Old Dog Ways (The Ways of an Old Peruvian Chow Chow)

Old Dog Ways
(The ways of an old Peruvian Chow Chow)

When dogs grow old—(like Jason)
they seem to want to be left alone
(not completely, but some). They want to chew their bones
alone…in peace—; they want to lay down with a gentle-warm wind
(and fall to sleep). They want to get patted on the head,
now and then; drift along in a grassy backyard—, check out
the food bin! And like many people, prefer to be left alone,
with a few—select, good friends!

No: 1998 (9-21-2007); written in Huancayo, Peru on the platform. “Today, Friday, watching old Jason (perhaps seventy), he paces in the back yard, chews his bone, goes to the food bin, by all appearances he has a pretty good life, and he knows it.”

See Video of Jason and Rocco

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkafPebn2UU

Recollections of Old Dan the Horse and the First Day Care Center

By Poet Laureate, Ed.D. Dennis L. Siluk


Old Dan the Horse((A Minnesota, 1950s Poem) (A Minute Chronicle, in Poetic Prose)Through the fence, I’m feeding Old Dan the Horse, with hay;I can hear him crunching away, ripping it alongside his teeth—A gluttonous sound indeed, as his sides extend in, then out…Our lives—(a horse and a boy) are a farm and a fence;Behind us are weedy pastures, cows and wild flowers.Old Dan, is Old, his life is almost over, mine just beginning.Hard lines run though his body, he is like seven old horses pacing…!(Now, fifty-five years have past, I can now understand Old Dan)No: 2057 (11-18-2007)


Old Dan A Legacy


It really started with Old Dan. But he really wasn't old when I first met him. I was eighteen-months old when I first went to a boarding farm (so I called it back then and still do) called Kiddy Corner, in North St. Paul, Minnesota - back in 1948-49. My brother (Mike) and I would be the first of five-kids to experience this new employment, and form of watching children whom would grow to thirty-children in time - years later the name that would sprout from this new center for children would be called "The Day Care Center [s]"; yes, everything started from this, as we all know, it has to start someplace. But J.R. (Janet Riddler) was really the woman who started all this in the United States; she really was the first. She ended up in court more times than she could count times because of this new and un-regulated care center business; she would tell me years later because of envious County Employees, and neighboring people wanting to shut her down - many things of her struggles to maintain her business (I believe this simply because I had a rental business with 21-families, and most of them, all but one that is, went out of their way to cause trouble, little people like to feel big, and so they use such people in the process, thinking those who made it, killed or stolid or did something rotten to get it, it’s their greedy nature to do so, not all folks are like that, just 90% of us); after her husband had left her, she needed income, and so on her small farm she opened up a day, and overnight center for children, I suppose you could call it: A Day Center, today that would be proper. But she stuck with it - all the way until she got quite ill, that being some twenty –years or so. She paved the way for those who have day care centers today, believe it or not, there just was none. Most folks never heard of her I bet. But it didn’t happen by itself, now did it?
As I lived there off and on for the first five years of my life, for the most part, until I was close to six-years old, during the beginning of the last summer I had started Sunday school, went to kindergarten both near the Kitty Corner Center (living there four to five days out of the week); one the weekends my mother would pick us up, and take us to our grandfather’s home, where she was now living (in an extended family situation) and we'd kind of visit, until Grandpa made some kind of deal with my mother to let us all live with him, as his other children got married and left, one by one, which he had eight children, and my Grandmother had died of double pneumonia, some seventeen-years earlier.
One of my main memories of that time was when my mother came to pick me and my brother up to take us to our new abode for good, I mean for good [that is how I thought of it back then anyhow]. That was one of those great moments in my life, we don't get many of, but the few we get, we never forget. I had to leave a project of some kind at my school to get back to the farm on time so I would not miss my mother, and boy I just stopped everything and I left—I didn’t want to leave my project it was almost finished, and I knew I’d not return the following week to finish it, and take it home, but I just up and left, just like that, after the teacher heard my mother was at the farm waiting, and told me so; thus, I ran, I mean to tell you I really ran, ran and ran some more to get to my destiny; I left it behind and ran, and ran and ran. I always thought about that molding I left behind, but never recreated it.
And when I did go, I mean, actually leave the place, the farm, with cloths in hand, never to return, I had to leave Old Dan behind, a horse I got to love, know, feed, and he even kicked me once. He was ten years old at the time, I suppose in animal years he could have been between 70 and a 100. And yet, I didn't know at the time, but I'd return eight-years later for a visit, stay ten-days [way too long, but it was free, one of them things: for old time sake, Janet gave my brother and I]. But he wasn't old to me then either but of course he was, I just didn’t want to believe it. He was a youthful horse I got to ride as a kid, and somehow always remained that way; funny, even though I know that he was old, very old, he died at about 21-years old I think (that is old in horse years). He was never old to me, he was my first riding horse, and I'd ride much in the following years. I fed him grass many times through the wooden fence. He was very tame, loving.

Certain things, animals, people, like Old Dan stay in a person’s memory the rest of their lives. It tells you something, or should, that all living things get old, and die, it is he way it was meant to be, way God created the universe, us, them… and perhaps it is good, things otherwise get boring.

(Originally written, June 7, 2004, rewritten, shortened and renamed 1-3-2008)

The Garden in Lima (Letter to my Mother, IV)

It’s been eight-months I’ve been away from Lima, I’m back now, was in the Andes, in the Mantaro Valley of Peru, and Cerro de Pasco, Miner country, and the highest city in the world. Our garden in Lima is like a jungle, so everyone tells me, and I suppose they are partly right, but I like little jungles. I don’t like folks caring for the garden, they step on the grass, break the branches, the flowers get destroyed, you know all that kind of stuff; no one really cares for another’s garden, no one at all. They all like to give advise on how to care for it, but when it comes to planting and replanting and watering, and cleaning, you know, all that kind of stuff, it is as if they are blind folded, they step on this and that, and pretend they don’t notice themselves doing it, and give you the evil eye, as if to say: I’m doing you a favor, stay back. So I don’t have anyone work in my garden, and when I am gone, they seem to survive better, better than if I had a caretaker taking care of them because I’ve been down that road, and its bumpy my friend. Anyhow, the birds came back yesterday, it was the second day back in Lima for me, and the butterflies came searching for a place to breath in this big city. It tells me something, they know the masters home, and they know things will get better, and they know they are welcome. One plant in the garden grew a half foot in three days; this is the third day, today. You see, with love and care, and telling the good for nothings to stay away, good things can happen.

#2131 1-1-2008

The Cat Poem

Note by the author: I am not sure what got into me about wanting to write a cat poem (as you can see I selected a great name for the poem); I just did it, out of the blue. I must have been triggered somehow because I do not care for cats. To be honest, if God gave me a choice between cats and cockroaches, I’d take the latter: and I’m sure I might have been a happier person. I do think cats are good for something, not sure what, perhaps for rats. It all stems back to when I was a boy scout, or at least that is what a psychologist would say: flashbacks, the white rabbit syndrome. When I was out camping at St. Croix camp grounds (Minnesota), back when I was thirteen, or so, I was in a big tent with kids, and guess who wakes me up? Yup, a cat purring down my mouth paws on my throat, and it scares the crap out of me when I opened my eyes and saw those marble eyes staring into mine.
Now that I think of it, perhaps this poem is long overdue. In any case, I dedicate it to all the cat lovers out there, to include my wife:


The Cat Poem

Cats, I never did care for them;
My wife had—before we wed—
Fifteen of them—.
They’re too lordly in the household
For me—:
Too aristocrat-able to please.
They are everything but what they
Seem, and
They seem surreal; and endlessly
Dreaming—or perhaps it’s scheming
(I can’t tell the difference)—but,
One thing I do know: they have mystic
Marble-eye-balls—: gives me the chill.

#1065 1/6/06


IN SPANISH
Translated by Nancy Peñaloza
Edited by Rosa Peñaloza

El Poema del Gato
Por Dennis Siluk

Nota por el autor: No estoy seguro que provocó en mí el deseo de escribir un Poema al Gato (como puedes ver seleccioné un gran nombre para el poema); sólo lo hice, cuando menos lo esperaba. Debo haber estado motivado de alguna manera, porque no me interesan los gatos. Para ser honesto, si Dios me da a escoger entre gatos y cucarachas, yo escogería a la última; y estoy seguro que sería una persona más feliz. Pienso que los gatos son buenos para algo, no estoy seguro para qué, talvez para las ratas.
Todo esto proviene de cuando yo era un muchacho explorador boy scout, o al menos eso es lo que diría un Psicólogo: Escenas retrospectivas, el síndrome del conejo blanco. Cuando tenía aproximadamente 13 años de edad, estuve de campamento en Saint Croix (en Minnesota), yo me encontraba en una carpa grande con otros niños, y, ¿adivina qué me despertó? Si, un gato ronroneando debajo de mi boca sus patas sobre mi garganta, y esto me sacó fuera de quicio, cuando abrí mis ojos y vi esas bolas de ojos mirando fijamente dentro de mis ojos.

Ahora que lo pienso, talvez este poema está demasiado atrasado. De cualquier modo, lo dedico a todos los amantes de gatos allí afuera, incluyendo a mi esposa:


El Poema del Gato


Gatos, nunca me interesaron;
Mi esposa tuvo—antes de nuestra boda—
Quince de ellos—
Ellos son demasiado arrogantes en el hogar
Para mí—:
Muy aristocráticos— para complacerlos.
Ellos son todo pero no lo que
Parecen, y
Ellos parecen extraños, y soñadores
Interminables—o talvez son maquinadores
(No puedo decir la diferencia)—pero,
Una cosa yo se: ellos tienen ojos
Místicos—que me dan escalofrió.

# 1065 6/Enero/2006

Little Rocco, The Dog (In English and Spanish)

Letter Three to my Mother

He lays in the morning sun, Little Rocco (the dog), he's looking at me like he's my son, or wants to be; eyes calm, brown, clear. He's a tinge plump, his stomach is pumping away, his ears twitching as he soaks up the sun, he now closes his eyes, as his ear swats a fly. The green grass is cool under him I suppose, among the drooping warm sun, high up here in the mountains, it almost lays on top of you. He now gets up, hides under a bush, it's all too, too much for him. His life mother, has just begun, he's three months old. I suppose, he is a two year old, in our time; he's in the spring of life, myself, like you were, I'm in the beginning of winter (I think he knows this).

No: 2125 (12-23-2007)

Spanish Version

El Pequeño Rocco (El Perro) Tercera Carta a mi Madre

Él se tira en el sol de la mañana, el pequeño Rocco (el perro), él me está mirando como si fuera mi hijo, o queriendo serlo; sus ojos tranquilos, marrones, claros. Él es un poquito gordo, su estómago está sobresaliendo, sus orejas se mueven mientras él se tuesta en el sol, él ahora cierra sus ojos, mientras sus orejas espantan a una mosca. El pasto verde es fresco debajo de él yo supongo, con el caliente sol saliente, aquí en las alturas de la sierra, el sol casi está encima de ti. Él ahora se levanta, se esconde bajo un arbusto, todo esto es mucho, demasiado para él. Su vida, mi amada mamá, acaba de empezar, él tiene tres meses de edad. Supongo, que él tiene dos años de edad en nuestro tiempo: él está en la primavera de la vida, yo, como tú lo estabas, estoy en el comienzo del invierno (creo que él conoce esto)

# 2125 (23-Diciembre-2007)

See Dennis' web site: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com