Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

Ruth came to me the other day and apologized. What for?, I asked. Because I’m going to ask you for something, she said.

What, I asked? A bathrobe, she said. I don’t have a bathrobe, and I get cold sometimes. I’ll be happy to get you a bathrobe, I answered. You don’t have to be sorry for asking.

I know you don’t have a lot of money right now, I said. Let me help you. She said okay, but I will pay you back. I said, thanks, but it’s not necessary. She said okay, and so I ordered this big and fuzzy bathrobe which came today and I brought it to her, and the smile on her face lifted me right up.

The bathrobe cost $55.99. As some of you have noticed, I’m asking for less money, and spending less money in these phase, we are supporting the Mansion residents in small but meaningful ways.

I’ve altered the refugee work, my focus there now in on helping gifted refugee students get scholarships to the best schools in the area. I believe that is the best use of funds right now, one that has dramatic impact on single lives.

I am committed to supporting Sakler Moo through his four years at the Albany Academy if it is at all possible. I think it is. I have much of the money for next year – about two-thirds –  already in a special bank account waiting for next September. The rest has been pledged, but not yet received.

For right now, I’m concentrating on the Mansion work.

As we locate refugee students with special academic records, I’ll let you know and ask for some help, although I am only working with schools that offer full scholarships. I don’t want to be asking for thousands of dollars unless the circumstances are truly extraordinary.

And I don’t want to be fund-raising every day. I do wish to do whatever I can to help WBTN, a venerable community radio station in Bennington, Vt. survive.  I am supporting their Amazon Wish Lists, currently sold out by the Army Of Good.

And of course, offering my time free for the radio show, which debuts tomorrow at 1 p.m. WBTNAM.org. You can livestream the broadcast, or call in, 866 406-9286.

In the Mansion, we deal with small and necessary things – a robe for Ruth, a Carhartt winter jacket so Wayne can go outside in his wheelchair. She loved the softness of it, but more importantly, it will keep her warm when she baths or showers on cold days and nights.

Right now, the Mansion fund is about $500, I’d like to get it up a bit. A number of the residents needed nightclothes and sweatshirts for the winter.

If you wish to contribute, you can send a payment to Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected].

In the new blog, donations sent to “The Army Of Good” (bottom of each blog posts) will automatically be funneled to the Mansion and refugee account, which is separate.

If you have a preference for the money, please write on the check or Paypal payment, “Mansion,” or “Refugees.”

Peggie is off to Cuba. Her daughter Dee Dee came and picked her up at 2 p.m., she thanks all of us for her suitcase, travel bag, windbreaker and travel money. I learned the name of her benefactor today, she is quite generous, a good human being to pay for Peggy’s trip to Cuba.

Dee is responsible and loving, she loves Peggie dearly and knows her health situation very well. She will closely monitor her medications and other health issues. I asked Peggie if she planned to dance, she said for sure.

She went first to Albany, and then flew to Miami. She’ll take a charter bus to the boat, and then set tail tomorrow. I think they’ll get to Cuba by the weekend. That’s all she knew.

She is very grateful for what she calls the “cha-cha” necklace that we gave her. Everyone at the Mansion is excited she is going, Ruth is sad because she will miss her.

I don’t expect to hear from Peggie until she returns, but you never know. If I do, I will share the news. Good trip, Peggie, you deserve it and the more I think of it, the more I think Cuba is the perfect place for you to go.

Bud is a strange dog, unlike any other dog I have had, and I have had some strange dog. He does things I have not seen my other dogs do. For one thing, he moves shoes and slippers all around the house, but we have never seen him do it, not once.

Our friend Kitty came to see Maria in her studio today and she left her boots out in front, they were muddy. When she came out, Bud was marching around the yard with the boot in his mouth, perhaps looking for somewhere to bury it. It was taller than he is, but he didn’t mind.

He is mostly housebroken, except he lifts his leg every day on Red’s food bowl for reasons that are not clear to us, and we have not yet figured out how to get him to stop. (We remove the bowl now, which is one way).

When we put the food bowls down, he runs to Red’s bowl, then Fate’s bowl, then to his bowl, he wants to see what everyone else is getting.

In the crate, he sometimes whines softly, he responds well to the command “please shut up.” It isn’t what Cesar or the New Skete Monks do.

He is very calm around people and with some training, is also calm around the sheep. But he is not yet calm around Lulu, one of our donkeys.

He is feuding with Lulu, barking at her and seemingly taunting her. Twice, she lowered her ears and charged at him, and he got the message and took off.

Now, he gives her (wisely) a wide berth but also barks at her contemptuously as he moves away, almost as if he is cursing at her. Somehow, I think he is. She gives him the stinkeye but leaves him alone.

When I took a brief nap today, he jumped up onto my chair and tried to sleep on my stomach. There wasn’t room, so he jumped down and slept on Red’s stomach. Red didn’t mind.

He loves to navigate in the car, he sits on the front console and looks ahead. He is curious, and often stares at me as if I were some kind of odd species, he is trying to figure me out.

It was sometimes difficult to walk in the woods this summer, it was very hot, humid and the woods were full of biting insects and ticks. Fall  has finally come, and today was beautiful and we took Fate and Red to walk on the road.

I’m not sure Bud will come on our walks in the woods, I don’t have a 100 per cent recall with him yet, and there are all kinds of things in the woods for him to chase.

I think he’s going to be a house and farm dog mostly, we’ll keep on walking with Red and Fate. Red is losing his eyesight steadily, so I think it’s also easier for him to walk with Fate, they love to stalk and chase one another, as they are in the photo.

I love the shadows at this time of day, they give the dogs a special aura.

Here we are. Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 17th, from 1 to 3 p.m., we launch my new radio show, “Talking To Animals” on WBTN, a tiny, struggling community radio station in Bennington, Vt., 30 minutes from Bedlam Farm.

The broadcast is a call-in, you can live stream it at WBTNAM.org. You can call into the program toll-free: 866-406-9286 to ask any question you want, or you can e-mail me the questions at [email protected] and I’ll read them on the air.

I’d love to hear from you, a bunch of blog readers called last week. They had great questions.

I have a folder full of questions already, but call ins are the most fun for everyone. I’m starting each show by choosing one of the e-mailed questions to talk about.

If you like the idea of community radio – this is radical media for the people, there is nothing slick or well-funded about it, the equipment was installed during the Korean War- please consider a donation to the station. They have no lobbyists, lunch with no regulators or fatcats.

They need every single thing there is on the earth, form paper clips to an FM transmitter.

The mailing address is WBTN, Harwood Hill, Bennington, Vt., 05201, or you can make a contribution on the station website. I am not being paid for this broadcast, of course, working for free is one of my specialties.

I love everything about the place, especially its idiosyncratic Executive Director, Thomas Toscano, who is most often the only person in the station, day or might.

Thomas says he is single by choice, he considers not being married or having children a public service.

You don’t meet a lot of people like him. I like him a lot.

I could not have found a better place for me, the station is hanging on by a thread, but with live streaming, can be heard anywhere in the country. If you know much media history, Community Radio may seem familiar to you.

I have long fantasized about hosting a thoughtful and intelligent program about animals, WBTN is giving me the chance to do that, and in return, I hope to do what I can to support this community radio station and get them some badly needed help.

This idea of community radio is important to me.

When the early settlers to America created what we call media, it usually meant farmers and merchants – usually the most literate citizens – posting essays (op-ed pieces) on the fence posts of their stories and farms.

Anyone could be a columnist, everyone could be a reporter, everyone had a voice.

They could not have imagined corporate media, the nightmare behemoths who have taken over our politics and civics for profits and swallowed up smaller independent stations and newspapers and turned them into a destructive kind of money-worshipping mud wrestling.

We can all see what corporate control of media is  doing to our country.

No one worth listening to has access to this media, and individual voices have disappeared. Profit-centered corporations now control most, if not all of our media. They haven’t gotten to WBTN yet, there’s still time.

Politicians and media in Washington pretend to hate one another, they sleep together every day and night. Each makes the other possible and profitable.

Community radio is the same idea as the original one really, and perhaps the last redoubt where ordinary people can have a real voice in media. The corporate media has steadily eroded the values and principles of what we used to call journalism, no real people can get anywhere near it.

Community radio is a non-profit system created to service local communities, it has to fight every day against government regulators, corporate lobbyists and feckless public officials.  Some community radio stations are booming, some are hurting, many have fallen.

But the thing is that there is new promise:  new streaming technologies have made every radio station national.  We just have to keep them alive for a while.

So tomorrow, I join WBTN for my own national two-hour broadcast focused on an intelligent conversation about dogs, cats and other animals. Red is coming with me.

I love talking about animals, and I love listening to the stories people bring me.

It’s a call in show, I’m doing it with the help of Thomas, a computer and conductor and opera singer from Bronx and Brooklyn, his title is Executive Director,  but whose e-mail says Host/Producer/Technician.

Thomas is everything and all things for WBTN, I think he even vacuums the studio at night. His is the only car I have ever seen in the parking lots (along with a Fish Fry wagon).

I suggested an Amazon WBTN Wish List, and the station put one up. Both lists sold out quickly. You might want to bookmark it, though, it will be back.

I hope my broadcast works, and I hope WBTN hangs on, we need them more than ever.

Again, you can live stream the show, and you can call in free of charge: 866 406-9286. I haven’t seen equipment like this outside of museums, so it can get funky at times. But I’m told the streaming works very well, and we got a bunch of calls last week, from California to Virginia.

If this all works, I just might be the first person in radio to  host a thoughtful, non-sappy show on dogs and animals (are there others?) That would be awesome.

If not, this will be great and important fun. Life isn’t about winning, it’s about trying.