To the Woman Who Kicked My Dog: How Did Your Easter Fast Go?

Museums are closed, as are churches, but the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art is bringing pieces to the streets of Provo for our communal contemplation.

FEAR FEEDS FEAR FEEDS… flashes in loop from 6 to 8pm in a Provo neighborhood. The installation is by BYU’s Collin Bradford and the message on the placard reads:

I made this long before the COVID-19 pandemic. I saw a feedback loop of fear feeding more fear in our culture around lots of issues, from immigration to LGBTQ+ rights to climate change. I watched fear feed fear and foster feelings like mutual mistrust, suspicion, and hopelessness while starving empathy and love. Fear during the COVID-19 pandemic has motivated everything from toilet paper hoarding to brutal hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Let’s find it in us to respond with love and empathy rather than fear as we reduce everybody’s risk by working together (apart) to prevent the virus’s spread.

@utahmoca on Instagram

This week I saw another sign, not related to UMOCA, hanging from someone’s porch: DON’T FORGET TO BE KIND

***

I had no plans to fast this week, though the universal call to deny myself for a god’s attention has been persistently in my feed like the coronavirus emails in my inbox. Then on Tuesday I went to the park next door with Kylo and my roommates’ dog Leo. Leo is perfect off leash, Kylo is 80% there.

Off-Leash Kylo is a recent development. He never was off leash back in California on my runs, back when I could run. Here in Utah, my concern when he’s off leash isn’t breaking park rules, it’s his own safety, and I consider every moment a training opportunity. Since my injury I haven’t been able to help him expend as much energy as before, so every off-leash trip to the park is a calculation, weighing the risk of getting in trouble with animal control with the reward of letting him burn off more steam than I can manage at my current pace. I clip him to his leash whenever we see a dog we don’t know or if the park is particularly busy. The rules I don’t break: I will ALWAYS clean up after my dog.

When he was a puppy, I was determined to make of him the friendliest, most socialized companion for LT and me. For a year we lived next to a Walmart and I would take him in there leashed, with clicker and training treats, prepared to leave as soon as I was asked to, but eager to give him novel exposure in a public place. My efforts worked: of all of Kylo’s favorite words, “friend” is sure to perk his ears as he looks around for who to greet. (Incidentally, his least favorite words are “bath,” “shower,” “teeth,” “brush,” and “timeout.”)

On Tuesday, I miscalculated. I hadn’t figured that it wasn’t just unfriendly dogs I’d need to protect Kylo from, but people too. The park was empty except for a family at the far end. A pair had broken off from their group to make a loop and I had both dogs sit and stay as they passed and were far enough away not to tempt Kylo into making an introduction. We headed in the opposite direction. I’d collected their bathroom breaks and had just dropped the bags off in a dumpster when I saw a woman break off from the same group at the end of the park to start a jog. She was headed toward me so I started crossing the park to avoid her, but I hadn’t made it far enough into the expanse of grass before Kylo zeroed in.

Months ago, if I’d yelled to break his concentration, or clapped my hands to stop him from doing something disobedient, I would’ve gotten his attention, but since moving back and acquainting himself with the park and area, it’s become a setting for him to make as many friends as he can manage. When he’s disobeyed and run up to strangers at that park before, he’s generally been greeted kindly, he gets in a few licks and sniffs, and maybe even gets some pets and a compliment on the softness of his fur. As for me, my apologies are accepted (I understand that some people are afraid of dogs, allergic, or just don’t really like them), then Kylo’s scolded and leashed as punishment. I’ve learned, however, that this training tactic isn’t cutting it, finally, with the lesson that some people would rather hurt a friendly animal to communicate their frustration with my rule-breaking, than simply communicate with me.

Despite my attempts to curtail his intentions, he ran up to her.

“He’s friendly!” I called as I hurried up with his leash to clip him in and discipline him, while still trying to social distance.

Kylo licked at her ankles, sniffed her, wagged—all the hallmarks of friendliness. She said nothing to me as she looked at me and I showed her the leash, but seemed annoyed even as she continued jogging. Then she said, “No, you know what, get out of here!” wound up and kicked my dog in the side hard enough to make him yelp and run back to me.

Like Kylo, I was absolutely stunned. She’d made calculations too; it wasn’t an instinctual reaction. The delay, the way she’d looked at me, what she’d said before bringing the force of her leg into one of the sweetest animals on this blighted planet. I added it to the list of harsh reunion moments in my return to Utah and felt the weight of the way I looked in my baggy morning clothes, my piercings and half-shaved head, my brownness.

After a moment, I yelled, “He was friendly! Don’t kick my dog!”

“Put him on a leash!”

Cue her family from across the park yelling the same. Rule-breaker. I’d given them license to be cruel. Pandemic. Maybe this is simply the nature of our new world, and this was my introduction. Lesson learned, at a cost.

***

FEAR FEEDS FEAR FEEDS FEAR FEEDS FEAR

I’ve gone over it again and again:

If I’d looked more like her,

If I’d smiled more,

If I’d apologized more,

If we weren’t in a pandemic,

would she still have hurt my dog?

Of all the options at her disposal to rebuke me for breaking the precious rules of a near-empty park, of all the reasons to be angry, why didn’t she say something? Why didn’t she talk to me? Why did she hurt my dog?

Dog-kickers. I’d be one too if I was ever attacked, if Kylo was attacked, but just to punish the owner? And if it was the contact she was worried about, contagion, allergies, why increase it by kicking him?

FEAR FEEDS FEAR FEEDS FEAR FEEDS FEAR

I seethed. As I left the park, she passed by me again and from across the parking lot I indulged in the rage fantasy of thoroughly cussing someone out. I was already sobbing at that point. It didn’t make me feel better. FEAR FEEDS. I’ve continued to sob ever since, waking up too early with an aching, pounding heart, obsessively returning again and again to the moment, to my questions. Repeating to myself that all things pass. It’s like my trauma-recovering brain returned to familiar paths, launched me into a state of panic for my own protection. Kylo’s bounced back like a champ, but I’m still feeling the kick to his ribs.

As an HSP, I simply can’t help myself, and it’s how I began my involuntary fast. For me, anxiety and panic comes with no appetite. This morning I woke early again to nausea, a breakneck heart rate. I accidentally broke a glass before filling it with a cold water infusion of violet and yarrow, and didn’t realize it until I was already drinking from it in the dark, invoking the cosmos for respite from conflict, illness, from cruel people, from fear and the chemistry of my brain, from the pitfalls of my past and the inevitability of future mistake.

To the universal energies, to a kind god, to a probable Jesus, this is my prayer. To my cracked glass and broken heart, to my friends and family, to my fears, indigestion and insomnia, to my tears, this is my prayer.

How many of us have fallen ill already, not from the virus, but from a loss of empathy?

That woman in the park: Did she update her FB profile with the Worldwide Fast banner? Did she encourage her contacts to join in? Did she actually fast? Did she send her thoughts and prayers to Italy, China, New York, the world? Was she Mormon? Did she set aside last weekend for the ritual of General Conference and resolve to be more like Christ? They were a white family of at least six in Provo. I’d bet on those odds, but in the end, what she is, what she did, how she reacted was about her, and healing from it now is about me.

And it’s Easter. And I’m fasting against my will because this is the way I’m wired, and because like so many of us I have been broken and remade by the efforts of love—the variety of which is ours to claim. Yet every once in a while, an experience makes you remember your cracks. Makes you grasp again towards healing. I am grateful for my lack of fever and the health of my lungs, and I recommit to my role in keeping others healthy too. For no other reason than that, I should have done a better job of isolating my dog from others. Even if she had been as friendly and well-socialized as Kylo, she would have been right to call me out for that misstep, no animal cruelty necessary. But because she wasn’t properly socialized, loved, reared, and leashed, today I’m in the frustrating grip of anxiety.

I may as well make a prayer of my stomach cramps and desperate introspection. I may as well imagine Christ that day in the park, as he really would have looked—that rule-breaker and activist, that dissenter of the status quo—out in the fresh air, a presence that at least 73% of Utah claims to cherish, invoke, and emulate. Who knows the percentage of people that actually do, as they overlap with the non-believers who in their own ways and for their own reasons try to embody the same spirit of generosity, empathy, forgiveness, and love.

I write this for my believing loved ones. I write this from a place of reverent secularity and respect for when a true embodiment of Christianity succeeds in pointing people towards unconditional love and a full acceptance of others, when it heals their pain and deepens their empathy. I write this because it heals me, in a way, to imagine the little creature I’ve been blessed to raise running disobediently from his disobedient mother up to a wandering Jesus, tail wagging. Jesus rubs his ears, compliments his fur, tells me I’ve done a good job raising a friendly little guy, as Kylo licks his feet clean.

I hope to break my fast with this vision and wish my believing loved ones a Happy Easter.