A long way down

The view from the top of Two Lovers Point, a cliff edge from which mythological star-crossed Chamorros once hurled themselves eons ago.

Now, Japanese tourists get married there.

40 Days and Nights

To celebrate the triumph of liberating American soldiers over Japanese occupiers in 1944, Guam annually holds a Liberation Carnival on the grounds of the baseball stadium.

Like all events of near-biblical import, the event lasts for 40 days and nights from late June to early August.

Being the intrepid reporter that I am, I was supposed to spend my Saturday evening checking out the carnival food and taking notes. I decided to stay home, however, to make a pie and watch a documentary about West German revolutionaries.

Instead, I decided to go Sunday afternoon, thinking that nothing would be so natural then spending Sunday at the carnival.

Unfortunately, the whole event was shuttered and empty, leaving Heidi and I to explore all alone amongst the abandoned not-at-all-death-trap-seeming carnival rides.























Which was, in retrospect, probably not a bad way to enjoy the whole event.

the unfortunate shape of soul mates

Munchkin was a dog.

While it's hard to imagine anything other than an lap-sized shitzu being named after the diminutive tribes of Oz (which, he was, in fact, having been adopted six weeks after our family moved to Kansas) I have to occasionally remind myself of this fact.

Munchkin was not like other dogs. Excepting the first few, inevitably, adorable months of his life, Munchkin was a foul-smelling, hazy-eyed rat-shaped creature with perenniel gunk in his eyes and a tongue that hardened just outside his mouth, with the personality of a psychoticaly possessive and pathologically grumpy old man. He may also, incidentally, have been my soul mate.

I bring this up now, because I had a dream about Munchkin last night. Having spent the last week or so fondling adorable dogs in one way or another, I guess dogs have been on my mind.

This dream, however, was not full of vacant puppy cuteness, or the kind of knee-jerk satisfaction that comes with meeting the needs of a creature designed to need.

In my dream, I was in Paris, which seems to be the sort of sound-stage of my pysche for dreams about Guam. And I had brought Munchkin, perhaps ill-advisadly, to live with me. There was also some sort of sprawling hotel, lazer-like tornadoes searing through the ceiling, and a death-defying climb on the tiled roof, but that's beside the point.

The point was that I was reunited with my long-lost (or at least buried) dog.

In my dream, I picked him up, and he did this thing he used to do whenever I returned home from a long absence. He'd unfurl his whole body into my shoulder, plying his neck against mine, and shaking from a kind of joyous relief at my return. It seems strange, because, well, he was a dog. But, he was also my dog, and no one else seemed to elicit this kind of response from him.

Whenever he did this, I would be reminded of the kind of unquantifiable psychic bond Munchkin and I had built up over, what were, admittedly, years of being friendless and awkward in Midwestern suburban monotony.

I don't remember when, but at some point I became increasingly convinced that Munchkin was in fact a soul mate from a past life, who, due to some past-life indiscretion, was doomed to share life with me, always at an arms- (or leash-) length distance.

When I left for college, the hardest part was saying goodbye to my dog. I promised him I would come back for him, patheticaly sitting on the stairs before leaving for what I knew would be months (months!).

The year after college, when I still harbored fantasies of New York being a habitable place to live, I decided to keep my promise, and Munchkin lived with me in a Queens duplex, and then we moved to my first Brooklyn apartment. He spent afternoons watching cable TV with my bartender hipster roommate, and waited patiently for my return home at 11:30 from my starvation wages job at a Manhattan bookstore.

When I started bringing Keith over, who slouched his way from the kitchen the bedroom with the same defiant aura of post-college disinterest, Munchkin would first try to take up space on the bed, until I moved him gently to the closet, where he would glower with unhappy disapproval for the rest of the night.

He hated Keith. And Keith wasn't exactly a fan of his either. They would stare at each other in a sort of distrusting stand off.

On days I worked, if I came home later than expected, he would alternately shit on the carpet, or tear holes in my blinds/lovebeads. On my days off, he would insist on accompanying me on errands around Williamsburg, riding atop the piles of laundry in my metal shopping cart, and sitting beneath my feet at Bubbles laundrymat until I was done.

Sometimes I would take him to the dog park in Union Square, putting him in a cart (he was too fat for a bag) and wheeling him onto the subway. He hated the noise, however, and usually got in fights with the other dogs.

The only things he really seemed to enjoy were licking things, and eating. He ate pretty much anything he could, especially if I ate it first. He was the only dog I've ever seen eat lettuce, which he did only after I had some.

After a year in New York, we both retired to Nebraska. My stay was briefer than his, and after a few months I headed back to the city.

I came back, on and off, but never again with the frequency of my college days. He always shook when I came home though, until the days when he didn't.

Eventually he went blind, and deaf, and started having seizures, or strokes of some sort. The last time I visited him, he was mostly indifferent to the world, existing in some half-wakeful half-sleeping state, in which he would occasionally howl at an unheard or unseen force, or waddle through the grass in the front yard to pee.

My last trip home was just weeks before he died, and I never knew if he realized I had come back. He died two days before my birthday, and my parents planted him under a tree, now known as the Munchkin tree.

When I finally went back, I thought I would feel his presence under the tree, and half-imaged being planted there someday, like the greek myth about the elderly couple that sort of just grow into a tree together.

But, it was just a tree.

In my dream, however, I had found my soul-mate dog again, and for a second, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to be reunited. Of course he was happy to see me. Of course we found each other again.

Puppy prison

Motivated by a recent experience with heart-melting adorable puppiness, Heidi and I decided to take a trip up to the local animal shelter.

Located off Route 1 in Yigo, the shelter has rows of outside kennels, where dogs are kept in concrete cages, until (hopefully) someone adopts them.

Guam, it should be noted, is full of boonie dogs and cats. The feral animal population has never been accurately tallied, but bedraggled animals can be seen in nearly every island parking lot after dark, rooting around for food and a cool spot to sleep. There are also frequent reports of packs of wild boonie dogs attacking school children in the weekly village news, which generally leads to bad things for animals and people alike.

Still, even knowing that the shelter is a necessary part of keeping animal suffering to a minimum, we steeled ourselves for the experience.

Upon arrival, and despite all the very nice volunteers and well-taken-care-of animals, it was clear — this was puppy prison.



The rows of dogs lay lethargically in the sun, not paying attention to us at first. When it became clear we were interested in them, the dogs would stand up and approach the barbed-wire fences with their most manipulatively adorable faces.

Anyone can come and visit the dogs, and even take them out of their kennels for walks and romps in the nearby dog park. So Heidi and I started down the rows, taking out one dog at a time. This seemed like a good idea when we headed up there, but as we picked the first two dogs for walks, the others started barking and howling, which was all so very heartbreaking.

At any rate, we tempered the pathos by indulging in a hefty dose of doggy cuteness.

We took several rounds of enthusiastic dogs out for runs in the grass. There was a really nice sheep-herder dog named Bailey, and another super enthusiastic puppy that Heidi and I dubbed White Fang for his vampire-esque eyes, and also he looked like the dog from the Disney movie.



Heidi immediately became attached to a very cute and timid boonie dog named Paz. She seemed to have recently given birth, perhaps multiple times, and Heidi lay in the grass for her for a while petting her. She also whined and cried a lot when put back in her cage, leading to a teary-eyed Heidi deciding that maybe we should adopt a dog after all.






There was also this hyperactive striped dog, appropriately named bubbles, who seemed to have be smooshed or smashed in her past life, with a slightly lopsided gait and some a twisted snout.















I thought we should name this one "Harvey Dent"-- because she had a two-face-like split right down the middle of her face, and also because Harvey is a really hard-core name for a girl dog.


Anyway, after about 45 minutes Heidi and I had pretty much thoroughly given in, and might have adopted pretty much of all the dogs had the shelter not been closing, and also we're broke.

There was a nice couple there, who had been seriously interviewing dogs under a shady bench during our frequent trips to the dog park. I was hoping they'd adopt Bailey, who seemed like a good, reliable house dog. Instead, they went home with a dog, a puppy and a kitten.

Yah! Happy ending, or something.

green things

Before I left New York, I found myself dreaming of green things. For months before I left, I had these dreams about there being a wide open green space next to my apartment, where, sort of like the secret garden, the potential lay for boundless cultivation.

Since coming to Guam, my green fix has been met by the ever-growing incursion of jungle parenthesis, hugging the civilized area with a untamable zeal.

Still, fruits and vegetables are expensive, so I thought that growing things on my very limited veranda space might be a good idea.

So, among the many things I shanghai-ed my parents into buying for me -- sort of, my dad was very insistent about the couch, bed frame, washer/dryer (thanks dad!) -- I had them take me to Home Depot to buy me plants.

Satisfyingly, what started out as packets of seeds and brown dirt in empty boxes has now actually started sprouting, which, despite my limited knowledge of biological processes still seems sort of miraculous.

Behold -- potatoes, basil, tomatoes (none yet), peppers, and all sorts of herbs.

a tale of two composts

I had a box of worms in my kitchen once.

They were, like so many other things in my life at the time, an attempt to make my Brooklyn apartment habitable -- at least for anything other than the cockroaches and rats.

This didn't exactly turn out as I had hoped. In terms of life forms, I guess you could say the kitchen became definitively more habitable, as the worms ended up becoming part of a thriving ecosystem of funky humid air, raunchy rotting smells, and millions -- I swear to God -- of tiny little gnats, who covered the surfaces of nearly everything in my kitchen with a few weeks.

This was not as I had planned.

At the time, I was starving for some kind of emotional connection to the natural world, plus I threw out vats of rotting fruit and vegetable detritus on a near-daily basis. Composting, which my mom did with ease in her Nebraska kitchen, seemed a natural solution.

Based on my usual intense research processes (I vaguely remembered being told my a crunchy, eco-friendly activist colleague that home composting was really easy, and by another that there were worms available through the farmer's market in Union Square) I set about laying the groundwork for my very own green revolution.

Basically, this involved calling the number on the website of the East Village environmental activist group to find out how one obtained worms. All you had to do, I was informed by a pleasant woman over the phone, was put in an order, and for $60 you could get your very own composting kit, complete with a batch of worms, a plastic container to house them in, and an instruction card on how to compost. All you had to do was go by the farmer's market on a Saturday afternoon, and they'd have the worms read to pick up.

Ta da! Problem solved. Newly flush with funds from my corporate advertising job, which had just transitioned from temporary to indefinite, I told the woman that yes, I would like to buy some worms.

Some things that I might have overlooked, upon reflection, included the fact that I had an all-day, very important and unmissable activist media planning media (or something like that) to attend on the scheduled day of pick-up. This wouldn't have been a huge deal if say, I were picking up potted plants, or something a little less, well, wiggly. But, worms are actually alive and kind of sensitive, thus, they do things like die when forced to hang out all day in harsh wintery temperatures.

This brings me to the second thing I may have overlooked slightly. It was February -- or January, I forget. It was the dead of ass-cold winter in New York, which can prove to be really, really inconvenient when hauling live temperature-sensitive worms from an outdoor market home to your apartment in the boonies of Brooklyn via public transportation.

I say all this hypothetically, as I didn't actually pick up the worms. This task fell to Keith, who, in his typical gentile understandingness grumbled intensely when I told him of my plan, and in all ways refused to participate, except of course when I made him go pick up the worms.

The worms didn't die though -- and they soon safely had a space under the enormous and precariously over-laden metal shelving unit we had erected to hold nearly all of our/my pots and pans.

Within days of depositing my kitchen scraps, however, the gnats began gathering on every visible surface.

Despite all our best efforts, which included duck-taping the cracks of the plastic box, intense amounts of fly-swatting, spraying surfaces with any chemical spritzer we could find, and a half-dozen homemade gnat-catching traps made out of soda bottles, laundry soap and beer, they kept gathering.

Soon, any movement in the kitchen would elicit a cloud of tiny flies, swarming in all directions before resettling on the cabinets and appliances.

I stopped cooking. The gnats limited even my willingness to brave the kitchen for food. In desperation, we tried to leave the compost on the concrete patio between the building's stairwells, only to find it immediately left in the trash bin. Keith daily threatened to exterminate the worms, only stopping short of dumping the whole thing out of my entreaties that it would be really bad worm karma.

Eventually, however, we decided we had to risk the bad karma, and dump the whole mess of newspapers, worms and rotting fruits and vegetables. When the time came to dump them, however, the worms could still be seen wriggling, alive and happy in their gnat-infested home.

So, instead, we took the bin out front and dug through it, separating out maggot-laden banana peels, rotting potato skins, cabbage heads, etc., from the worms. We had waited until it was warm enough (it was March in New York), so that we could set the worms free into the wild world without incurring the wrath of worm gods everywhere.

So, after sorting out all the garbage from the worms, Keith and I spent one afternoon with the worm bin balanced atop a metal shopping cart, looking for a place to deposit them.

We were going to go to Prospect Park, which was several subway stops away, but only made it as far as the nicely manicured juniper traffic island in between the impeccable Victorians we happened to live near. While Keith stood watch (there was a private security guard making the rounds) I dug a hole with a stick in the dirt, and dumped the worms in piles around the juniper.

May they live long and happy lives making dirt for rich people.

At any rate, this is compost-attempt #2. No worms this time. And I'm keeping the whole apparatus on my balcony, should gnats decide to storm.