Rescues

I got a text last night from JD letting me know Bubbe, a small grey terrier, had died. Bubbe was a rescue from back when JD and Jaelynn were live-in caregivers for my Dad. Bubbe was brought to us by B, a former client, who had gone to visit his kids and found Bubbe locked in a cage, starving and filthy. He grabbed her and brought her to my Dad’s apartment. She was so weak she couldn’t lift her head and her hair had grown over her eyes so she couldn’t see. Between us, we couldn’t afford the vet, so we looked online and started giving her tiny sips of pedialyte. A few gentle baths and a hair trim later, she was starting to look better, but getting her back to normal was a long, painstaking project. Dogs are tremendously resilient and even early on she didn’t hold a grudge against humans. She knew we weren’t the ones who hurt her and just wanted to sit on laps and be cuddled. That was a long time ago- Dad died in 2012, so Bubbe was about 15, years of love she would not have had without B’s last chance intervention. Thinking about B as I wait for a banker, I start thinking about a call I got from him late one cold night. He was breathing hard, I could tell he’d been running. As he got his breath back, he told me that his kids’ mother, the same one who tortured Bubbe, had poured bleach all over him and tried to set him on fire. He fled, in just his T-shirt and socks, into the freezing streets of Coney Island, with no money or train fare. I didn’t have anything a large guy could wear but I grabbed what I could and shoved a bunch of damp paper towels into a ziploc to wipe off the bleach and headed out to Stillwell. Coney Island at late night in the winter is nothing like the greasy, cheerful, somewhat dilapidated and sticky place where I had watched my Dad build replicas of Mayan temples out of pails of damp sand I brought him, gathering an audience of astonished strangers. I found B shivering just outside the turnstiles and paid his fare. We got on the train and did our best to wipe the bleach off his excema covered skin while the few other riders practiced the New York art of pretending not see a young white woman and a sobbing, underdressed black man reeking of bleach. We made our way to Manhattan, to Midtown where the rushing business people and the hot dog carts had been replaced by tribes of rats eating restaurant garbage. We walked way west, over to Sylvia’s, opened the heavy metal door, and stepped into the welcoming chaos. Being the Director of a very grassroots shelter was often really difficult. I had to manage everything from plumbing leaks to the constant search for funding, but it gave me one ability that felt like magic, the ability to wrap someone in the safety of our space. Even if it was only a bunch of mismatched cots in a battered church basement, as long as someone was within our walls, they could be themselves, free from hate and violence.