An essay by Gary Kamiya in Salon.com today, “Me and Mr. Bonds,” (click on the title link above), takes an interesting look at the moral dilemma that Barry Bonds will present us next season as he moves towards breaking Hank Aaron’s career home run record of 755 (Bonds is at 734 right now). As most people know, Barry Bonds has, along with many other modern day sluggers, been accused of using steroids, growth hormones and other performance enhancing drugs in the last few years running up to Major League Baseball finally banning them outright. To put a fine head on things, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada’s Game of Shadows presents so-called definitive evidence that Bonds knew exactly what he was doing.

Kamiya is a San Francisco Giants fan and a Bonds lover. He openly, and humorously, presents some of the basic excuses people are making for the beleagured slugger, and teases us with pronouncements that are somewhat nose-thumbing in posture, but pulls back admitting that, in his own words, he’s “…full of shit” in several parts of the essay.

I was hoping Mr. Kamiya would get us baseball fans over the moral hump that most people don’t even seem to be able to see yet. It’s good that he makes the hump visible at least, but he should have gone all the way. There is no question this is one of the true conundrums sports fans have ever faced–especially those of us who love the game of baseball more than life itself.

I was surprised, however, that no mention was made by Kamiya of the structural changes in the game that sort of detract from all of the offensive records we’ve seen since the late 1960s. Dropping the official height of the mound seems to me to be one of the more obvious asterisk producers I can think of. After the Year of the Pitcher (1968) baseball required mounds to go from 15 inches down to 10.

Although it’s not true of all ball parks, there’s no question that fields are shrinking. Most of the new parks have power alleys designed for fan appreciation first and big muscled boppers. Rumors about a juiced ball are always ebbing and flowing as well. Who knows?

And what about the equipment? In the early days of the game they didn’t even have home run fences. If you hit a bomb, you just ran like a bat-out-of-hell and legged it for all you could get. Gloves weren’t as well made either, nor bats, and the courage it took to stand in there on an inside pitch when you didn’t have a helmet (take a look at photos of Babe Ruth or even Ted Williams at the plate) is something we all forget–not to mention the fact that no one used elbow, wrist, and shin armor.

As I write, rumors begin to crop up that Bonds may be headed to the Oakland A’s next year — an American League team — where more than likely old Barry will become a designated hitter extraordinaire. One has to wonder how many more homers Ruth or Aaron would have hit had they been provided with such a luxury.

And speaking of Ted Williams and moral character, most of the real baseball people I know don’t give a damn about Ruth’s old record, Aaron’s current one, or Bonds and his enhanced possibilities. Everyone knows that Ted Williams, The Splendid Splinter, gave nearly 5 seasons of his career, from the age of 22 to 27 (kind of prime years) to join the military as a volunteer and defend this country in World War II and the Korean War. Five years is about a quarter of his major league sojourn. Williams ended his career in his last at-bat with his 521st homerun. He is number 15 on the all-time list. He’d be right up there near the top if they’d had the DH and he’d not been so patriotic.

Finally, of course, is the problem of modern professional baseball and it’s 30+ teams versus the “good old days” when there were two leagues with 8-10 teams a piece. Those who made it up to The Bigs were truly ready back there in the Golden Age. Nowadays, and we all know this, a good 30-40% of the pitchers just aren’t up to the level we want them to be. I don’t know the statistics, but I’d like to see a study done on who Bonds is hitting his homers off of–(McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro and all the others supposedly disgraced by the game as well).

The point here is that if the moral issue about performance enhancing drugs comes down to the idea that some players are cheating and others are not, that’s one thing. But if you’re concern is about whether a performance-enhanced Bonds should get credit for breaking Hank Aaron’s record for lifetime home runs, you can relax because Aaron hit practically every homer (though not all) in the era of bigger parks, less questionable balls, and taller mounds (and for that matter, higher grade pitching overall). In this regard, there’s no way to take much of this record-mania very seriously. Post 1968 is a different era and there’s just no comparison (I won’t even go into the argument comparing Aaron’s feat to Ruth’s engenders, except to point out that a segregated pre-Jackie Robinson sport meant that Ruth never faced some of the best pitchers of his day but Hammerin’ Hank got to look at pitches from Ferguson Jenkins, Bob Gibson, Mudcat Grant, Al Downing, and Dock Ellis–to name just a few–regularly). And I would imagine even Hammerin’ Hank would tip his cap to Ted Williams and admit that his record and pretty much every other hitter in the 500 club should have an asterisk next to their names pointing out that Ted Williams service for his country makes all these numbers rather anti-climactic and flaccid.

But let’s go to the question of cheating by using chemicals, because regardless of records, that’s the real question. I am a 48-year-old squash player whose body has broken down. Five years ago I competed one night in a club match against a 17-year-old whiz kid (ranked #2 in the country in his age group). I stayed close for the first two games of our best-of-five match, but half-way into the third game my body began to turn into rubber and I was sucking wind like the old, feeble man I had just realized I was. I lost the match 3-1. In the final game I didn’t get a single point.

These days I content myself with long walks in the woods, hitting the ball around with other old farts, and working out on the court by myself doing drills and trying to learn new shots. My days of intense competition are over. It is a sad, sad reality to face if you are a committed athlete.

Add to my situation $15-20 million a year (not that anyone would) for another few years, and I assure you I would have no problem getting help from anyone who had a “cure.” In fact, I’m not sure whether there’s anyone in this country who would not do what old Barry has done. (People make asses out of themselves on TV all the time for far less money). There’s plenty of gym rats and running addicts and club competitors who have bought into the “fountain of youth” syndrome. In fact, there are doctors out there who are willing to provide any one of us with the necessary prescriptions to stay on the court or the track.

Is medical science taking a very serious look at what could reasonably be done for the likes of folks like me using low-dose therapeutic levels of steroids and hGH? Exactly what would the problem be if that were a real and acceptable option? Is it cheating when you’re boss takes anti-depressants in order to function at work? How about truck drivers and night-shift workers with prescriptions for amphetamines? Or, simply, athletes who get cortozone shots or prescriptions for other pain meds? Or look at the case of Adam LaRoche of the Atlanta Braves who must take a banned substance in order to control his attention deficit disorder. Yes, he’s a much better player under the influence. Is that natural? Is it right?

Where do we draw the line? I don’t think we can. You can try, but you risk sounding awfully sanctimonious…and the louder you yell, the more obvious it will be that you haven’t got a leg to stand on. This is the 21st century. We’re kind of different than we were back there in days of yore.

In the end, it all comes down to two weird ideas that we seem to have about Sports: 1) competition must be based on equal playing fields and, 2) athletes should compete in “natural states.” I’m not sure if these ideas are driven more by the basic philosophy of the fan as an innocent who needs to trust what they’re seeing, or by the gamblers out there who govern so much of sports from the underground.

But there are no “equal playing fields” and no professional athlete is in a “natural” state. Special diets, special workout techniques, hi-tech excercise machines, scientific practice schedules, the fact that athletes can simply dedicate themselves to nothing but playing–all of this is unnatural, and truly, remarkably, presents room for massive amounts of inequality. If we took this logic to it’s ultimate conclusion, maybe pro basketball should limit player height to 6’6″, and maybe pro football should limit weights to 280 pounds. And maybe in baseball every field should have the exact same measurements and pitchers who throw over 100 mph should be penalized. Certainly, all the body armor that baseball players wear while at the plate needs to be banned. And it’s common knowledge that many players in many sports take amphetamines on game day. Who’s really making a big deal about that?

You may think I’m trying to let Barry off the hook here. I’m not. I think there’s no question that his cheating sullies the sport (a sport I love more than life itself). But he’s just adding insult to injury. I love The Game itself, but I’ve got a love-hate relationship with the major leagues. The Majors easily gets me confused about my feelings for The Game. I’m very happy coaching youth baseball where there’s never an equal playing field. I love working with preternaturally gifted athletes side-by-side with kids who can barely catch. And I am happiest most of all watching high school ball where the only reason anyone is playing is to play, and there are usually no home run fences.

What I like about the pros is that they make fewer errors than any other level and that they are so monumentally talented. No matter what, the eye-hand coordination required to make full contact with a ball thrown 95-100 mph is a titanic feat–juiced or unjuiced. I’ll take it however it’s dished up. I always wonder how home run balls feel traveling so high above everything, knowing they are on their way to never-never land.

Barry will confuse many people, but not me. It will be marvelous to see him break the record, but it won’t mean a whole lot…and you can be sure that Barry, a student of the game and Willie Mays’s godson, knows better than any of us how stupid and pointless it is to make such a big deal out of this. He’ll be happy for awhile; he’ll be relieved; he’ll make a good amount of money off his name for the rest of his life; but he will not be confused by what he’s done. He prolonged his career (and money-making potential) by taking drugs, and maybe gave himself a little boost of power in the process. But the record? My guess is that Barry Bonds already understands that in the end records mean very little to a retired player. At best they’re like trophies sitting in your den; at worst they’re a reminder that you’re done with the game, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, and now you have to figure out how to be a real person in a world you never even knew existed. God bless you Barry Bonds. God bless the game of baseball. God bless us all. Think 756…

On September 11th we needed to say goodbye.
Our phones are mobile now
So we did. And somewhere
In that bright blue sky
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings
Found every one of us.

We needed to say goodbye to innocence;
Goodbye to an innocence
We did not know we possessed
Until it was gone.

There is no longer anything to hold onto.
We are letting go.
The world of silk and linen
The world of wet hair and hot skin
Is drifting into memory, into time.
We are left with our selves,
With each other.

That night, we listened to the Beatles
And watched Sam Waterston and Robert Redford
In The Great Gatsby.
A blue pool under a hot, summer-ending sun.
“Speaking words of wisdom. Let It Be.“

We did not know it was behind us
Until it was.

You can’t repeat the past.
It is gone.
We are left to dream our new world.
We are left with our dreams
And the new world.

© David Biddle, September 12, 2001

Several websites have recently published fiction that I’ve written. Sleep Magazine posted my short story, “The Exact Black of Night,” back in October. You can find it in their archives near the bottom of the page. I am tickled pink that a London-based, avant garde team of crazy wonderful supporters of new writing would choose my story about a desolate, American male, lost and lonely in his neighborhood video rental shop.

Wildviolet.net has also published excerpts of journal entries by Cecil Miller from my first novel, The Electric Pool: Beyond the Will of God. If you were around in the Sixties and Seventies, then you know that there was magic and philosophy in the air. “The Significance of Music” addresses that magic and philosophy. Let me know your thoughts. I’m editing The Electric Pool again and want to re-submit to agents and small presses in early 2006.

Finally, back last summer the well-regarded magazine, Toasted-Cheese.com, published my little short piece, “Guda and His Son,” a story about a Pakistani father and his American-born son, Carter, one early summer morning a few years ago working together at the gas station they own. There’s a nice little payoff for the reader, so check it out.

Let me know what you think of my work. Send agents and publishers to my stories. I am going to die an unhappy, possibly early, death if I don’t get to the point where I’m earning my living writing full-time.

More power to you. Read books! Take the time to pay attention to short stories. Eat lots of fiber. Grow your own thoughts. Life is for the creative and thoughtful. Go watch a Little League baseball game this spring!

-db

When we set out on our journey to Richmond, it never occurred to me that I would have a story to tell. I took some notes on thoughts I was having at the time. I wrote in my journal some. But I never intended to write out this story. It just came to me over the course of the end of 2003, sort of as an unrelenting need to struggle with what had happened to me–especially the strange sleepy sensations I was having and the vague auditory hallucinations.

I could not even have conceived of writing the story of our quest for Dana without having read Dick Wertime’s Citadel on the Mountain several years ago (see “true links” to the right for a sample from the book, or click on the title of this entry to go to Amazon). Citadel is Dick’s memoir of growing up with a father who was brilliant, intense, possibly connected to the CIA, and also at times paranoid and delusional. Dick’s story is about trying to understand his father (and himself) after his father had died, realizing how much of his own life he did not understand.

I had the pleasure of meeting with Dick in his office at Arcadia University here in the Philadelphia area several years ago. He is a professor of English and writing there. We spent maybe a half hour talking about writing and his book. The intent of the meeting was for him to give me advice on my first novel, Beyond the Will of God (sadly, unpublished). In ten minutes he illustrated five key points of fiction writing that I have taken to heart over the years. We also talked about non-fiction and the memoir as a form. Until that conversation, I had resisted the hype surrounding “creative non-fiction” and New Journalism. I have always admired Mailer, Wolfe, Matthiessen and others capable of exploring real-life in essays and books, but I never saw their “journalism” as art. To me, even serious photography was not art. It approached art, but it was still simply getting lucky by catching a piece ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giff someone’s or something’s moment.

But Dick turned me around. We discussed the whole idea of what Citadel was about: a sort of detective story, a refitting of the puzzle pieces of his life after discovering new shapes and new dimensions.

I came away from Dick’s office with a greater appreciation then, for the literary quality of non-fiction. (Please understand that I have been a cretin all my adult life and I apologize for this. Although I have been writing since I was eight, I never took an English class or a fiction workshop of any kind after high school).

I’m still not sure where creative non-fiction and memoir fit in the taxonomy of the field of “Litchertchure.” I do know, however, that without reading The Citadel on the Mountain, and having the opportunity to listen to Dick’s wise counsel, I never would have figured out that I could write this story.

Dr. Wertime will be releasing a new novel soon called San Giovanni.

The Acadians of the Maritime Coast in Canada were a fully integrated culture mixing Native and French cultures over the course of several centuries prior to the Revolutionary War. They were a culture of some 18,000 people wiped out in a few years by the British, utterly eliminated through forced removal or simply driven into the wilderness to fend for themselves. Some of these displaced Acadians eventually straggled down to Louisiana. Over the next century (mostly the 19th), French/Creole language shifts eventually came up with the name Cajuns for them.

An article in Salon.com contains an extended interview with John Mack Faragher, a Yale professor of history, who wrote the book entitled, “A Great and Noble Scheme.” The article can be found at Salon’s website in the books section, “America’s Forgotten Atrocity.”

Here’s an interesting clip from the article:

“To what extent should the Acadians be viewed as a mixed-race or an ethnically mixed people? And how much did that perception contribute to their downfall?

There was an early period in their history, mostly in the 17th century, where there was considerable intermarriage. It really characterized the first and maybe the second generation, when the community was in formation. Once they had established their community the rate of intermarriage fell off, but the important point was that they recognized kinship across community lines. The Acadians looked at the Míkmaq and didn’t just see “others” there. They saw cousins, distant cousins perhaps, but cousins nonetheless. They often went to the same missionaries, their names were placed in the same baptismal records, the same marriage records. Because of the early pattern of intermarriage, they came to recognize a cultural and Christian kinship across ethnic lines.

In fact, this also characterizes a lot of American history. I don’t like the word, but we’re a miscegenated culture. There is nothing really pure about Americans. You scratch us, and we bleed many colors and many ethnicities. Our culture is about hybridity, bringing formerly separate things together. The Acadians are perhaps a more dramatic example.

Now it must be said that the French had a tendency, in part because they emphasized commerce rather than agriculture, to create the kinds of ties with the Indians that made commerce possible. They also practiced an ecumenical Catholicism and were genuinely interested in converting the Indians, where the English really were not.

Yes, you write that the Puritans made no attempts to do that.

Well, there were some attempts, John Eliot and the Mayhews — these were missionaries in 17th century New England. But the Indians that Eliot converted, who lived in the “praying towns” in Massachusetts, those Indians were attacked during King Philip’s War, and subjected to the same hatred and violence as non-Christian Indians. This remains one of the fundamental problems in understanding North American history: the English way of dealing with the Indians vs. the French way.”

From the beginning it is likely they had a good idea what orphanage I would be sent to. I’m sure the Wayne County, Indiana professionals in the Department of Children and Family were considering their options–that I may well have been a topic at staff meetings, even brainstorming sessions. How cost effective could it be for a social worker in Middle America to spin her wheels looking for a family that might legitimately want to adopt such a conundrum?

The social worker in charge of my case had three daughters all nearly full grown. She and her husband had always wanted a boy. I’m told I was one of those very personable, fat and happy babies. The story is that she and her husband decided if no one else was going to adopt me, they would.

But that was not to be. In the same town, Loureide Jeanette Biddle, a feisty, compassionate, in-your-face woman barely five feet tall, had taken it upon herself to expedite the adoption process for her son Bruce and daughter-in-law Ellen who had just suffered their fourth miscarriage in as many years. Loureide was no ordinary woman. Neither was her husband Bill. Together, during the thirties and forties, they forged a new approach to applied social science that they called community development. Drawing on principles of anthropology, social work, and religion, community development meant helping solve the problems of the poor and destitute by going out and living with them, participating in their way of life, understanding their values and the needs of their town or village. Then, from within, using the networking smarts of the social worker, Bill and Loureide would work with group leaders to solve the problems of the community. Bill was a very respected thinker in the progressive and liberal world of social science and education. By the fifties he was a professor at Earlham College, a small Quaker liberal arts college on the western half of the town of Richmond, Indiana (besides my mother who did graduate work at Earlham, my brother Jesse received his BA there thirty years later). Bill was busy teaching his theories in 1958. Impish, frenetic Loureide was a super-bright woman in her own right: an accomplished musician and political activist who had organized the socialist democratic party of Philadelphia in the early forties, and was also the first female lower school principal at Friends Central, a private school in Philly’s privileged mainline. In slow-paced Richmond she was champing at the bit for a new project, a new challenge. Bruce and Ellen were living in Lexington where he had his first job as an associate professor of social psychology at the University of Kentucky. Louriede pushed for adoption and, as the story goes, figured they all had a better shot in sleepy little Richmond than Lexington.

In my early years, I saw my grandmother Loureide tell off and boss around any number of people. She never took No for an answer. She had the remarkable skill of being domineering and even bitchy in order to get her point across, all the while never leaving you with the sense that she’d done anything other than sweetly ask you to do something for her. I can only imagine how the social work agency responsible for me dealt with her.

Ellen Horgan Biddle and Bruce Jesse Biddle became my parents on May 5, 1958. I’m sure I was dumbfounded and overwhelmed by the love and happiness surrounding me. On my birthday every year for my entire adult life my mother would send me a card reading the same words: “Dear David, when I first saw you I fell in love with you. I loved you then and I love you now. I held you in my arms and smiled down at you and you smiled right back at me and cooed like a little dove. Happy Birthday. I love you.”

For the first twenty-four years of my life, that love was all I needed. Faithfully, I never felt the need to know anything about my origins. People would always ask me: “Don’t you want to find your birth parents?” But my answer was always the same. “No. No, I don’t need to find them. I belong to this family. That’s more than enough.”

But it wasn’t enough. I spent the first two decades or so of my life ignoring something so fundamental and personal that it may permanently have warped my sense of identity. In the heart of my heart, I was nothing to the world and I was nothing to myself.

Around the time of my birthday every year, my mother would tell me how happy she had become once I came into her life.

“Tell me how you found me,” I would say.

“It’s a sad story,” she would respond. “But it has a happy ending.” This was a ritual between us, because I knew how much my mother loved me and I knew the story by heart.

“We came to Richmond, Indiana because your grandparents lived there. I had finished my master’s work at Earlham College which is located there a few years earlier. It was a small town then. People had trouble dealing with skin color in those days. Your birth parents were high school students in Richmond. You were put up for adoption as soon as you were born, but you were too dark-skinned to be adopted by a white family. And you were too light-skinned to be adopted by a black family. You were perfect for us, though, as soon as we saw you.”

I felt the radiance of my mother’s love when she told me that story. But the message wasn’t lost on me either: no one could deal with me. Light and dark. Black and white. It was early 1958, one of the pinnacle years of the civil rights movement. I was actually born thirty miles from Richmond in Dayton, Ohio, a city that twenty years earlier had been the temporary home of a young Ralph Ellison who found inspiration there to begin his writing career that would eventually lead to the novel Invisible Man. I always figured my birth mother had me in Dayton in order to escape the humiliation and shame she would have faced in her small home town. No one would know her in Dayton. She would have been invisible.

Through the last weeks of the winter of 1958 I was shuttled from one Richmond foster home to another while my social worker sought a family who could accept the implications of my skin color. There’s no telling how I was treated during my first month and a half. March has always been a tough time for me if I’m not careful. I imagine my round face and big, dark eyes staring at different ceilings, very quickly coming to expect a sense of being alone in a small room at the back of houses that all smelled different: camphor, old newspapers, garlic, cat urine, rubber tires, old lumber, fried food, fresh paint. How many inquisitive seven-year-olds peered over the railings of my many cribs and spit on me? How many gentle sixteen-year-old daughters stroked my cheek and sang the songs of the day to me? How long did it take for the realization to set in that I was very likely the product of a mixed race union? How long before a new home had to be found for me, a new ceiling, new smells, new people who might or might not have the time to hold and comfort me? How might I sense that life would ever be otherwise, that normal babies are doted over by their mommies and daddies, that there is only one house to wake up to every morning, that no matter what the smells and sights and sounds, it all comes to equal warmth and love and security to a baby in the end?

Back then there were those who believed in equal rights for African Americans and those who did not. But I wasn’t an objective legal principle, I was the end result of it. In a hypothetical world, if all couplings between men and women could be mixed, the question of “the Negro in America” would fade away–so would the question of Caucasians. In the late fifties, those of mixed descent must have confounded everyone. The riddle of white versus black was so big and so volatile and carried such emotional valence–even hysteria–that the gray areas and the nuances of real life were too much for people to handle. Even today in the year 2003, the majority of mixed race children feel the need to choose sides.

My skin was the color of raw teak or breakfast coffee half full of heavy cream and sugar. My nose and lips were nondescript Anglo, though my hair was nearly black and my eyes were the color of baker’s chocolate. I was, and still am today, a dark-featured blend of something.

There are many versions of mix in this country. Although there are no useful statistics, it is very likely that ours is a country dominated by mixed heritage citizens. Certainly, most African Americans and Hispanics are mixed race. And the number of so-called white people who are actually combinations of multiple ethnic groups with hints–or more–of African, Native, Hispanic, Jewish, Asian, and Mediterranean genes in their histories, is untold. But no one could tell me anything about my story. In one sense I was whatever you wanted to imagine I was. You could make up just about anything and it probably would have worked.

My demons come back when we return to our room. The ventilation system doesn’t work well and there are no controls. The room is a perfect seventy-eight degrees with moderate humidity, but I want it seventy-two and I want a unit that will allow me to drive the humidity well below fifty-percent.

We go to bed, all four of us, and I lie there feeling the heat prickle my skin, thinking about the fact that I am driving to Richmond, Indiana with nothing but the name of a high school student from 1958. In order to fall asleep, I count the things I want to take back in my life. There are many of them. I have lied and stolen things. I’ve manipulated the lives of those I love. Most of my major decisions were made in order to please others. My ego drives what I accomplish. I am a materialist. I want desperately to be rich. I’ve done worse too, far worse. The worst thing though, I realize in the dark, is that I’ve worked so hard to appear to others as a good person, a noble, decent, gentle man with positive, progressive values, that I’m no longer sure who I really am. “I’ve worked hard,” I think, “at covering up what a shit I’ve become.”

I drift across a sea of sleep, bumping into myself over and over, wondering about all of my transgressions, wondering if they’re somehow related to being adopted. If you aren’t connected, if you’re untethered, isn’t it inevitable that you will be at least slightly morally off-center and selfish? I usually do the right thing in life, probably more than some, but occasionally I make mistakes. And when I do, there is nothing to face. No guilt. Nothing. I am alone and floating outside the rest of the world. I am a mistake, an alien, a lone wolf cut off from the pack. I struggle to find sleep in the incessant heat of the room and tumble in and out of guilt and self-consciousness.

There are moments in all of this, while I drift, where I understand things better. At one point in the night, I realize that loneliness might be a good thing. It is the root cause of my ability to love others. It is the source of my deep need to find, and my belief in, true love. I went through so much to discover that love, to find Marion.

That same loneliness is filled every day being around my sons. The desperation of my situation in the world has been salved by my family, but it has not been eliminated. I lie in a room on the 16th floor of the Pittsburgh Ramada Inn and I can only be cured of this desolation by overcoming my adoption, by understanding, at least in part, the formal reasons for why I occurred.

I’ve dreamt of wolves and wild dogs my whole life. Sometimes I am in my house sitting at the kitchen table by myself. There are house noises all around me, common house noises: a ticking clock, the refrigerator, the far off sound of a vacuum sweeper, maybe I forgot to turn the water off in the sink. A wolf comes into the room. He is salivating and panting. I smell him. Death out of the dark. His eyes are ice cave blue, his fur the color of burned forest and dust. And then he’s gone. I’m afraid I will forget. I’m afraid I won’t remember he was there.

It’s sunrise, the air is moist and thick, a pack of wild dogs goes noisily through our back yard, mongrels bred of pit bulls, boxers, bull dogs, and mastiffs, some with huge, almost bald skulls, bulging eyes, vicious snarls. They breath in unison, messengers of fear cruising through our suburban neighborhood, looking to fall on any living thing, flesh on their minds. I struggle to figure out if I’m dreaming. Our suburb is on the edge of a great, sprawling metropolis. The pack streaks through our yard, then silence. The yard is vacant. I am looking out the window, standing on my bed, wondering if what I saw was real. Sometimes you’re the wolf. Sometimes you’re the dog. Sometimes he’s just there, like in the kitchen–watching, waiting, moving through.

A single dog finally comes into the yard, unable to run with the pack, it seems too goofy and deranged to belong in the group. It is the quintessential mongrel: part Shepard, part Lab, part Beagle, part Golden Retriever. Sometimes I am that dog and sometimes he is me.