Walking the Dog: Six Degrees of Separation
• June 18, 2013

The other night, just before round two of the load of rain dumped by a tropical depression over the Washington region, I managed to get Bailey, my 14-year-old Bichon, out for a much needed walk.

I learn a lot from Bailey. We’re nearing the Exxon gas station at twilight when we see two little children getting out of an SUV. “Hey, it’s Bailey,” or something like that, yells Patrick, who is nearing all of three.

His friend turns and says, “Wow, I didn’t know we were going to run into Bailey.”

Talk about enduring fame. In our Lanier Heights neighborhood, as I’m sure it is elsewhere, dog owners are not always greeted by name, but their dogs are. Everyone, in short, knows Bailey. But a surprising many people struggle with my name, which is both a curse and blessing. I feel like Jack Kennedy when he said, “I’m the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” I am the man who walks Bailey around the block.

Bailey’s very localized appeal made me think about the nature of fame — how it is sometimes fleeting, sometimes lasting, and sometimes recurring. In America, there are first acts, second acts and more — and always last acts, in which famous people have their achievements and infamy reprised after duly passing away. Often, given the state of vitamins and good medicine, these famous people haven’t been heard from in a while. People live longer, die later. Or as Tony Curtis, a true old school movie star, said recently, “In this town [Hollywood], you have to die before somebody says something good about you.”

So, herewith, we give you a little of the life and times of: Tony Curtis, Eddie Fisher, George Blanda, Vance Bourjaily, and Arthur Penn — American success stories all. A movie star, crooner, football quarterback-kicker, novelist, and film-stage-television director — all of them fell victim to health issues in their eighties, the best parts of their professional lives long over, but endured in the memories of people, who themselves are, well…getting older.

I believe in the six degrees of separation bit. Somewhere there is a connection, however distant or intimate.

So let’s begin with Tony Curtis, matinee idol, New Yorker kid, sailor boy, Universal Pictures studio creation, terrific-at-times actor, lover boy (married six times), artist, and underappreciated. Think of Curtis and, as a moviegoer, you immediately see him fending off Laurence Olivier in “Spartacus” (“I am Antoninus, singer of songs, hard g’s clanking on Roman marble.”), or seducing Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot”, the Billy Wilder classic comedy in which Curtis and Lemmon pretended to be female musicians in an all-girl band during prohibition. You think of the oily huckster in “Sweet Smell of Success” , the bigot Southern convict chained to Sidney Poitier, on the run in “The Defiant Ones”, the creepy title role in “The Boston Strangler” — a pretty good body of work right there.

Curtis rose in the studio system that trained him, a pretty boy with pitch-black wavy hair, blue eyes, and attitude, growing up poor in Manhattan. He became a movie star and never spent much time resisting its temptations or opportunities. He was almost as pretty as Leigh, a beauty sometimes burdened by a bosomy build and a much underrated talent (witness her work on “Psycho”). The marriage did produce Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Lindsay Lohan’s mom before Lohan became a train wreck.

We saw Curtis here during the opening week of the World War II Memorial, when he was at the Navy Memorial for the annual commemoration of the Battle of Midway. Curtis, who was born as Bernie Schwartz, was a sailor in the U.S. Navy in World War II and spoke movingly, thanking the navy for letting a poor kid from New York “expand his horizons, see the world and its possibilities.” Here, he was both things at once: movie star incarnate in dazzling old age, alligator cowboy boots, a big cowboy hat, and tanned with his gorgeous, thirty-ish wife beside him, and Bernie Schwartz, sailor boy.

Curtis died in Henderson, Nevada, where my son lives. Six degrees.

I vaguely listened to Eddie Fisher’s records when he was one of the country’s top crooners. “Oh My Papa” was everybody’s favorite, and young girls and mothers both adored him. This was pre-rock and roll, pre-Elvis, early 1950s: Fisher was dark-haired, handsome, with a stylish, moving voice and a way with a soaring, moving ballad. He was a teen idol before old swivel hips came along and ruined it all for a generation of lesser singers like Vic Damone and Johnny Ray.

Few people remember his musical career, which continued at lesser levels with albums, Las Vegas, and hotel show rooms. Fisher was something of a rat pack wannabe in his day, and, like Curtis, something of a dog with the ladies. What people really remember is: Debbie, Mike, Liz, and Dick. The paparazzi that existed in those days, from the mid-fifties to the early sixties, had a field day, and Fisher got bowled over like a gasping fish by the whole thing, with nobody to blame but himself.

Fisher married just about the nicest young girl around, a miss Debbie Reynolds, and together (with Curtis and Leigh a close second at the time) they became America’s Sweethearts — clean-cut, shiny teeth, and hugs with babies (daughter Carrie). Eddie had a best friend named Michael Todd, a larger-than-life Broadway and film producer who made “Around the World in Eighty Days” (Best Picture Oscar), married the reigning movie star of the day, Elizabeth Taylor, and promptly got killed in a plane crash. Eddie consoled the widow and then consoled her some more, much to the public chagrin of wife Debbie. They divorced, Eddie married Liz, and both became vilified in the public eye — especially Eddie, the cad. The whole thing was the biggest scandal ever, until the next one.

Liz redeemed herself professionally by playing a hooker in “Butterfield Eight” and winning an Oscar. Then she moved to Rome to make the ruinous, hugely expensive “Cleopatra”. While filming, she met Richard Burton, her Anthony, and promptly began a hot, heavy, and very public affair, much to the chagrin of husband Eddie — the perfect storm of all scandals, excluding Brangelina. Six degrees.

I sat in on a press conference in San Francisco in the 1970s for Debbie Reynolds, who was touring the country in the musical “Irene” with her daughter Carrie. I recall her very funny and forthright answer to the clichéd question about how she might change her life if she had to do it all over again. “Well,” she said with a straight-face, “I’d probably screw around a lot more.” Jaws dropped onto the hotel’s red carpet.

More recently, I saw Carrie Fisher, daughter of Eddie and Debbie, perform her one-woman show “Wishful Drinking” at the Lincoln Theater, which included acerbic anecdotes about Hollywood and a childhood with famous parents. Fisher already has a very permanent, red-hot kind of fame from her role as Princess Leia, in the 1980s “Star Wars” Trilogy. Perhaps some might even remember her very first lines in her very first movie “Shampoo.”

It turns out Curtis was more right than he knew. On Access Hollywood, the most shameful guilty pleasure and half-hour showbiz-and-buzz TV show featuring the one-time Christian music deejay and Bush family relation Billy Bush, you had to wait until the end to hear a less-than-a-minute tribute to the life and times of Curtis. The show and Billy were preoccupied with such matters as Paris Hilton’s car riding over the toe of a paparazzi, whether “Glee,” the hit Fox show, crossed the too-nasty-for-kids line in its Britney Spears tribute, and advice for Lindsay Lohan from Donald Trump. So it goes, and so it went.

I saw George Blanda, then in his forties, sub for Daryl (dubbed footsteps) Lamonica as quarterback for the pre-Kenny Stabler Oakland Raiders and had occasion to watch the old man from the sidelines on several occasions. He won games throwing, he won games kicking, and he played until he was 48 years old. An NFL owner, who had hired him originally, said he remembered in the 1970s that his father had played in the 1950s. He had a butch haircut like Johnny Unitas and craggy features: quarterbacks from that era, like Y.A. Tittle of the Giants and Unitas of the Colts, were born looking like marines. Blanda had the dubious fortune of playing for Al Davis, the only football owner that makes Dan Snyder look like Mother Theresa. I was kicked out of his office once during training camp when I was a young sports writer. That would be two degrees.

Davis, legend has it, came home once in the wee hours, and his sleeping wife reportedly moaned “God” in her sleep. “You can call me Al at home,” said Davis. I believe it.

Vance Bourjaily was of that generation of American post-World War II writers, many of them veterans, who pursued the dream of the G.A.N. (That’s not Good Morning America but the Great American Novel.) He tried hard, and sometimes movingly, and belongs in the ranks of writers like Updike, Mailer, Bellow, James Jones, and one of the surviving members, Philip Roth. Like them, Bourjaily, in novels like “The End of My Life”, “The Violated”, and “The Man Who Knew Kennedy”, wrote frankly about sex, which made their books must-reads for young men growing up in that era, in addition to their literary value. I read all of them and still didn’t learn everything there was to know. One Degree.

If “Bonnie and Clyde” was the only movie he ever directed, Arthur Penn would still be in some kind of pantheon, just for changing the movie culture of the 1960s. To say the film was revolutionary — a romanticized, stylized, sexy, and ultra-violent telling of the tale of Depression era bank robbers, with hunky Warren Beatty and super sexy Faye Dunaway in the leads — is an understatement. Time Magazine ran a highly negative review, then reversed itself. It’s one of the best movies ever made.

Penn became known as something of a liberal, leftist, counter-culture kind of force as a director. He captured the sixties zeitgeist, always a favorite word of the critics who praised him. He also directed “Alice’s Restaurant” and “The Miracle Worker”.

Penn was also a close friend of the controversial state department official Alger Hiss, who was convicted, in the early days of the McCarthy era, of being a Communist spy. Hiss always declared his innocence. Three degrees. I had a lengthy and haunting interview with Hiss at American University in the early 1980s.

And so it goes.

Walking the Dog: How My Dog Taught Me to Read
•

 

-My dog Bailey doesn’t read. He’s like that dog on the commercial for bacon bits, sniffing, panting that “you know I can’t read.” Bailey, like all dogs, is all nose, or so he let’s me believe.

I think he reads, in his own way.

I read books, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, novels, short stories, poems, sentences,
blogs, and fragments of words. My office could pass for a used bookstore. As a reader, I worry. I read signs of change as if they were omens, portents, signs, predictors of a bookless, wordless future. As a writer, I worry about the deterioration of the English language — of any language at all.

Bailey reads the wind, the grass, the sides of trees, the flashes of sunlight, and the cracks in the sidewalks, and he perceives all sorts of things: the arrival of new puppies, the sore bones of a tall shepherd of advancing years (Bailey commiserates.), the small yapping poem left by a teacup poodle, the echoes of which lie like sparkly dust in the growing leaves. The scents are full of news of his world and beyond.

He reminds me a little of the dog called Mr. Bones in Paul Aster’s novel “Timbuktu”, about a homeless, mad, lost writer, who at some point tries to appraise Mr. Bones of the arts through smells. But while Mr. Bones enjoys his efforts — what fun! — he knew he was already blessed: “For once Mr. Bones was glad he was not endowed with the power of human speech. If he had, he would have been forced to tell Willy the truth, and that would have caused him much pain. For a dog, he would have said, for a dog, dear master, the fact is that the whole world is a symphony of smells. Every hour, every minute, every second of his waking life is at once a physical and spiritual experience.”

Just so, and in the same way, dogs read and spread the news and take in gossip and heartbreak from earth and wind, if not fire.

On the other hand, we, who write words, who take them in like elixir and drugs and the sweetest alcohol, who use stories and poems and biographies to inspire us and make us whole or get through the day, who love the feel and weight of books, the heft of a fall Vanity Fair issue, the rows upon rows of words in the New Yorker, or the black and white drama of a really big headline, who, when we’re lucky, can make sentences dance, worry.

Newspapers are shrinking. Magazines are disappearing. Daily, the evidence mounts up. The New York Times publisher gives an interview in London, in which he says that the print edition of the world’s most venerated paper might not exist for very long. Here, a Border’s, of all things, closes up shop downtown with a great big remainder sale. One of the city’s more original bookstores, Bartleby’s in Georgetown, is said to be closing in the near future, and a few days past, Carla Cohen, the founder and former owner of Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue, passed away from a rare form of cancer.

Bartleby’s is awash with old books, very old books, and books nobody’s read in a while — books about Waterloo, the Civil War, Wagner, and the early editions of state histories. Usually, there’s only one copy of each book in the hundreds to thousands that stack the shelves or the outdoor racks on sale. Not too much of James Patterson here, the mystery writer who seems to write a book every night except Sundays. Bailey would be right at home here, sensing, scenting the odor of old pages, the silky sigh of “Nevermore”, the thunderous thick words describing battle, the delicate quality of fragile pages from 1839 or some such lost year, the leaf and gold.

Patterson would have probably been on one shelf or another at Politics and Prose, out of necessity
and the good graces and the New York Times Bestseller List, but there were always books on politics — some esoteric and some written by people in the neighborhood, this being Washington. Often, the authors would show up in the flesh, and every time you went to a book reading at the store, it made you feel hope for the future of well-made books, articulate writers, and the charms of the written word spoken out loud.

Like Indian summer, these portents of hope are somehow sad for their infrequency. Used book shops seem to do quite well actually, but newer bookshops have their problems of price and volume so that they resemble more and more a supermarket with books, toys, records, videos, accessories, and digital dandy stuff. Of course, this includes books on your telephone and Kindles — a different version of the same thing — for which little slips resembling book covers are provided at an extra cost.

Riding a connector bus the other day, I saw a young woman reading one of those things. I look over her shoulder and asked her what it was and why she was using it. It was the very same digital book in a cover. “I have a huge bunch of books,” she said. “The last time I moved I had to get them up to a third story walk up. I am never. Doing. That. Again.”

She extolled the virtue of the digital book. It’s easy to carry in your pocket, unlike a hardback of “War and Peace” or even James Patterson’s latest. “You can control the type-size, make it bigger. Better than needing glasses.”

A young woman on my block showed me a Kindle — John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” right in your pocket, in big type. I looked at the comfy little cover of the digital book the young woman had. I thought of advancing age. I thought about the coming Christmas, and for a minute I was tempted. But a voice said, “Not yet, not yet,” if not, “Nevermore.”

I picked up my copy of the latest Reacher novel and left. Somehow I remained unbowed and unblemished but fretting about what texting and blogging are doing to words and sentences. I came home. I walked Bailey. He did his business. He sniffed all through the walk: the poodle’s poem, the song in the wind, the news of a stiff paw on a blade of grass, the telling of the tale of the new basset puppy, the songs straight out of the sun, and the scent of drying leaves. What he reads will come to him every day, the same way.

Tomorrow, I’m pretty sure The Post will come and The Shopper, but I’m not always sure about either one of the Times.

Bailey sniffs the tree for news and stories. I worry. It’s probably like Mr. Bones said — that it’s a good thing they can’t talk.

Walking The Dog: Joseph’s House
•

Some twenty or thirty people—nurses, volunteers, aides, visitors, activists—had gathered at Joseph’s House at 6:30 in the evening.

They heard “Amazing Grace” played by a bagpiper from the firehouse. They were welcomed by Joseph’s House Executive Director Patty Wudel and were led in a light-sharing ceremony by volunteer Andrea Woods. Candles lit and spirits high, they embarked on a walk through Lanier Place in Adams Morgan, through the one-way section which makes it easier for the ambulances and fire engines to come in and out of the local firehouse. They walked past all the houses, the night having come on, the candles acting as pathfinders through sidewalks full of blustered leaves. Around the block, past the house next to the fire station where the old lady from the Carolinas had lived for so many years, and they were home again.

Joseph’s House staff member Kate Lichti read a poem called “Beannacht,” or “Blessing,” and they shushed their candles in the yard and went inside.

I came in behind them, late through faults entirely my own, and saw the extra chairs for the viewing of the Showtime documentary, “The Other City,” about the continuing rise of AIDS in Washington DC.

They were bringing in pizza and assorted snacks and lemonade and iced tea into the dining room, where the counters and walls were alive with the pictures of laughing, smiling men and women, almost all of whom are now gone.

It was World AIDS day at Joseph’s House, self-described as a compassionate community for homeless men and women at the end of life, founded in 1990 by Dr. David Hilfiker.

“We gathered tonight to celebrate Worlds AIDS day, and to celebrate the lives of all the men and women, over 300, who have died here,” Ms. Wudel said.

Mercelda Williams, a long-time personal care aide here, spotted me. “You’re the guy with Bailey,” she said.

That would be my dog Bailey, who is well known here, even though there is a new house dog, a cat named Romeo and a fierce female Yorky named Ajax, who, when it comes to Bailey, becomes fanatically territorial.

There’s a reason to bring up my dog. We’d always walked past the big, roomy house on the corner of Lanier Place and Ontario, with its peeling bark trees, its garden tools in the yard, the well-lit windows reflecting warmth, the gray statue of Mother Mary. We saw the men sitting on the porch, the employees, nurse’s aides, young, apple-faced volunteers, and a man in brown monk robes. I knew it was a hospice for homeless men and women with terminal illnesses, primarily AIDS, but also cancer.

It was a home on the street, really, very much a part of the neighborhood. Sometimes there were celebrations and gatherings there, and ambulances and hearses would stop there, which was a part of the life of the home. Some days Wudel would greet us warmly, as she does most people, and she took a liking to Bailey, as do most people.

Bailey, a Bichon Frise, wears his natural, little-dog cuteness, with a certain amount of diffidence, volunteering affection grudgingly. But it was Bailey who took an interest in the residents at Joseph’s House.

We would walk by—over the years a few thousand times, most likely—and Bailey would stop and look up. And the men there would respond. “That sure is a cute dog,” one or the other would say. And Bailey, instead of moving briskly on, would stop and look back. His tail would wag. Soon, some of the men would come down and pet him, and he stood still for it. I guess the word went out. Pretty soon, we’d be on the other side of the street and would hear, loud and clear: “Hey, Bailey, how you doin’?”

“That was Jesse,” Williams said. “He started that ‘Bailey’ stuff. Lots of them. They just naturally got to liking him.”

And Bailey would respond in kind, which was so rare as to require noting. He and I turned the corner with Fred and Donald. Fred was a carpenter by trade—he made the Welcome sign at the top of the porch—and his best friend there was Donald. Fred suffered from terminal lung cancer. When they were out on the porch early in the morning, Bailey would not only stop, but would hop up the two sections of stairs to see one or the other.

Donald, a navy veteran, a thin, lively man who refused to bow to the idea of dying, was out on the porch early in the morning, and Bailey came running up the stairs. “Yo, Bailey,” he said, opening the door.

“Fred,” he said, “you better get on out here. Bailey’s up here.”

“I think he’s sleeping on the couch,” Donald said. But Fred came out, walking slowly. It was near the end days of his illness, but he came out in the cold to greet Bailey.

The two of them showed up in November two years ago to vote. “It’s a history day, isn’t it?” Fred said. “It’s a great day. I had to do that.” It was also an act that spoke directly to the future that Fred would not be occupying, and he knew that.

Donald, it turned out, was one of the people who survived his illness and returned to the world outside of Joseph’s House. He would come back, show up periodically, and if I saw him, he asked about Bailey.

If this sounds prosaic, even whimsical and sentimental, it’s not meant to be. I began to understand what was happening at Joseph’s house, which was just this kind of thing. “We treat people with unconditional love,” Wudel said. “Nobody has to earn love, nobody should have to do it.

“It’s about respect. It’s about being curious about people’s lives. It’s about learning how to live a full live in the process of dying. There is a deep exchange that goes on here. We are not naïve in the face of death. We feel the loss, too.”

And life is all about greetings, the smell of fried eggs, fading light at dusk, early morning cold on a porch, people sharing moments by extending their time, life and hands.

When we pass by, I seem to remember them all—the young white man who made every effort to be out in the community, shopping at Safeway, going to the Deli, relatives showing up on birthdays, twenty-something volunteers on the porch listening to the latest resident talk about his or her life, the voices not quite carrying but being a musical murmur. Sometimes kids and men and women would be gathering, and there were tears. And you knew that the tears were a part of things here, and there would be somber faces in the morning here.

Daily life goes on there, and the house and the people in it are very much a part of the neighborhood, the street with its winter potholes, the bright street lamps, the ambulances coming out of the fire house, all the people with dogs walking dogs, the burst of babies in their carriages. There is no spot on the stairs or on the sidewalk that says this is where Joseph’s House ends and the neighborhood begins.

No one, it seemed to me, retreats into a solitary death there. They live in company even at the last. Walking by, we know all that, and the vibrant lives still lived, and those remembered.

“Who knew,” I thought early on.

I think Bailey knew.

www.JosephsHouse.org [gallery ids="99574,104854,104857" nav="thumbs"]

Walking the Dog: News and Perspective
•

We live in a city full of news; it seems sometimes to come like rain from above, buzzing on television, or erupting from below. The world shakes with chaos and revolution in the Middle East and we feel the vibrations in our city.

The Middle East, the crowds and demonstrators in the streets of Cairo, the fall of Mubarak, the fall of Tunisia’s government and the civil war now raging in Libya are the kinds of things that reverberate in our city, keep the lights out in the White House, and in numerous embassies.

It’s the kind of news that preys on the mind as we wake up in the morning, brew the coffee, get dressed, pick up the morning Post and check for big-headline updates.

It stays with you when you walk the dog, a buzz in the head, the stuff of neighborhood conversation, WORLD news. Other news follows the buzz and the talk—while Libya is still on the mind and Egypt remains shaky, the news closer to home about a major, brewing scandal concerning our newly minted mayor sends ripples through the two blocks or so that Bailey and I navigate every morning, noon, evening and night. The election signs are gone now from the yards, but the memory of everyone’s votes and arguments lingers in the morning air, especially now.

We have other news, of course, news of our bodies faltering, news of the newly elected firebrands across the country clashing with teachers unions and policemen and firemen. You think of that around here. The street is full of people who work in education, as teachers, as policy makers, as wonks and educators. And Bailey’s mom is a teacher herself, so you can manage the discussion that lingers, following us on our walks.

On our street we have a firehouse, and we have police cars patrolling and lately handing out a spate of parking tickets. That’s news too. A while back, a man walked by me who I used to see walking his wife in the sunlight, gently guiding her in a summer dress back in August. He stopped and turned around to tell me that his wife had passed away over the Christmas holidays. “I thought you should know,” he said. The woman had appeared frail, but her husband always seemed steadfast in the way he held her hand, and so we greeted each other with interest and courtesy. That too was news.

On my walks with Bailey, the world conflates sometimes, only to open up wide when I see one of our neighbors. There was the retired diplomat who spent a good deal of time in the Middle East including a stint as consul to the American Embassy in Cairo. He was worried about the fate of people he used to work with abroad and concerned about where all this will end. Watching television, you guess, he’s seeing streets and places he saw every day back in his time. Down the street I see the wife of a journalist who works for a Swedish news agency covering the United States, now endlessly preoccupied with the reaction to the news abroad.

The news: the weather is much on the mind of anchors these days, with their furrowed brows, their ill-guised thrill at being this close as well as this safely distant from the proximity of disaster. For people around here, it means the possibility of flood, the day-after-day cold, the endless winter. It is not healthy not to complain about the weather; exult in the rare balmy day. The big news also brings changes around the neighborhood: the price of gasoline at the nearby end-of-the-block Exxon station, always expensive, is inching toward $4 a gallon, regular.

Bailey, who is 14 years old now, has his own take on the news. It is closer to the ground, and he brings me in that direction too. For Bailey, the oncoming rain means avoiding walking in puddles in order to do his thing, something not always possible. The news to him is the first budding trees, the cawing of the blackbirds and an occasional hawk. Dogs who are pets are torn, I think, between trying to discern the feelings of their owners as they navigate the news of the world, and focusing on what’s important to them: bark of trees, bark and scent of other dogs, rumors and gossip of their comings and goings written in the blades of grass.

When I stop to talk with people these days, the talk is not so much about sunny days, or the lack of sunny days, but about the what-in-the-world-is-going-on reaction to the Gray-Brown imbroglio, touched by either a certain disappointment or the I-told-you-so reaction. Bailey sits and sniffs it out—good mood, bad mood for dad?

But what he really cares about at the moment is the onrushing Bassett hound or Lulu, the giant schnauzer, still a puppy, across the street standing up like a flailing horse.

It’s not that he doesn’t have feelings about history, time and such: when Tina, the Yorkie down the street, returns from abroad, he is beside himself with persistence and wagging, although it’s often ignored. He hasn’t forgotten that Rosie the terrier and he have a long-standing feud going back eight years that erupts into instant snarling the moment they sense each other’s presence on the sidewalk.

Walking Bailey on the block gives me both opportunities to talk too much about everything with others, and perspective. He teaches me to downsize every now and then, not be so intent on worrying about how the eventually new Egyptian government will deal with Israel, but concentrate on the trees that were only recently winter naked, now becoming populated with as yet unopened buds. It means something: renewal, a process that will radically change the view on the sidewalk, if not the talk.

Bailey teaches me to look closely and closer to home, as I’m swept up in the grand view, the big news stories that are so much a part of this city, where they seep into the neighborhoods of daily life like rain and sunshine.

I have news for him too, although I suspect he had already sniffed it out in the casual nosing among his friends. The mighty Mubarak may have fallen from power, and tyrants an dictators sleep less with history knocking on their door, but here we have the news that a little white Maltese, whom I liked to call “Little Bailey,” has passed away, managing to last life out for 19 years, a mighty old age for such a small little guy. And later still, we hear the news from the owner of Andy, a beautiful dog with a lustrous brown and white mane, that he too has gone where all dogs go due to an enlarged spleen.

Somewhere on our walks, if Bailey doesn’t know, he’ll figure it out, by scent or by absence, that his friends are gone, that he will not see them again forever. As for me, I knew Little Bailey and Andy better than Mubarak, better than Charlie Sheen, better than Sulaimon Brown, and I feel their loss and their absence on our walks.

I know that Little Bailey perked up time and again when he saw my Bailey kicking into an uncharacteristic run. And I know that I found Andy’s graceful trot, his mournful eyes begging for a treat, things of beauty. Bailey and I will miss them.

And that’s the news today.

The Last ‘Walking the Dog’: a Tribute to Bailey and Barney
•

Barney, who fulfilled the role of first dog and his master’s best friend for two terms at the White House, died a few weeks ago of lymphoma at the age of 12.

President George W. Bush made the announcement in straightforward, affectionate terms: “Laura and I are sad to announce that our Scottish Terrier, Barney, has passed away. The little fellow had been suffering from lymphoma and after twelve and a half years of life, his body could not fight off the illness. Barney and I enjoyed the outdoors. He loved to accompany me when I fished for bass at the ranch. He was a fierce armadillo hunter. Barney guarded the South Lawn entrance of the White House as if he were a Secret Service agent. He wandered the halls of the West Wing looking for treats from his many friends.”

From the former president’s tone, it’s pretty clear that Barney had many friends. In his own way, as first dogs tend to do, he became famous—the “Barney cam,” where he displayed his eager demeanor and outstanding ears and trying to upstage things at the first lady’s unveiling of the White House Christmas decorations simply by walking by.

Around that time, we found out that Smokey, the black lab and cocker mix who had best friend to Bailey, our Bichon Frise, during his neighborhood days, had passed away. We lost Bailey, about whom I’d written in several “Walking the Dog” columns in The Georgetowner, late last spring to cancer which was discovered too late for any succor or relief.

I did not write about Bailey on the occasion of his passing. I am doing so now for one last “Walking the Dog”— or until we should bring another dog into our lives, a subject about which there has been much discussion among our friends and neighbors.

The passing of Smokey, and Bailey, Woody, and Navy and Gertie and Spot, and the Maltese whom everybody called Little Bailey at the age of 19, and Jazzy and others, and, yes, if we may, Barney, because he was a part of our larger neighborhood in the city, marked the passing of a generation of dogs who were a part of our lives, directly or by association. Some, like Eddie, remain, but few are left.

Bailey lived to be 15 and spent all but the early months of his life in our Lanier Heights section of Adams Morgan. There are new dogs, newly minted dog friends, pups who tug their owners and pull them to the dog park, which did not exist when Bailey came to the neighborhood. There are new children, too, some of whom will want dogs. In case I didn’t mention it, this is a dog neighborhood. Bailey, for reasons I still find a mystery but appreciate with great feeling and affection, was a presence in the neighborhood. His absence is felt, as I’m sure Barney was at the White House and on the Bush ranch.

This is the nature of the beast—these small and large beings who are not beasts, but our pets, companions and unalloyed silent best friends. They will devastate us with the regularity of predicted loss, and, oddly, knowing what we know, there is no way of avoiding the pain of the loss or predicting its length, nature and specifics. In our world, in the neighborhood and all across the country, pets have become not only a cottage industry, but beings who are constantly written about, talked about, gossiped about in the hood, studied scientifically, and speculated about: who are these guys and girls anyhow and why do they mean so much to so many of us?

I can say this, and I suspect it is true for the Bush family—the loss of a dog is a death in the family, and around here, a death in the neighborhood.

I don’t mean to make so much of Bailey in terms of his neighbors, but I suspect it is true still. My four daily walks—rain, shine, the seasons, the weather, the talk, the other dogs, meetings and greetings—regulated my life. Bailey was the best alarm clock I had, the best weatherman, the best judge of conditions, the best communicator of need, the most patient soul in some ways. He was my enabler, in the sense he let me discover the neighborhood, let me think about how to write stories, or entertain ideas or receive them on the walk. He made me notice all of it—homes and hearth, the air, the change in temperature, the age and sudden absence of trees, the spots in the grass. Dogs don’t sniff idly. They dig out news in the grass and on the side of trees. They communicate in the air.

Dogs chasten your sense of self-importance—Bailey did that so routinely and without seeming to that I swear he was smiling in there somewhere. Bailey was instantly recognized by name. I would hear people hollering, “Hey, Bailey,” as if it were a daily song. Bailey was diffident about fame—he had it and seemed to know it—but he was not needy that way. He was not a seeker of strokes, pets, treats, or God forbid, hugs, and he was not a slurper like the happy labs and goldens. His appeal was simple: he was unforgivably adorable and cute—big black bottomless eyes set in a white furry face and body and facial expressions that could haves gotten him acting jobs. Oddly, he had an opportunity to do just that: they were filming the Will Smith thriller “Enemy of the State” on our street in the late 1990s, and had not yet cast the lone little dog part. The AD eyed Bailey, saying “He’s a cute little guy.” Bailey promptly ran his leash around my legs five times giving the AD pause and eliciting the comment, “Kind of hyper, isn’t he?” There went Hollywood. I should add that Bailey was hardly ever hyper except when he went into a mysterious, crazed run called the “Bichon blitz.”

I spent more time with Bailey than anyone I know. When I was working on stories, he would come into my office in the back and find several sleeping spots—under the computer, in the closet, by the bookcase and so on. He inspired me often—not just in writing about him or dogs, but about the neighborhood. What he did and how he conducted himself made me think and often entertained me. The dog who barely tolerated most people except to give them 30 seconds to admire him, discovered two of the residents of Joseph House, the hospice for the homeless in our neighborhood and routinely ran up flights of steep stairs to see them. I think he was a contrarian: outside of Smokey, Navy, and a few other dogs, his best pals were cats with whom he played, a Siamese on our block and Tiny, who would lay in wait for him under parked cars.

It doesn’t end, either. Henry, a dog walker and neighborhood guy, asked us about our dog future, then began talking about Bailey recently. “That Bailey,” he said. “He was a legend.”

And just the other day, I ran into a neighbor I hadn’t seen in a while, who was taking his little daughter out. Just as I left, I heard her voice: “But where’s the doggy?”

Smokey was his friend—he saw him after a year-long interval and they wagged and sniffed, but not forever. They were older, after all, no point in making a fuss. Bailey had once put his 14-pound body between Smokey and two large terriers who had gone after Smokey. There they were side by side, and Stanley, Smokey’s dad, said, “There they are, the salt and pepper team.”

I’d offer my condolences to President Bush, but I know how he feels. There were news photos of Bush and Barney—which sounds like a law firm, and maybe if you added Bailey on to it, it would be—and in both Bush is smiling and grinning, Barney darkly mysterious.

Bush said, “He never discussed politics and was always a faithful friend”.

Here’s to Barney. Here’s to Bailey. Barney and Bailey—we all know what that sounds like.

[gallery ids="101172,142526,142522" nav="thumbs"]

Behold Our American Heritage, Right Here at Home
• June 6, 2013

With Flag Day, June 14, and Father’s Day, June 16, soon upon us, we find ourselves in a sentimental and all-American mood.
In Georgetown, we know of that man who lived here and penned that great American paean to the flag and its power, “the Star-Spangled Banner,” our national anthem. Opened but 20 years ago this September, that park on M Street next to Key Bridge honors Francis Scott Key and the American flag.

Our American fathers, whether of the historical kind or our very dearly own, we hold close here in Georgetown and also hold a secret: history, while of the past, lives on and teaches much more of the present.

For many, our fathers have departed this world and live in our thoughts every hour. For others, they are strong, dutiful, sensible men who guide and have guided their children to become complete persons as well as patriotic, thoughtful Americans. It seems a coincidence these special days for our flag and our dad are but days apart. Yet, perhaps, it is that wonderful American moment when this is the way it is to be.

Meanwhile, we look around our neighborhood and see friends striving to make our town and city better everyday. Whether it is those honored last week by the Citizens Association of Georgetown (shown below), or those working to make the business district more appealing with events, such as the Taste of Georgetown, and public discussion of the future, or those keeping the parks useful and in top shape, such as Volta Park, or another business group, ready to salute the late Jim Weaver, or those teaching the young and sending them forth into the world, this is our town. Tudor Place offers wonderful children’s programs. We unveiled Percy Plaza at the new Waterfront Park to memorialize Georgetowner Sen. Charles Percy. Still, our longest-serving, dedicated councilman Jack Evans, wants to do more, too: he wants to be the Mayor of Washington, D.C.

Accomplished persons in a superlative place, that is Georgetown, our part of the American dream, and it is our proud American heritage. We are grateful and know what Americans do: keep improving themselves, their families, their hometown, their nation. ?

Citizens Association Honors Town’s Best; Elects Pamla Moore New President
•

The best of Georgetown was on display May 29 at Dumbarton House during the annual awards meeting and officers’ election of the Citizens Association of Georgetown. Its new president is Pamla Moore.

After departing president Jennifer Altemus welcomed the crowd, councilmember Jack Evans of Ward 2, who lives with his wife Michele and their children on P Street, presented Altemus with a proclamation from Mayor Vincent Gray, designating “May 29, 2013, as Jennifer Altemus Day.”

Evans, for his part, reminded the group that May 29 was the birthday of President John Kennedy, who lived in Georgetown in many houses through his years of public service in D.C. The presumptive mayoral candidate also launched into his “Georgetown’s Golden Age” stump speech which lauds the achievements of the neighborhood since the late 1990s and likewise touts the dynamism of D.C. as one of America’s leading cities, a true “boomtown,” cited by recent media reports.
Then, it was time for the awards during the briskly paced meeting.

The Captain Peter Belin Award was presented to Karen “Cookie” Cruse “for her expert and dedicated work in preserving the historic character of Georgetown.” Cruse said the prestigious award was “frosting on the cake” in her gratitude of the town.
The William A. Cochran Award was presented to Leslie Buhler, executive director of Tudor Place, for “exceptional efforts to protect and enhance the community’s parkland and architectural resources.” While living elsewhere, Buhler said she “loved Georgetown” best.

The Charles Atherton Award was presented to Dana Nerenberg, principal of Hyde Elementary School, for “exceptional service by a dedicated public-sector professional for outstanding work preserving and protecting historic Georgetown.” Nerenberg said that she had “the best job ever.”

The Martin-Davidson Award to the business persons who have contributed significantly to the community was presented to Clyde’s Restaurant Group’s Ginger and John Laytham. Noting Clyde’s longtime involvement in the community and its 50th anniversary in June, John Laytham said, “I hope Clyde’s is around for another 50 years.” Ginger Laytham also noted Clyde’s community efforts and thanked CAG for its leadership.

A special appreciation award was presented to Ray Danieli, now retired from Georgetown University, for his dedicated and distinguished service to the Georgetown community. Danieli said, “The city and the university now have a great relationship.”

Election of CAG officers and four directors also took place at the meeting. Here is the new line-up: Pamla Moore, president; Bob vom Eigen, vice president; Barbara Downs, secretary; Bob Laycock, treasurer; and directors: Diane Colasanto, Karen Cruse, Hazel Denton and Luca Pivato. Jennifer Altemus will remain on the board as immediate past president.

Upon her election as CAG president, Moore recalled that when asked to run she thought about it and then told the audience: “The reason I said yes was you.” ?

Jack Evans Report: It Was a Smart Call to Return Baseball to Washington, D.C.
•

I usually write about our baseball team around opening day every year, but I think the timing of opening day caused the budget to take precedence for me this year. April 1 was opening day for the Washington Nationals, and it was a great day to head outside and watch the Nationals win their opener over the Marlins.

Since the Nats started playing baseball at RFK stadium in April 2005, I have attended every opening game. Although I had never attended an opening game for any team before and had been to very few baseball games, I have come to look forward to baseball season. This year, there were obviously high expectations after our exciting playoff appearance last year, but it’s tough for any team to be successful with so many injuries. Still, I’ll take second in the division versus last place, for now, and I will hope we put some more wins together as the season progresses.

Little is heard these days about the decision to bring a baseball team to Washington and to build a new stadium. The stadium has worked out better than anticipated. The District borrowed $584 million to build the stadium and identified other sources of revenue to pay off the loan: 1) a 1-percent increase in the commercial utility tax; 2) a tax on businesses with gross receipts of more than $5 million; and 3) revenue generated from the stadium itself, including rent and sales tax on concessions, tickets and apparel.
Together, these taxes have raised millions of dollars more than necessary to pay the annual debt service obligations. All contingency funds have been fully funded, and I support using the excess revenue to pay off the bonds early. Our stadium financing method is used as a model by other jurisdictions.

Development around the stadium has occurred but has been slowed by the recession. Recently, with the credit markets becoming available, development is proceeding. I stated at the time that it would take ten years to build out the area. Keep in mind that it took that long to develop the area around the Verizon Center, a part of town which was much further along than the baseball stadium area.

So, as we settle into another baseball season, if you are a baseball fan, make sure to run over to a game after work or on a sunny weekend. Play ball! ?

Councilmembers Running for Mayor. What About Mayor Vincent Gray?
• May 23, 2013

Now there are two, with more expected to join in.

Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells officially announced that he was running for Mayor of the District of Columbia in the 2014 election, during the course of a rainy kickoff event last Saturday at the Starburst Plaza in Northeast Washington where heavily trafficked H Street, Maryland Avenue, Bladensburg and Benning Roads meet in a changing neighborhood.

The announcement came as no big surprise—Wells has hinted, almost made it official, criss-crossed his ward with listening and exploratory events and raised money—and now adds Wells to the official portion of the field which includes Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser, who announced in front of her childhood home a little earlier this year.

Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans—who ran unsuccessfully once before in a different time, a different political atmosphere and a different city—is expected to make his candidacy official in perhaps the next three weeks or less. Political chit chat has it that At-large Councilman David Catania might join in also. Talk has it that former City Administrator Robert Bobb may also join the fray.

The big question mark as of this writing is the status of Mayor Vincent Gray, who has a record to run on and a previous campaign to run against. The mayor’s low-profile work shows a city that has a big surplus, a declining crime rate, some improvements in schools, a booming economy fueled by new and very visible developments all over the city, and a changing demographic picture which has brought about visible changes in areas like those where Wells made his announcement.

Wells touted forging liveable, walkable neighborhoods, which has been a hallmark of the Capitol Hill area and beyond for his ward, but also of Ward 2 in the downtown area and in Southwest. He also focused on and emphasized ethical issues the city government has faced and continues to face with the cloud that still hangs over Gray’s mayoral campaign (and a so-called shadow campaign), which is still under federal investigation. No word from the U.S. Attorney’s office of late. No word from Gray either, who so far has been quiet about running again but has not ruled out the possibility.

It may seem early for folks like Wells and Bowser to make an official move, but deadlines are coming up, if not fast and furious, enough to see them on the horizon, including a filing deadline in September of this year and a D.C. primary election on April 1, 2014. That’s less than a year away.

The lull in the investigation, which is ongoing, puts a damper on Gray’s actions in the sense that the possibility of more revelations, even if they’re not materializing, create an atmosphere of ambiguity and political uncertainty, which is having a chilling effect on the political process when it comes to Gray.

Wells said he would focus on ethics in government, or what he called “a crisis in the Wilson building.” He said, “We’ve seen the greatest ethical crisis in our city since home rule.” That’s a little bit of hyperbole but not unexpected with the arrests of Ward 5 Councilman Harry Thomas Jr., and former Council Chairman Kwame Brown.

Other issues—race, which has been a noticeable factor in recent special council elections, transportation, (Metro efficiency and streestcars) schools,(closings and test scores), housing both affordable and less so, and gentrification—loom on the horizon for what promises to be a wide-open election campaign.

The Things That Truly Matter
•

It’s a good thing tornados don’t have names. Otherwise, we’d never get them out of our heads.

The folks in Moore, Okla., will have no trouble remembering the two-mile wide F-4 storm that blotted out the sun and for all intents and purposes destroyed their town like humans stepping on an ant hill.

The videos, photos and the sounds and stories from the people trying to find adequate words to describe what happened to them were indelible and overwhelming. For a time, and hopefully for some time to come, they will drown out the excitement-fueled chatter of the talking, tweeting, blogging and gossip and commentary classes about the scandal triads of the IRS, Benghazi, the Associated Press or the lottery winner or the engagement travails of Jennifer Aniston — to say nothing of Jodi Arias.

Mother Nature is a teacher, although her lessons, while obvious, are almost always frightening exercises in tough love, detachment and fury. For all intents and purposes, Moore no longer exists as a functioning, recognizable suburban town outside of Oklahoma City, an urban pocket in the flat landscape of Oklahoma where tornados touch down with devastating regularity. Storms like these and their tragic results undermine certainty, the kind found in the voices and statements spoken with such regularity in Washington, D.C., about just about everything. This is the worst scandal since … fill in the blank and not since … fill in the blank. I wonder if the senators and representatives from Oklahoma will have such rock-solid certainty in their voices when they will, as they must, visit the piles of wreckage that were homes, hospitals, schools and neighborhoods, will find such certainty trying to describe their reactions to the disaster that visited their state.

I know and remember this area. My son was born in Oklahoma City, and I went to school for two years at the University of Oklahoma just south of there in Norman. Writing about sports for the local newspaper, I logged a lot of mileage traveling with a semi-pro baseball player on the kinds of back roads and through towns where tornados are regular and feared visitors, places like Choctaw and Muskogee, towns with Native-American names. I suspect in times like these it doesn’t matter much what party they belong to — Democrats, Republicans or Tea or none of the previous. They belong to the party of the grieving, the shocked, the lost and hurt, the devastated, the party which doesn’t have an expert opinionated on “Meet the Press,” although the press will surely inundate their town armed with video and sympathy and air time.

I think perhaps politicians, elected officials, and the media and the policy nerds talk a little too much about things that nobody really talks about that much. Right about now, in terms of the United States government, Oklahomans will probably talk about the size of government, whether it is big enough, not only in resources but heart and determination, to keep the promises of speedy and enormous aid that are bound to be made.

All the rest is so much dribble and dross, looking small against the horribly transformed skyline of Moore, Okla