Street roots
14
June 21, 2013
Sometimes happiness comes from accepting the roll of the dice
don’t believe in soul mates. At least, not
in theory: I think of my life, my reality,
as the one that won out among many
possible realities that could be entirely
different if I’d made one infinitely small
decision elsewise.
As it happens, I decided to work on a
creative nonfiction essay about Raymond
Chandler at the Aalto Lounge in April of
2003, and Marshall, my husband of nine
years now, happened to walk by my table,
happening to wear a jacket identical to one
I’d given to Goodwill the year before, which
I’d happened to buy at another Goodwill on
the coast during a last-minute trip with my
then-roommate in 1998, so I said hello.
One decade later, I can’t imagine not
being here in North Portland, in our house,
getting ready to put Ramona to bed with her
best friend Jascha, who’s spending the
night, whose father, Eric, I happened to
meet one day when I was three months
pregnant and kind of sick to my stomach in
February 2006, because we were both
letting our dogs off-leash in the park across
the street — he and his partner had just had
a baby, too, and we spoke of hanging out
sometime.
That meeting led to Jill, best friend
Jascha’s mom, dropping off a bag of diaper
covers and onesies a few months later,
which led to a baby-care swap in 2007,
which led to a friendship so strong between
Ramona and Jascha that today, six years
later, in the car back from an adventure in
Longview, Wash., while we looked after
Jascha so his mom could go to a yoga
conference while his dad was touring with
his band, Jascha said, “I think Ramona is my
sister. We have had 1,000 fights but we are
still best friends.” Right on, sweet Jascha.
Our trip to Longview had in mind the
finding of a new friend, which didn’t work
out exactly, but more on that in a minute.
We have a dog. The dog, Vera, is an
essential member of our family. We got her
when she was a baby, about a year before
we had our human baby, Ramona, and right
after I moved back to Portland after
finishing graduate school in Pennsylvania.
I
Melissa Favara
Melissa Favara
teaches English in
Vancouver and lives
and writes in North
Portland, where she
parents Ramona, age
6, hosts a bi-monthly
reading series, and
counts her husband
and her city as the
two great loves o f her
life.
•c
The dog is absolutely lovely; we often say,
when people ask us whether Ramona is our
only child, “No, we also have a
Newfoundland mix.” Because that’s how we
feel: Vera is Ramona’s Fur Sister, her
protector and bestie and best beast and
homegirl. Sometimes when I have insomnia,
I worry that Vera may indeed be mortal — at
eight years old, though still sprightly and
leaping, she’s going gray in the muzzle. We
want to open our home to another dog
while Vera is still vital—she’d enjoy leading a
pack, and we want her to train the addition
in the art of Being Our Dog.
How we acquired Vera is a love story. We
wanted a dog, and after I came home from
graduate school in May of ’05, a year into
being married, we started looking. We met
an adult Rott/Lab I wanted but Marshall
thought lacking personality, a mastiff he
liked but I felt skittish about. Then,
Marshall spied a notice in the Oregonian
about a litter of Newfoundland mix puppies,
and we were off to Woodland, Wash., to
check them out.
If you know anything at all about getting a
dog, you will know immediately that in
getting our Beloved Vera, we did everything
wrong. While the family who sold her to us
were not running a puppy mill, they were
the definition of backyard breeders — selling
their dog’s litter without shots or
deworming or anything that should have
been included in her steep-ish price. It was
a beautiful day in late July. We drove my old
Dodge Dart up winding roads to a sprawling
house whose yard tipped toward a wooded
valley; the mom on the scene was hugely,
glowingly pregnant, and children and
puppies seemed to be spilling out in a joyful
tumble everywhere. I crouched at the end of
the yard and called, “Here, pup!”; the entire
litter looked at me like I was crazy, except
for the black one with the white star on her
chest, who ran over, climbed into my lap,
and gazed wisely at me with old-soul eyes,
and that, as they say, was that. The then-
anonymous puppy — destined to be named
after Vera Katz — and I both knew. And
Marshall did, too.
In choosing a friend for Vera and
ourselves, this time we’re seeking a rescue
dog, and probably a young grownup a year
or two old who needs a second shot. We’re a
family of late bloomers ourselves, and it
seems only fair. So far, I’ve been tempted by
an all-American pound dog at the Humane
Society, but Marshall wasn’t feeling it. And
Ramona liked an elderly Pekingese out in
Cowlitz County, when we traveled to
Longview with her and Jascha partying in
the back seat to explore the Cowlitz
Humane Society’s adoption event this
weekend, but we don’t want to have our
hearts broken so soon.
This next dog, wherever he or she is,
comes with higher stakes, entering, as it
will, a family with more members and a
more challenging set of competing
schedules. Marshall and I have both been
known to be impulsive, and we’ve been
lucky so far, choosing each other, choosing
to have Ramona, choosing Vera among all
the other options. I’ll never know what
going down a different corridor would have
been like. If I’d chosen to write across the
street at the Belmont Inn that distant
evening, whom I might have married
instead, if anyone at all, what specific joys
might have been different if Vera had blown
me off in favor of her siblings and we’d kept
looking.
But I think that one of the keys to
approaching happiness is regarding the way
your own dice happened to roll as inevitable
to the extent that’« possible: because
there’s no evidence to the contrary, and
what’s waiting for you behind that door
marked What If? Which is not to say that,
once we are presented with options, we
don’t exercise some control over our fates.
We will take our time and wait until we
know the new canine family member when
we see him or her. Then we’ll go all in, and
we’ll make it work even when it takes work,
as we are in the habit of doing with each
other in our family. And eventually, it will
seem as though it couldn’t have happened
any other way.
Tonka
Downtown Portland
By Shon B.
By Nivi
Earth is a ground, it is
Unquestionable. It is strong and
Can grow without human touch.
The love she is giving
Us is her movement toward
Your perfection.
Walking upon bricks
Brick after brick after brick
Look up to the sky
Cloud after cloud after cloud
Surreal and perfect is all
“Communities aren't ju st streets and build
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where cultures, commerce and souls grow
stronger together ”
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Social Impact Banking
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