There's Something About Harry

Washington Post Article

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarodsof his youth, frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all directions, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other tree or hydrant or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had transformed his walk into a simple process of elimination -- a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs. On these
walks, Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harry's size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.
Harry sat. For 10 minutes, he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his tail a-twitch. Our walk home was almost {lcub}hellip{rcub} jaunty.
Some years ago, the Style section invited readers to come up with a midlife list of goals for an underachiever. The first-runner-up prize went to:
"Win the admiration of my dog."
It's no big deal to love a dog; they make it so easy for you. They find you brilliant, even if you are a witling. You fascinate them, even if you are as dull as a butter knife. They are fond of you, even if you are a genocidal maniac. Hitler loved his dogs, and they loved him.
Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and, best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so appealing -- his unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness to please, his infectious happiness. His unequivocal love. But it is not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and coalesce. Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these flaws are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they seem at peace.
Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments we build, the wars we wage, the ways we love and hate and procreate -- all of it. Kafka was talking, of course, about people. Among animals, only humans are said to be self-aware enough to comprehend the passage of time and the grim truth of mortality. How then, to explain old Harry at the edge of that park, gray and lame, just days from the end, experiencing what can only be called wistfulness and nostalgia? I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm with grace and dignity, and die with what seemed to be acceptance. I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend the passage of time, and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of the onset of their frailties. They understand that what's gone is gone.
What dogs do not have is an abstract sense of fear, or a feeling of injustice or entitlement. They do not see themselves, as we do, as tragic heroes, battling ceaselessly against the merciless onslaught of time. Unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their lives. You've got to love them for that.
At the pet store, we chose Harry over two other puppies because, when wrestling with my children in the get-acquainted enclosure, Harry drew the most blood. We wanted a feisty pup, and we got one.
It is instructive to watch what happens in a tug of war between a child and a young dog who is equally pigheaded, but stronger. Neither gives an inch, which means that, over dozens of days, the child is dragged hundreds of feet on his behind.
The product of a Kansas puppy mill, son of a bitch named Taffy Sioux, Harry had been sold to us as a yellow Labrador retriever. I suppose it was technically true, but only in the sense that Tic Tacs are technically "food." Harry's lineage was suspect. He wasn't the square-headed, shiny, elegant type of Labrador you can envision in the wilds of Canada hunting for ducks. He was the shape of a baked potato, with the color and luster of an interoffice envelope. You could envision him in the wilds of suburban Toledo, hunting for nuggets of dried food in a carpet.
His full name was Harry S Truman, and once he'd reached middle age, he had indeed developed the unassuming soul of a haberdasher. We sometimes called him Tru, which fit his loyalty but was in other ways a misnomer: Harry was a bit of an eccentric, a few bubbles off plumb. Though he had never experienced an electrical shock, whenever he encountered a wire on the floor -- say, a power cord leading from a laptop to a wall socket -- Harry would stop and refuse to proceed. To him, this barrier was as impassable as the Himalayas. He'd stand there, waiting for someone to move it. Also, he was afraid of wind.
While Harry lacked the wiliness and cunning of some dogs, I did watch one day as he figured out a basic principle of physics. He was playing with a water bottle in our back yard -- it was one of those five-gallon cylindrical plastic jugs from the top of a water cooler. At one point, it rolled down a hill, which surprised and delighted him. He retrieved it, brought it back up and tried to make it go down again. It wouldn't. I watched him nudge it around until he discovered that for the bottle to roll, its long axis had to be perpendicular to the slope of the hill. You could see the understanding dawn on his face; it was Archimedes in his bath, Helen Keller at the water spigot.
That was probably the intellectual achievement of Harry's life, tarnished only slightly by the fact that he spent the next two hours insipidly entranced, rolling the bottle down and hauling it back up. He did not come inside until it grew too dark for him to see.
I believe I know exactly when Harry became an old dog. He was about 9 years old. It happened at 10:15 on the evening of June 21, 2001, the day my family moved from the suburbs to the city. The move took longer than we'd anticipated. Inexcusably, Harry had been left alone in the vacated house -- eerie, echoing, empty of furniture and of all belongings except Harry and his bed-- for eight hours. When I arrived to pick him up, he was beyond frantic.
He met me at the door and embraced me around the waist in a way that is not immediately reconcilable with the musculature and skeleton of a dog's front legs. I could not extricate myself from his grasp. We walked out of that house like a slow-dancing couple, and Harry did not let go until I opened the car door.
He wasn't barking at me in reprimand, as he once might have done. He hadn't fouled the house in spite. That night, Harry was simply scared and vulnerable, impossibly sweet and needy and grateful. He had lost something of himself, but he had gained something more touching and more valuable. He had entered old age.
Some people who seem unmoved by the deaths of tens of thousands through war or natural disaster will nonetheless summon outrage over the mistreatment of animals, and they will grieve inconsolably over the loss of the family dog. People who find this behavior distasteful are often the ones without pets. It is hard to understand, in the abstract, the degree to which a companion animal, particularly after a long life, becomes a part of you. I believe I've figured out what this is all about. It is not as noble as I'd like it to be, but it is not anything of which to be ashamed, either.
In our dogs, we see ourselves. Dogs exhibit almost all of our emotions; if you think a dog cannot register envy or pity or pride or melancholia, you have never lived with one for any length of time. What dogs lack is our ability to dissimulate. They wear their emotions nakedly, and so, in watching them, we see ourselves as we would be if we were stripped of posture and pretense. Their innocence is enormously appealing. When we watch a dog progress from puppyhood to old age, we are watching our own lives in microcosm. Our dogs become old, frail, crotchety and vulnerable, just as Grandma did, just as we surely will, come the day. When we grieve for them, we grieve for ourselves.
The meaning of life is that it ends.
In the year after our move, Harry began to age visibly, and he did it the way most dogs do. First his muzzle began to whiten, and then the white slowly crept backward to swallow his entire head. Pink nose, white head, tan flanks -- he looked like a stubby kitchen match. As he became more sedentary, he thickened a bit, too.
I remember reading an article once about people who raised dogs for food in Asia. A dog rancher was indignantly defending his profession, saying that he used only "basic yellow dogs." As I looked down at Harry, asleep as usual, all I could think of was: meat.
But Harry's physical decline was accompanied by what I will call, at the risk of ridicule, a spiritual awakening. A dog's greatest intelligence is said to be his innate ability to anticipate and comprehend human feelings and actions. It's supposedly a Darwinian adaptation -- dogs need our alliance in order to survive. In earlier years, Harry had never shown any particular gift for empathy, but as the breadth of his interests dwindled, and his world contracted, he seemed to watch us more closely. My wife, who is a lawyer, also acts in community theater. One day, she was in the house rehearsing a monologue for an upcoming audition. The lines were from Marsha Norman's two-person play "'Night, Mother," about a housewife who is attempting to talk her adult daughter out of suicide.
Thelma is a weak and bewildered woman trying to change her daughter's mind while coming to terms with her own failings as a mother and with her paralyzing fear of being left alone. Her lines are excruciating.
My wife had to stop in mid-monologue. Harry was too distraught. He could understand not one word she was saying, but he figured out that Mom was as sad as he'd ever seen her. He was whimpering, pawing at her knee, licking her hand, trying as best he could to make things better. You don't need a brain to have a heart.
Harry was always terrified of thunderstorms, but as he aged and his hearing waned, as if in a benign collusion of natural forces, this terror subsided. He became a calmer dog in general, if a far more eccentric one.
On walks, he would no longer bother to scout and circle for a place to relieve himself. He would simply do it in mid-plod, like a horse, leaving the difficult logistics of drive-by cleanup to me. Sometimes, while crossing a busy street, with cars whizzing by, he would plop down to scratch his ear. Sometimes, he would forget where he was and why he was there. To the amusement of passersby, I would have to hunker down beside him and say, "Harry, we're on a walk, and we're going home now. Home is this way, okay?" On these dutiful walks, Harry ignored almost everything he passed. The most notable exception was an old, barrel-chested female pit bull named Honey, whom he loved. This was surprising, both because other dogs had long ago ceased to interest Harry at all, and because even back when they did, Harry's tastes were for the guys. Though he was neutered, Harry's sexual preference was pretty evident.
But when we met Honey on walks, Harry perked up. Honey was younger by five years and heartier by a mile, but she liked Harry and slowed her gait when he was around. They waddled together for blocks, eyes forward, hardly interacting but content in each other's company. Harry reminded me of an old gay man who, at the end of his life, returns to his wife to end their time together on a porch swing under an embroidered lap shawl. I will forever be grateful to Honey for sweetening Harry's last days.
I work mostly at home, which means that during the weekdays Harry and I shared an otherwise empty house. Mostly, he slept; mostly I wrote and paced, and my pacing often took me past his lump on the floor. I would always mutter, almost unconsciously, "Hey, Harry," and he would always respond in the same fashion: His body would move not at all, but his tail would thud, exactly once, against the floor.
I didn't really know how important that ritual was until there was no thud anymore.
One night at 3 a.m., a smoke detector in our house began to bleep in that water-torture way, signaling that it needed a new battery. It was mildly annoying, but to Harry it appeared to be a sign of the Apocalypse. He began pacing and panting, and actually tried climbing our stairwell to hide under our bed. His rheumy legs buckled; we caught him before he fell.
So I mounted a ladder, disconnected the bleeping thing, and took out the spent battery. Then my wife spent two hours talking Harry down into a semi-sane condition. She slept on the floor by his side.
It turned out to be Harry's final eccentricity. When he awoke the next morning, he could no longer use his hind legs, and we trundled him off to the vet. Harry had timed his departure thoughtfully. Had he waited a few more hours, my daughter would have been unable to hug him and tell him what a good boy he had been. She had known and loved Harry more than half of her life, and I believe this was not incidental to her choice of career. She was leaving, that next morning, for her first day of veterinary school.
For nearly a week after Harry's death, my wife and I shared a knowledge that we left unspoken, even to each other. It was simply too heart-wrenching to say out loud.
As he lay on the gurney and the doctor began to push the poison into his vein, Harry had lifted up his head and kissed us goodbye.

Confused Hen

An Exodus of South Africa's Educated Workforce?

The Economist
SOUTH AFRICA
Sep 25th 2008 


Violent crime and political turmoil are adding to South Africa's brain
drain

FIRST he thought it was a mouse, then a rat--and then the rat shot him
in the face. That is how Andre Brink, one of South Africa's most famous
novelists, described the recent killing of his nephew Adri, at home at
3am in the morning. The young man was left to die on the floor, in
front of his wife and daughter, while his killers ransacked the house.

Such murders are common in South Africa. According to Mr Brink's
account, published later in the SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 16 armed attacks
had already taken place in a single month within a kilometre of the
young couple's plot north of Pretoria, South Africa's capital. Soon
afterwards--this is more unusual--the police arrested a gang of six.
They recovered a laptop and two mobile phones. That was the haul for
which Adri paid with his life.

A decade-and-a-half after the end of apartheid, violent crime is
pushing more and more whites out of South Africa. Exactly how many are
leaving is impossible to say. Few admit that they are quitting for
good, and the government does not collect the necessary statistics. But
large white South African diasporas, both English- and
Afrikaans-speaking, have sprouted in Britain, Australia, New Zealand
and many cities of North America.

The South African Institute of Race Relations, a think-tank, guesses
that 800,000 or more whites have emigrated since 1995, out of the
4m-plus who were there when apartheid formally ended the year before.
Robert Crawford, a research fellow at King's College in London, reckons
that around 550,000 South Africans live in Britain alone. Not all of
South Africa's emigres are white: skilled blacks from South Africa can
be found in jobs and places as various as banking in New York and
nursing in the Persian Gulf. But most are white--and thanks to the
legacy of apartheid the remaining whites, though only about 9% of the
population, are still South Africa's richest and best-trained people.

Talk about "white flight" does not go down well. Officials are quick to
claim that there is nothing white about it. A recent survey by
FutureFact, a polling organisation, found that the desire to emigrate
is pretty even across races: last year, 42% of Coloured (mixed-race)
South Africans, 38% of blacks and 30% of those of Indian descent were
thinking of leaving, compared with 41% of whites. This is a big leap
from 2000, when the numbers were 12%, 18%, 26% and 22% respectively.
But it is the whites, by and large, who have the money, skills,
contacts and sometimes passports they need to start a life outside--and
who leave the bigger skills and tax gap behind.

Another line loyalists take is that South Africa is no different from
elsewhere: in a global economy, skills are portable. "One benefit of
our new democracy is that we are well integrated in the community of
nations, so now more opportunities are accessible to our people,"
Kgalema Motlanthe, now South Africa's president, told THE ECONOMIST.
And to some extent it is true that the doctors, dentists, nurses,
accountants and engineers who leave are being pulled by bigger
salaries, not pushed by despair. But this is not the whole story. Nick
Holland, chief executive of Gold Fields, a mining company, says that in
his firm it is far commoner for skilled whites to leave than their
black and Indian counterparts. "We mustn't stick our heads in the
sand," he says. "White flight is a reality."

Another claim is that a lot of leavers return. Martine Schaffer, a
Durbanite who returned to South Africa herself in 2003 after 14 years
in London, now runs the "Homecoming Revolution", an outfit created with
help from the First National Bank to tempt lost sheep back to the fold.
And, yes, a significant number of emigres do come home, seduced by
memories of the easeful poolside life under the jacaranda trees,
excited by work opportunities or keen--perhaps after having children
themselves--to reunite with parents who stayed behind.

In some cases, idealism remains a draw. Whites who left in previous
decades because they were repelled by apartheid, or who expected
apartheid to end in a bloodbath, can find much to admire. Whites build
tall walls around their houses and pay guards to patrol their
neighbourhoods; they consider some downtown areas too dangerous to
visit. But on university campuses and in the bright suburban shopping
malls it is still thrilling to see blacks and whites mingling in a
relaxed way that was unimaginable under apartheid.

REASONS NOT TO PANIC?
So South Africa certainly has its white boosters. Michael Katz,
chairman of Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs, a law firm in Johannesburg,
hands over a book with the title "Don't Panic!", a collection of
heartwarming reflections by disparate South Africans on why there is,
even now, no better place than home. Mr Katz ticks off the pluses as he
sees them: minimal racial tension (a third of his own firm's 350
professionals are black); a model constitution that entrenches the
separation of powers and is "revered" by the people; a free press and
free judiciary; a healthy Parliament; a vibrant civil society; good
infrastructure and a banking system untouched by the global credit
crunch. The "one major negative" Mr Katz concedes is violent crime. If
only this could be brought under control, he says, the leavers would
return.

But would they? Violent crime is undoubtedly the biggest single driver
of emigration, the one factor cited by all races and across all
professions when people are asked why they want to go. Police figures
put the murder rate in 2007-08 at more than 38 per 100,000 and rape at
more than 75 per 100,000. This marks a big fall over the past several
years, but is still astronomical by international standards (the murder
rate was 5.6 per 100,000 in the United States last year). It has
reached the point where most people say they have either been victims
of violent crime themselves or know friends or relatives who have been
victims. Typically, it is a break-in, carjacking, robbery or murder
close to home that clinches a family's long mulled-over decision to
leave.

All the same, crime is far from being the only cause of white
disenchantment. Some say that 2008 brought a "perfect storm". A
sequence of political and economic blows this year have buffeted
people's hope. Added together they provide reason to doubt whether the
virtues ticked off by the exuberant Mr Katz--a model constitution,
separation of powers, good infrastructure and so on--are quite so
solid.

Good infrastructure? At the beginning of the year South Africa's lights
started to go out, plunging the thrumming shopping malls and luxury
homes into darkness and stopping work in the gold and diamond mines.
This entirely avoidable calamity was caused by a distracting debate
about the role of the private sector in electricity supply. Eskom, the
state-owned utility in which many experienced white managers had been
too quickly pushed aside, is now investing again in new plant under a
new chairman, Bobby Godsell, a veteran mining executive. But for the
time being power will remain in short supply and rationing and
blackouts will continue.

As for that model constitution and the separation of powers, Desmond
Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, was moved this week
to describe the sordid battle between Jacob Zuma, Thabo Mbeki, the
party, government, prosecuting authority and courts as suggestive of a
"banana republic". As well as being appalled by events at home this
past year, whites have watched Robert Mugabe's pauperisation of
neighbouring Zimbabwe and wonder whether South Africa will be next to
descend into the same spiral.

Besides, fear of crime cannot be separated from the other factors that
make South Africans consider emigration. People who do not feel safe in
their homes lose their faith in government. John Perlman, who worked
for the SABC, the state broadcaster, before resigning in a quarrel over
political interference, does not believe that most people leave because
they are afraid. "I think they leave when they lose heart," he says.
One white entrepreneur about to leave for New York says that it was not
being held up twice at gunpoint that upset him most: it was the lack of
interest the police showed afterwards. Tony Leon, the former leader of
the opposition Democratic Alliance, claims that policing has been
devastated by cronyism and that the entire criminal-justice system is
dysfunctional. The head of the police, Jackie Selebi, is on leave
pending a corruption investigation.

How much does the outward flow of whites matter? South Africa can ill
afford the loss of its best-trained people. Iraj Abedian, an economist
and chief executive of Pan-African Capital Holdings, says a pitiful
shortage of skills is one of the main constraints on economic growth.
He concedes that the ANC has pushed hard to give every eligible child a
place in school, but argues that a "politically correct" focus on
expanding access has come at the expense of quality. With virtually no
state schools providing adequate teaching in science or maths, he says,
the country has added to its vast problem of unemployment (every other
18-24-year-old is out of work) a no less vast problem of
unemployability.

THE GAP THEY LEAVE BEHIND
On Mr Abedian's reckoning, about half a million posts are vacant in
government service alone because too few South Africans have the skills
these jobs demand. Not a single department, he says, has its full
complement of professionals. Local municipalities and public hospitals
are also desperately short of trained people. Dentists are "as scarce
as chicken's teeth" and young doctors demoralised by the low standards
of hospital administration. Last May Azar Jammine, an independent
economist, told a Johannesburg conference on the growing skills
shortage that more than 25,000 teachers were leaving the profession
every year and only 7,000 entering.

A blinkered immigration policy makes things worse. Nobody has a clue
how many millions of unskilled Africans cross into South Africa
illegally. But skilled job applicants who try to come in legally are
obstructed by a barricade of regulations. Mr Abedian says that the ANC
used to think that relying on foreigners would discourage local
institutions from training their own people. Now at least the
government earmarks sectors where skills are in short supply and for
which immigration procedures are supposed to be eased. In April,
however, an internal report by the Department of Home Affairs showed
that fewer than 1,200 foreigners had obtained permits under this
scheme, from a list of more than 35,000 critical jobs.

In fairness, South Africa has been through far worse times before.
Whites streamed out during the township riots of the 1980s. It is far
from clear how much of the present dinner-table talk about leaving ends
with a family packing its bags. Alan Seccombe, a tax expert at PWC in
Johannesburg, says that many affluent whites have moved money offshore
and prepared their escape routes, but that his firm's emigration
practice is doing less business today than it did in 1995.

Perspective is necessary in politics, too. Raenette Taljaard,
previously an opposition member of Parliament and now director of the
Helen Suzman Foundation, a think-tank, says that events this past year
have raised profound concerns about the rule of law and the durability
of the constitution. But Allister Sparks, the author of several
histories of South Africa (and a former writer for THE ECONOMIST),
maintains that the ANC has done as well as anyone had a right to expect
after apartheid's destructive legacy. Some whites even express
enthusiasm about the advent of Mr Zuma. How many other African
liberation movements, they ask, have been democratic enough to vote out
an underperforming leader, as the ANC has Mr Mbeki?

For the average white person, South Africa continues to offer a quality
of life hard to find elsewhere. And there are other compensations. Mr
Brink says in the article on the murder of his nephew that people who
ask when he will be emigrating are perplexed to hear that he intends to
stay. There is, he says, an "urgency and immediacy" about life in South
Africa that lends it a sense of involvement and relevance he cannot
imagine finding elsewhere.

All the same, he is staying on bereft of some former illusions.

The famous novelist will stay. Many other whites are making plans to
leave, and will be taking their precious skills with them. 

Changes in South Africa's government

Rise and fall of Tabo Mbeki

Life after Mbeki

The demise of Dr. Beetroot

Please global warming, can I just have this?

Updating is Fun!

Fortunately, my in-laws are quite handy around the house. Andrew came around yesterday to help us install a new chandelier in our dining room. Our apartment is finally rid of the 1980's brass chandelier with those weird "candle" light bulbs that emit no light.

New Couch

Hey Everyone! Daniel and I are thinking of getting a new sofa.  We want something firm so that we both can sit on it and in the past, when going to furniture stores havn't seen anything even close to what we want!  Yesterday while going through our junk mail I randomly saw these two in the Target catalog.   We are undecided but are leaning towards the first one.  Let us know what what you think.