GOTTA STOP DOGGING ME AROUND

GOTTA STOP DOGGING ME AROUND

 

       Like most of Rutland County, I’ve been reading about the pit bull attack at the Green Mountain Shopade, and have been thinking back to my own experiences with dog attacks.

       To start with the most important, when I was in second grade I had a frightening standoff with a dog near the Brandon Grade School playground, but was rescued by an upper grader, who came to my aid and scared the dog away. I made up my mind then and there that when I was a big kid, I would be the kind who protected smaller kids, not like the ones I knew who pushed them (me) around. That unknown boy’s deed has had a lifetime effect.

       In high school, I did a fair amount of long-distance biking. On one occasion, knowing I didn’t have it in me to do a 50-mile hike like President Kennedy said was a peak challenge for the fit, but as a substitute, I rode my bike from Burlington to Brandon on Route 7. This was a Schwinn whose gear for climbing hills by pumping harder while standing upright, and whose downshift was the brake, which meant standing on the rear pedal if stopping fast was necessary. My parents were blessedly tolerant of such adventures, though I suspect that in my mother’s case it fell into the category “Why mothers get grey.”

       I learned that dogs were as much as hazard as traffic, so I made a club from a thick stick, pounding nails through at the end so that I had a heavy weapon capable of inflicting serious damage if necessary. On one occasion, a dog on Pearl Street Extension ran at me, and I swung at him, making sure to use the nailheads rather than the spikes, upon which the real hazard became the family, which blamed me rather than their poor bleeding dog. Another time, carrying my fishing rod while coming up Depot Hill in Pittsford, a larger and more dangerous German shepherd  charged. Napoleon said, “Fight with the weapons at hand.” A well-timed smack with the two sections of the dismantled fishing rod hurt and surprised the dog so much that it turned and ran—while I stood on the pedals and pumped like hell.

       As a grownup, I haven’t been as fearful. Confronted by a dogfight, my standard procedure would be to wade in, grab the most available scruff of neck, lift the dog, swing in a circle, and throw it as far as I could. In the days when I was splitting my own  wood and could ring the bell at the Fair, that was far enough to break up the fight. Just for the record, I’m six foot two, weigh about 250 pounds, and was told by one college coach that I should go out for the tackle squad.

       These days, at 61 and with a bad back, I might have to resort to what Patrick Todd taught me. Patrick Todd was, by his own description, “the only poet in Montana,” back when I met him in the early Seventies. (An Internet check found he had continued, published, and taught, still in Montana.) A big, bearded bear of a man, he was hitching around the country, and being near Robert Frost’s former farm in Derry, New Hampshire,  decided to stop by. I was the poet-in-residence there, thanks to Frost’s daughter, and in the years before the farm became a state park (I was the first park manager), I regarded guiding writers on such  pilgrimages as one of my duties.

       Todd said that if you are seriously attacked by a dog capable of severely wounding or killing, you should face it, crouch down, and throw up one arm to catch the dog as it lunges for your throat. When it clamps down on your arm instead, reach your other arm behind its head, pull that arm toward you as you push with the arm in the jaw, and snap the dog’s neck.

       I can’t say from personal experience how well this would work. I do know that Patrick Todd made it back to Montana.

       The title for this comes from one of my favorite rock videos, by Michael Jackson. Rest in peace, troubled spirit, rest in peace.

MAGIC WOK

MAGIC WOK

        One of the stories I’m working on for the Herald’s sibling publication the Rutland Business Journal will be part of their regular New Businesses section. It’s about the Magic Wok, which just opened along Route 7 south of Middlebury, next to the A & W root beer stand.

       That story will be a basic, just-the-facts-ma’am account of a new business venture. My editors have made it clear that I am NOT to write a “restaurant review,” talking about food quality and atmosphere and service and things like that.

       This is a restaurant review. It is a review I did not expect to write, but feel impelled to because I have just witnessed something exceptional.

       Owner and chef Sunny Chin insisted on giving me a sample of what they offer, in a way that would have made it extremely impolite to refuse. Feeling guilty and not wanting to cost a lot, I picked something fairly basic from what looked, on the surface, like a pretty standard Chinese restaurant menu: garlic chicken.

He was back in about five minutes with a rectangular plate that held two crisps something like crab rangoons only smaller, which were as good as any crab rangoon I’ve had; a small roll made with the sort of dough that is used for baklava, which could have done as an hors d’oeuvre at a fancy party; BROWN rice, which I asked about with little hope of getting any; and the specified dish.

       In contrast to most “Chinese” food I’ve eaten, which seems intent on pumping the eater’s body full of oil, the chicken, broccoli, mushrooms and carrot slices were very lightly flavored by a spicy sauce that didn’t, for a change, remind me of the line in the play “Oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor.” Earlier, he had told me, “We don’t use anything out of cans.” The garlic chicken made good on that promise.

       Two people leaving the restaurant told me it had been wonderful (no one said the opposite). But the really wonderful part had yet to come.

       Chin grew up in Singapore, a crossroads of the East, and started working in restaurants when he was 15. This helps to account for the presence of Malaysian, Thai and Mongolian dishes, here and there, on the menu; I have no doubt these could be expanded if public demand seeks it.

       Wondering how to take a picture of all this, I learned that Chin had no objection to my coming into a kitchen for a picture of him at work. Doing so, I learned why it had taken so little time to create me repast.

       The man is a kitchen athlete, moving rapidly from one wok to another in the constant heat, which is sometimes augmented by flames that roar out of the stove. Stuff gets flipped in the air, added to other stuff, and presto, in next to no time the next dinner is done. Magic wok indeed. Let me stress the athlete part: as in farming, just getting it all done takes a major physical effort, and only a lifetime in the kitchen arena made it possible for Chin to juggle such responsibilities (I use the word advisedly) in such heat. Only dedication to his craft would keep him going—there are easier ways to make a significant amount of money.

       Sunny Chin is another chapter in a book that someone ought to write, on the expatriate Chinese. Asia knows them well, and America is learning. These are people who fled miserable and sometimes genocidal conditions, and brought with them intelligence and creativity that has been as much as force in transforming Asian life as the Jewish diaspora has been in Europe. The two experiences have similarities, the Holocaust having a counterpart in the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), finally put down with the help of the British and French, during which somewhere between 20-30 million (Wikipedia) and 50 million (Colton & Palmer’s world history) died.

       Bottom line, there’s a good new restaurant in the area. And if you feel hungry again after an hour, that may just be because you’re longing for another taste.

 

I’m appending a couple of pictures, one of the restaurant’s exterior and one of hot times in the kitchen.

TERRARISKS

TERRARISKS

        I would like to introduce a useful word, the one that serves as the title for this set of thoughts.

       It came to me while I was listening to an account of the human costs of a car bomb explosion at a Baghdad marketplace. The story had focused on a single family, whose provider, the father, had died—leaving his wife and eight children without a mean of support.

       Probably those who put the story together expected me to think, “Oh, the tragedy!” My first thought was, “Eight kids?”

       We have terrorists because there are cultures in which life on this earth is considered expendable, and we have cultures with such values because there are simply too many people. Pardon my insensitivity, but for me the newscaster’s human interest story wasn’t “Oh, the humanity!” but rather “Oh, the too much humanity!”

       Our task at this juncture of history, with resources clearly finite and endless growth obviously impossible as an ultimate economic goal, is to find ways of life that together are both fully engaging and sustainable. Not exactly a steady-state world, but one in which growth is tantamount to maturation.

       But much as people talk about patriotism, they seek their futurity in family. The idea of controlling family size gets put aside before it can be proposed because politically, it would be end the career of anyone who suggested it,

       How are we, as a country, to reorganize our economy so everyone can make a living? The old manual labor jobs are either gone or are so poorly paid, for the amount of physical effort, that only emigrants will take them. Not everyone can go to college and get a job helping to lead the Information Age. The only way to make it work is to pay people to live sensibly—welfare contingent on the general welfare. But any such system would be torn apart, just like viable farms in African nations where the land has been split into miniscule allotments—just as European agriculture would have been without primogeniture. All the sensible solutions depend on sharing, but without population control, there can be no sharing.

       Any group that proclaims that its rapidly growing size is a key to its future power is guilty of genocide, because what we have called multiplication is in reality division. And the people who want to have more children than is necessary to reproduce their community, while not necessarily terrorists, are at the least terrarisks.