San Francisco Panorama

McSweeney's No 33 San Francisco Panorama
2009
Weight: 3.4 lbs
Method of Disposal: Donated to Goodwill

I see hard things every day.  I watch baby kittens die for reasons completely unknown to us as humans, though mama cat seems to know which will live and which won't.  We fight nature.  I watch dog's hearts break into thousands of pieces while their owners drop them off and don't look back.  A mom telling her children in a chipper tone, "kiss your dog goodbye but don't touch him with your lips!"  Dogs with chemical burns all over their body.  Dogs who will live but are currently so sick that the life seems to leave their eyes, and they just lay in a heap in a cage no matter how much affection you shower on them.  I see dogs and cats being misunderstood. Every. Day.  People say, "that dog is just mean."  Really, she is just terrified and having the worst 6 months of her entire life.  I jump from one broken heart to the next to the next to the next.  This description is of just some of the animals I cared for this week.  Sometimes, the animal will be busting at the seams with gratitude and joy, which is wonderful and, yet, still so sad that they expect so little out of life that 15 minutes with me is enough to change their world.

I rarely break down.  I always power on.  After 10 years you would think I had seen it all, but I still get surprised almost weekly.  Then something not surprising at all, that I have seen many times before, will hit me with all the force of my first day all those years ago and my stomach will turn and my breath will leave me.  It catches me completely off guard.  The other day we sent a senior mastiff to be spayed.  She'd had many many litters, but we had her for awhile and she showed no signs of pregnancy.  She's old and ready to retire.  The vet tech brought her back, and the dog had the most forlorn expression.  The tech said, "She had one big baby in there.  She couldn't have passed it anyway." A solitary puppy.  But it was the word "big" wasn't it?  Or the expression on the dog's face?  Or the fact that she would have to "sleep it off" in a kennel all by herself along with all the other suffering pets.  No peace, no giant dog bed in a cozy home with doting humans.  She was truly and completely on her own.  More alone now, as her one big baby would have died or had to been euthanized after the spay.  No one expected to find that baby. She likely did not expect to lose it.  She just woke up, and it was gone.  Maybe it was painful but a relief or maybe it was devastating,  Her face seemed to tell me it was the ladder.

I wanted to bring her home but, with 5 dogs of my own and 3 foster dogs, all of which had made my stomach turn at some point, I knew I had nothing left to give her and, even if I could take her home, I would have to leave all the other broken hearts behind.  I covered her in a warm blanket from the dryer, pet her, spoke gently and then left with my partner to try to rescue two feral kittens who had been abandoned at the fire department.  No time to cry or to register what had happened to that beautiful mastiff.  It haunts me, like so many other things, though she was much happier today when I saw her just a couple days into her recovery.  I am so ready to see that dog go home and know that her new family will not have to carry the sadness of having seen her that day.  That they will be able to look at her and love her with pride and not the guilt of closing the cage and walking away from her on what may have been the worst or one of the worst days of her entire life. 

Noel the Coward

Noel the Coward by Raboert Krauss Illustrated by Jose Aruego amd Ariane Dewey
1988
Weight: 1 lb
Method of Disposal: Leaving at Kroger off North Decatur Rd

 

I chose this book because I feel that this illustration captures exactly how I have felt upon waking the last two days.  I am not sure if it is the Chantix, living so far way from my fiancée, the way my new job overwhelms me, the stuff going on around me, the hormones, or if it is just a normal sadness that will soon pass.  I slept in until 11am, trying to hide today.  I try not to waste me weekends like that, but we cannot change the past.  We can only move forward, and there is SO MUCH TO DO TODAY.  Waaaaaahhhhhhhh.

 

I think the pictures in this story are superior to the actual words.  It is about a little coward and his cowardly father.  The little coward gets picked on all the time so him and his father take a self-defense class.  He learns how to avoid a fight and does not have to fight because he knows he could and so do the bullies.  Mama is so proud of him and dad.

 

Why can't life be so simple?

The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar  by Sylvia Plath
2000
Weight: 8.8 oz
Method of Disposal: Leaving in a book box in East Atlanta or Oakhurst

It is a dull, dreary, rainy, sleepy day and thus, probably a good day to get rid of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.  I first read this book in high school and then, as a junior, I reread it and attempted to write my first serious literary comparison.  I had a vivid memory of it several weeks ago but now I cannot remember what the topic actually was.   I know that I read a lot of books and did so much work to get that paper done.  I was only suppose to write a short paper on one book, but I got special permission from my English teacher to take on a much larger project.  I got so caught up in reading every Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Elizabeth Wurtzel book I could find that I became overwhelmed with information and turned in a terrible paper.  I believe I got a very disappointing "B."  I deserved lower, if you just looked at quality, but I worked so hard.  It was so worth it though.  Little did I realize that the next year I would write an even more daunting paper on "The Sexual Connotations of Little Red Riding Hood" and then after that would attend a private college where you would be assigned a ten page paper in a math class and a 20-30 page paper in an English class and so on and so forth until you got to your thesis work, which was particularly big if you double majored, like me.  I needed that failing paper to get it out of my system, learn how to organize, and move on.

The Bell Jar.  It appealed to me because of the strong-minded woman narrating it.  I underlined, "And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat(85)."  I related to her desolation and her disillusionment with the world and the people that inhabited it.  "The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life (142)."  I understood the pain behind people's throw away comments.  The ones about your own reality that people make when they try to care but cannot wrap their head or heart around what you are showing them. 
                    My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."
                    I looked at her.  "Like what?"
                    "Like those awful people.  Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused.  "I
                    knew you'd decide to be alright again (145-146)."

I am somewhere else in life now.  Far, far away from the experiences of Esther Greenwood/Sylvia Plath.  I still have dreary, dim, daunting, alliterative days and sometimes I even fall into depression but never with the same gusto and, if I do, it is only with the help of some sort of hormonal medication that throws everything out of whack but that I can recognize, gather support for, and move on from.

Today, I am just slightly sad and slightly sleepy.  Goodbye, Bell Jar, go spread your word.