Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

When I met Susan Popper a few years ago, I never saw her smile. She says she didn’t smile for years. I don’t need to go into the details of her sometimes difficult life, you can follow that on her very authentic blog, Just Susan.

A few years ago, Susan’s life nearly fell apart and she has been slowly and painfully and openly rebuilding her life, choosing eventually to embark on a hero journey, to leave the ordinary and familiar  to move up into the country where she has found a job she loves and friends she loves.

I am one of them.

Susan and I have both experienced the drama of friendship, choosing the wrong friends, giving away too much, lured into unhealthy relationships. We are both working hard to learn how to be a friend, it is new to both of us.

Susan has battled many challenges in her life, one of them is obesity, which she is undertaking to confront now. She has already lost some considerable weight, and is research the possibility of additional help.

it is awfully difficult for Susan to talk about being obese, there is so much shame and pain involved. I’ve never been close to someone with a severe weight problem, and I have learned to see through that part of her – I don’t really see it anymore – and into her loving and generous soul.

I learn a lot from her every day about courage and strength.

She is a good friend to me, and as you know,  i have always struggled with friendship. She and I trust other, and talk honestly and openly to one another.

Susan is a student in my Writing Workshop, one of the most hard-working and committed students I have had.

She listens and grows and never quits, and her writing is taking on a depth and authenticity that makes teaching and editing worthwhile for me. She really works at it.

It seems a kind of miracle that Susan has moved up herself to give rebirth to her life, and in the process unleashed a powerful creative spark – she is writing almost every day on her blog and has become an accomplished photographer with her own Etsy Page, Susan Reframed.

She works just as hard at photography as she does at her writing.

As a photography, I love to do portraits of people who smile in what I call a radiant way.

My favorite smile portraits were of Kelly Nolan, who worked at the Bog restaurant, now shuttered. Susan has an equally radiant smile, a smile that radiates through her own body and conveys a particular kind of joy, and hard-earned joy it is.

Like Kelly, she is a strong woman, by which I mean she looks right into the lens and just dares the camera to click the shutter.

Susan is also a very close friend of Maria, the first close friendship we have shared together. Maria doesn’t talk much on the phone, Susan and I are inveterate phone yakkers.

Susan knows every part of our lives, and we know all about hers. She’s going to help out at the Open House this weekend, and I will be grateful to have her around. The Open Houses test me.

Today I  bought some flowers at our local Farmer’s Market – three small arrangements –  and Maria suggested I give one to Susan and one to the brillian artist Abrah Griggs, who was having brunch with us along with Susan.

Abrah designed the very wonderful logo for my new blog.

Giving the flowers away became a joke with Maria whispering to me that it would be generous (I just bought them this morning) and me whispering back that I wanted to keep them for our house.

Susan could, of course, hear every word we were saying. She pointed to the vase that she knew I loved and said she wanted that one.

Susan cracked up over this, and I got to see her full laugh, which involves her entire body. It is a great pleasure to see Susan so happy, I have seen her so sad.

Her smile traveled beyond her  body and into the room.

Her smile, like Kelly’s, has import beyond her and her life.

She is a testament to the power of fearless human beings to change their lives – obesity was just one problem she has faced.

She reminds me that only the strong get help, and that help helps. She reminds me to be honest about my life and to see it clearly.

She reminds me that we need not be slaves to our fears and the abuse that took away our peace of mind and confidence.

We need not turn our lives over to mental illness.

Susan is brave, and her smile is a beacon to the world and a light to the lost. We all suffer, we all have our battles to fight.

She seems to be  winning hers, and her smile tells a powerful story about life and faith. Outcomes can change at any point in our lives.

And oh yes, camera does not lie. You can’t fake smile like this.

I got a phone call from Carol Johnson tonight, she is my good friend and the rescue volunteer who saved Bud and fostered him and helped to nurse him out of trauma and back to health.

The call meant a great deal to me.  Jon, this Carol, I’m absolutely astounded by how well Bud is going, I would never have thought he would have done this well that quick, I would have thought he would have been afraid of everything. Great work.”

Coming from Carol, who works so hard to save dogs, and whose standards for them are so high, this meant a great deal to me.

I am astounded by Bud as well, Carol reminded me  again tonight of how traumatized he was when she saw him months ago and how he will fall to the ground and freeze when anyone approached him or tried to pick him.

She doubted he would ever be so adventurous. Bud is still fearful and there is much work to do, but I am also surprised by how quickly Bud is coming along. He seems to feed on live and encouragement, and he loves treats, which makes training a lot easier.

I’m excited to have resumed the Small Dog Experience, it was a long and intense and sometimes grueling prospect, but it feels very good to me to be back at. I’ve learned a lot from my Small Dog Experience so far.

Small Dogs are now the most popular dogs in America, and it’s important for me to understand them. I am beginning to see why the Big Men In Trucks love their small dogs so much they cry when they talk about them.

I have, of course, developed my own theories about small dogs, and about training dogs and living with them. One is that I don’t see them as small dogs, or as fragile beings, or as being made of crystal, too  delicate to live the lives of dogs.

Another is that you will never again see me refer to Bud as a rescue dog. The word means nothing to him, and it only hobbles him and my expectations of him to see him as piteous and in need of special handling.

To some extent, that is true. But when I stood at the pasture gate and opened it for him, he gave me the longest long, as if to ask “do you really want me to go out there with those donkeys and sheep and fast dogs?”

I focused on my own sense of confidence and trust, and I said, “yeah, come on out. You can handle it.” And he did. (See video below).

I am constantly being told that dogs like Gus or Bud can’t handle the cold, don’t want to be out in the heat, must wear sweaters, should never be near donkeys or running sheep, have little stamina due to small snouts.

Some of this is absolutely true. One has to be careful with Boston Terriers in the heat or in mid-day or if there is not plenty of shade and water. And they don’t need to be out in sub-zero weather or raging blizzards, although I find that snow and ice doesn’t really bother them all that much.

But the lower one’s expectations, the less a dog will do. These dogs are dogs, and I need to see them as such.

My idea is to be thoughtful and to be careful, but as their steward, to give my dogs every opportunity to live their lives fully and with dignity.

Gus could handle the pasture. So can Bud. And just as nobody can really tell me  how to get a dog, no one can tell me how to train one. We are all different, so are they.

We are training our dogs every minute, really, training is not about obedience, but communication. It’s about learning to live in our world, which is rarely hospitable to dogs. Talking to them is important, so is listening.

I have this relationship with Bud now, when he starts to whine in the crate,  I say “no” in a sharp voice or “husssh” with a hiss. And it works. All the books say don’t ever speak to a dog in a crate when it’s whining, you will just reinforce them. And that is true, except when it’s not. I try to keep an open mind, try different things, see what works.

Tomorrow I’m getting a water bottle and if he is still lifting his leg in the house and marking territory in a week or so, I’ll squirt him on his head or on his butt. Dogs hate that. We’ll get there.

I believe in patience and love, the two most powerful training tools there are, and they are both free. I don’t need body wraps or,  hopefully, water bottles. I want to give him a chance to figure out life in our house, and to succeed. I don’t want to expect him to fail, or to set limits he doesn’t set for himself.

If I do my job, Bud will figure out what Maria and I like and don’t like, and  he’ll try to do it. That’s the genius of the dog.

If you listen to dogs, and also talk to them, they will tell you what you need to do, and you can hear what it is that they need to do.

The irony of small dogs is that in reality, they are quite often big dogs in a small body. So I think big when I think about them.

I think nature has made small dogs loud and powerful and strong, it balances things out. I know a lot of bigger dogs that are not nearly as tough as Gus was or Bud seems to be.

So this was a great weekend with Bud. He is sitting on command, we are working on stay, he is sleeping in his crate. Life is good.

Come and see this remarkable video of Bud going out into the pasture Sunday afternoon, past the donkeys, out to the sheep, running with Fate and sitting with Red. I would not have believed this possible for the first 24 hours.

I am forever in awe of the ability of dogs to acclimate to change. People tell me all the time how their dogs grieve and mourn, but the most wonderful thing about dogs to me is their infinite capacity to move on, change and learn.

I think of the Katrina dogs, they didn’t mope around grieving for home, they moved forward with their lives. I don’t know of one who perished in grief for being separated from their homes.

That is their genius, the thing squirrels and raccoons can’t do.

They know how to move on, much as we don’t want to hear it.

This is inspiring to me, the reason dogs, alone among very few animal species, are thriving among destructive, greedy and neurotic humans. I don’t love them because they are like us, but because they are not.

They do what they need to do to survive.

Bud  has been with us for about 24 hours. In his previous life, he was locked up in a metal cage outdoors without shelter or a roof or any kind of heating or shade. His only companion, a Pug, died of heatstroke.

Bud was covered with sores from bites, and emaciated, he was suffering from heartworm, exposure and dehydration. He shows every sign of being handled roughly, he is timid at first, then his self emerges. My job is to bring out the true self. It is starting to emerge.

That was the only home Bud ever knew until Carol Johnson and the Friends Of Homeless Animals went and bought him from his inhumane human to Carol’s home, a foster home for dogs who are in great trouble and homeless.

He spent six months in Carol’s very loving home recovering his health, he lived with five or six other dogs in need of a permanent place to live.

He was well cared for, but as rescue people know,  foster life is not the same as a  regular life.

I saw But three months ago on the FOHA website, and  rushed to adopt him right away. He just seemed to be my dog.

It took this long to get him well.

I was expecting weeks, even months of careful rehabilitation and adjustment for Gus, but he seems to have come  home, and he seems to know it.

Today, he spent hours outside running around the back yard, taunting Fate, snuggling with Red. I decided it was time for him to go out to the pasture with Red and Fate and run around a bit, cut loose and  have some fun.

Bud is a very serious dog, time for some fun, I thought. And he had a blast out there. This is Bud’s first close encounter with sheep. Come and see how much fun he is having here..

It seemed like a small thing, but it was a big thing. For the first time, Bud came into my study while I worked.  He stood around nervously for a few minutes, but I studiously ignored him.

In a minute, I heard snoring, and when I turned around,  he was curled up in Gus’s old bed,  calm and cozy. We’re getting there, pretty fast for one day.

I know I said I wouldn’t bring Bud out to meet the sheep, but he loves to hang out with Red (and even looks like a Boston Terrier version of Red),  and it was a beautiful morning, so I just put a leash on him and went out into the pasture.

The two made quite a pair and Bud gave she sheep some eye, but was not much interested in them, nor them in him. I think he wants to be a farm dog, though, the donkeys didn’t faze him and he loved the freedom.