Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

More good news today. I am now in charge of a Commitment Ceremony.

I love the Mansion because I consider it a “Big-Hearted” place, the people who own it and work there care about the residents and give them love and tender care.  This is why I love to work there and am grateful for their support of my work.

I was surprised yesterday when Ruth and Wayne beckoned me over to where they were sitting and asked me if I would consider planning and running their Commitment Ceremony, scheduled for May 15.

It was the second time they asked me. Mansion officials met with them this morning to determine what they wanted, and they were clear.

Ruth can be direct sometimes, when she wants to talk, she yells “Hey, Come Here,” and then talks in a whisper. But she knows her mind.

There was talk of bringing in a minister, but that was when we were planning a wedding, not a commitment ceremony, the two are similar but different. I am delighted, really, nobody has ever chosen me in place of a minister for anything.

So I can continue my “commitment” planning chores, and will add another to it – running a ceremony. This is important to me,  it transcends Ruth and Wayne.

First off, it is about the Mansion, which is a Big Hearted place, which is why I appreciate it and the residents feel safe and cared for there.

From the top, there a tone about the place which preaches compassion and empathy. The people who work there are some of the nicest people I have ever met, from Kassi, the Mansion Director, right down to  aides like Brittany and Tia and staff like Bonnie and Julie.

It is a very significant thing when two people in an assisted care facility choose to seek out and celebrate love rather than vanish from the consciousness of the world. This Commitment Ceremony might seem like a small thing but it is really a big thing, much bigger than any two people.

I explained to Wayne and Ruth yesterday that a Commitment  Ceremony is similar to a conventional wedding in many ways, but it has become popular in recent years, gay couples promoted the idea before their marriages were legalized, and now, all kinds of people choose a Commit Ceremony over a wedding.

I said there is no marriage certificate. “Can we say we are married,” Ruth asked?

No, I said, you’re not married, you are committed to one another, for as long as  you are in love. You can leave the relationship at any time.

The larger message  is that older people, impaired people, don’t have to give up on love, and the Mansion is a place that celebrates love. And so do I.

Ruth and Wayne understand what they are doing. I suggested they have no fights for awhile.

I’m already at work collecting readings and poems for the ceremony, arranging for flowers, food and music dickering and negotiating for the best prices. I’m thinking of a ceremony that runs between 20 and 30 minutes. I want to talk openly about a Commitment Ceremony – the first ever at the Mansion – what it is and what it means, especially in the context of assisted care.

This is a great honor for me, it makes the heart and soul sing. I believe strongly in older people joining the rest of the world in ritual and freedom.

I’ll share the process with you.

If you wish to contribute to the wedding, that would be welcome. You can donate via Paypal, [email protected] or by mail, Jon Katz, Commitment Ceremony, P.O. Box 205,  Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

And thanks. This is a ride I will cherish.

Good news this week for Noorul Hotak, a brilliant 13-year Afghan refugee. Noorul has been invited to visit the prestigious Albany Academy in  Albany, New York and take their entrance examination.

He has not yet been admitted to the school, but this is a significant step in that direction. Kathy Saso, his teacher and champion at the Hackett Middle School

The Academy has been generous in awarding scholarships for Sakler Moo, who you may remember from the refugee soccer team and E K Pru Shee Wah, also 13, who spend was admitted to the school a few weeks ago.

I don’t know how much extra money is available for scholarship support for Noorul, private schools don’t have as much money as people think.

if the academy can’t take him, I’ll contact several other schools in the area. Kathy says Noorul is one of the most gifted students she has ever had in her public school classes, Kathy is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher.

She knows what she is talking about. Noorul, who loves mathematics,  is shy, but I could get him to smile. He wants to go to college and study engineering.

I met Noorul last week at the Hackett Middle School, he is an extraordinary young men, his father, a physician, died just before Noorul was born while treating sick Afghan children, he contracted one of the diseases he was trying to cure.

Noorul’s family fled Afghanistan amidst a wave of child kidnappings, shoots and bombs. His family got to Pakistan, and then to the United States. Noorul spoke no English when he came to the United States two years ago, he speaks the language fluently now.

I feel the need to say that his family came here legally, and are excellent citizens.  Noorul is no criminal, predator, thief, gang member or drain on society. He gives a lie to the libel many of our politicians are spreading about refugees.

His mother works in a local Wal-Mart at least 10 hours a day baking in their bakery. Noorul leads his class in honor grades and Kathy says he is a remarkable, hard-working and gifted student. They embody the American Dream. She fought her way to America to give her children a better life. I hope to help make that dream a reality.

I will fight hard to get him admitted to the Albany Academy, I might need to raise between six and seven thousand dollars in order to do it. I might have to do that every year for four years. Whatever happens, the school’s commitment to diversity has been generous and very real.

Christopher Lauricella, the head of the school, is impressive. He is someone I have come to trust and respect. He is honest, he does what he says he will do and is open about what he can’t do.

As some of you know, my work with the refugees has been difficult, the refugee organizations sometimes xenophobic or worse,  I work easily and honestly with people like Chris. He is transforming lives and also helping his school. These are good students to have.

I’m not at that point of fund-raising yet, and it may not be necessary this year, but I will share Noorul’s journey openly and transparently, as always. He is worthy of our support, I consider it a patriotic duty.

Kathy’s class has 30 students in it, and Noorul, with his special gifts, needs a more focused environment. I believe he would be a great asset to Albany Academy, but that is up to them. You don’t find many students this bright anywhere.

But the first step, after his test, is to get admitted. We’ll have to take it from there.

Kathy and I have teamed up to support her gifted refugee students. I’m funding a class trip the FDR home and museum  Hyde Park N.Y. We got Eh K Pru admitted to the academy, time to fight for Noorul. He needs advocates.

Kathy is a treasure, she is a heroically dedicated teacher, making little money and working in difficult conditions. She cares so much about her students.

If you wish to support this important work at a critical time, you can help: You can donate via Paylal [email protected], or by mail, Jon Katz. Refugee Scholarship, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

Please mark  your contributions “Refugee Scholarships,” all money goes into a special account audited monthly by a bookkeeper and also by an accounting firm in New York.

Bud is a smart and resilient animal, he has adjusted well to our lives and our farm, better than I could have imagined. Yet he is also a canine trauma victim, I have never bought or adopted a dog who was mistreated in the way that he was, and sometimes it shows.

There are certain things – movements, corners, sounds – that will send Bud into a near hysterical terror, and it is not always clear why. He  shivers and cowers for many minutes, and even food won’t pull  him out of it right away.

I’ve never seen a dog be as frightened as Bud sometimes – rarely gets – and the more I learned about his abandonment and confinement, the more I understand why. Bud is a very generous and grounded animal, but he is also very damaged, and when the scars show themselves, it is a hard thing to see.

We have a small crate we never use, and it’s under a table near my desk. Since he always goes into Fate’s crate without any resistance, I assumed he would do the same. We want to put Fate back into her crate when we leave, she gets restless and sometimes gets into trouble loose in the house.  Fate often needs re-ducating. For her sake and ours, we want to go back to crating her when we’re gone.

I tossed a treat into the small crate I wanted Bud to  use, and he took one step towards the crate and then just melted into absolute terror, paralyzed and shaking and whining piteously, in a way I have hardly ever heard a dog sound.

Instinctively, and without thinking, I grabbed his collar and pulled him towards the crate, thinking he would recognize it and just go on, as he always does. But he just became more terrified, froze, dragged his feet, shook so hard I worried about his heart.

I help people with dog troubles, I can be smart, but like so many other people, I can also be quite stupid. My response made it much worse, and I thought “he must never go near that crate again.”

This crate was small, and the sides were some kind of hard plastic, Bud could see out of either ends, but not the sides.

Something about going into this small and enclosed space triggered a horror in him, I imagined that he had been confined in a tiny space, starved and abandoned, that is one of the stories I heard about his former life. The other dogs with him died of starvation or exposure, that’s why the rescuers came to buy his freedom.

He would not go near this crate, not for anything, and not once he sensed I was trying to push him in there.

His enclosure looked just like this, I thought, or perhaps he was confined for days, weeks or months in a small crate. That was my best guess after watching him. I kicked myself for making such a silly mistake, had I damaged the trust I had worked so hard to establish with Bud? It was a horrible moment for him, and for me.

But I pulled myself together and remembered that my job is not to berate myself for being all too human, but to strategize and help this dog get to a better place, and keep his trust for me.

We threw the small crate out and I drove the first thing to Petco and bought a medium-sized crate, open on all sides. Normally I would get a smaller crate for a Boston Terrier, but I could see Bud had a terror of being confined in a small space without sight on the sides. That was my sense of it.

I brought the crate home and we assembled it in the living room, Bud was watching. For the  first two or two-and-a-half days, I would simply toss a biscuit or favorite treat in the cave and towards the rear of the crate and walk out of the room, making sure Fate and Red were with me.

Bud circled the crate, tried to get in through the back. Then he figured out where the entrance was, and stuck his nose in, then backed off. I watched him from the dining room, after a few sniffs he walked gingerly in, snatched the biscuit and turned around.

I did this perhaps 10 or 15 times during the day. He is a grounded dog, despite his trauma, he works through things rather than just run. He got a bit more comfortable with each biscuit.

We fed him in the crate, putting the bowl towards the rear. He walked in and ate his food. There is no place dogs love more than the place where they eat.

By the second day, he was walking in, looking over his shoulders, but getting less wary. He likes snacking in a crate because Fate stalks  him and will steal the food if she can (he returns the favor.) When he had one of his peanut-butter filled bones, he would sit in the crate and chew it.

He came to see the crate as safe. We put a quilt over the top and sides to make it more like a cave, which is a natural place for dogs, who are den animals in the wild.

This morning, he came in from being outside and went into the crate – still in the living room in front of my chair – and lay down and slept. When he got up, he stole one of Fate’s small rawhide chips and ran into the crate to eat it while she paced outside of the crate, looking for a way in. (The door was open, but she didn’t try to get in.)

That was it. We had flipped this around, Bud was at  home in this new crate, and that will be the crate he  goes into when we go  out for a long time. I locked him in a half-dozen times today, and Maria also did while I was out.

I am glad we turned this uncomfortable situation around. I need to remember that Bud has suffered some traumas that are not known to me. If we had made Bud terrified of crating, that would have dramatically altered the balance in our house and made any kind of training a nightmare.

I want to say that we are all  human, we all make mistakes. Some people can see them and admit them and some people can’t. I learn so much from my mistakes, and when I make them, it’s the dog who pays for it.

Training a dog is a creative process, we may not be nicer than them, but we are smarter. It is always the human’s fault when things go wrong, somewhere along the line.

So we ended up in a good place. Bud is teaching me all the time to wake up and think. In the photo above, Bud is chewing on his stolen rawhide. The door to the crate was open.

Bud has challenged me in new and important ways, I am grateful for the lessons.

A very nice woman named Joan sent me a message on Facebook this morning wishing me luck when I went to see the throat doctor, she didn’t want to lose her “favorite curmudgeon.”

I didn’t think my life was on the line, just my voice, and it was a nice thought. It was in no way offensive, and I didn’t take it that way.

I smiled at the message, Joan couldn’t know that I was first called a curmudgeon by my mother when I was nine years old, I was upset about my Bassett Hound Sam, who kept pushing me out of bed.

“Don’t be such a curmudgeon,” she said. “He’s just a dog.”

A neighbor called me a curmudgeon once after his tree fell over on my fence and front lawn in New Jersey and he hadn’t cleaned it up in six months. “Well,” he humphed, “I didn’t know you were a curmudgeon.”

I’ve been called curmudgeon many times in my life, but oddly enough, not in many years. Until Joan called me one, I wasn’t really sure what it meant.

I’m sorry I looked.

According to Merriam-Webster, it isn’t as affectionate an endearment as I am sure Joan meant it to be. The first definition is “a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man.” The second was “miser.”

Think Scrooge.

Ouch. Was this really me? I go under the general philosophy that everything bad that people say about me is true, the idea is not to get angry but to take a look and see if there is anything to it. That’s how I try to grow.  It’s hard work.

I learn a lot more from criticism than from praise, although I like it a lot less.

“I am an old curmudgeon, and I know it,” said Jonathan Frid. “In a way,” said the brilliant writer V.S. Naipaul, a grumpy and ill-tempered old man,” my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.”

Yet as I thought about it, I wondered if curmudgeon wasn’t just another word used (not by Joan) against older men in the way women who are outspoken and opinionated are often called bitches or worse.
“Women can be irritating,” wrote one aggrieved man, but they cannot be curmudgeon.” This is true, I’ve never heard the word used against a woman, and I have known some grumpy and ill-tempered ones.

I’ve always been wary of labels, I’ve never known them to be helpful or useful, only hurtful and divisive. And I think old talk is especially dangerous and destructive for other people. I believe old talk kills.

So I try very hard not to use those words.

Why do we need them, the idea of the “left” and the “right” seems to me to be poisoning the country. I think labels keep us from seeing the human being, just the idea. I’m reading a wonderful book about an 88-year-old grumpy woman who murders people, and because she is described by others as a “sweet old lady,” nobody ever suspects her of murder.

I  never do old talk or think of me in those terms.

“At our age,” one woman wrote, “I see that young people are never polite.” I wanted to write back and ask her what age had to do with it? When I was a young person, it never occurred to me to be nice to anyone, of any age. There is no “our age.” She cannot speak for me just because I am getting older. We are not all the same.

I think terms like this are often used against men – “curmudgeon,” middle-aged crisis” – to diminish or ridicule those men who are different, or who like to speak their idea of the truth. Or do don’t do what men are supposed to do, have kids and kill themselves working.

In one way or another, people have been labeling me for years.

I refuse to accept labels, they are the antithesis of thought. But most of them aimed at me have had to do with outspokenness and a cranky insistence on independence.

This doesn’t mean I am not a jerk. It doesn’t mean I am a curmudgeon either.

Writing as long as I have, and especially online, I’ve learned that people often say they want to hear the truth, or be made to think, but they frequently hate the people who tell them the truth or make them think. I guess, in that sense, I’ve been a curmudgeon all of my life.

I should say I have never been a “miser,” though, if I had been, I might be richer than I am today.

The irony, oddly enough, people are telling me I’ve changed, and for the better. “You used to be angry,” said one woman posting just below Joan a few notches on Facebook. “You seem to have gotten nicer, and I credit Maria with that.”

Well, thanks. I like to think it is true, and that I had something to do with it. Maria is amazing, but she is not Merlin.

I will ask her when she gets  home from belly dancing tonight if I am a curmudgeon, and if she made me nice. I think that will be a fun conversation.

I remembered this quote by a writer named Lionel Fisher, who had been described by a critic as a curmudgeon.

“Curmudgeons speak up because they have to, because it’s become critically important for them to tell the truth as they see it. Telling the truth is as natural to them once more as it was when they were children. The fact that no one cares to listen is inconsequential. Curmudgeons speak up, raise their voices, stand for something too right to be silent about anymore, whatever the cost, despite a world that deals with what it doesn’t want to hear by crucifying the messenger.”

I have to say I like Fisher’s definition better than Merriam-Webster’s, and I think there is some truth to it, although it’s too noble to describe my own persona and moods. That’s a bit too self-serving to me, I am no saint.

Perhaps I am a curmudgeon. I have been called worse.

I think as I get older, labels seem to make less and less sense to me. I like most of the people I meet, no matter who they voted for.

Honesty is often confused with grumpiness and authenticity often mislabeled as ill-temper. If you are honest, or try to be, you will shed friends like rain off a rooftop, and learn quickly to spend time with yourself. I think there is something natural about that, and I like being alone.

I am also blessed with marrying a person who insists that I am nice. She says I am excitable but even-tempered. I hope that holds up. She would never live with a curmudgeon as the dictionary defines it.

I was sure grumpy this afternoon when I was sucking my new throat medicine up through my nose, and Maria cracked a joke about it. I said I saw nothing funny in the moment. She went off to her studio.

Have I gotten grumpy as I get older? Am I some kind of curmedgeon now?

Is that another thing about myself that I need to face and acknowledge.

The thing is most of my childhood heroes – Clarence Darrow,  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Elmer Fudd, Buddy Holly,  Froggy (Of The Magic Twanger) Thomas Merton – were grumps.

I saw them as honest, but I might be biased.

In the final analysis, I don’t get to judge myself and decide these things. We are all defined, and inevitably so, by how other people see us: our friends, family, children, spouses, and surely, readers.

The world is a jury, grace is accepting the verdicts.

Today was the third Meditation Class I taught at the Mansion. I always bring meditation beads for the new comers but several of the regulars forget that they have them, and I need to order some more.

I see the residents wearing them as necklaces, my class is a delight, they are very interested in learning how to meditate.

It looks like seven residents are going to be attending regularly, and each week  most of them want me to refresh them about what meditation is and how it works.

And today, I felt there was a breakthrough of sorts, an important moment.

The subject of our meditation class today was distraction,  how to keep from being distracted when we are trying to be calm and feel safe.

I could see the residents were eager to meditate on this, this was the subject they choose, I gave them a number of options. I am trying to encourage them to talk about aging, and how they feel about it. They very much want to do this, and meditation seems to center them and open them up.

I tell them that meditation is an ancient form of contemplation that can lead to a deeper spiritual awareness.

It is not just about taking a moment to ponder. It is a state of profound, deep peace that occurs when the mind is calm and silent, yet completely alert. It can be a transformation that leads to a higher state of awareness and peace of mind.

They closed their eyes, and sat silently during the ten minute meditation. I gave everyone my riff about what meditation was and what it can do. At the end of the meditation, I asked them if there was anything they wish to talk about.

I see the powerful impact meditation has had on them already, just as it has had on me for many years. I wasn’t sure what to expect.

M, one of the residents, said she was thinking all during her meditation about her daughter, who has asked her to come and live with her and leave the Mansion. It was upsetting, she said.

She was thinking about it all through her meditation, she thought it was a distraction, but then she said, she remembered that I said there was no right and wrong in meditation, you went where your mind took you, and if it was not a good place, go back and count your breaths.

“I thought it wasn’t a distraction, it was in my head. I don’t know what to do. I love my daughter and I’d love to live with my grandchildren, but I love the Mansion and have all my friends here…My mind was going a little crazy on this…”

I suggested we all be silent for a minute or two, I was careful not to tell  her what I thought or what I should do, it isn’t my place. I asked how these thoughts made her feel.

“It wasn’t peaceful,” she said, “I got upset thinking about it.”

I nodded. I said my mind sometimes goes to scary places. When it does, I count my breath for a while.

Another of the residents, J, jumped in. “”M,” she said. “But what if you fell down there while you were  babysitting? Who would pick you up and call for help like you did when  you fell down a few months ago? Who would help you if  you got sick and couldn’t walk right for few days, you’ve fallen more than once. Who would bring you food?”

M took a deep breath and looked at me. “What if I don’t feel  safe in a place,” she asked.

“Do you feel safe here?”, I asked. “Is that why you are here?”

She nodded. “I feel very safe here, they always take care of me when I am sick or fall  down.”

I said I thought feeling safe is important, especially as people get older. At the Mansion, safety is a big word, not an abstract wish.

J asked her again what would happen at her daughter’s house if she fell while she was baby-sitting?

“I think I need to stay here,” she said, looking lighter.

“How do you feel now?,” I asked. “I feel lighter,” she said. She did, too.

I think the Meditation Class is an important idea for the Mansion.