. There is no type of human—man, woman, old, young—that he fears or shies away from. I can only assume his mistreatment was episodic, not chronic; he has no wariness or mistrust of people.

  I will never forget the long lines of people who traveled from all across the country to see Simon. They helped me understand the power of animals to touch our hearts and change our lives.

  Saint Thomas Aquinas got it right, I think, and my experience with Simon taught me that compassion is not an easy or a pretty thing—not in animals, not in people.

  Simon did not save me, I saved him, but he did teach me what compassion is all about. How hard compassion is, and how easy it is to withhold it from people I don’t like, or who do cruel or offensive things. The true pilgrim, the real seeker of compassion, learns to cross such bridges; each one is different and leads us to a different place.

  Simon touches the deepest parts of me; it is such a joy to give him the life he deserves. He lovingly accepts the person I am. He challenges me to become the person I want to be.

  EPILOGUE

  Toward a Compassionate Heart

  In the spring of 2013, I began studying Tai Chi, the Chinese practice of movement and meditation. One day when I was feeling particularly unsettled, I walked through the pasture, into the barn, stood still and began my movements there.

  Simon, attuned to me as always, came over and stood quietly by my side. As I moved my arms in a circle and looked up at the sky, I felt a gentle pressure in my back. Simon had pressed his head against my spine, and for the next ten minutes, I leaned back against him, practicing my movements, feeling his support and connection.

  It was a profoundly spiritual moment, an experience that showed me just how close an animal can be to a human he knows and feels safe around. I felt that Simon completely understood what I was doing in my practice, and helped me to achieve the calm and peacefulness I was seeking. Perhaps it helped him as well.

  The news of the world is filled with cruelty and violence; we are forced to confront it all day, almost every day. Troubling stories are no longer compartmentalized in the morning paper or on the evening news. They permeate our lives, our homes, our work spaces, the very air we breathe. They are no longer occasional disturbances, but now part of the ether.

  It is difficult to feel compassion for the people we see and read and hear about doing the most awful things. Our civic life is filled with strife and argument rather than comfort and guidance.

  Every day, we are called upon to forgive and understand behavior that is sometimes beyond our comprehension and challenges our ideas about compassion.

  Jesus, Thomas Merton, Albert Schweitzer, and the Dalai Lama can say what they want about compassion; most people do not accept their messages, do not believe we are all one and the same. Most of our institutions are not built on empathy. Compassion is tricky, dangerous, volatile. It is easy to talk about it, but another thing to practice it. Simon had taught me that. But he also taught me not to give up on it.

  The Lincolns, Gandhis, Martin Luther Kings, and Nelson Mandelas of the world are much admired, but if you look at their mostly common fates—we tend to either kill or exile them—their practice of compassion was perceived to be dangerous. Why would any normal human being choose that fate?

  Donkeys have always represented the best and worst of the human experience, loved, celebrated in great art, revered, reviled, abandoned, and mistreated. They have always walked with human beings in the theater of chance, as Simon was walking with me.

  There is a wonderful simplicity to compassion, as Simon helped me understand that afternoon. All you need to do is ask yourself this: what kind of a person do you want to be?

  Months later, a priest, the codirector of a Catholic boys orphanage in Brooklyn, called me. The group, Father Joseph said, was coming upstate to spend a few days at a retreat. A reader of my blog, he thought it would be wonderful for the boys to meet some farm animals and to see Red herd sheep.

  Most of the boys knew dogs only as guard animals; they had no concept of pets. But mainly, he said, he thought they ought to meet Simon. The priest sensed his gentleness from my photos and stories about him.

  He warned me that most of the boys had come from extraordinarily difficult backgrounds. Some were the victims of rape and incest. Others had been arrested by the police for different crimes. Some were the children of illegal immigrants or had been abandoned when their parents had died, gotten sick, or just vanished.

  Some had severe emotional and behavioral problems; he hoped I would be comfortable with that.

  Father Joseph added that only one of the boys—a young teenager from Mexico—had ever seen a farm animal; he had grown up with a donkey. The priest told me he was especially drawn to the idea that a spirit can suffer awful misfortune and keep an open heart. He thought that might be the message of Simon, one the boys could empathize with and perhaps emulate.

  I agreed to the visit. A few days later two battered vans pulled into the farm’s driveway, and about twenty boys and five or six counselors and priests hopped out.

  Father Joseph had not misrepresented the group or exaggerated their troubles. They were all children of color—black, Latino, Asian. Some could barely speak and had obvious emotional disorders and physical disabilities.

  I admired Father Joseph, the priest who had called me and now stood grinning in my backyard. He had a warm smile, and his patience and affection for the boys was palpable. This was somebody who didn’t need any lessons in compassion; he was all about it. Although some of the boys challenged him, refused to come when called, or talked over him, he never wavered in his calm and affectionate responses and eventually got everybody to do what needed to be done.

  Lenore and Red greeted the boys enthusiastically, tails wagging. Most of the boys were clearly afraid of dogs. I remembered Father Joseph’s caution about their unfamiliarity with animals and called the dogs off, making them stand back until the visitors could get used to them.

  Jean, a seventeen-year-old Haitian orphan whose family was killed in that country’s devastating earthquake, was the first to step forward and put his hand on Red’s head. Red, now a licensed therapy dog, stood still and looked Jean in the eye. The other boys were astonished. It seemed they had never seen a dog quite like Red, and, one by one, most of them followed Jean’s example.

  I noticed that Simon had appeared outside the pole barn and had walked over to the gate. Simon understood the concept of visitors, and his gaze fell on Father Joseph and the other counselors, who were holding large bags of carrots.

  Simon looked over the group carefully and let out a joyous and welcoming bray that sent several boys running back to the vans.

  No, no, this is Simon’s welcome, I explained. This is how he says hello.

  Another boy named Juan walked up to the gate. Father Joseph whispered to me that his family had been murdered in front of him in a Bronx drug war; he had nev
er seen the ocean or a farm. The boy came up to me and shook my hand and asked me in broken but intelligible English to tell Simon’s story to the group, which I did. I told the story of Simon’s mistreatment on the farm and gave a brief synopsis of the history of donkeys. I discussed what they eat, how long they live, and how to approach them and touch them.

  Then I opened the gate and invited them all to come into the pasture and stand in a semicircle around the donkeys. The counselors and I broke up the carrots into little pieces and handed chunks to those boys who wanted to get closer—only four or five did.

  Simon was an intuitive host; it was always hard to reconcile his troubled story with his gentle nature. He was good at reading people; he never approached people who were nervous around him.

  For ten minutes or so, one member of the group after another stepped forward with their hands out and Simon crunched away at the carrots he had come to expect from visitors.

  Juan stayed back; he was clearly frightened of the big donkey, unwilling to get close or to offer him a carrot.

  Simon had a ring of people around him—counselors and kids—holding their carrots out, but something drew him to Juan, who stood back by the gate. Simon walked through the circle and toward Juan, who was holding Father Joseph’s hand and watching wide-eyed.

  “It’s okay,” I said, moving toward them. “He won’t hurt you.” I trusted Simon completely, but I wasn’t certain what he wanted from Juan. Simon stood alongside of the boy. He looked down at his bright green sneakers, shook his head a bit, and leaned down to sniff them—perhaps he thought they were food.

  Then he simply stood alongside the boy, staring out through the gate.

  “What does he want?” asked Juan nervously.

  “He is waiting for you to rub or scratch his ears,” I said.

  There was a long silence. The other boys were all standing still, holding their carrots and watching. Then some of them began offering opinions about what Simon wanted—he wanted food, he wanted a walk, he wanted to say hello.