Margotlog: Where Were the Neighbors?

Margotlog: Where Were the Neighbors? 

 

We Americans like to think of ourselves as individuals to the max, making our own way for better or worse in the world. Yet, as I think about the tragedy of 4-year-old's Eric Dean's death, reported Sept 2, 2014 in the StarTribune, I find myself asking, "Where were the neighbors?"  

Eric's childcare workers brought frequent reports of the child's abuse to the Pope County's Child Protection services. Yet, little was done. The boy was bitten by his father's girlfriend, bitten many times, as well as punched, bruised, thrown down stairs which led to his arm being broken. And finally he was inflicted with sufficient bodily harm to lead to gastro-intestinal death. No wonder his former childcare workers feel guilty.

 Yet, why didn't they go to the police. Were none of the neighbors suspicious of the boy's trauma? Was his house so isolated that no one except his childcare workers saw much of him? As I mull the difference between city and rural life, I'm aware of events in my St. Paul Lex-Ham neighborhood that took place about ten years ago.

 The "incident" involved a very friendly, full-bred Siamese kitten named Bandit. Anyone walking past Bandit's house, as I often did, would find him coming to be patted. He seemed to have a limp. A month later he began walking the neighborhood meowing for food. When he came up on our porch and yowled, I fed him and he purred a thank-you.

Word about Bandit began to circulate--his friendliness, his limp, his desire for food, his being outside in all weathers. A neighbor closer to Bandit's house reported that his owners were keeping him as a "stud." They wanted him inside only when it was time to impregnate their female Siamese.

His limp got worse. He looked thinner and thinner. I along with a few others knocked on the owners' door and told the surly man who answered that we were concerned about the cat. "I'll be happy to adopt him if you don't want him," I said through the screen and gave him my name.

The owner threatened to call the police if Bandit went missing, and slammed the door in our faces. The next afternoon a very polite Saint Paul policeman rang our bell. We stood talking on the porch for a few minutes. The gist of his message was that the owner had called, threatening to do damage to anyone who showed any interest in Bandit. The policeman urged me to stay away from Bandit. He also said he'd told the owner it was his job to feed the cat, and keep it indoors if he didn't want it wandering the neighborhood.

A cat is not a child. Yet we often treat our pets the way we treat our children. Some are pampered and indulged. Some deprived like Eric of a most basic human rights--safety. Bandit might not have been older than a four-year-old boy, but he knew how to survive up to a point. Within a month, however, we heard that his owner had run over him, whether on purpose or not, we never knew. Some of us were very sad for Bandit.

 Six years later when Bandit's home burned, his surly owner died of smoke inhalation. Few of us grieved. But we were shaken. The fire seemed like retribution far beyond the misdemeanor of neglecting or abusing a pet.

If Bandit had been a child, I like to tell myself, our neighborhood attempt to help him might have made a difference. It certainly eased my distress over Bandit's neglect, and gave us the support of like-minded neighbors and a kind, sensible city policeman.

I wish the same had been true for Eric's childcare workers who tried so hard to protect him but were stymied by the family's stone-walling, by limits on Child Protection follow-ups, by fear that going to the police might lose them their jobs. Some things, like limits on the number of abuse reports kept active, will change, so Minnesota officials promise, but no change will bring back a badly and repeatedly damaged child. I wish there had been neighbors to sound the alarm. I wish someone had called the police.

  

Margotlog: Three Cities in Italy and My Poem, "The Annunciation"

Margotlog: Three Cities in Italy, and My Poem "The Annunciation"

 

I just came home from la bel'Italia, specifically three cities: Orte, Arezzo, and Florence. I've never been to Orte and Arezzo before, Florence, however, many many times. As part-Italian, and an art-lover, as a happy speaker of even limited Italian, as a fan of the country's quirky history and beautiful landscapes, and ever a pasta-lover--my trips to Italy rejuvenate me and send me home after 8-10 days completely satisfied.

 

There are always snags. This time, I was at my wits end trying to procure b & b's and even a hotel at the last minute. Luckily, friends who know Orte agreed to pick me up at the train station and chug-chug me up the incredibly high wall face to the old city. They deposited me at the clean quiet B&B I'd reserved, and the second day I took a tour of the enormous city underground - miles of snaking tunnels and deep pools which once formed the city's water reservoir and delivery system. There were no desiccated bodies as in Rome's catacombs, but the sense of being in another world, with quivery light, and deep blue water satisfied some desire to try out burial ahead of time.

 

Arezzo, though also high, is not much like Orte's almost funeral quiet. Arezzo is a town of youth wearing everything from torn jeans to tiered gauzy dresses. The first evening in a rambling two-room hall, a friend held a retrospective exhibit of her lover's work. He died three years ago. They kept horses in a stone farmhouse 40 kilometers outside town. She still stables two mares and a filly-in-training for the big time. It was a time of celebration, but full of strangers and maybe on my part, too much wine.

 

It was the second day, on my own, when I truly gathered a sense of this ancient yet very lively town.

High up beside the cathedral, I sat in a very pleasant park under a rim of umbrella pines leaning together to catch the sun. Children ran across an open circle with their dark German shepherd barking after them. When he was leashed and couldn't follow, he emitted the strangest groans and gurgles I've ever heard coming from a dog. Otherwise, in the quiet, I looked into the hills studded with a few

quintessential Tuscan farmhouses, three-story, with the bronzed terracotta look of old wood, and topped by an almost flat roof that overhung the entire building, like a sheltering hat.

 

Coming down from this repose, I found myself surrounded by young men in snazzy suits, pulling and pushing one of their comrades in a bicycle three-seater. He carried a bouquet of huge zinnias. What's going on? I wondered. Following them as they braked to keep him from zipping down the steep street, I stopped with them before an ancient building renown for its collection of different columns. Then, up from the bottom of the street, chugged a VW bus. Inside sat the bride, dressed in gauzy white, with cheeks as round and firm as a ripe apple. She looked so young, almost like myself, in the photos of my first wedding, the one where I too wore a veil partly hiding my face. Lots of onlookers like myself hung around to see her slowly descend, have her veil spread around her and slowly enter the sanctuary, carrying her own bouquet of red, pink, yellow, and orange zinnias.

 

Finally Florence with my artist friend Patricia Glee Smith (look for her website). We visited the Uffizi at night, the only way to avoid the crowds. Standing before Leonardo's "Annunciation," I was happily transported to my first love affair with this painting, which coincided with falling in love with the back of a young man walking down the aisle of a Minneapolis poetry reading.

 

Now I give you the poem, published in my full-length poetry collection, Between the Houses (Laurel Poetry Collective, 2004). If you order it from Amazon and read it, please leave a comment on the Amazon page for the book. Here's the poem, perhaps the one I treasure most:

The Annunciation

In Leonardo's painting, she studies
out of doors, this eminent virgin
in her habitual cloth of red and blue.

Before her on a pedestal table
encrusted with a mollusk shell, lies
an open book from which she raises her eyes

to the boy dressed in swan's wings, wearing
a cap of curls and carrying a lily wand.
She may have seen him ahead of her

in church, his shoulders and torso
masculine and square, his hair
a tangle of innuendo.

That he comes to her in the garb
of heaven is only an accident
of myth and history, for she needs

nothing announced. The cleft in the palm
of her raised hand anticipates all he means
and she accepts only provisionally,

for he is her inspiration, not a winged
word or an unborn child. This child-man
with fabulous pinions, will cause her

to abandon the protected corner,
to crush the low, delicate plants,
and dream his weight will never rise.