Thank you, Gail.
Thank you, Jane.
It's so wonderful to read with you.
You've been such a great colleague and inspiration
to me.
And thank you all for coming tonight.
I'm going to start out with a short essay
from a series of micro essays.
And then, I'll read from the new book.
These are all essays that are about three pages long,
and they will be in a collection called With Animals in Mind.
"Dog Tags."
"Clamp the S-hook to the collar, and the dog
has permission to live.
If he gets lost, the person who finds him can get your address
and bring him home to you.
If he gets hit by a car, someone will deliver a definition
for the grief you feel at the loss of his company.
Every year or two, you will renew his license
using pliers or a vise grip to detach the old tag
and attach the new one.
Then, the dog will prance around the living room shaking
his head for a few moments feeling the collar that he
had forgotten he wears.
You will hear him jingle in the house at night
as he scratches his fleas.
His fleas, like he is your dog.
Though unlike this in that he takes no pleasure
in their companionship.
You will hear him stir, turn, and resettle
in the night because of the metallic jingle.
A stranger who once has been attacked
(such a sweet dog, he would never)
will be grateful for the music of dog tags
that give warning before the bark, or growl, or baring
of teeth that will trigger your startle reflex.
The body's memory of a trauma the mind has suppressed.
Once a person has known teeth in her flesh,
the dog tags will no longer convince her
that anyone owns the dog's wildness, except the dog.
Domestic only means he has agreed to live in the house,
and we have agreed to welcome him there.
Men and women wear dog tags too to identify their bodies.
In 2001, a 27-year-old man, traveling in Ho Chi Minh City
to scout for business opportunities,
found the dog tags of American soldiers hanging
on a string in a back alley market not frequented
by tourists.
They were for sale 6 or 7 for $1.
He was disgusted.
He could not stop thinking about them.
Were they real or fake?
He returned to buy 620 of them and brought them home.
Some of the dog tags belonged to men who are still living.
30 years after leaving Vietnam, where every one of them
must have left a piece of his soul,
the soldiers got back their IDs.
For them too, the dog tags meant, in retrospect,
permission to live.
30 years after their sons died in Vietnam,
some parents got back their dog tags.
One mother said she felt joy to hold them.
For her, they meant identifying with her son's body,
and he was real and tangible, at least in her mind,
as had been the child whose back she had stroked as he fell
into sleep on troubled nights.
One morning in Vermont, when I lived
simple and remote, visitors rare and reminding me
that the world extended beyond my house, and barn,
and neighborhood, I picked up a hitchhiker.
This was near the Canadian border, so near
I had gone several times to a club the size of my living room
in the Eastern Townships of Quebec
to hear Jesse Winchester perform.
The Memphis born folk singer and draft resister
had become famous for his love song, "Yankee Lady,"
but he could not perform in the United States
without being arrested for evading his 1967 draft notice.
That war was everywhere in American society.
And it showed up quietly on my dirt road that morning.
The hitchhiker looked about the age I then was, 24 or 25.
He was bearded, scruffy, and carried a dirty backpack.
The sartorial style signifying, it seemed to me then,
his solidarity with resisting the trim exterior that
belied America's vicious heart.
To be messy and grow wild was to be truthful about the reality
that our nation was a mess, and the war had gone wild.
A ferocity no one's tidy rhetoric could control.
But appearances rarely are what they seem,
and I realized soon that I had projected my own ideology
on the stranger, instead of learning
the story that had brought him to this spot
on this tattered map.
I know this is beginning to sound like one of those tales
we call a shaggy dog story, so much
digression you can't see where you're going.
I brought the man to my house for lunch, gave him homemade
soup and bread.
He wanted a lift a few miles down the road
and I agreed to take him.
He pointed to the green area on his map
saying it looked like the biggest
stretch of uninhabited forest in the vicinity
and asking me if that were true.
I said, yes, and pointed out the window
to the cold, hollow mountains, which
had been my comfort in the landscape that had taught me
I belonged to something larger, and older, and wiser
than human life.
He told me he wanted to see if he could survive in the wild
with nothing but his pocketknife and sleeping bag.
Did he even have a sleeping bag?
I remember so little of this, only
that I thought he was crazy, or suicidal,
or running from something that must have
seemed to him worse than death.
It was late autumn, and in that region winter brought
killing cold weeks when the morning temperature would
register at 40 below.
Why didn't I ask the stranger where he had come from and why?
Why hadn't I offered him something
other than soup and a ride?
What would it have been?
I was afraid of him.
And I wanted to protect him, and the contradiction
immobilized my good intentions.
After lunch I drove him as far as a car could go on the dirt
road that dead ends on a saddle of those forested mountains.
This looks good, he said.
The maple trees had already lost their leaves
and lay crisp with frost on the hard packed ground.
I stopped the car.
Are you sure?
I began to see that I might be helping a man to kill himself.
Yes, he said, and his eyes were sure.
What was unsaid hung around us like acrid smoke.
Will you do me a favor, he asked?
What?
He reached in his pocket and took out
a set of dog tags hanging on their chain.
Put these in the nearest US mailbox.
I stared at him.
It's OK, he said.
I took the tags.
I let him out.
He walked upslope into the woods.
I wanted to call out to him, but what could I have said?
I drove to town and put the dog tags in the mail drop
at the post office.
I felt as if I were committing a crime.
I cannot say what his intentions were.
Perhaps he'd gone AWOL and would hike north to the border
for amnesty.
Perhaps he died in the cold woods
with not one thing on his body to identify him,
wanting to be reduced to the animal,
because he felt himself no longer to be human.
There were so many men, mostly men in those years,
who were lost or could not find a way out
of the arguments in their heads over what they had
done or not done in the war.
I felt ugly to myself, as if by handing in his tags,
I was treating a man as if he meant less to me than a dog.
I regret still that I did nothing more to help him.
What would that have been?
Send a letter to his family explaining
his confident resolve?
Perhaps this account is that letter.
Perhaps we, every one of us who has no faith in war,
are his family.