I was startled today, one of the most unexpected things occurred today and it involved one of the most unexpected things: dog poop.

Maria and I got home from a visit with a friend this morning, and she was going to her studio to warm it up on this gloomy and chilly day.  I looked up and saw her standing on the porch looking wretched – she was in a funky mood – and I saw that she was holding one of her kick-ass stomping hiking boots, the kind that has all sorts of ridges.

I knew instantly what had happened, she had stepped in some dog mess in the back yard, an occupational hazard here.

Oh, I remember thinking, I can’t let her do that standing out in the rain, she was so anxious to get to work. The stuff  was quite embedded in the many hard ridges of her boots, and she looked as if she was about to scream. I have been writing about dogs for years, and am a veteran of much foot-and-boot scrapping, it is absolutely nothing to me.

I took the boot into the barn, took my pocket knife and a hose, and went at it. It was a serious mess, but not a great big deal. This process, perfected by me over many years, requires a sharp object, a stream of water of feasible, and is, like dog training, a lesson in patience. A task of much repetition and many scrapes, a kind of inverse meditation, if you will.

I took the boot, and Maria was astonished, almost speechless, as rare for her as for we. There is not a  lot of silence in our home. She just went into the house, and then later, thanked me repeatedly and said she was shocked by my doing this work – she said the men in her life always got furious when they stepped in dogshit, she could hardly believe I would do that for her, and she even wrote about it on her blog.

It was my turn to be surprised, I’ve been with Maria eight wonderful years and yet, I can never quite grasp the depth of her hurt and injury at the hands of men. I had a dream the other night that I was writing a novel about her and the opening line was “For all of her years, she was to hear the reproaches of men ringing in her ears.” She often hears a question as a reproach, she sometimes hears the voices of other men in mine.

I wondered why this meant so much to her, it was absolutely nothing to me, it seemed so natural a thing to me.

Unlike most people, I am grateful for this unsettling and disturbing election season. I have learned a lot, thought a lot. I am hopeful and have faith in our process and the ultimate wisdom of people. Nobody sane loves this election, but I strongly believe it will do a lot of good on many levels over the long term. So many people have been aroused and awakened to so many things.

Especially to the real lives of women.

I have always considered myself a feminist, always supported women in their lives and their work to the best of my awareness, it is not a new idea for me, I am not just awakening to it. But I have never fully grasped or come to consciousness at the hurt so many women have experienced at the hands of oblivious and insensitive men. It is simply universal.

There is assault and groping and abuse and sexual harassment, of course, but there are also the smaller hurts, the things Thomas Jefferson called death by a thousand cuts – control, diminishment, fear and dismissal. Maria told me of several men in her life who got angry, even furious, when they stepped in dog feces, or blamed her if it was left by one of her dogs. She always thought of it as something that was somehow her fault.

Maria couldn’t comprehend the idea that a man could not only not be angry about it, but would volunteer to clean it off of her boot. She has done many harder and messier things for me by far. She called me a good man several times in the day, and I thought, how sad that the bar for men is that low, that this sweet and generous and loving person would be so grateful for such a mundane and simple thing.

Maria is a very good woman, in very man ways, but I would not think to label her that because she cleaned dog shit off of my shoe.

I am a man, and an older man, and I do not ever presume to fully grasp the thoughts and feelings of women, I do not speak for them. But this year, and because of this election,  I am better able to walk in their shoes than ever before, and am beginning to learn what it actually means to be a good man. It is a long and hard slog.

The reproaches of men…that dream line echoed in my head all day, there are the big hurts and there are the small hurts, and I feel women have risen – and taken so many men with them – in this election year that just maybe the reproaches and cuts of men will sting less, and be less. That would be a great boon of this election no matter what happens.