The trouble started after Suzanne went to bed and Maisie the Jack Russell Terrier indicated she needed to take a bio break in the backyard.
No big deal normally, but the pup (now 16 years old or 112 on the canine calendar) had developed an infection in her right paw.  Vet wrapped it in a pink camo bandage and warned us sternly not to let her get it wet.
This means each time she goes out, we must tie onto her leg a rigid Baggie-like contraption that keeps the infected paw dry.
She hates it of course.
It turns her right foot into a paddle-like contraption and for the first few days, she stumbled over it.
But being a Jack Russell Terrier who can learn new tricks, she adapted.  She figured out how to make decent speed for an old hound by throwing her leg up and out -- almost as if she were swimming a butterfly stroke, but on land.
I caught her at the door and began to tie on the Baggie.  On the fifth try, I got it, but she slipped from my arms and ran off into the house.
Again, normally, no big deal.
The dog is all but blind.  Inoperable cataracts in both eyes give her just a vague notion of what's out there, She has adapted, having walked every inch of the house for hours, and knows the place by rote, but look, let's face it, not hard to catch.
But I've got a blown out knee -- a torn medial meniscus -- that makes me slower than normal and not quick off the mark.
And she has chosen to run to the dark side of the house, where there are no lights.
In short, she is now the blind Audrey Hepburn heroine n Wait Until Dark, and I am the hapless sighted but sorry-ass Alan Arkin villain.
Oh, I can hear her flapping about with her Baggie.  Briefly.  Then she freezes.  I bump into something and she moves again. Then freezes.
I know her game. She's peeved about the bag.  And if she possibly can, she's going to hatch one right on the living room rug.  Not something Hepburn would have done, but I respect the strategy.  I'm bare-footed.  This is high stakes now.  I feel real fear for the first time.
She maneuvers stealthily.  I bang into assorted stuff moved from the basement hurricane flood.  In a battle between a gator and a grizzly, terrain is everything, and I now am hip deep in her swamp.
There are grunts and groans.  My cargo shorts -- real Governor Christie beltless Big Boy specials -- keep dropping down, hampering my movement.  I may also be laughing more than a little.
Suddenly she breaks for it.  She runs to the light.  Turns the corner, skitters on the kitchen linoleum and wham -- is out the door, throwing that bagged paw up in the air like Phelps closing in on the eighth gold medal.
She paces the backyard on her regular patrol, and the light bounces back from a waxy-lidded eye she has cast in my direction as I stand in profile at the lighted door.
"My way," she seems to say, and of course that's fine by me.  Who wouldn't root for Audrey Hepburn?

A new proposal from the House Republican leadership would bring jobs to America by expanding the rights of  Job Creators while also helping young married couples.

"We are all about individual rights," said US Rep. Eric Cantor, "and for too long the federal government has trampled on ancient rights held to be inalienable and eternal, predating the Founding Fathers even."

"It's all about freedom, and the rights that the federal government has taken away from Job Creators," Governor Rick Perry, a proponent, said of the legislation.  "This helps put an end to 'class warfare' practiced for decades by liberals, Democrats and wimpy Republicans."

The program is also designed to help young couples get a start on their marriage by easing the tension and burden of the very early stages of matrimony.

While the bill does not make reference to it, the new legislation is based broadly on the "droits du seigneur" rights of noblemen in Europe.  It is also known as "jus primae noctus" or simply
"the master's obligation."

"That just sounded foreign and maybe even French," said Perry, who successfully implemented a pilot of the program in Texas. "We've taken the basic principle and call it the 'Job Creator Freedom Program."

A spokesman for the White House said it will study the measure, does not practice class warfare and will consider any job stimulus program of merit.  

There's not much that Texas Governor Rick Perry and I have in common.  Oh, I love Texas, the land and its people.  If my Eastern friends don't get that, I can't explain it.  It's a you-had-to-be-there sorta thing.

But Perry strikes me as a rhinestone cowboy rather than the real thing.

First off, there's that varmint claim.  I don't think he really shot a coyote to protect his dog.  Why?

Because if I did, I would have it mounted -- or at least take a picture of it.  He didn't and his friends don't even ask him to prove he shot it.

If I pulled that, my Texas friends would laugh me out of the state.  Every single one of them knows that if they shot a coyote, they would keep at least the tail.  And if they shot a coyote with a pistol, they would have commemorative photos and probably a custom made coffee table book of pictures.

Yet they believe Perry.  I think he maybe saw a coyote.  Or he saw something.  Or he shot a collie thinking it was a coyote.  And then buried Lassie and made up a story.

Plus, he's just too picture perfect in his wardrobe.  I think Ralph Lauren, not Lonesome Dove.  He is far more Lexus than Texas.

In cowboy garb, he dresses as something he isn't.  It's a little like that shot of him dressed as a fighter pilot at the cockpit of a jet.  He served in the Air Force, and good for him.  I respect those who serve.  But he flew cargo planes, not fighter jets.  So why dress up as a fighter jock?  If he can ride a horse, good for him, but why dress up as a Village People dude rancher cowboy?

There is an obvious extension to politics of course.  Hyperbole is one thing.  A good rant can be fun. But Perry's campaign against government -- as a career politician -- strikes me the same as the coyote story.     In fact, there's plenty of proof that if federal dollars would leave Texas, the economy would deflate like a soggy pinata.

Nothing proves the worth of government, at least some of it, than the heroic effort federal fire fighters are waging against the fires in Texas.  This is as it should be.

But it should make people think twice when they listen to Perry.  Or to any of the "starve the beast, government is evil" folks.  Much in government can be improved.  But eliminated?

It is a false cockiness Perry has.  Romney called him on it well during the debates.  Texas has many blessings that has helped its economy.  Surely Governor Perry is not taking credit for those, or he would be like Al Gore claiming he invented the internet.

But that is how Perry comes off to me.  He is someone banging through the saloon doors angry and looking for a fight.  But he is all hat, no cattle.  He is the cock crowing in the morning, proud that he has raised the sun.

Those aren't the Texans I know.

What more is to be said about 9/11?  I had more than a casual association with it.  I walked through the World Trade Center for 15 years on my daily commute and worked in it for two years.  It was a part of my NYC "home" -- and it was if my home were struck by a meteor.

Three business colleagues of mine perished there, and the devastation blew out my television studio in the World Financial Center across the street and forever scarred the psyche of friends who were witnesses to the devastation.  My neighbor two doors over left behind two young children, a wife, and a faithful Siberian husky who howled constantly for a week with no food and no water before the vets and family reluctantly put him down before he died.  The dog literally grieved itself to death.

For a long time, staring down into the hole in the ground at ground zero, my emotions ranged from anger, sadness to a sense of vengeance and resolve for justice. There was a "phantom limb" phenomenon -- something you knew was gone but felt still existed.   I think I'm pretty typical in that regard.

So the best I can do now -- other than observe the moments of silence -- is to honor the fallen and those who have volunteered to protect our country, and suggest we mark the tenth anniversary as a time when our national mourning stops and closure comes.

I'm not suggesting we forget.  Anything.  The sacrifice, the loss, the bravery, all should be honored.  What may be less obvious is that we should not forget our mistakes, made on both sides of the political spectrum.  We need to understand that for that dreadful day, we were indeed victims of a particularly evil and cynical hatred.  And there were true victims.

What bothers me is that in the time since 9/11 both the left and the right seem to see power in being fulltime victims and blame assessors.  The debates seem not geared to what is best for the country but who will be voted America's Biggest Victim.

There is a power to victimhood, but only when it is authentic and compelling.

We are a powerful nation, not a nation of victims.  Politicians of any stripe would serve us far better by not pointing fingers across the aisle, but extending a hand of compromise, compassion and pragmatism. What made this country great is pragmatic compromise, not pure idealogy.  We do what works.

If we are to honor the roots of this nation, it's time for Congress and the President to stop pointing fingers at each other and collectively point toward a pragmatic future.

It's time to go to work.  Or elect people who will.

Tolstoy wrote,  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

He got the first part wrong, or at least he never met the Fox family of Paxton, Illinois. 

There were five kids -- two boys and three girls -- all with Beach Boy blond-like hair and then there was Mom Fox. They lived in a big-porched house on Orleans Street and their big living room with big old comfortable chairs and couches was the place where we hung out a lot in the first half of the Sixties, when my generation was coming of age. 


You could call the family cool and come close to it in some ways.  Three of the Fox kids were older than us and the collective, pooled purchasing power meant they had every Kingston Trio album ever made.  The girls were drop-dead gorgeous.  The guys were rugged but laid back.  The college-age siblings sense of fashion and style filtered down fluidly to the younger brothers and sisters, and so if you saw a shirt that was a "bleeding madras" in the early 1960's, you saw it on the Fox kids first.  


But it was effortless. Floating.  There was no strain in it.  What the family emoted was an ease and kindness and comfort that enveloped visitors.  


At the core of that was Mom Fox, who most nights sat with the television off, reading, or so it seemed, looking up and from under a book and her glasses with a smile that was all-knowing and a bit mischievous.  If that was not a welcoming enough sign, cats would dismount from various nooks and eases in the big house to come rub against your shin.  


We'd sit and talk and listen to music for hours in that living room, with the various generations of the Foxes and their friends passing through of an evening.  It was a sort of salon with a touch of the south. But it was also a place where you could speak in front of an adult about the political issues of the day and find an ear rather than a glare. 


Delon and Charlene were the Foxies of my generation.  Delon was a member of the band of buddies we formed at age 16 and a kindred spirit forever.  He was the gentlest soul I knew, off the football field.  On it, he was all raw bone raptor, pure power and muscle, setting conference records as a defensive end. 


Charlene moved down the halls of our high school in a sweet and slow samba as if she were in her own vignetted film spot -- close focus on that Fox smile of content, confidence and spritely mischief.  She seemed to know a secret of sorts, a comforting punchline to the cynical straight lines life often serves up.  


They lost her in August,  by all accounts the same person I knew and loved 50 years or so ago, with that same smile.  She was a remarkable ambassador of good will from a remarkable family whose existence in and of itself made my life in a small town so much larger.  

Fifth day boiling water. 

Third day,line of  neighbors walking in strange manner, up porch, tried to bite Suzanne.

Went down to basement, box marked Texas and other "ammo." 

 Generally, Suzanne loads, I fire, but she is learning. 

Fine so far. 

Call a head if you visit.