Meet Crockett

He jumps when you pat his head.

He jumps when you walk past, keeping distance between feet and ribs.

When he does let you touch his head he’s cautious, head low and submissive.

But he always wants to be close.

We brought Crockett home from the animal shelter Monday afternoon, a sweet and nervous brindle beabull (beagle/bulldog mix) that had been given up because of his habit of chasing farm animals.

He’d been in the shelter two days when we met him Saturday, but it was enough to leave him shy and anxious and depressed.

Or so it seems. We don’t see much of the chicken-chasing dog his previous owners dropped off.

The baby loves him.

She laughs out loud when she sees him, wriggles and squirms across the room to him, reaching fat fingers for his coat, panting the way she does when she sees something she wants.

He tolerates it a minute, then moves out of her reach. But always, he’s gentle.

That first night he kept us up ’til 10, throwing himself against the gate in the kitchen or the bathroom door, choking himself when we tried tying him in the kitchen instead, until we gave up and gave him the run of the house, JJ sleeping on couch cushions in case of destructive tendencies. 

He spent most of the night beside the couch, just staying close, and in the morning he seemed less nervous.

When one of my piano students came in I saw the lively, playful dog he was; he wanted to smell her jeans, put his feet up on the piano bench to sniff the back of her neck while she played.

I guess that’s the age he knew from before. That size human, I guess, is a friend.

And after a long walk before dinner he spent the evening curled on the floor at our feet. He’d get up to follow if we moved, then settle back down to rest.

And he’s still jumpy if you move too fast and refuses to enter the crate we bought him if we’re anywhere near the door but he holds his head higher already. He loves to watch the birds in the yard, paws on the windowsill. He barely acknowledges Jasmine the ferret after a quick sniff-introduction.

So this is Crockett, the newest member of our family.

Night writing

I don’t like writing at night.

By the time the day has passed and the evening meeting concluded there isn’t much left. Words stick and clog my brain and what I do type isn’t worth reading.

So mostly I’ve given it up. I’ll drop my notebook on my desk and go home, and in the mornings the words will have shook lose and what I write will be clear, easy.

Sometimes, though, that backfires and my mornings are crazy. Sometimes I’m on a police shift and then it’s better to have written ahead.

I hadn’t meant to write last Thursday night. But the campaign event wrapped up early and I owed some time and so I thought I’d get my notes organized, make it faster to write in the morning.

For once, though, the words came relatively easily and I finished a draft before powering off the computer, driving home.

It’s a good thing.

We’re down a reporter right now and there aren’t enough of us and when I walked to work early Friday morning helicopters hovered over Indiana.

It’s never good when helicopters are hovering.

Turns out a house was burning to a charred shell a few blocks over and no one was completely sure who had been there that night, who was missing or who was accounted for  at some other house. The students who definitely had been there had left. Firefighters were anxious and mad.

TV news crews were excited. There was yellow “crime scene” tape up across the block and  ”that’s not normal, do you know if someone was inside?” The camera man is asking a couple bystanders. 

(For the record, it just meant they didn’t want curious passersby getting in the way. No one was inside.)

But I walked in the door and “is your story written? Can you go out?” they ask and I read through what I wrote the night before, fix spelling and names and file it and head out.

By the deadline there are two stories with my byline and the crime lists but we get it all done, somehow.

And I’m glad that, for once, I wrote at night.

Working from home

There’s cereal on the stack of criminal complaints on my dining room table.

The phone is on a high chair.

There’s cereal on her eye and on my upper arm and how did it even get there? And the woman returns my phone call perfectly in the 20-minute nap that gave me just long enough to grab lunch and conduct a short interview.

I worked from home this afternoon, bowing to a cold that’s left her nose practically useless, mealtimes a chore, and her breathing loud. I always think working from home will be easier than it is.

It works great in theory. I get work done while she naps, take a break to change and feed her when she wakes up, then she plays on the floor while I go back to typing up criminal records or turning my notes into a story for the weekend papers.

Of course, it never works that way in practice.

So I type those records between scooping bites of cereal into her baby-bird mouth and I read them out loud as I type for amusement.

It’s a strange sort of litany to read to an infant: “Charged March 28 with DUI on this street in this town, his BAC was 0.225. Charged April 10 by state police with indecent assault.” And so on.

Luckily she’s not old enough to ask what any of it means. And luckily she finds my voice and the cup of water on her highchair tray interesting.

We get the reports typed before she loses interest.

And of course we do get the story written too, it just takes a little longer and I work a little later than I usually do, taking advantage of a second nap that’s so much longer than the first.

It’s just not quite as simple as I always think it will be.

Remembering the goodness

What I remember most is how the sound of an airplane crossing the September blue sky made the silence of the previous three days suddenly loud.

We talked about it, then – and wondered that a plane flying above us would ever be such a big deal.

I was 16.

And the only reason NYC meant anything to me in rural East Texas is that Dad used to work right there and he was scared and looked like he might cry.

Then white powder showed up in the Capitol.

The world’s a lot smaller when you’re an adult. And of course Boston and NYC are different and the situations are different and I hope this doesn’t spark another war. Less people died and less were injured but it doesn’t make the marathon any less horrific.

And now tainted letters are again arriving in Capitol mail.

I talked to people this morning who were there, running or waiting at the finish line, and their voices are tired. 

“This isn’t Boston,” she tells me and I think she’s crying on the other end of the phone. “Boston is safe. Boston is phenomenal.”

She uses that word several times. Phenomenal. She refuses to talk about anything she saw, just that Boston is a great place, great people.

On Tuesday just after deadline a woman brings us a loaf of banana bread, hot out of the oven, wrapped in a double layer of tinfoil. There’s a yellow paper flower taped to the note along with it. 

“Sometimes it’s hard to read the paper,” she wrote. “I can’t imagine actually putting it together.”

She was there when the twin towers fell, and I know she is choking again on smoke and dust and rubble and hearing again the screaming wail of fire engines, of people, of carnage.

I think we’re all remembering.

CNN is throwing up “exclusive” and “breaking” banners and every minute it’s something new. The volume is down but I watch from the corner of one eye. I have friends on Capitol Hill but they’re on the House side so selfishly I hope that the suspicious mail doesn’t cross over there. It’s all on the Senate side for now.

Fear can make you selfish.

But on Facebook there’s a picture of Mr. Rogers going ’round in his signature cardigan and a red trolley on his lap and a quote: look for the helpers, he says. Where something bad happens, there are always helpers.

The woman who called Boston phenomenal, she told of emergency workers running toward a bomb, not away. Another local runner told of strangers coming out of their homes with water, food and clothing for stranded competitors waiting for direction. 

The woman from yesterday, I know her nightmares are pressing in again but she gets up in the morning and bakes banana bread, with chocolate chips melting into it.

Then she brings it to us, brightens our dark day.

There’s a yellow flower and a wad of tinfoil still on a newsroom file cabinet.

And while we’re all looking at the darkness and again reminded that we’re not nearly as safe as we think we are, it’s nice to see the goodness too.

And it’s good to remember that a Tshirt or a drink of water or a slice of banana bread can go a long way to brightening the darkest place.

Writing about friends

You’re not supposed to write about your friends.

It’s a pretty straight forward rule in theory. If you could be or if it appears that you could be unduly influenced by the person, you hand off the story to someone else.

But it’s a small town and it’s a small newsroom and sometimes there’s no way around it. Sometimes your friends are newsworthy and you’re the only one to write about it.

Saturday night I was the only reporter on shift with a skeleton staff for Sunday’s paper. The night before, a filmmaker I know had been on CNN to talk about a trial underway in Philadelphia for a doctor accused of murder and how his abortion clinic had been allowed to operate for so long.

It’s always news when a local person has his or her 15 seconds of national fame, but mostly they have minor parts, brief snippets on one show or another.

The filmmaker was brought on to join a panel of experts, due to a documentary he wrote and directed. It was front page news, here. But it had happened on Friday. To wait so someone else could write it would mean it wouldn’t run until  Tuesday, too long to matter anymore.

So I called my friend and wrote the story that night, between the crime lists and obituaries and a late-night run to the ice cream store down the road.

“I’m working tonight,” I told him when I called, and we both knew it meant that for the next 10 minutes we’re not friends. For the next 10 minutes we leave out our spouses and children and life outside of the newsroom behind and I am just a reporter and he is just someone I’m interviewing.

Really this particular story isn’t a big deal – there’s nothing controversial about being on national television, so there’s no way I could be unduly influenced.

But it’s still odd when the rules of journalism are so completely broken.

Welcome to the neighborhood?

We don’t talk to our neighbors much.

I know Joe, right next to us, whose daughter I taught piano until she moved in with her mother. I know his friends Bill, from around the corner, and Lenny, from the next street over.

Sarah and Melanie across the street I know by name and we wave when we pass on the sidewalk, but that’s all. The ladies behind us mostly keep to themselves and the house on the other side of the alley is a rental; the occupants change regularly.

But now and again something happens and I remember that we live in a neighborhood.

Thursday it was a dog.

He was a big dog, wearing a collar that rattled long before you saw him, running up and down the street through everyone’s yards. He ran around ours several times, checking out scents from the side of the house. I watched from inside.

It was my day off but I hesitated to sit outside in the grass with the baby while he wandered. He looked friendly but then no one was outside to threaten him.

He ran off. A borough police cruiser headed up the dead-end street slowly — a rare occasion in itself — then back again.

Maybe an hour later he was back; I heard the rattling collar again and saw him run out from along the hedge. But now the neighbors had noticed. Joe was on the phone on his front porch watching for the dog. The renter and a teenage girl — I don’t know to whom the girl belongs — were wandering up and down the street, calling for the dog.

“Here buddy, here boy!” they were calling until the girl got close enough to read the letters on the collar. Then “Come here, Stakes!”

Everyone who passed either on foot or on wheels was stopped: “He’s not yours, is he? You missing a brown dog?”

Despite his intimidating size and square jaw, Stakes had no interest in any of the excitement. He had too much to smell. Maybe he saw the red leash in the teenage girl’s hands. Either way, he was loving his freedom way too much to be caught.

I went back inside to change the baby. After a while I stepped back out. Joe was still on his porch but the girl was gone and the renter was sitting on his back porch, texting.

“Catch him?” I called across the alley.

“No, but he ran up behind the ballfields and I don’t know where he is now,” he called back.

The clouds were blowing over and we went back inside and the dog stayed gone.

And that was more than I’d talked to the renter since they moved in.

Burning season

It was a beautiful morning.

The sky was pink in the east and the clouds were all tinted by the rising sun and the birds were singing and squirrels running across the street and two robins chased each other through a hedge.

And I was halfway to work when the sirens started.

I’ve had three police shifts this week and each has been busy. It’s been warm and dry and the leaves aren’t out yet so anyone who tries to burn yard waste or garbage sets off brush fires. The fire chief is sleep deprived and mad. Morons keep burning garbage and what if we have a structure fire but everyone’s out fighting a brush fire set by a burning piece of paper? He says I can quote his ‘moron’ statement and since it’s the only colorful quote that doesn’t involve a curse word, I do.

It doesn’t make it into the headline, though everyone would read the story if it did.  ”Fire chief: Stop burning, morons!” I should have pushed for it. 

It would have made people mad, though.

I was halfway to work this morning when the sirens started and I thought, of course, there would be something  happening this morning, but the doors to the fire company across the street from the office were closed.

Which was good. It was a busy-enough morning without breaking news.