November 25, 2013
It's become bitterly cold in New York and everyone is coping as best they can, switching to the puffy down jacket and assuming the "Michelin tire man" look; or, if you are younger, the flat and fashionable micro down. A few of us are still cycling, although once the wet weather arrives, I will opt for "spinning" on a stationary bicycle at the gym a few blocks away. Forty-five minutes of high-speed pedaling under the direction of a pumped-up gym instructor is not for the faint-hearted, but perhaps it is the only alternative to dangerously slick streets.
What I find particularly appealing about the local gym is that it will be offering classes on both Thanksgiving and Christmas. There will be a spinning class at 9:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day, which appeals to my sense of rightness. If I'm going to eat more than usual, then I ought to exercise at least as much as usual.
But then I've always been enamored of the ideal of mens sana in corpore sano. I first learned of the ideal (a Greek contribution to Western civilization), reading the Cornford translation of Plato's Republic my senior year in high school. To test the body's limits has always seemed to me as essential as testing the mind's. I think I owe much of my ability to cope with life's challenges to my having never abandoned the habit of motion, if you will.
In fact, when I was at Harvard, at a particularly stressful moment in my time there, it was the will to exhaust myself physically by exercise that kept me from suicide. At the end of the summer before the start of my junior year I broke up with my long-time boyfriend. I was living in an apartment with a pre-med student, a young woman from Boulder, Colorado named Karen Fogel. We were not close, but she wanted to live in an apartment (as did I), and we thought we could room together, despite not being more than acquaintances.
One night in early October 1973, on the way home from the "Lucky Garden", a Chinese restaurant in North Cambridge, she and another Radcliffe student were jumped from behind and stabbed, both seriously. As a result, I lost my roommate, whom I had projected would offer some company to tide me over while I adjusted to my new single status. With her gone, I faced an empty, unfurnished apartment.
As I was one of the few young women to take up with a young man in freshman year, I did not enter the lottery for Harvard housing, remaining at Radcliffe as a sophomore and junior. When I broke up with my boyfriend and my roommate was hospitalized, I lost the social network I had built around my boyfriend, and any hopes for a new network, and it was tough. I wasn't from an affluent enough background to socialize with most of my peers, many of whom regularly went skiing in places like Vail, or who had weekly allowances far larger than what I could earn as a student simultaneously trying to earn a degree and make a little money to keep myself in books and movies.
My aloneness was particularly felt on weekends when, not being in a dormitory, I did not have the life on the hall to distract me from my woes. Also, at Harvard when I was there, there were a few suicides. An Asian young woman who was admitted to Harvard at 16 threw herself off the roof of Cabot, a dormitory in South House. A young man jumped off the roof of "new" Mather, an ugly, newly-built, high-rise dormitory whose layout discouraged interaction among residents, unlike the more traditional dorms. A shiver went through me every time I heard of someone so young taking their life: Harvard may be the most competitive environment for young people in the world; the pressures of relentless competition can be isolating. When I found myself without either a boyfriend or a roommate in Wolbach Hall, the apartment building associated with the residential complex to which I was assigned as a freshman ("North House"), I began to crumble slowly.
One night I had a panic attack and thought of killing myself. At one moment, though, I just got angry. Why should I, who had labored so hard to be accepted to Harvard, who had fought my parents to let me apply, who had gone there without the support of my parents, accepting that my fate there would not be easy or "typical" --who had made the calculation that, no matter how difficult it could become over the course of the four years, in the end, it would all be "worth it". And as I weighed whether I really wanted to end my life, I realized that I still believed that: so instead of slitting my wrists, or jumping off a building, or taking an overdose, I just uttered an expletive and threw myself down on the floor and started doing, of all things --"sit-ups"! "Sit-ups" saved me --it sounds hilarious, I know, but it is the truth. After I had done about one hundred, I was so exhausted I was drained of anxiety. And I persevered and graduated --not on time, but two years later --with honors in "general studies".
Why any of the above has any relationship to Beau's big day is beyond my power to explain cogently, so consider the story a sort of lagniappe --a free offering from my biography, a memory of being in difficulties and prevailing against them. I cannot help but thinking that my little dog's days test him, too.
Today he went to see the vet for a rabies shot. Whenever he visits the vet he is picked up and put on the scale, then he has a thermometer stuck inside his rectum: "Ouch!" I hold him and look in his eyes and he doesn't squirm too much, so he must be an enduring soul. Next, the doctor opens up his eyes by pulling the lids back and staring in. "Ugh!" Finally, the doctor takes out a big needle and gives him the injection. "Aarrgh!" As the first year of a dog's life is reckoned as being the equivalent of ten human years, Beau is enduring all this at the age of two and a half. Yet he doesn't bark or whimper or cry, he takes it all in stride.
The vet said that I can take Beau out for a five-minute walk once a day to get him used to being outside, even though it will be mid-December before he will be able to go out and meet other dogs. I jump at the chance to get Beau to experience life beyond the confines of the apartment and once we get home from the vet's I remove him from the carrier, put his leash on and take him outside. It will be his first outing.
We walk up 111th Street from Broadway to Amsterdam and then back, before its time to go in. Beau is curious about the sawhorses the police have put down (For what reason, I don't know.) He does not approach the barriers protecting the trees that line the street and the plants that surround them. He walks by my side, with my occasionally saying "Heel", but Beau essentially doing so, never pulling on the leash. We pass lots of "street furniture", but Beau remains largely undistracted, a new experience for me with a dog.
I do not want to encourage Beau to get any closer to the trees, as I want him to be a good canine citizen. Too many dog owners in New York allow their dogs to soil the earth of these plots, destroying the work of neighbors who meticulously cultivate the plantings. In fact, in the building I live the owner of an enormous black Labrador used to allow the dog to leap the barrier directly in front of the building and relieve himself in the plot. As the dog was enormous, he literally "watered" the flower beds. The neighbor was oblivious to the obligation of civility dog ownership imposes. The practice stopped only with the dog's death, which was barely lamented.
Somehow it seems less the dog than the owner who is at fault. Its instinct was to jump in the flower bed, but it was the owner's duty not to, literally, give the instinct rein. Similarly, an old man down the street who walks a "mop" of a dog, allows it to drop its turds without retrieving them in a plastic bag. On my apartment building floor, the owner of a pair of Japanese "Chins" never notices they have left something behind after entering the elevator.
I want Beau to be a good citizen, so when others meet him they will never say "beautiful, but dumb". As a flea-bitten, worm-ridden child of Charleston's woods, he wasn't born with the equivalent of a "silver spoon in his mouth" --American Kennel Club papers; but he's hard-working, bright and spirited. I daresay I'm anthropomorphizing him when I apostrophize:
O Beau! What hopes I have for you!
Little brown dog, if you can 'make it' here
You'll 'make it' anywhere!
O Beau! Who? You! That's Who!
Your 'Beau regard'
All accord
Promises much
As a nonesuch
Boykin Spaniel
Splendid animal!
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