❝I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come into my life somehow. He didn’t.❞ –Ed Tom Bell | No Country For Old Men

NSD: Evenings are hardest.

In this, the second installment in a five-part series, I outline a typical day in the life of @NoShelterDog, a three-year-old homeless bulldog living out of an SUV in San Diego’s North County.

@NoShelterDog sits very erect in order to best observe cars and people (and the occasional dog on a leash) passing on the sidewalk outside the front windshield.

NSD: I’m most creatively active at night. I get my second wind, and then all my thoughts start crowding my brain with chatter. I feel like organizing them.

Normally, right now I’d be sitting at my computer writing, planning, thinking, tweeting– all while watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And Stephen Colbert! I love him! I was in the habit of staying up well into the AM working on the Internet and watching TV. That was our routine.

Doing The Right Thing Is Important To Us

NSD: That’s why WiFi access is really important– to both of us. The library closes at 5:30 or 8:00 most evenings, so unless you have a paid account, working late at Barnes & Noble and Starbucks is basically out.

Border’s Books offers free Wi-Fi, and they’re open until 9:00, but the closest Border’s is forty-five miles one way. And not all of them have desks or tables for you to work on either, unless you’re patronizing the Seattle’s Best Coffee cafe. We wind up opening our laptops on chairs.

TO: So what’s left?

NSD: McDonald’s, whose commitment to social responsibility and pledge “to make a positive difference in the lives of our customers and the communities where we operate” by providing free Wi-Fi apparently does not extend to include electrical outlets.

At least in the dining areas of most of the local restaurants I visited with @NoShelterDog, there were neither floor nor wall outlets anywhere in the customer dining areas, making being able to do anything more than send and receive email next to impossible if you need to work longer than what the life in your laptop battery will allow.

NSD: Can’t plug in so you can’t stay very long. Don’t want the community of poor people loitering about trying to Twitter or blog or complete online job applications. That chore alone can take as long as five hours, what with having to write individual cover letters and custom tweak every resume.

@NoShelterDog snickers a bit.

NSD: Social responsibility has its limitations, I reckon.

It’s A Bully Thing

His Person is one of the thousands of college-educated, middle-aged, long-term unemployed who has exhausted jobless benefits and is now without work, without savings, without income, without prospects and worse, without even a modicum of hope of ever securing a job.

Medium-build, 5 ft. 3 in. tall, probably 130-140 pounds and petite, only those cavernous circles and pronounced puffiness below almond-shaped, hollowed, brown eyes hint at a succession of nights spent in a less than fully prone sleep position–with @NoShelterDog, as always, situated in his usual position on her chest or legs. Either way, the butt is never too far away–right in his Person’s face, I’m told.

NSD: We accept the things we will not change. We slept together before all this and we have the same arrangements now! *snickers*

Oh yeah. It’s a bully thing.

Bulldog In An SUV

I have to laugh, too. @NoShelterDog’s humor and quick wit even makes him laugh. He’s disarmingly charming. For a homeless dog, he’s got a most refreshing outlook and attitude. He never whines or complains or speaks ill of anyone.

Instead, all his energy, love and devotion is reserved for and showered upon the one Person who, at least to him, is the most important Person on the face of the earth; this small, guarded, quiet Person struggling mightily to care for a bulldog in an SUV.

NSD: I never complain about my lot. No dog should, I mean, why?  We get away with all sorts of things and our People never hold it against us. They don’t scream or yell or get mad. I think they like it when we do goofy things or we get sick or we have to go to the vet or somethin’.  They love tellin’ ’bout the  funny things we do. People are way more tolerant of their dogs than they are of each other.

Even I wonder why that is a lot of the time.

Tuna Salad On A Hamburger Bun

It’s 8:15 am. His Person is just now re-emerging from Brother Benno’s, knapsack slung over the left shoulder and the plastic grocery bag dangling from her right hand. @NoShelterDog’s joyful butt wriggling, excited vocalizations and attempts to lick are greeted with cool, calm, assertive silence.

The contents of the plastic grocery bag are inspected with the detached, intensity of a quality control inspector. First, the sack lunch that is daily dispensed at the center in a brown paper bag.

Today’s offering: tuna salad on a hamburger bun, a pouch juice drink, two packages of Chips Ahoy chocolate chip snack cookies, and a bag of some other wafer-thin chocolate cookies.

The rest of the contents of the plastic bag include a one pound tub of chicken salad, a quart of milk, a 15 oz. box of Special K cereal and a banana.

Once @NoShelterDog calms down,  he gets some much appreciated affection and is offered a piece of the banana which he refuses. The sweet cookies and the rest of the banana are tossed. With no kitchen or refrigerator, any perishables left unconsumed today will likewise be tossed.

Since they became unemployed in November of 2008, all the focus and their meager resources has been used training and preparing @NoShelterDog for AKC certification as a Canine Good Citizen. After months of training, he earned his CGC in June 2009.

Clear, Focused Ambition

His greater ambition is to become a licensed Animal Assisted Activity dog.

NSD: Because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggone it, People like me!

The DELTA SOCIETY defines Animal-Assisted Activities (AAA) as activities which provide opportunities for motivational, educational, and/or recreational benefits.

AAA are delivered in a variety of environments by specially trained professionals, paraprofessionals, or volunteers who work with animals.

So far the process has been arduous, replete with disappointments and redundancy which has placed a lot of strain on what remains of their ever dwindling, consumable resources–namely gas.

The last of the three unemployment benefits extensions ran out in January. By the end of February, the family was sleeping in their car. It all happened just that quick.

The Difference Between Facebook and Twitter

They head to the local library. The library is open until 8:00pm on Tuesdays.  It’s “bonus day” as @NoShelterDog has taken to calling them.

NSD: We both have blogs we work on and we both have our own Twitter. I really like Twitter.

TO: You have a Twitter account…?

NSD: Doesn’t everybody? I love the Internet. I love social networking. Don’t you feel naked and completely isolated without it? I love technology. I’ve always been rather gadgety. BOL. And I like to be thinking, using my head, sharing my thoughts.

I’m careful to keep things light, though, ’cause when you reveal too much it makes people, well, uncomfortable. After all, when you think about it, what can anybody really do for anybody anyway? I don’t interrupt the flow of “happy tweets” with this stuff.

TO: And do you post on Facebook as well?

NSD: Yeah, but I like the pace of Twitter better. The vibe is more fun and you can mix in news, sports and weather if you need news, sports and weather.

Facebook is like a lumbering dinosaur. Everybody’s cultivating farms, or playing games, or relentlessly selling something. I don’t encounter as much of the boring overshare on Twitter, either. Brag-a-book is tiresome. Definitely a “thoughtfulness” deficit on Facebook.

I keep myself as busy as I can.  Keeps the energy up.  You need your energy to be up because the down times, when we’re all alone and we don’t have anyone to talk to…that is very exhausting, very spirit draining. It’s exhausting keepin’ up the appearances just doing the basic things.

TO: Like what?

NSD: Like parking. If I have to stay in the car, there needs to be shade. In California, it’s illegal to leave an animal in a parked car so this is huge for us right now.

There’s another library closer to their camping spot in the parking lot of CVS. They drive to this one, located downtown in the business district however, because it has a shady, covered garage. And plenty of lawn.

NSD: Clean grass. I don’t bank my daily deposits just anywhere. BOL! And you know, That, this season has been an unusually rough allergy season. A lot’a dogs have come down with mange. I need to be very careful where I step, so I’m careful to keep to the same spots every day.

If You Don’t Ask, I Don’t Tell

Not one of these smiling people seem to know he spent last night sleeping in a car. Or don’t they? The workers here at this library must see them in here every day.  A few of them even acknowledge the hapless pair. They make polite, yet animated small talk. They compliment @NoShelterDog on how cute he is. What if there’s something like an unspoken “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” attitude policy operating here as it is everywhere?

As long as things are left unsaid, the problem doesn’t exist–it’s invisible, like the 800 pound gorilla in the room, or the dead body People just step over as they glance over their shoulder expecting the next person coming up from behind will do something.

“A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side.  In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’”

Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?

“He who showed mercy on him.”

Then “Go and do likewise.”

Be the change.

Up In The Air

But now as we sit in the library’s parking garage, there is a palpable shift in mood. It’s 8:20.

NSD: This is when it really hits: “What are we going to do? What are we going to do now?” That’s the hardest part. Who doesn’t love having an occupation–some where to go, some place to be, some thing to do?

With those words, a tape suddenly goes off in my head.  Back in November, I listened to Jason Reitman discuss, in an interview with Robert Seigle on NPR, what he learned from his experience working with ”real people who had lost their jobs” for his film Up In The Air starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga.

“If you’d asked me before I did this movie, ‘What’s the worst thing about losing your job in this type of economy?’ I would’ve probably said the loss of income,” Reitman explained. “But as I talked to these people, that rarely came up. What people said, time and time again, was: ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ … It was really about a lack of purpose. They would say, you know, ‘After I finish this interview, I’m going to go get in my car, and I have nowhere to be.’ And I can’t imagine thinking that every day.”

Library + Phone = Connection @NoShelterDog’s continued animated chatter reorients my focus.

NSD: And we like to watch “The Good Wife” but we don’t get to watch a lot of TV these days.

Throughout, his Person quietly enjoys a crunchy dinner of Special K with whole milk, and seems quite content to allow @NoShelterDog to indulge his favorite pastime: posting Twitter updates with his iBone.

NSD: In the beginning, I tried to tweet about what it’s like to be a homeless dog, but a lot of the time, I’m just not feelin’ that. Most of the time I don’t feel like the spirit of moanin’ and groanin’. I still feel like laughin’.  I still feel like I’m OK. Inside I still feel like I did before we lost our home. So I don’t post much to that account.

TO: Ah ha, so you have another Twitter account?

@NoShelterDog only stares at me with that peculiar, self-contained grin.

NSD: When the library closes, all that stands between association and isolation is this phone. It is, quite literally, my lifeline–to information, to entertainment, to anipal connection. Sometimes the anipals I tweet with make me laugh so hard I cry. Let me tell ya, That, it feels good to really laugh. We just have to keep this [the phone service] goin’!

I Dreamed That God Would Be Forgiving

It’s 10:15 pm. The cereal bowl lies empty. @NoShelterDog yawns a big, gaping, strenuous yawn. Like a giant convulsion it involves his entire body causing even his crimped, tight tail to quake and shudder. The yawn is throaty and contagious. Everybody to a Person starts to yawn. It’s a funny sight–and sound. Everybody laughs.  A lot of pent up anxiety and stress got released in those few moments.

His Person has returned from the trek across the parking lot to CVS and back. She continues to take further advantage of my “conversation” with @NoShelterDog, stretching out across the front bucket seats as much as possible and drawing the blankets up close around her chin.  It’s nearly the end of April, already spring.  Still the nights are pretty brisk.

I step out of the car into one such cold, moonless night. Plenty of light here, though, in the CVS parking lot. Their preferred parking space is bathed in cool, yellow light. A black BMW makes its way slowly through the parking lot. I can tell it’s a black BMW because the rear vanity plate reads: BLKBMW.

The radio or CD or iPod or whatever is playing. Susan Boyle’s mellifluous voice at once becomes pixelated with the chilly, night air, reverberating off concrete walls:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die

I dreamed that God would be forgiving…

Coming soon in The Anipal Times:   How and Why–What Went Wrong?

“Now life has killed the dream I dreamed…”