Free The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater Page B

priest in billows of black leaning out over the sill of a window.
Go home. Your mother must be worried
.
    Amen.

    On the subject of god, as a child, I was skeptical, but my mother was not. Where I wavered, she stood strong. Where I wondered, she knew. If personalities can be described as punctuation points, I was a question mark, half erased. She was an exclamation point, typed in toner so dark it bled through and blackened the fingers.
    As for god’s particulars, these my mother also knew. In fact, when she spoke of God it seemed she was so intimate with him that they’d just gone golfing or had a dinner out at the Capitol Grill. When there were wars—and the 1970s were
full
of wars or hijackings or kidnappings in the Holy Land or about the Holy Land—God, like Santa, always knew who was wrong and who was right, and he always told my mother, who always told us. Despite my doubts, I never went to bed unless I’d recited the Schmah at least twenty three times, in Hebrew, lights out.
    This, I know, has nothing to do with horses, at least not on the surface. But beneath the surface, it was Judaism, or more specifically Zionism, that brought horses to me and also, ironically, prevented me from becoming the rider I so wanted to be, because, as my mother often repeated once the great affair had begun, “Lauren [all exasperation], Jewish people
do not
ride horses. They play tennis or golf.”
    There’s probably some truth to this statement in the aggregate, but here’s the problem: I was not the aggregate but rather some speck spinning within it. And the particular speck called Lauren (and
not
Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph) one day, sometime around the age of twelve, two years after the fire, well, that speck began to burn in a whole new way.
    We travelled to Israel, my brother, two sisters, parents, and me, sometime after the Yom Kippur War. I don’t remember much from this trip except a vague boredom and the tinted windows of tour buses. I do recall landing at the airport and how my mother, so stern, so
fisted
, how she bent down to kiss the ground and told us to do the same. I remember kissing Jewish ground, the smell of smog and soil combined. I remember seeing horses on the highways, so odd, the dusty, plodding equines side by side with peppy cars whizzing and tooting hysterically. This was Tel Aviv. The war was over, but still the streets were full of soldiers and Red Cross cars. My brother and I collected bullet casings on the Golan Heights, where the fighting had been fiercest. Inside one casing mysteriously speckled with black, I found a ladybug. I fed her from a secret stash of leaves. I brought her home within her home, snuck her through the airport search on one side, customs on the other. A few days later, back in the States, when I looked into the casing, there was not one ladybug but hundreds. How could this be? The bugs were tiny, each bright being the size of a pencil point, but growing day by day. I brought my cornucopia to the science teacher. She put her glasses on, peered inside and announced, “Babies,” as though this were the most common thing in the world. Babies in a bullet shell. Babies from another world. Babies that had survived against all odds, in a place devoid of resources. At recess I took the shell outside and, kneeling at the far end of the schoolyard field, where the woods began, I tipped the bullet-nest downward, tapped on its copper bottom, and, after several delicate thumps, the whole infant galaxy slid into the moss. I couldn’t find the mother though. I said an improvised prayer—
Good luck. Schmah y’Israel.
When I came back to check the next day, they weren’t there.
    When I think of Israel now, from the graying, worried age of forty-eight, I think of ladybugs in a desert. I think of blooms in bullet shells and the Golan Heights. I think of the bedouins we met, people in a warp, untouched by time. They wore long white shirts that billowed in the desert winds; they