Stories

Darkness has flooded my room. I nervously try to avoid pressing power buttons on any of the number of electronics that surround me. Has the power gone out? Did we buy enough if it did? When will it come back on? I go to plug in my computer and to my dismay, the charge light comes on. Hurricane Sandy has completely spared my apartment building—and for the most part my neighborhood: Bushwick Brooklyn.

And I feel nothing but gratefulness for that—but sadness for all that I am seeing across the East River.

My friends on the Island are without power. Those in the lower east side, and most below 34th street- my fellow New Yorkers are too. The subways have flooded, the tunnels are closed, and homes have been destroyed. Cars are floating down the streets—the Brooklyn Bridge Park Carousel is now a submarin-o-sel, and a hospital was evacuated late in the night.

A few weeks ago a friend of a friend invited me to a pig roast.  Having never attended one, I looked forward to what seemed like the perfect California outing: meeting new people and trying new food, all at a BBQ in February.  Eating a pig that had been selected from a local, organic farm also sounded rather virtuous as far as meat-eating goes, and maybe in my heart of hearts I was thinking of the party as a kind of Omnivore’s Dilemma, Live.  Besides, I like to say that I’ll try anything once, especially when it comes to food and I think that I might get an article out of it.  I even started to string together a few premature sentences about The Pig Roast on the way over, dreamily trying out lines like “fork-tender localness”.  (Michael Pollan I obviously ain’t.)  Mental notebook at the ready, I pulled up to a trendy house in Los Feliz and quickly found myself among a crowd of strangers, each of us staring down at a charred animal the size of an eight-year old.  The pig, laid out on its grill of cross hatched re-bar, turned a party of stoned hipsters into Lord of the Flies characters with edgier haircuts, everyone vaguely competitive and wondering what to do now.

My name is Farleys D Destino Del Lago, but friends call me Charlie.

Being a puppy of a certain age has been challenging. There is this “potty outside” thing that is constantly being hammered into my being - not to mention sit, stay, off, no bark, and hearing my name, “Charlie” said as though I was in really deep trouble…(something about humping… ?)  I guess you all know the drill.

But, tonight the education came to fruition; I went to my first restaurant where I finally got it.  And, I had a date with a little cutie named Lucy, not to mention Comely Sonja - the hostess that greeted us. Wow.  She made me feel most welcome among all the ‘beautiful’ people.  Did I say we dined en plein air (Hey I am a poodle puppy…  French Poodle puppy)

Apparently, this was no everyday kinda place - this was Daniel Boulud’s famous Café Boulud at the Brazilian Court in Palm Beach and they love, LOVE dogs!  Chef Jim Leiken (who came down from New York’s Daniel) has created a dog friendly cuisine with such items as, for example, an 8oz prime beef patty (they hold the bun and onion) and little lemon Madeleine Cookies with just a hint of yummy powdered sugar).

There is much in this world that leads us to believe that as humans, we are superior to other life forms. We have opposable thumbs, and the kind of intellect and consciousness that allow us to build more than a hive or a dam and shape our future with intellect rather than instinct. We have religions that teach us that we are “stewards” of the earth, as if we had somehow been handed a title by an unseen force who we may actually have invented.

We do not, often, look at ants as they carry a fallen comrade across our bathroom floor and consider whether we would do the same. We worry about how they got into our house, and how best to kill them. No one is going to be bothered to carry every ant, spider and fly outside – they are, after all, encroaching in our homes with their dirty little feet. We particularly hate stinging creatures like bees, hornets, and wasps. We say things like “I see a purpose for bees, at least honey bees, but the other ones don’t do anything useful.”