Tag conversation

I said I would still rant a little.

Dusty Leave a comment

Let’s talk.

I know I just said last night that I was going to reduce the rants and move towards a simple journal about my experience trying to be a published writer. I also said I was terrible at arguing. Both of those things are true.

But also, I think that continuing the conversation is vital to our democracy. People frequently blame our president for his continuous denigration of the media, and you can see the results in how frequently that charge is echoed by his supporters; but the free press alone is not enough to protect our country and our liberties. We all need to think about it, and talk about it. The women’s marches, last year and this, are a wonderful example of citizens participating in the conversation, and the interview I heard this morning on NPR in which a woman criticized the marches for not having a clear message was, I think, missing the point. If you are determined that the answer must be clearly known and entirely solidified before you speak up, before you take action, then you’re assuming that the answer is simple, and therefore so is the problem.

We’re talking about our country. Our democracy. It is not simple. Especially not when you also include women’s rights in our society, women’s issues within our culture, gender politics, and the culture of sexual assault and harassment in the conversation. I recognize that the woman making the comment on the radio was trying to say that we should limit the conversation to a single talking point, but then it becomes easy to discard because that single talking point doesn’t affect everyone. Sometimes a single issue should be the exclusive focus, but sometimes it should be broader. Both types of conversation are necessary: a marriage can’t be considered healthy just because the two people have figured out who does the dishes, but no marriage can go on without figuring out who does the dishes.

So here’s a conversation I came across and that I would like to participate in. Not as an argument, just a conversation. It’s a couple of days old, now, but if Fox News will let me, I will link to this blog in the comments, and see if anyone gives me a response. I welcome responses of any kind.

It’s an op-ed called The Truth About Trump’s First Year, by Allen C. Guelzo, a professor of history at Gettysburg University. The first victory for the president, according to Professor Guelzo, is simply that he is still president:

 

But despite the Russia investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, despite the unrelenting fury of the princes of the op-ed pages, despite President Trump’s hiring of staff he was forced to fire, and despite his much-criticized tweets, the president is still in charge at the White House. And he appears to be wearing down all but his severest critics.

 

The last sentence is the thesis of the essay (though Guelzo goes a bit further than that by the end of the piece), that the President is convincing all and sundry that, actually, he’s doing a better job than we have given him credit for. The slant of the piece is apparent in the list of “despites:” the Mueller investigation is not over, of course, and Professor Guelzo does not list the various elements of the investigation that have already called the president’s actions and associations into question; the “unrelenting fury of the princes of the op-ed pages” is a wonderfully loaded phrase, calling into question both the rationality and impartiality of the pundits, and also implying they are undemocratic, unlike the Man of the People in the White House (I will not point out that Mr. Guelzo is himself declaiming on the opinion page, as I’m doing the same; but I will include this picture of the Man of the People.);

Image result for trump private residence the tweets are “much-criticized” not because we’re all biased against the President, but because the man should not Tweet as he does – and nearly every interview I hear with a supporter of the President says the same. You think there’s broad bipartisan support for DACA? Run a poll on whether or not Twitter should close the President’s account. So I think that Professor Guelzo is already discounting things that should not be discounted, in any assessment of the President’s first year in office.

But let’s see how the President is wearing down his critics. The first issue raised is ISIS: Guelzo refers to a New York Times op-ed that discussed the collapse of the Islamic State this past year; the author, Ross Douthat, who describes himself in the piece as focusing primarily on finding fault with the President’s actions, grudgingly gives the President some of the credit for ISIS’s collapse:

So very provisionally, credit belongs where it’s due — to our soldiers and diplomats, yes, but to our president as well.

But Douthat’s argument isn’t terribly good, either:

I mean the war against the Islamic State, whose expansion was the defining foreign policy calamity of Barack Obama’s second term, whose executions of Americans made the U.S.A. look impotent and whose utopian experiment drew volunteers drunk on world-historical ambitions and metaphysical dreams. Its defeat was begun under Obama, and the hardest fighting has been done by Iraqis — but this was an American war too, and we succeeded without massive infusions of ground troops, without accidentally getting into a war with Russia, and without inspiring a huge wave of terrorism in the West.

Right, so as Douthat himself states, the war effort began under Mr. Obama, and was fought primarily by troops from the countries involved – Iraqis in the struggle to overthrow ISIS in their country, and Kurds and Arab soldiers in Syria; at least 160,000 fighting troops, and about 2,000 U.S. advisers, plus the American personnel carrying out airstrikes and artillery support – and so I immediately have to question how much of an American war this was. Yes, we were involved; but the President changed very little about that, he didn’t send more troops, didn’t appreciably change the strategy or the resources, didn’t bring new allies into the coalition. He gave the U.S. generals more freedom in deciding strategy, but how much influence did that really have? Were our generals behind the actual strategy as carried out by the fighting men? And then the success markers Douthat lists – we DIDN’T send in thousands of American troops, we DIDN’T get into a war with Russia, we DIDN’T inspire new terrorists (Well. Not yet. Right?) – I mean, that’s a low bar. I didn’t do any of those things, either. Can I have credit for the victory? (Snark aside, this article from the Guardian makes a compelling argument that the collapse of the actual Caliphate was inevitable, and that we have not yet seen what will come of ISIS as a stateless terrorist organization, which is what we have made of al Qaeda and the Taliban – both of which we are still fighting. I think this is not much of a victory at all, let alone a victory for the President. I will also say that the collapse of the Islamic State is a good thing, and that U.S. forces do deserve some credit.)

Next in Professor Guelzo’s argument is this:

Douthat’s observation was followed by never-Trumper and fellow columnist Bret Stephens’ insistence that, despite the collapse of ISIS and other achievements, President Trump must remain beyond the pale because he lacks “character.”

What Stephens didn’t say was that the Constitution does not list “character” as a prerequisite for the presidency, nor do voters necessarily reward it – or punish a perceived lack of character.

The issue of “character” certainly did nothing to affect Bill Clinton, or, for that matter, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy. Stephens’ attack was a pout, and when pundits turn to pouting, it means they have lost faith in their own argument.

This is, unsurprisingly, a poor rendition of Stephens’s argument. Stephens, who calls himself a conservative, discusses how the conservative viewpoint was once the one that touted character as the most important criterion for political office; he describes how the President’s particular personality has had harmful effects on his own administration. He makes a dozen points to support his contention, and to dismiss them all with “Well, character’s not in the Constitution!” is a pretty ridiculous red herring. Guelzo’s other point about character not affecting Clinton or Kennedy or Johnson is obviously false: Clinton was destroyed by the Lewinsky scandal, and Gore was sunk by the same torpedo; whether or not Kennedy would have been affected by character assassination was made moot by the other assassination. Professor’s Guelzo’s argument regarding this President seems to be that if one gets elected, and does not specifically violate the requirements in the Constitution, then that shows that one is satisfactorily performing the office.

I suppose we’re not going to talk about the emoluments clause. Did you know that Trump never even set up the blind trust (which wasn’t going to be that blind since his children are not exactly disconnected from him) for his company? I didn’t know that either.

Guelzo then refers to a third New York Times columnist, David Brooks, who wrote about how people meeting the President are surprised to find that he’s not actually a lunatic in person. I suppose that’s a victory. This is followed with these critiques of the left’s response to the President’s inauguration:

[A]s we turn the page on President Trump’s first year in office, the dirigible of anti-Trumpism is assuming an amusingly deflated look. It actually began deflating in the first few weeks of the Trump presidency, after Antifa thugs gave the “resistance” a self-inflicted black eye and a “Women’s March” made the wearing of funny hats its biggest accomplishment.

All right: so “Antifa thugs” that gave the resistance a black eye is only valid from a specific point of view, one that was looking for a black eye to give the left after the largest single protest movement in the history of humankind – which, apparently, only accomplished the wearing of funny hats. I think the only response to this is to reverse it: the white supremacists in Charlottesville gave the President’s party a black eye, which they tried to cover up with their MAGA hats. No, that’s not all the Republican party and the conservative movement accomplished in the last year, and the very worst elements affiliated with the right should not taint that entire half of the political spectrum. So too with the Women’s March or Antifa, which all by itself should not be tainted by its worst members – none of whom, I will say, drove their car into protestors.

What’s next, Professor Guelzo?

President Trump succeeded in getting Neil Gorsuch confirmed to fill the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. In addition to Gorsuch, the Senate has confirmed 22 Trump nominees for federal appeals and district courts, with another 43 awaiting action.

What’s more, as Jonathan Adler of the Case Western Reserve University Law School has said: “The overall intellectual caliber of Trump’s nominees has been as high, if not higher, than any recent predecessor. That’s almost the opposite of what you might have expected.”

Okay, this is certainly an accomplishment; the appointment of Justice Gorsuch was one of the most pivotal issues that swung traditional conservatives to support the rather unconventional candidate picked by the GOP’s base. Turns out that this is actually an impressive number of judicial appointments:

Trump ranks sixth of 19 presidents filling the highest number of judgeships at the Supreme, appellate and District Court levels in their first year in office, while Obama ranked tenth, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis Friday.

The president has appointed 23 judges, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, a dozen appellate court judges and 10 District Court judges. Obama appointed 13 judges—Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, three appellate court judges and nine District Court judges.

Source

Of course, context is everything. You know that, Professor: you’re a teacher. You teach history, for Pete’s sake. Why would you drain all the context out of this, if not to achieve a slanted partisan talking point?

Context:

Trump’s success comes in part from the fact that the GOP holds a slim majority in the Senate, which confirms Trump’s picks. In addition, Republican senators in Obama’s first five years blocked three dozen judicial nominations, Politifact found. Democrats used a simple majority to pass most judicial confirmation votes, not a super-majority of 60.

“Nominations pretty much came to a halt until the start of the Trump administration when the Senate started quickly confirming his nominees,” University of Georgia law professor Susan Brodie Haire told the LA Times.

Source

 

And as to Professor Guelzo’s comments about the intellectual prowess of Trump’s nominees, this is why he went with the opinion of a single pundit using a single subjective metric:

However, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary has rated four of Trump’s nominees as “not qualified,” which is close to 14 percent of his picks and a higher percentage than recent presidents.

Of the 23 confirmed judges, only nine have previous judicial experience and most have backgrounds in litigation in either private practice or government. The association bases its ratings not on candidates’ politics, but their “integrity, professional competence and judicial temperament,” its guidelines state.

And while 23 confirmed appointments and 43 awaiting processing is impressive,

There are still more than 140 vacancies in the federal judiciary.

Source

 

Context, Professor.

At this point in the piece, however, Professor Guelzo does take on a more fair and balanced view of the President’s first year in office.

And despite an undeniable string of misfires with Congress (especially on the “repeal and replace” of ObamaCare), there are now more grins than grimaces among Trump loyalists from the increasing number of successes the president has scored over trade deals (withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership), the repair of the crucial diplomatic relationship with Israel, the decline in illegal border crossings, and the economy.

I mean, the withdrawal from TPP may have been a victory, but I have heard nothing but negatives about the renegotiation of NAFTA, the withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the attempted scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal. I suppose we have improved our relationship with Israel, though of course there are two sides in Israel and we have pleased the hardline conservative faction while upsetting the more liberal faction, so it’s more that the President shifted our relationship with Israel than that he repaired it; the President’s decision to move the U.S. embassy has also made our relationships with Arab nations much more difficult, especially Jordan, a nation whose population is 30% naturalized Palestinians, with another 2 million Palestinian refugees living in the country.

So what’s the clear victory here? Must be this:

“It’s the economy, stupid,” was once a Democratic battle cry; it may now become President Trump’s.

The Dow Jones industrial average has soared from 18,259 on the day President Trump was elected to over 26,000, in what one analyst called “the most doubted bull market of all time.” New jobs created topped 200,000 in December, driving the unemployment rate down to 4.1 percent – the lowest in 17 years.

 

I mean, how can I argue with this?

Luckily for me, I don’t have to. Professor Guelzo argued it for me.

 

Anti-Trump diehards will argue that these are not really Trump accomplishments at all, but the last successes of the Obama years. There is probably some truth in that. The reality is, though, that it’s irrelevant.

Every president takes the credit (or assumes the blame) for what occurs on his watch, and harvests the votes afterward.

 

Simply put, I don’t think the truth is irrelevant. I don’t think the ability to “harvest votes” (A strange phrase, when one thinks that every vote is a person) justifies all. He’s right, of course, that every president takes credit for things that aren’t his doing; but that sucks, and we shouldn’t accept it, let alone encourage it.

So let’s tell the truth. President Obama was not the greatest president in history. Nor was President Clinton. The Democratic Party has done some really bad work in the last two decades, including the catastrophe of the 2016 primaries that led to Hillary Clinton’s nomination. (Some specifics: President Obama never dealt with Guantanamo; the continued and in some ways intensified involvement in Middle East nation building – the longest war in our history, presided over by Obama longer than any other president including Bush – has had terrible consequences; Obamacare is a travesty of a gutted compromise when what we should have had was single-payer healthcare, or nothing. President Clinton ravaged the welfare system, took down the Glass-Steagall Act and thereby was the single most important precursor of the 2007 Wall Street collapse, and yeah, really did lack character in important ways, which have continued to resonate to this day. And the 2016 primaries? Superdelegates and collusion among the DNC leadership, anyone?) I also have argued and will continue to argue that the President should not be impeached until and unless he is proven to have committed high crimes and misdemeanors against this nation, just as I argued that President Clinton should not have been impeached just because he cheated on his wife; the idea that he lied about it and therefore perjured himself was too much of the snake eating its own tail. I think the Russia investigation is important to restore some faith and credibility to a democracy that got invaded by Russian hackers; but I doubt that it will bring down the President, and unless Mueller finds evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the President, evidence that has so far been nonexistent, it should not bring him down.

And on the other hand: it’s the economy, stupid. Our current President deserves little if any credit for the unemployment rate, which has been going down steadily since its height in 2008-2009. The arguments that conservatives have been using to knock that progress, that the official unemployment rate doesn’t include those who gave up looking for work, and that the current rate doesn’t reflect the number of people who are underemployed, are still true. The bull stock market only increases wealth disparity, as it concentrates more wealth in the hands of those who had the money to invest big in the market before it went up, an issue which the tax overhaul only intensified, and no amount of short-term tax cuts for the 99% can counteract. Income inequality is the number one place where our entire government, of millionaires for millionaires, fails to act to protect our country and our citizens; I hope I don’t need to actually argue that the election of a billionaire real estate developer has not brought progress on this issue. The deficit and national debt have been increased, as it always is by the majority party when they are in control, and despite past Republican claims that they would rein in spending, despite the President’s claims that he would drain the swamp and oppose the entrenched Washington interests. Did you see, by the way, that the President has now said that he will campaign for incumbents? Or at least that he’ll avoid primaries?

At the same time, the President has launched an all-out war against immigrants, which has had the effect of scaring millions of people, and therefore both reducing border crossings and increasing tension with other countries; I can’t see it as a good thing in the final summation – though it has not yet run its course, so we’ll have to wait and see before we can judge that. He has agitated our enemies (Iran, North Korea) and insulted our allies (Germany and the EU, the Arab nations, and all of those shitholes). He has, whether Professor Guelzo wants to admit it or not, so soiled the office of the Presidency that even his staunchest allies are forced to turn hypocrite or offer weak criticisms of his Tweeting while ignoring the bullying, the accusations of sexual assault and misconduct, and the clear racism. It’s true that poor character is not the exclusive province of the President; but it’s also true that he does exhibit it to an extent that Americans should decry, regardless of their positions on policy. It’s a tired trope, but I would get fired if I did half the shit that the President does, and I’m only responsible for a hundred or so students. That’s the truth.

Conservatives may be pleased by the reduction of regulations, by the dismantling of the EPA and the Department of Education; they should be pleased by the appointment of conservative judges, particularly Justice Gorsuch. I’m sure corporations are still whooping it up over the tax cuts, and those who are seeing direct benefits, such as the increased wages and the bonuses, should be happy too. The current administration has had victories, both symbolic and practical.

But that’s not the whole story. And the conversation should continue, and continue to be as honest as we can possibly make it.

Good Neighbors

Dusty Leave a comment

In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.” He’s not wrong: some neighbors, you want a minefield and electrified barbed wire. And a moat. My current neighbors would only please me if they were encapsulated in a soundproof dome, so I wouldn’t have to listen to them play beer pong at 3am. Nothing like a drunken coed caterwauling “WOOOO!” after a good bounce to rock you to sleep.

But the thing that has made me a better neighbor, apart from my aversion to early-morning alcohol-fueled yodeling, is not my fences, not the separation between us and mutual respect for privacy. It is my dog.

In fact, my dog has made me a better person in a number of ways. I am cleaner, especially now that I have a dog who will eat things that aren’t food if I leave them lying around within his reach. I am braver, because while I will avoid confrontation for my own sake, I do not hesitate to get between him and any danger that threatens him. I have more patience, because losing your temper at a dog doesn’t do anything but break your own heart when he cowers away from your yelling, the toy falling from his mouth, his tail tucked between his legs, his wide eyes seeming to say, “But . . . but . . . I just want to play with you!” I laugh more, because there’s nothing better than watching a dog run towards you – unless it’s watching a dog dream about chasing things, his feet a-twitch and his throat squeaking out sub-vocalized barks. And I have far more tender moments when he curls up next to me, or turns on his back so I can rub his tummy.

But my most stubborn and problematic trait is probably this: I am an introvert. Being around large groups of people, especially talking to them and interacting with them, exhausts me. Therefore, I avoid it, as much as humanly possible. I like people; I just don’t want them around me. Given the choice between going out to a crowded, lively bar, and sitting home alone, drinking bitter, rum-laced coffee in a dark, empty room – maybe with Tom Waits playing in the background and cold rain sheeting down the windows – I’ll take the depressing solitude, every time. Actually, it sounds nice. Peaceful. Given the choice between, on the one hand, calling an electrician, describing the problem, making an appointment, greeting them when they arrive, making small talk while they work, smiling the whole time; and, on the other hand, learning how to change a broken light fixture myself – complete with slight electrocution when I brush the bare wires – I will grab my pliers and hope I don’t burn down the house. The only reason I haven’t burned down the house is that my wife won’t let me do the serious wiring myself. Sometimes my fondest wish is for the ability to cut my own hair and clean my own teeth.

And all of this anti-socializing is exacerbated, of course, by the fact that most people kinda suck.

But you see, I have a dog. My dog needs to be walked. (I have to break in to mention this: he is, at this very moment, curled up on his back by my left side, as I type this on the laptop sitting on my couch. I’m typing one-handed, because he has wormed in close enough that his foreleg has curled around my left wrist, as if he’s asking me to hold his hand, or maybe to escort him to the Governor’s ball; and so of course I’m petting him with my left hand while I hunt and peck with my right. Because writing is important to me – but I know what my real priorities are.) And there is a rather amazing thing that happens when you walk a dog: you make friends.

I don’t know most of my neighbors; in most cases, most places that I’ve lived, I’ve never even learned their names. I don’t throw nor attend block parties; despite my genuinely good intentions, I don’t go to neighborhood cleanup days. I’ll wave and nod when I see my neighbors outside – and then I turn away, and hope they’re gone by the time I look again. Normally when I walk down the street, I look away from anyone coming the other way, at most giving an awkward nod if I glance at them while they’re glancing at me. But when I have a leash in my hand, with a dog on the other end – suddenly, I’m chatting, I’m smiling, I’m making eye contact. I’m meeting my neighbors, and introducing myself and my four-footed furry companion. Suddenly, I’m friendly.

It’s him, of course. My dog is an extrovert. He loves meeting people, especially other four-footed furry people; as soon as he spots someone coming towards him, while I’m looking down at the ground to avoid their gaze, he starts wagging his tail and pulling towards them, hoping to get some petting and maybe a nice compliment on how soft his fur is; at the very least he’s hoping for a chance to sniff some new people-smells (And he thinks furry-people smells are the best.).

And while he’s standing there, wagging his big fluffy tail, nose squiggling inquisitively towards them from under his bright button eyes and pointed fox ears? I have to talk to them, if they’re human people, or to the people that walk with them, if they’re furry. I have to introduce my friend Sammy, and tell them he is friendly and not dangerous, though sometimes he gets rambunctious and jumps up on people. If it’s a human person alone, that’s all I have to say; they generally give him some pets, and they always say how soft he is, usually how pretty he is (I also have to tell them he’s a boy; if they make any comment that has a feminine twist – “Oh, she’s lovely!” – then I shorten his name to Sam, or lengthen it to Samwise, and I usually say “Good boy!” at some point. I’ve been mistaken for a girl, back when I had long, pretty hair; I didn’t care for it much.), and then they head off on their way, with a smile on their face and a wish for a good day for me. They often thank me. These encounters are, without question, the easiest, most positive interactions I have ever had with strangers.

If there is a furry person involved, the conversation is a little different: he generally ignores the human person, going straight to sniffing the furry one and being sniffed simultaneously. I still tell the human person that Sammy is friendly and will not bite, though occasionally he gets rambunctious; but I never have to say this to the furry person. It doesn’t matter if they’re twice his size, or one-quarter of it: there is never any fear when Sammy meets another dog. He will sometimes shy away from a dog barking from behind a fence if it seems angry; I use his response as a litmus test to tell me if the barking dog should be avoided or can safely be ignored. Sammy seems to know best. But if it’s a dog on a leash on the street, then it’s nothing but tail-wagging and nose-stretching, and it’s up to the human people to keep them from tangling their leashes.

And for the human persons, there is always more to say: they ask what breed Sammy is, generally with a compliment on how handsome he is – sometimes they say he looks like a fox, which he does. I tell them we don’t know: he’s a mutt we got from PACC, the county animal shelter here in Tucson. Then they often guess: and they always say Chow-Chow. Well, he is the right color, almost, and he does have thickish fur and a curled-up tail; but our last dog Charlie was at least half Chow, and Sammy looks very little like him, and acts nothing at all like him. The conversations Charlie had, whether with furry people or with human people, always started with him saying, through his attitude and body language, “I’m the Alpha. I’m in charge.” His body language was very clear: We took Charlie to an obedience class once, and he made a puppy pee itself in fear only by staring at it. The other dogs we met on the street either bristled at him, or, far more often, submitted to him, usually looking down and backing away. He didn’t allow human people to put their hands on top of his head, pulling back from their stroking fingers with offended dignity – though he would allow them to scratch his chest. And if it was a child, or the young woman with Downs’ syndrome whom Charlie met a few times at the library, Charlie would be completely calm and passive, would allow them to pet him anywhere they wished, would lick their hands and take food from them. But generally speaking, Charlie’s conversations were more formal, more dignified; based on what we’ve read about Chow-Chows, which are one of the “Ancient breeds” and were used for centuries as guard dogs in Buddhist temples in China, this had much to do with his heritage.

There’s nothing formal or dignified about Sammy. And as he’s hopping about, trying to shove his nose either into the face or under the rear of the other dog he’s greeting, the human person and I will talk about dogs, and about being dog-owners. I compliment their furry friend as they complimented mine – because all dogs are beautiful. We’ll chat about the weather, and about the neighborhood. We’ll let each other know if there is anything to watch out for or that needs to be avoided – a dog that has been spotted roaming loose, or a patch of sidewalk littered with broken glass. Eventually we’ll break off the sniff-fest and pull away, with several goodbyes.

Then, if we meet again, we recognize each other: I tell Sammy, “Look, it’s your friend!” And he acts like it: by the third time or so meeting the same dog, Sammy graduates from sniffing to trying to play, batting at them with his paws, rearing up or play-bowing as dogs do. The other human persons greet him by name – they still don’t know mine – and give him a little skritch about the ears or shoulders. Now the humans’ conversations also get more friendly, and we start getting to know each other. I have never spoken to two of the people living in the house next door to me; but I know the woman down the street, who walks her Dachshund twice as day as I do Sammy. She’s 87 years old, from Germany (I don’t comment on the amusing stereotype of a German woman with a Dachshund, but I think of it and smile), and she’s a badass: she walks that dog for miles, takes aerobics classes, and carries a wooden cane not to walk with, but to smack the heads of dogs that come after her little friend, because a loose dog once got into her yard and picked her dog up and shook it violently. Whenever I pass the two of them – which is frequently, as her walking schedule coincides with ours – we wave and greet each other with fond smiles, even yelling across the busy street. I like her. Her dog is also the sweetest, calmest Dachshund I’ve ever known; I have never heard him bark, and when he and Sammy met after he had had some teeth pulled and a growth removed from his snout (non-cancerous, his person told us – and expensive to have removed, but “Vat can you do? Zey are our children.”), Sammy sniffed carefully all around the wound, gave it a little lick, and the Dachshund let him.

That’s how it is, when you walk a dog: you get to know the other dog-walkers in the neighborhood, and their dogs. You smile and wave to each other; if your dogs get along, you cross the street to greet each other and have a little sniff-fest. If your dogs don’t get along, there isn’t any judgment, no grudges held; you simply cross the street away from each other, or pull one dog off the sidewalk to allow the other to pass without incident. (This was much more common with Charlie, but Sammy still does get nervous around some dogs; we simply stand aside, and there’s no issue.) I’ve shared poop-bags and treats with dog-walking friends who forgot one, and many a piece of advice or encouragement about training or health or food or general pet care; I’ve recommended vets and groomers and the obedience classes we took Charlie to. We’ve never actually been invited to a doggy birthday party, but they have been discussed, as have Christmas presents and special treats and favorite toys and games. We’ve told fond and interesting stories, and sometimes poignant ones: now that our family has been through the grief of losing Charlie, we have some more somber stories to talk about – but we can always lighten the mood by discussing Sammy, who is an absolute bundle of joy.

I’ve made friends, several of them, but not through any effort of my own: simply because I have a dog, I walk my dog, and I love my dog. Good fences don’t make good neighbors: good dogs do.