Solicitude and charity towards drunks

Hot, drizzly Monday morning with the kitchen full of flies. Great blue horse flies, clustering black house flies, tiny hovering fruit flies. I cover the fruit bowls and  spread muslin cloth over the veggie racks, sponge down  counters and wipe tables. It makes no difference of course, the flies will keep coming. Flies are part of the given.

The dogs are all sitting in the kitchen doorway staring out at the hot rain splashing down on  brickwork and grass and gravel, hissing  summery rain. I know more or less what they are thinking, my much loved dogs sitting there together in the doorway. They want to go out and  lie on the grass  in the sun as they do each morning. They want to chase lizards and butterflies and follow me around the garden with my watering can. They want the  daily routine. And it is raining. Something is wrong in blissful Dogland.

John Homans in What’s a Dog For?, reviewed here:

This state of being-in-the-moment is what’s so compelling about dogs. It’s hard for a human to get to it. Even in the most difficult times, dogs are cheerful and ready for experience. A dog can’t figure out that it’s being measured for its grave. The three-legged chow that walks on my street every day doesn’t know the number three or have any sense that anything is wrong with her at all (and as I write, the dog is sixteen and still fit). It’s not that a dog accepts the cards it’s been dealt; it’s not aware that there are cards. James Thurber called the desire for this condition ‘the Dog Wish,’ the ‘strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.’ This is a dog’s blessing, a dim-wittedness one can envy.

The second week of Advent, going into the  third week of December. An impish anecdote about the young Thomas Merton fancying himself a saint-in-the-making, stopping on the way to hospital with suspected appendicitis to do a good deed:

  ‘In the Fourteenth Street subway there was a drunk. And he was really drunk. He was lying prostrate in the middle of the turnstiles, in everybody’s way. Several people pushed him and told him to get up and get out of there, but he could not even get himself up on his feet.

  ‘I thought to myself: “If I try to lift him out of there, my appendix will burst, and I too will be lying there in the turnstiles along with him.” With my nervousness tempered by a nice warm feeling of smugness and self-complacency, I took the drunk by the shoulders and laboriously hauled him backwards out of the turnstiles and propped him up against the wall. He groaned feebly in protest.

  ‘Then, mentally congratulating myself for my great solicitude and charity towards drunks, I entered the turnstile and went down to take the train to the hospital. As I looked back, over my shoulder, from the bottom of the stairs, I could see the drunk slowly and painfully crawling back towards the turnstile, where he once again flung himself down, prostrate, across the opening, and blocked the passage as he had done before.’

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