Not all that funny really. I just liked the idea of starting a blog that way. And as I sat on a dusty, barely paved road near the railtracks in Berkeley late yesterday afternoon, trying to coax a small injured starving chihuahua from her hiding place behind a chain link fence, I couldn't help but laugh at the visual image of my personal connection with this 8 pound creature. An open can of puppy food, a snappy snare, a couple of leashes and a swiss army knife; and me with food smeared on my jeans on my knees peering at this dog with one rear leg bloodied and swollen to twice the size of the other one with the fur torn back across the skin. I'll be 57 years old in two weeks for fucks sake.
And there are 5 chihuahua puppies in a puppy pen at my house, with the mother bored out of her mind with them, pleading with me to let them loose on the street. And she, Frida, the mom (formerly called 'hash', yeah that's right), unaware that neither she nor these 5 will spend too much time longer at my place. But her journey from the side of the freeway in San Bernardino County (if young Brandon who gave her to me can be believed) to a motel room in Richmond where she gave birth and then quickly collapsed with a calcium deficiency and almost died, to my newly painted bedroom where she and her brood have taken over - her journey is also one where the intersection of her life with mine reminds me of the story where thousands of starfish have become stranded on the shore and a young boy picks one up and carefully restores it to the watery depths. An adult man asks the child why he bothers. After all, he points out the obvious, there are thousands, what does it matter? The child doesn't hesitate: it matters to this one, he says, entirely clear on the concept that is eluding the cynical and jaded older man.
I think that even in this my 58th year, that little boy shines a light onto and into me that is the kernel of truth in the morass of political and moral engagement that has characterised my life from the earliest. I never was that good at playing with others, even when the room was crowded and the room filled with friends. Social but terrified, surrounded but isolated, charming but entirely ready for battle at any moment, I have either missed out on or avoided (depending on your viewpoint) some common human interactions. Though I shared 12 years with a woman I loved, I feared the intimacy beyond the companionship, though I had the opportunity when I was in my twenties, to become pregnant and have a child like many of my radical lesbian friends (with radical gay men as the sperm suppliers), in order to raise a new generation of feminist imbued youngsters, though I have been loved well by many and devotedly by some, though I can boast of friendships across continents and across generations which remain intense and joyous across time and space, and even though I have come close to the kind of professional success I see certain others in my circle rightfully enjoy - I have remained apart, distant and surrounded by a darkness from which my soul may never be released completely.
The battle began so early. Was it the day when I was 5 or 6 when I buried a doll I had just been given right in front of the guests who had given it to me? Was it the day I menstruated for the first time, at 12? Was it the day my breasts began to show through my dirt specked T shirt? My mum would dismiss my anguish with the familiar refrain about my just being a tomboy. But I was not a tomboy. Neither was I a boy. And didn't like the way boys behaved most of the time. My older brother Alan who I tried to tag along with would always push me away as I followed he and friends down the driveway as they left on some boys adventure. By the time I was 10 and wearing my fathers shirts with a schmeer of Brylcreem in my hair, the torment was complete, and the battle raging. By the time I found what I thought would be the liberation of feminism, the war was already lost, with my reluctant acceptance of my femaleness but my tortured desire to be among women not as one of them but as lover of them. If lesbianism seems the answer to that, you are following along nicely.
But lesbian feminism brought - instead of liberation - a proscriptive and angry set of behaviour modifications for a boy like me. And so the fear and loathing set in. At nearly 57, as the anger has subsided for the first time in my life I get a chance however late, to live true to a principle so simple it makes me smile in almost childlike exuberance. Gender, my gender, my torment, my inner torture means absolutely fuck all to the terrified dog behind the fence. Animal rescue, while heavily populated by middle class and middle aged women, is a gender free zone in the mind of the animal, the one to whom it matters whether they get left on the beach to suffocate with the thousands of others or whether that intersection with my life brings them to safety.
The injured chihuahua peered through the fence as I cracked open the can, and as she began to feast on the wet food on my fingers and allowed me to slowly touch her face and her back, and to slip a leash around her neck, she understood the difference between fear and trust. It took just half an hour. She is at the vet now, and will go to the shelter later today. And probably next week, or tomorrow another funny thing will happen on the way.....
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