Requiem for a gentle soul

Seven years ago we were looking for a dog to adopt.  Not too long before we'd lost our brilliant, eccentric border collie mix Doolin, and while we knew there was no replacing that big a personality, we felt like our house needed another canine presence.  Our other dog, Grendel, had gone into a positive decline when his friend died, and although he was beginning to come out of it, he was clearly still lonely.

We started pawing through (pun intended) local rescue and adoption sites, and for a while didn't see anyone who seemed right.  Grendel was great with other dogs, so compatibility wasn't likely to be a problem, and one April day we drove with him to a couple of shelters to see who might need a home.

After a couple of "well, maybes," we ended up at the lovely Animal Care Sanctuary in East Smithfield, Pennsylvania.  If you're ever up that way looking for a dog -- not very likely, I guess, because it's in the middle of rural north-central Pennsylvania -- this is the place to go.  Carol had found a listing for a dog who seemed interesting, a seven-year-old hound mix, so we drove down to meet her.

The first thing we found out about her was that she'd already been adopted three times -- and brought back.  The people at ACS weren't sure why, although they thought one time had been because of problems getting along with another dog who was (their words) "kind of hyperactive."  But we figured we could tell a lot by how she interacted with Grendel when they met, and it'd be obvious quick if the problems had been partly on her side.

We left Gren in the car while we went to meet her.  We were escorted into a meeting room with toys and a dog bed, and waited for the assistant to bring her in.  When the door opened and she came in on a leash, Carol and I said simultaneously, "Oh, my goodness, she is gorgeous."  I'd never seen a dog with those markings.  Apparently she was part bluetick and part redbone hound, and the markings were a blend of both -- patches of black and chestnut-brown, and lots of white with freckles of both colors.

The second thing that became apparent quickly was that whatever the problem had been with the other dog, it hadn't been her fault.  She trotted right up to us, tail wagging madly, as if we'd known her for years.  When we brought Gren in to meet her, there was more tail wagging, as well as the obligatory mutual all-over sniff.  It took us about five minutes to decide she was coming home with us.

We named her Lena.

Me with Lena and Grendel shortly after her adoption

Our dogs seem to accrue nicknames, and in short order Lena got the moniker "Splat:"

Her penchant for digging led to her being called "Pothole:"

Snow, ice, whatever.  Didn't matter.

Other times she was JellyBean (what Carol usually called her), Moaning Myrtle (because of her moans and groans when she was getting an ear rub or a belly skritch), Speed Bump (she had a knack for lying right across door thresholds or across the top of the stairs), Derpy (when she did something unusually silly), and Your Royal Majesty (from her habit of standing at the back door barking when she wanted to be let in right now).

The most striking thing about her, though, was her extraordinary gentleness.  She is far and away the sweetest, most laid-back dog I've ever met.

When Grendel died four years ago and we decided to find her a new friend -- and settled on a big, goofy knucklehead of a pittie mix who's named Guinness but who earned the nicknames "Galoot" and "Crash" really early on -- she tolerated his antics and love for rough play without a hint of a growl.

Like they all do, she got creaky with age.  When she hit ten, she started to get a little arthritic, but most days handled all the staircases in our house without any hesitation.  And even when her health began to get more precarious, early this year, she never lost her exuberant cheerfulness and sweet disposition.

The tail never stopped wagging.

That, in fact, is how we knew something was seriously wrong last week.  She stopped eating, and began to experience other unpleasant symptoms I won't go into.  But the biggest red flag was that she was clearly unhappy.  The tail was down, the eyes downcast, and a gentle probe of her stomach elicited a yelp -- and the presence of a mass that shouldn't have been there.

Three days later, it became obvious she was suffering badly.  As a frail fourteen-year-old, there was no way we were going to put her through surgery, which was unlikely to be successful and certainly would have compromised her quality of life even if it extended the quantity.  And Monday evening, we sat with her as our wonderful vet, Dr. Bonnie, helped to end Lena's pain with us sitting right next to her stroking her head and telling her what an amazing dog she was.

Even though it was the right thing to do, I feel heartbroken.  It's going to be a long time before I stop looking for her to walk into my office in the morning to say hello and get the obligatory ear rub.  Other pet owners will understand how much they become part of the fabric of your family, and how much both pet and owner get from the mutual unconditional love.  Lena was an extraordinary dog, and her loss leaves a hole in our lives.  But despite the pain I'm feeling now, I'm thankful we had the chance to give her seven great years in a warm and loving home.  Although I'm crying now I'll always remember with a smile a calm, sweet, gentle soul with a huge heart, who needed very little to be happy -- and always gave us far more than she ever took.

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I've always loved a good parody, and one of the best I've ever seen was given to me decades ago as a Christmas present from a friend.  The book, Science Made Stupid, is a send-up of middle-school science texts, and is one of the most fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious things I've ever read.  I'll never forget opening the present on Christmas morning and sitting there on the floor in front of the tree, laughing until my stomach hurt.

If you want a good laugh -- and let's face it, lately most of us could use one -- get this book.  In it, you'll learn the proper spelling of Archaeopteryx, the physics of the disinclined plane, little-known constellations like O'Brien and Camelopackus, and the difference between she trues, shoe trees, and tree shrews. (And as I mentioned, it would make the perfect holiday gift for any science-nerd types in your family and friends.)

Science education may never be the same again.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Requiem for a cathedral

As I sit in my office writing this, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is burning.

It's hard for me to describe what I am feeling.  Mostly, it's a deep, deep grief that something beautiful, something irreplaceable, is gone forever.  It was a place of devotion, a building that had been lovingly cared for and added to for almost nine hundred years, an iconic symbol of the city of Paris.

And now it's gone.

I know that loss is part of the human condition, but this is a big one.  It appears that there isn't even anyone to blame, to take our minds off the grief, as there was with 9/11; the best guess anyone has right now of the cause is an accident during renovation.  That one blunder could deprive the world of something this grand is mind-boggling, but that's what seems to have happened as of the time I'm writing this.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Delso creator QS:P170,Q28147777, Paris Notre-Dame cathedral interior nave east 01d, CC BY 3.0]

This sense of grief at the destruction of something beautiful has been with me for a long, long time.  My first contact with it happened when I was little -- probably not more than four years old -- and my mom, who was a devoted gardener, presented me with a little packet of forget-me-not seeds.  I was so excited I had to open it and pour them into my hand, and in the process stumbled walking across the yard and dropped them into the grass.  I don't recall what my mother did other than saying "so much for that."  What I do remember is crying inconsolably that something that could have been beautiful was lost.  Every time I've been confronted by loss since then, I remember that little packet of seeds and how final and irrevocable it seemed, how nothing I could ever do would change what had happened, would ever make it all right again, world without end, amen.

And it always launches us into the if-only trap, doesn't it?  When a chance set of circumstances led to the death of our beloved border collie Doolin a few years ago, I spent the next weeks trying to parse what we could have changed had we only seen ahead.  Tiny differences -- waiting two minutes, leaving our house through a different door, taking a different path into our yard -- any one of those would have meant that she and that speeding car would not have been at the same place at the same time.

But we're not prescient, and all of those tiny events only add up in retrospect.

Every time something irrevocable occurs, from the minor to the overwhelming, I can't help thinking if only something could have been done differently.  If only someone hadn't blundered, hadn't had a moment of carelessness, had been paying more attention.

And each time, I am brought to the reality that the if-onlys are pointless.  It's done, it's over, it will never be again.

It's the scale of this one that's so horrible.  Consider the love and wonder of the millions of tourists who visited Notre Dame; the ones (like myself) who wanted to go, always intended to go, but never did; the thousands who devoted their time, effort, and money to the upkeep and renovation of the structure; the countless devout Catholics who considered this a central icon of their deeply-held faith; and you have a glimmer of understanding of what people are feeling right now.

I keep going back to the news stories, watching the videos as if to make sure I've understood right, that Notre Dame is really gone.  A part of me still can't quite believe it.

Of course, I still mourn the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, so it may be a while before this wound heals.

Firefighters are still trying to save what they can, but the last word I heard was that even the vault might be in jeopardy.  Realistically, I don't see how anything but the stone framework will remain standing, and probably not even all of that.  And if they rebuild it, then what?  What they create might well be beautiful and awe-inspiring, as the 9/11 memorial and the new World Trade Center are, but it won't be what it was.  That will only exist in our remembrance -- and in our art, photography, and writing, which (after all) are our species's collective memory.

I'm not sure what else to say.  It still seems surreal, a blow to our false confidence that the world will always remain as it is.  I will be processing this for a long time, I think.  But for now, I'm going to go look at some photographs of a treasure that is now lost forever.

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Requiem for a heart-stealer

Eight years ago, my younger son and I were sitting on the couch in the living room, laptop between us, looking through photographs on PetFinder.

About a year earlier, we'd lost our venerable old hound Arlo, and our other dog, an eccentric and wound-too-tight hound/border collie cross named Doolin, was clearly lonely.  So we decided to start looking around for dogs at local SPCAs.

Pretty soon, Nathan and I saw one that we both thought was cute, up at the Seneca County SPCA, only about fifteen miles north of us.

We showed the photograph to Carol, who was at first less than sanguine.

"I don't know," she said.  "He's kind of... funny looking."

Nathan and I insisted that he was cute, and that we go up and meet him.  Although, upon consideration, we had to admit that she was right.  He was kind of a funny-looking dog.  Square, stubby muzzle, curly tail, coat like a German shepherd, ears that cocked at a goofy angle when he was interested in something.

Even so, we thought he was worth a visit.  So about a half-hour later, we were in our car driving north, with Doolin riding shotgun.  She, of course, had to get along with whatever dog we got, so she had to have first right of refusal, as it were.

The lady who was staffing the SPCA that day told us this dog's rather horrid backstory.  He'd been badly abused, she said, ending with his owners moving away, leaving him tied to a tree, in an upstate New York November.  Leaving him, in other words, either to starve or freeze, whichever came first.  The neighbors heard him crying and rescued him, but they couldn't have a dog, so they brought him to the SPCA, where he lived for nine long months.

It's kind of understandable that no one took him home.  He was really fearful of anything new, naturally distrustful, and had a serious issue with anyone getting between him and food.  (A leftover, of course, from his being starved as a puppy.)  But the lady brought him out, he went nose to nose with Doolin...

... and both of them started wagging.  In fact, Doolin went into the doggy "play bow" -- something she almost never did.

So we were sold.  Shortly thereafter, he was in our car heading home with us.

I decided to name him Grendel.  I've always loved the tale of Beowulf, and feel a bit sorry for Grendel -- not quite human, not quite animal, sort of an unfortunate combination who doesn't fit in anywhere.  Grendel the dog was a little like a dozen or so breeds put in a blender, so it seemed appropriate.

Grendel on his first day in his forever home

He was kind of skittish at first, but it was amazing how quickly he responded to love and a warm, comfortable home.  He'd obviously never seen stairs before -- the door into our fenced back yard opens off the basement, so he had to go downstairs to go outside.  The first time, he looked terrified, and simply stared down the staircase, frozen to the spot, and barked.  I clipped on his leash, and dragged him down the stairs -- once.  He got to the bottom, and sort of went, "Oh.  That was easier than I thought."  And never had a problem with the stairs again.

It wasn't long before he had stolen our hearts.  Carol's comment: "I swear, this dog keeps getting cuter every day."  His favorite thing was playing with his rope toy:

Tugging on the end of that toy, he made noises that were terrifyingly fierce.  The closest approximation I can come to is that they sounded like the snarling of the Tasmanian Devil on Looney Tunes.  One time we had some friends over, and they were in the kitchen talking to Carol, and I picked up Gren's rope toy.  Seconds later, our friends came running into the room, because it sounded like Gren was tearing my face off.

It was all show, of course.  His personality gave him the nickname "Mr. Cupcake," one of dozens of names he ended up with.  He was totally attached to Carol and me, and when we were home, all he wanted was to be near us.

Not spoiled a bit.  Nope.  Nuh-uh.

One thing that surprised us was his ability to climb chain-link fences.  You'd never guess he was that agile, to look at him; he was -- and I say this with all affection -- the same basic shape and size as a fireplug.  But he got quite adept at scaling the fence and getting out, one time doing so an hour before the one and only tornado warning I've ever experienced in my 25 years in upstate New York.  The storm came roaring through -- no tornadoes near us, fortunately -- but Grendel evidently spooked and took off.  He'd escaped before, and always came back, usually covered with mud and very pleased with himself, but night came -- and no Grendel.

We searched the neighborhood.  Nothing.  We put up signs, went from door to door down our road.  (One kid looked at the photograph we had of him and said, "Oh, what a pretty dog!"  Carol and I looked at each other and said, "Um... not really.")

Three days went by, and we got a call from the SPCA in Watkins Glen, twenty miles down the road.  Grendel had been found in Burdett, a little village about ten miles away...

... after he climbed in someone's open car window at a mini-mart, and when the car's owner came out, he barked at them and wouldn't let them into their car.  They called Animal Control, who came down and lassoed him, and then looked through reports of missing dogs.  The guy who called us said, "Well, we have this dog, and we're pretty sure there couldn't be two dogs of this description, so we think he's yours."

So we went down and bailed him out.  I've never seen a dog so excited to be back home.

The years went by, and he slowed down some -- stopped climbing fences, spent more time snoozing on the couch, started getting a little gray around the muzzle.  Still kept being the huge presence in our lives, a funny-looking dog with an outsize personality (and who, I swear, did continue to get cuter and cuter).  Our routine revolved around him -- get up in the morning, let him out, put the coffee on, let him back in, let him into the bedroom so he could climb on the bed for snuggles, and so on.  But he always gave us far more than he took from us.  He still wanted little more than a warm bed, a bowl of dog chow, and cuddles.

Then, about two weeks ago, he stopped eating.  He'd always had a bit of a sensitive stomach, so we thought maybe it was the food.  We tried tempting him with canned food, then with cooked chicken and hot dogs.  At first he ate a little, then he pretty much gave up completely.  We brought him to the vet -- always a last resort with us, as the final remnant of the abuse he'd experienced as a puppy was a fear of being restrained.

An ultrasound, blood work, and urinalysis confirmed that he was in the middle of complete kidney failure.

The decision was clear, but it is still one of the hardest things I've ever done, to make that final call to the vet.  They were wonderful, kind, and understanding of the heartbreak we were experiencing.  I held him as he drifted off to sleep one last time, and we both wept as we said goodbye to the best dog I've ever had.

The house sure seems empty without him.  It's amazing how big a spot they hold in our lives.  Our redbone/bluetick coonhound mix, Lena, has been at a loss, wondering where her friend went.  We feel the same way.  I keep expecting to look over at the couch and see his earnest and rather silly face looking at me in perplexity, wondering why I'm not petting him.

That's the thing about pet ownership; the great likelihood is that you'll eventually have to face losing your friend.  It's still worth it, all of it.  I'll never regret rescuing him from the SPCA and helping him work through the fear and trauma he'd experienced, and watching him grow into the sweet, affectionate little guy that was always inside him, and just needed a kind voice and a welcoming home to let out into the open.

But it still hurts like hell.  It's inevitable that it would.  I'll be grieving the loss of my little buddy for a long time.  Right now, I need to wind this up, because I can't see the computer screen any more.

Taking time for gratitude

I'm going to take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to share something personal.

My first year of teaching Critical Thinking, when I felt very much like I was sort of making the curriculum up as I went along, I had a student in my class named Tamila.  When I saw her name on my class list the first day of school, I had that momentary "oh, no" feeling that all teachers can relate to.  Tamila had a reputation as a tough kid, a hardass, someone with an explosive temper and little tolerance for frustration.  My first few days with that class, I found that my fears were somewhat unfounded; she had a bit of a swagger, some bluster in her mannerisms, but was well-spoken and intelligent, and didn't seem to be walking in with a chip on her shoulder.  Still, she didn't say much in class discussions at first, just sat in the back listening and watching me with intense blue eyes that you got the feeling didn't miss much.

As time went on, Tamila began to open up.  First she started raising her hand, contributing to  discussions, asking questions, challenging what other students said.  It was always in a respectful fashion, and added a tremendous amount to the class.  She shared with us that she had been raised in poverty, and was able to explain in an articulate fashion how that changed her perspective.  She started coming in early (the class was right after lunch) and bringing her lunch along, so we could chat about stuff -- sometimes trivia, sometimes important things, and more than once because she was still thinking about what we'd talked about in class the previous day.

Toward the end of the semester, I assigned the final project, which was for students to write a personal essay explaining how their thinking had evolved over the previous months.  I thought it was a good opportunity for students to do a little self-reflection, consider how their own thought processes worked and why they believed what they did.

Tamila's essay had me in tears.  She told me how through twelve years of schooling, it had never seemed important what she thought -- that in class after class, teachers had simply told her information and expected her to recite it back a couple of weeks later.  Then you get the grade, then you go on to the next course.  Critical Thinking, she said, was the first time anyone had ever truly valued her opinion, and (more importantly) shown her that her opinions had value.  The course had, she told me, given her the confidence to think on her own, and the knowledge that she could figure stuff out when she needed to.

Right after the course ended, though, Tamila took a serious downturn.  She got pretty close to hitting bottom.  I lost touch with her -- I sent her a couple of emails asking how she was doing, but never got an answer.  It was about four years later that I ran into her, quite by accident, at a local restaurant where she'd just gotten hired on the wait staff.  She came up to me with a big grin, gave me a hug, and told me that she was doing well, had been drug and alcohol free for a year, and was optimistic about her future.  We became Facebook friends, and I enjoyed seeing her updates -- frequently about her passion, which was fishing.

A couple of months ago she sent me an email saying that she still remembered Critical Thinking and all of the discussions we'd had about issues large and small.  I responded that I still treasured her final essay -- that it was, to this day, one of the best and most heartfelt ones I'd ever seen.  She responded with a string of emoji smiley-faces and hearts and said that meant an incredible amount to her.

That was the last time I chatted with her.  And yesterday I found out that two days ago, Tamila was killed in an automobile accident.

I'm not posting this to garner sympathy for my own loss of a friend, nor to bring anyone to tears (heaven knows I've shed more than enough since I found out).  It's more to say how thankful I am that I had the opportunity to tell Tamila how much her friendship meant to me, how glad I was that I'd had the opportunity to be her teacher.  She was a young woman who I doubt heard that from very many people, either during high school or afterwards.  That I had the chance to let her know that I still remembered her with great fondness is something I will always be grateful for.

So I'll end this by encouraging you all not to put off telling the people you care about that you love them.  It's almost a cliché to say that you don't know how much time you have left, but it's also the honest truth, and I think we all need to carpe the absolute hell out of every diem we have.  Tamila told me once that I had truly changed her life, and my grief over her death is coupled with a deep gratitude that she also changed mine.

So take the time to be kind and loving and appreciative of the people you see every day.  As for me, I need to close this, because I'm having a hard time seeing the keyboard.

Elegy for an unpredictable universe

I was asked not too long ago how, as an atheist, I cope with tragedy.

"I don't see how you could possibly find a way to understand loss and grief," my friend said, "without some sense that there's a larger meaning in the universe."

In some ways, of course, I don't.  Not only do I not believe there's meaning in the universe (at least not in the sense he meant), I don't understand loss and grief at all.  I experience it, all too deeply -- I've lost both parents and a beloved grandmother, not to mention friends and colleagues.  It's impossible to live 53 years without going through the sorrow that comes with knowing that you will never, ever see someone you care about again.

But it is when the magnitude of the loss is amplified -- as it was yesterday with the announcement that Malaysia Flight 370 was almost certain to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 239 people on board -- that we struggle hardest to wrap our brains around what has happened.  How could the world be so built, we think, that something like this could occur?

It brings back one of the formative books of my teenage years, Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  This book chronicles the search by the 17th century Franciscan monk Brother Juniper, who is shocked when a bridge in his Peruvian village collapses, killing six people.  He is a devout man, and is certain that god must have had a reason for bringing those six onto the bridge, and no others, in time to die when the cable holding the bridge aloft snapped.  So he traces the life history of each of the six, trying to see if he can discern a pattern -- to see if he can read god's mind, determine what it was that led those particular six people to die when hundreds of others crossed the bridge daily and survived.

In the end, of course, he fails; and he concludes that either god's mind is too subtle, too deep to parse, or else there is no pattern, and things simply happen because they happen.

 It is a devastating conclusion.

Brother Juniper's search for meaning in apparent chaos is the genesis, I think, of religion, not to mention other worldviews perhaps less sanctified.  When you think about it, conspiracy theories come from the same place; a desperate need for there to be a reason, even a dark one, behind all of the bad stuff that happens in the world.  It seems that many of us would rather there be an explanation -- even if, in Christopher Moore's vivid turn of phrase, it involves "heinous fuckery most foul."  Better that than the universe being some kind of giant pinball game.

And in extremis, even we atheists still look for explanations, don't we?  Faced with tragedy, the first thing I've asked is, "Why me?", as if there is some answer to that question that is even possible given my philosophical worldview.  But it's a natural inclination, and seems to be universal to the human condition.  It is this aghast recognition that the world could treat us this badly that was captured in the starkly beautiful painting by Eugène Delacroix, depicting a Greek woman looking at the ruins of her home after her town was sacked by the Turks:

Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Sometimes there is no reason, no pattern; the world's machinery seems to work much of the time without any regard to us at all.  I flew Malaysia Airlines a year and a half ago, from Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong, and arrived there safely; two weeks ago, a similar bunch of passengers, expecting (as I did) nothing more than a few hours of tedium, ended their lives in the turbulent waters of the Indian Ocean.  And if you think that the phrase "there but for the grace of god go I" hasn't gone through my head more than once in the last few days, you're sorely mistaken.

Of course, for an atheist, that phrase is only a metaphor, and perhaps not even a very good one.  I don't have the recourse of falling back on "they're with god now" or even "god has a plan."  All I'm left with is a sense that the universe is a strange, chaotic, and unpredictable place, full of beauty and goodness and love and pleasure, and pain and danger and fear and death, sometimes meted out in unequal parts and in ways that I will never really comprehend.  But I do know one thing: we need to be more conscious, right now, about the gratitude and compassion with which we treat the people around us.  None of us have any idea how many minutes we will be given; none of us have time to waste.  Hug your loved ones, your friends, your pets -- hell, hug total strangers if you want to.  There is nothing certain about tomorrow, so you damn well better make every second of today count.

As Thornton Wilder put it in the last line of The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead; and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."