One day, Buck went missing. Sam came home to silence. He looked around the house, then all around the dairy. He called out for Buck, grabbed Buck’s leash, and began searching the ditches, the neighboring farms, and then the neighborhoods of Slough City. As the sky began to darken, Sam retraced his search, and then into the night he walked in spirals through and around Slough City calling “Buck … Buck … Seemo … boy?” And he woke in the morning on the steps of the senior high school, and he felt deep shame for sleeping while Buck was out there alone somewhere. And so he continued to feel the bite of that shame as night followed day. He never found Buck, and Buck never returned, nor was any rumor heard of him. Sam’s canine brother—his only family left after the fire—was just gone.

The next time Sam met the girl, he bolted up out of the vision and ran as before, but Buck did not join him, though sometimes Sam felt that he did. From then on Sam ran alone, always with leash in hand or across his shoulders.

Other kids didn’t miss a chance to tease Sam about carrying a leash around everywhere. Sam wasn’t after any kid’s approval. On the contrary, he foresaw abuse with the confidence of a prophet. He felt that he had it coming. He was certain that he didn’t deserve anyone’s approval, so he made an easy target. But teasing inevitably led to bullying, and Sam was too anxious and physical to take a jab, a push, or a punch without finally returning the favor, and he returned it in heaping spades. He would erupt—physically and emotionally. A little passing jab would be rewarded with a hail of fists, and the offender would be left bloody and bruised at Sam’s feet, while Sam sobbed a shower of tears upon him.

Sam was suspended from school several times. Mr. and Mrs. Dorah looked after him, surely enough, and they tried what they could to help him. They got him a puppy, and tried to engage him at home and at the dairy, but it all seemed futile. Sam didn’t seem to want any help, though it may possibly be more precise to say that he didn’t know how to receive help. Who could know? He just kept working, and at school he kept fighting.

One day while Sam filled a couple of chuckholes left from the winter rains, a sedan parked out off the highway shoulder for a while. Sam looked up to see the sedan, saw what seemed at a distance to be a dark-haired woman behind the wheel, and resumed shoveling gravel out of a wheelbarrow. Inside the sedan, Deena wiped her flushed, damp face in a linen cloth. Two books lay in the passenger seat.

Sam looked up once more. He leaned the shovel against the wheelbarrow, and began to walk out toward the distant car, wondering whether the stranger needed a hand. The car immediately started and drove off.

Continue …

Once Sam and Buck finally converged, Buck would leap up to Sam and then shrink down again and tunnel between Sam’s legs. Then, as soon as Buck had completed the greeting, he would stop dead still as if to think, “now where did I put that ball?” Then Buck would break into a run in some odd direction and come flying back with a tennis ball—or some other consecrated object. It wasn’t that he knew where to find a given object; it was more that there was always some qualifying object no matter which direction he shot off to.

Buck stuck to Sam’s side when Sam would permit it. Mr. and Mrs. Dorah were fond of calling Buck “the yellow shadow” For that very reason. Buck would follow Sam as the boy performed his chores, when he did his homework, as he fetched a few ears of corn for supper, while he ate supper, and even while Sam took a bath or answered nature’s call. Buck wasn’t particular, and Sam didn’t mind. In fact, Sam would have gladly invited Buck to attend school with him had it been permitted.

Continue …

I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared

The flame flashed through the heavy night air. It leapt out of the coffee can and reached out to the tall and yellow grass. It devoured the standing hay in big mouthfuls, sucking in the air and exhaling heat and smoke, sending a sandy haired boy, a yellow dog, and a swarm of yellow jackets flying in a whirling, stinging flurry through the combusting night. Zal heard the distant sirens, and he ran before the wasp swarm, desperate to be far gone before the arrival of the yellow-jacketed giants in their gigantic red trucks. He remembered how the giants rivaled the height of houses, and he ran harder still.

Zal and Seemo crossed the field, stopped, and turned to see the dragon from a safer distance. It had reached the house and the fumes of his father, devouring one as it inhaled the other. Zal turned again to run, and Seemo followed.

The companions ran across the Bakersfield gridiron until Zal succumbed to exhaustion and collapsed under the cover of a dusty, roadside oleander. They remained there until Zal’s fugitive paranoia would not let him hide there any longer. On the run, he felt exposed. In hiding, he felt trapped. After a day and night of flight and hiding, Zal grew hungry, and he looked at Seemo and knew the poor dog was doing no better.

Zal took to rummaging through garbage cans by night and sleeping by day. He followed Seemo’s deft nose, hoping the dog would lead him to something palatable. What passed for palatable often depended on how hungry Zal was. The dumpsters and bins of the city were bountiful beyond measure for anyone who’d grown hungry enough.

Zal knew that he and Seemo would soon need to move on. As plentiful as this paradise city was, it had too many eyes—eyes that might recognize and indict a young arsonist, and Zal could only imagine the most terrible of punishments might be reserved for the likes of him.

He trimmed and devoured the remains of a discarded sandwich, passing the trimmings to Seemo. He rubbed Seemo’s scalp and neck, stood up, and walked.

Continue …

As Behrooz drove up the highway toward Tehachapi Summit, Zal looked up at the desert ridges that overshadowed the highway, wondering whether the distant figurines on the ridge-tops were all Joshua trees, or whether any of them were Indian braves in disguise, poised for an ambush. As the Kermani family rode through the gates of inner California, several black flecks—vultures?—wheeled high above a ridge. Zal remembered the open-air burials of the Indians he’d seen on TV, and the story he’d heard of how the birds had been fed by the dead of his Iranian ancestors.

Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair

The lady in the radio sang along with the tires on the highway. To Zal, she seemed to be singing to the sun and the flying landscape. He glanced at his mother and knew that it seemed different to her.

Seemo wedged his snout into the window opening, surveying the panorama of scents, mapping their course as best he could.

It is true that the Range does not provide easy crossings. The Tehachapi route, though not easy, is an optimal crossing. The locomotives that labor along the same route are forced by the Range to burrow, boring eighteen tunnels in all, looping over and under themselves like so many king snakes as they strive against gravity over the tail of the Range.

Zal counted the tunnels as they passed. The highway descended into a stagnant, purple sea of trapped exhausts, herbicides, and pesticides. The air reeked of cattle and crude oil. Under that sea lay the Sink, a vast, subsiding basin at the southern end of California’s Great Valley that trapped the exhaust of the human economy and myriad millennia of wildfires. Pump jacks sucked the black blood from the dark, fertile soil everywhere, so numerous that a cloud of mechanical locusts seemed to have descended upon the earth.

Soon came Bakersfield, a city made of oil, citrus, grapes, nuts, and vegetables; a working town, and a dirty town; a city of many smokes. Looking at the size of it, Zal could hardly imagine that water and sediment carried through this city by the anemic Kern River had washed off the highest peak within thousands of miles. Hardly could he imagine the glacial bowls and canyons or the golden trout camouflaged against the amber sands of streams colored with sunlight. It was merely upstream, but not all streams are navigable.

Behrooz and Deena found a house near the Kern River Oil Field and the shores of what was once known as Kern Lake. This lake once spilled into Buena Vista Lake, which in turn spilled into Goose Lake, which spilled into Tulare Lake. You’d never guess that such a chain of lakes ever existed just looking at the land today, but those lakes did once live there, and their ghosts sometimes do haunt the house where they once lived.

Summer sat heavy on the polluted air with such a presence that it seemed to Zal to have been waiting for him there. It was a dry heat—as they say, but it was stale, sticky, and foul-smelling. What it lacked in humidity it made up for in toxicity.

Zal fell ill with the Valley fever—a notorious Bakersfield native—not long after his family moved into their new home. The boy sat coughing, looking out his bedroom window through the heat of the day into the suburb, with the orchards of refinery stacks beyond. He’d come from the desert where he was accustomed to wandering in every direction and following every mirage with boyish relish and canine curiosity. Now he looked out from his aching eyes to see a maze of warehouses that people called homes, each an impenetrable fortress. He labored to breathe. It seemed that one Valley fever had stricken his body, while another had seized his psyche. Seemo held to his side, waiting for direction.

Seemo had always been at the boy’s side. He’d been there since he was a puppy, and before that. He’d been there for ten thousand years, since the first dog, and before that. Long before that, Seemo watched the boy’s village, and studied the ways of men. Later, he entered the village and made the village his home. The men of the village were impressed by the dog’s ability to work with them. He knew them well, and he could see much of the world that they couldn’t see. He could see it all with his nose, his ears, and his night vision. He could even see death. Perhaps he could see it with his nose. However he did it, he could see when a man had crossed over into the world of the dead, so the village elders made him priest of the dead. Before the priest of the village prepared the dead for exposure, he would ask the priest dog if the man was truly dead.

That was how the partnership of man and dog developed in Iran, long before the armies of Allah drove the priest dogs and eternal fires off the land. Perhaps Iran has forgotten about its contract with the dog, but Zal had not. He knew of no creature closer to man than dog, but there were yet other creatures for Zal to meet, and one would prove to be very close indeed.

Continue …

wherein the whole world is not consumed in flame.

Pliny, Natural History

The dry breath of the Mojave blew tumbleweeds, ravens, voices, and parcels of waste across the plain. A yellow mongrel inspected scents from shrub to shrub, aimless as the dust devils that whirled and vanished around him, to a rusting electric stove that lay on its side, oven door ajar. Something had been there.

I’d be safe and warm if I was in LA.

Nearby, another creature stood under a black baseball cap, his green eyes squinting against the wind, dust, and ebbing sun. He was the dog’s master, a scent-blind primate who lived among the colors of the rainbow. An orange leash lay slung around his neck like a scarf.

I got down on my knees, and I pretend to pray.

A white wire wound out of his ear and through his sandy blonde hair, down into a black transistor radio in his right hand.

The boy’s thumb turned the tuning wheel as the sun was eclipsed by an unemployed utility pole—or was it the mast of some stray longship that sank into the desert sand at the ebb of a great flood, or the gallows for some forgotten messiah?

The dead do live long in the desert, in the sheltering shadow of the Range. The boy had not yet been trained to bury them.

The Mamas and the Papas dreamed California into his oblivious ear while he waited for the L.A. Dodgers broadcast to begin. The Dodgers were scheduled to play against the New York Mets and their centerfielder, Willie Mays. Number 24 was no longer wearing the black cap of the San Francisco Giants, but that made no difference to the boy.

The arid openness of Antelope Valley engulfed him. The face of the earth was a dehydrated, hexagonal mosaic of desert tile and isles of creosote and tumbleweed. He circled the ruin, holding it at a safe distance, stepping carefully from tile to tile.

He stopped. His eyes found his dog as it inspected a solitary brick chimney. There was no other trace of a house. Had the desert wind blown it away board by board or fed some fire that consumed it? Had anyone been there to watch it disappear? Did it happen a year ago or a century ago? Did anyone ever notice that it was gone? The questions circled around on the desert wind and the hours blew by. The sun dipped down toward the tail of the Range.

The Range. The Spaniards named it Sierra Nevada, literally “snowy saw blade.” It must have reminded them of that lesser sierra nevada down in Andalusia. But this blade of California is more than serration and snow: it is a granite dam that extends along much of the length of Alta California, squeezing the moisture out of the Pacific air. As the water cuts the gold out of the rapidly rising rock, the lands downwind are robbed of their share of life—without prompting any outcry for justice or compensation. The desert seems resigned enough to its fate.

The boy turned around, yelled “come on, Seemo,” and headed for home. The dog pricked up his ears, popped up his head amid the creosote, and followed his leader toward a distant patch of eucalyptus green.

Continue …

A walk through a wood
A walk through a world
A friend
“Man’s best friend”
A crackling campfire
“The most tolerable third party”
A sworn companion
The Logos fire
Henry David Thoreau
A boiling star

Mimi's Humane Society Photo

Back on June 17, just three days before Mom’s heart attack, we adopted this darling gal from Humane Society Silicon Valley. She had lost her home when her family of seven years had moved—another foreclosure? She had spent three months in foster care, with a student at Palmer College of Chiropractic here in San Jose, who did a great job of bringing her weight down, which was particularly important for her, as she suffers from bilateral hip dysplasia.

Mimi Upon Her Throne

Mimi is definitely pure mutt, a noble mix of Australian shepherd, maybe blue heeler, and Labrador retriever. She seems to have got her dense, black coat, webbed feet, and love of water from her Labrador pedigree. She also seems to have a rather soft (gentle) mouth. When she first entered our back yard, she plopped right into our little fish pond, which has not been the same since.

Uvas Falls

Mimi is our first mammalian family pet. I’ve cared for strays before, and even had strays spayed and put down, but never “owned” either a dog or cat. I’ve always wanted a dog. I like cats, but I love dogs, which is precisely the reason why I’ve avoided ownership, knowing that dogs in particular need activity, attention, and maintenance.

Mimi is no exception. In fact she’s downright bossy when it comes to getting her walk, but she’s worth it. She’s pulling her weight. Besides infusing our lives with affection, play, and loyalty, she’s helping one of us overcome her acute fear of dogs, and teaching our rambunctious little human pup how to be a little more gentle!

Georgie (snapshots.parade.com)

This is a continuation of a thread on dogs.

Zoroastrian funerary rituals appear to indicate that ancient Iranians believed that dogs had a unique power to discern whether the life had departed from a body.

What follows next is known as the dog-sight (sagdid) ceremony. A dog, generally a “four-eyed” dog (a dog with two eye-like spots just above the eyes), is presented so that it gazes at the corpse. Although various reasons are assigned to this ceremony, the purpose in ancient times was to ascertain whether or not life was altogether extinct.

Solomon Alexander Nigosian, The Zoroastrian Faith

It may be due to this high regard for the perceptiveness of dogs, and not merely the loyalty and utility of dogs, that lead ancient Iranians to treat the corpses of dogs with the same care that they treated human corpses.

Not only did ancient Iranians believe that dogs could alone tell whether a human was truly deceased, they also believed that dogs guarded the bridge to heaven. They may have even believed that these dogs guided souls across that bridge into heaven.

In line with this, dog breeding is a religious matter in Zoroastrianism, and canine pregnancy is treated quite seriously:

It lies with the faithful to look in the same way after every pregnant female, either two-footed or four-footed, two-footed woman or four-footed bitch.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

The Vendidad establishes that people have a moral obligation to care for pregnant strays and the pups of strays. The book lays out—in detail—how to determine who is responsible for a pregnant stray. And upon whomever the responsibility lies, negligence is murder:

If he shall not support her, so that the whelps come to grief, for want of proper support, he shall pay for it the penalty for wilful murder.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Rough treatment of pregnant dogs is a punishable offense:

It is the third of these sins when a man smites a bitch big with young or affrights her by running after her, or shouting or clapping with the hands; If the bitch fall into a hole, or a well, or a precipice, or a river, or a canal, she may come to grief thereby; if she come to grief thereby, the man who has done the deed becomes a Peshotanu (deserving of two hundred strokes or a proportional fine).

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Similar penalties are established for abuse of dogs in general:

It is the second of these sins when a man gives bones too hard or food too hot to a shepherd’s dog or to a house-dog; If the bones stick in the dog’s teeth or stop in his throat; or if the food too hot burn his mouth or his tongue, he may come to grief thereby; if he come to grief thereby, the man who has done the deed becomes a Peshotanu. He who gives too hot food to a dog so as to burn his throat is margarzan (guilty of death); he who gives bones to a dog so as to tear his throat is margarzan.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Unfortunately, the attitude toward dogs in modern Iran is quite the opposite.

Another means of distressing Zoroastrians was to torment dogs. Primitive Islam knew nothing of the now pervasive Muslim hostility to the dog as an unclean animal, and this, it seems, was deliberately fostered in Iran because of the remarkable Zoroastrian respect for dogs.

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians, pg. 158

Why, you may ask, have I adopted such an ancient, backward, and dying religion? Well it’s not just because I want my corpse to be devoured by birds.

Here are the principles of Zoroastrianism as I see it. How does it stack up against your fundamentals? Tell me what you think.

• Cosmic Dualism. Traditional Zoroastrianism is chiefly about a universal war between Good and Evil. I, like Henry David Thoreau, see morality in every aspect of our lives, just as Heraclitus saw that “war is the master of all”. I interpret the cosmic battle between Good and Evil existentially, that is, that the phenomena of consciousness are fundamentally moral, and that our very existence is saturated with a sense of good and bad, that is to say, perception is value-laden. Some might prefer to say that our perceptions are aesthetic, but I don’t think that “aesthetic” is a strong enough term for our involvement in the world.The Zoroastrian God is benevolent, but not omnipotent. The key point of this is that the only legitimate object of worship is the Good, or one might say Beauty (in the word’s broadest sense), and that no compensation can supersede the value of the Good. In other words, the Good is the only reward.
  • Ethos as Destiny
  • Henry Thoreau’s Moral Universe
  • Morality and Cosmic Dualism
• Universal Salvation. Zoroastrian salvation is ultimately the salvation of existence itself. Personal salvation is secondary to world reform.
• Fire (Atar). Fire is the symbol of universal order, just as it was for Heraclitus. It’s also a beacon of a somewhat moral character; a temple in its own right. It’s more than a mere symbol of life, illumination, transformation, and purification; it’s a tangible phenomenon, and, as combustion, it is our very life force, and the most ancient companion and technology of our species.
  • Our Daily Bread: Flamin’ Metaphors
• Life (Getig). I believe in affirming and celebrating life—this life, in recognizing the Good in life, and living wholly within the present day and the present world. “One world at a time.” (Thoreau)
• Truth (Asha). Asha vs. Druj: truth vs. the lie. I believe that a proper understanding of the Zoroastrian principle Asha, which is symbolized by fire, must be understood in the context of its opposition to Druj. Like Sir Walter Raleigh and Henry David Thoreau, I revere the truth, though I do not believe in confession. Most of all, I strive against the inner lie.”Every violation of truth is a stab at the health of human society.”—Emerson

  “There is no wisdom save in truth.”—Martin Luther

  “Sincerity is impossible unless it pervades the whole being, and the pretense of it saps the very foundation of character.”—James Russell Lowell

• Wisdom (Mazda). As with Heraclitus, divinity is characterized best as wisdom. The traditional name for Mazdaism, “Mazdayasna”, literally means “wisdom worship”, not terribly unlike the original meaning of the word “philosophy.”
  • Gods of Wisdom
  • Our Daily Bread: Lord Wisdom
• Partnership (Hamkar). Men are free agents, and potential allies of Good Lord Wisdom (who is not omnipotent) in working toward world reform.
• Sustenance and Sustainability. The heart—or gut—of Good Religion is to feed the people, and to refrain from acting recklessly with the bounty of the earth (natural resources). Zoroastrians are famous gardeners.
• Camaraderie with beneficial mammals (“dogs”). In most cases, animals such as sheep dogs, hedgehogs, and otters are considered allies and equals of man.

Zoroastrianism is a very ancient religion, and its scriptures take us back to a primitive society that hardly seemed to know civilization or large-scale warfare. It is a close cousin of the religion of the Vedas, and so it is like that Olive Tree in the Qur’án which is neither of the East nor the West (yes, Iran is indeed within the native range of the olive). Furthermore, it is the ancient root of my religious heritage, not only in the sense that it has influenced the Bahá’í Faith, but also in its influence of Shí’a Islám, Islám in general, and Judaism and Christianity.

• Our Daily Bread: Mazda in the Shadows
• Parsí Dualism in Shí‘a Islám

In a sense, I was born a Zoroastrian. I was, in fact, raised to believe that Zoroaster was a perfect incarnation (“manifestation”) of God, which is not at all how I have come to see Zoroaster. I now see him as an inspiring myth for mankind, which is a better thing than any divine prophet idol could ever hope to be.

If that doesn’t convince you to convert, here: Freddie Mercury was a Zoroastrian! (Say no more!)