January 13, 2014
A dog is not a human in more ways than one. Thinking Beau's metabolism followed my own, human one, has been the main cause of my sleepless nights, it seems.
Beau gets fed in the morning around 7:30 a.m. He digests that food by the afternoon. So far so good. However, I had assumed that my puppy ought to be fed later and later in the evening so he would sleep and digest his food as I do, overnight. So I was scheduling his last daily feeding for six p.m., then 7 p.m., then 8 p.m., then 9 p.m., hoping he would not need to go out at 5:30 a.m., as has become his habit.
My neighbor who runs a dog walking business told me to stop feeding Beau so late and start feeding him mid-afternoon. That way, by the time of his third walk (around 9:00 p.m.) Beau would have digested his food and sleep on an empty stomach until morning --unlike most of us homo sapiens.
I still have not tried out this alteration in Beau's schedule, but I pray it works. Sleeping in two and three hour "patches" does not suit me at all.
We now walk towards Morningside Park, rather than Riverside, on account of the poor air quality the fire Saturday brought on. The fire, it turns out, was not a four-alarmer, but a six-alarm fire: it was still smoldering late yesterday afternoon. A fire crew remains on the scene to make sure it does not reignite. It is still too hot to enter the basement to check on the condition of the safe-deposit boxes or to fully investigate the fire's causes.
This morning, Citibank put up a tent and assigned personnel to it to stand by, answering neighborhood residents' questions. "No", the building doesn't belong to Columbia. "Yes", Citibank will return to the Columbia neighborhood, if not to the former branch location. Camera crews are taking photographs of the scene, as well as photographers from the newspapers, and passersby eager to use the cameras in their iPhones. There are tourists, too, trawling the area, discombobulated by the mass of tents, trucks, and media concentrated around the space between the islands of green on Broadway and 111th Streets. They, too, are recording the event.
Apropos of the almost-universal modern impulse to capture images, I think of something Gertrude Stein, once said:
• It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.
Shooting photographs is a contemporary compulsion, overtaking reading, probably because my photos on an iPhone are probably not any better than yours, while there is a "caste" system associated with books. George Eliot trumps Barbara Cartland, The Great Gatsby beats Presumed Innocent. Some people are intoxicated by their new-found ability to photograph. What family dinner recently attended has not been punctuated by the younger family members "pointing and shooting" with their rectangular gadgets?
Twenty-somethings and younger seem particularly devoted to the practice. All I can think of is the primitive belief that photographing is tantamount to stealing the soul of the person photographed. Is there something talismanic about capturing an image, a belief that doing so stops time, and so protects against death?
The photos could be viewed as the "children" of those who take them, indeed, in the case of the great photographers, it would not be wrong to describe their innovations in technique and subject matter as "progenitors" of modern and contemporary visual technology. Yet most of the photos on the iPhones will never become prints, and the vast number of them will be erased, which is not possible with human children --or, in our dog-loving hearts, puppies, however early in the morning they rouse us.
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