No country for old dogs

This is no country for old dogs. Behind the fence around her small concrete lanai, in the sun Sweetie resembles a prisoner, shadowed slats running across her back. One friend thought she was a pig. Most days, she still lifts herself out of her plastic hut and staggers toward the peanut butter flavored treat I hold through the fence. (I try not to touch them much, as I'm so allergic to peanuts.) Other days, her eyes look out of her cave, stark with what? Pain? I can see her brindled spine now, her ribs like a bulge above her belly, a line of black nipples hanging. Diarrhea had been mostly hosed out yesterday. A yellow plastic bone never moves from its spot. Some days she lets me touch her.

 

At the top of the circle at the cemetery, Ola and Hoku, their emergency green shirts vividly backlit, walk toward Lilith and me. It's like a small parade. Lilith sits at Ola's feet while he grooms her, fur flying. "She's so calm today," he says. She stares out at the bay, the mountains, the woman who grieves for her son each day. My philosopher dog.

 

"The raccoon repellent didn't work," Hoku says. After a few days, the pigs are back. Fresh dirt and not from the "escavator" they love to drive. Still smells like garlic though, as if someone were having a big plate lunch. Pakalolo on the side.

 

In parting, I tell them about Sweetie. Should I post a sign to say, "Take me to the vet!" I thought about her all the way to the cemetery this morning. Let her be free of suffering.

 

A poetry of quietude

"SMILE! You are on voice and video cameras!" reads a new sign at the ticket shack outside the Temple. I look in on the woman we used to talk to as she fed the cats or prepared to sell tickets. She was vaping. We waved as I said something cheery about the surveillance state and she smiled crookedly at me. At the cemetery exit, Lilith insisted on sniffing where the cats (now kept from under the shack with plywood barriers) and chickens wander through the rows of flowers for sale. "She's inspecting," I say to my friend, the conspiracy theorist. "Always," he says. 

 

Up the hill, a woman and man approached us from "the heart," or the steep circle at the top of the cemetery. "Are you the lady who walks here every day and wrote a book about it?" the woman asked. Her friend, Joan, had told her about us. Are you the woman who hears fireworks? I asked. She lives behind the Temple's gift shop; hears cars racing through the cemetery some nights. She tells Rex (the boss) these things, but he blames them on the Karaoke place across the highway.

After I take their picture, the man says maybe they'll be in my next book. The walkers are still free from cameras and microphones; theirs is a free speech zone. But workers now inhabit zones of silence, a place of gestures divorced from words. Their hourly wages cannot afford the luxury of speaking.

You're the robot!

A and B were talking just outside the guard shack, so Lilith and I approached. B said he was fine, well not fine, and he pointed at the new camera set on the side of the shack. I said something about Trump's America. "Oh, the surveillance state, that was Biden." A: "I can't believe you supported Biden." I tried to say it was the Democrats I was supporting, not Uncle Joe, but he responded with another attack on the Dems for installing Kamala as the candidate. And besides, the new boss hates Trump. He's a Democrat. I didn't say anything about my political ambivalences. Ambivalence, like irony, is hiding under a rock somewhere (a power washed rock, I'm sure).

 

A started in on No Kings, the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled into the protests. "I've been to them all," I said, "and no one paid me a cent." "That's because you're a ROBOT." "Don't you call ME a ROBOT." 

 

The other day, my auto body shop friend told me, apropos of leftist over-stepping, "I hate what our side does sometimes; we NEED those words." He listed a batch used in stand-up routines. "I NEED the word RETARD," he said, "because that's what he IS."

 

Union brothers

Heading uphill toward what once was Ferdinand Marcos's grave, Lilith and I encountered a short Filipino man power washing stone walls. He stopped. I leaned in to say how much I love the moss and lichen. "Boss's idea," the man said through a bluish cartoon mask, which he lowered. "Have you seen the big stone wall?" Yes, I responded, I used to love the green moss. "Ugly," he remarked. I said something about hoping this cemetery regime ends soon, and he reached over to fist bump me, green debris on his right hand. I said I'd heard that trees are being power washed too, and he pointed up the hill, where Lilith and I were to find palms nearly naked up to a point that no one could reach. "He thinks the black stuff is ugly, but it's not going to work. It doesn't all come off." Sure enough, the trees wore ghost lichen and moss, faint shapes that reminded me of hundreds of photographs I've taken of them before they were ghosts.

 

The subject of surveillance cameras came up. "If he puts them in our dining area, we're going to the union," the man said. I said I was glad they have a union.

On the way out, close to Kahekili Highway, dozens of cars were entering the cemetery. One woman was standing beneath a palm writing a condolence card; her young daughter, in a bright dress with her hair carefully combed, was reading gravestones. "Big funeral," I noted to a man in a San Francisco 49ers shirt. "Yes, someone with a lot of support in the community," he said. "A stevedore." I said I'd appreciated the support my union had from the stevedores when UHM went on strike. "He went to UH," the man said, "football player." Young.