No-kill shelter

Two days ago, our beloved cat Shadow started stumbling around in circles, head turned to one side. We spent a small fortune on the vet only to be told we'd have to spend thousands more to learn what's "really" wrong with him. Finding out would cost an additional $5,000. Alas, the poor creature had become inconvenient and I, selfish wretch that I am, considered putting him down-- but my son won't hear of it. "You wouldn't do that to a relative,would you?", he asked. So we're nursing the animal, medicating him, hand-feeding him, and changing his pads when he soils them. We try to give him physical therapy. We've become a regular no-kill animal shelter.At 16,he's a brave little soul, obviously fighting for his life. He's alert, he eats, seems to have a fair amount of strength, and is slowly regaining his sense of balance and direction. We're hoping for the best, but he's not our only problem. These days,I'm dealing with the same kind of end-of-life scenarios I went through with my parents 20 years ago, and my grandparents before that. Only now it's my own generation's turn to get sick and die, and I'm just hoping I'll live long enough to help out contemporaries in dire need. A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. My older brother had suffered a stroke, and they were searching for his relatives. He is suffering from dementia and we still don't know whether he'll be able to return home or have to go into long-term care. His next of kin is his husband, who himself had suffered a stroke a few years ago and can barely communicate. My brother had been his caretaker, now both men are adrift, incapacitated. Now I have two brothers to worry about. It saddens me to remember what full and happy lives they've led, and I have to wonder what God would want them reduced to their present state.My younger brother, my son and I flew down to Atlanta to see how we could help. Atlanta, which I hadn't visited in decades, turned out to be an unpleasant surprise, a third world shithole of a city with ugly corporate architecture, kamikaze drivers and the smell of menthol cigarrettes everywhere. There are vagrants all over the place, they live in tents on median strips within major highways. Nothing works as it should. Nobody comes to the phone, returns calls or gives out information--not even direct numbers.They make you go through switchboards that invariably put you on hold. The ubiquitous recordings tell you to leave a message and expect a callback in 3 o 4 days.Maybe. (It's not a "Southern" thing, either. We're also dealing with Miami on an estate issue, and everyone there seems to be on their game.We ordered some legal documents from North Carolina, and actually got them within a few short days.)

Once in Atlanta, in a darkened little house, we sifted through the wreckage of lives that had been descending into squalor for years,without our realizing it (we had all been estranged when we had to regroup as a family and rush to the rescue). I think that things started falling apart when both men began to have health problems. Now there was filth, clutter, unpaid bills

and overgrown weeds everywhere. Their poor dog had a skin infection and was not being walked, so she had defecated throughout the house.I tried turning the dog over to Animal Rescue, but my brother in law refused to give her up, and in Georgia,go figure, you can't rescue abused animals without permission from the abuser (whereas in New York, abused animals can take their abusers to court).We cleaned up,took the dog to the vet, and are now looking into legal and financial issues.Almost miraculously, a squad of Good Samaritans has emerged to help us out. We're daily in touch with a group of well-meaning friends and neighbors who take turns checking up on my brother in law and the dog. The dog's still not being walked, but she's let out in the evenings and makes her bathroom run of the neighborhood before returning home. Nobody interferes with her. Some of these neighbors didn't even know my brother and his husband before all of this happened. Meanwhile, my brother languishes in rehab, cut off from external contact by Covid precautions within the facility. We check in by phone every day; he appears to be getting better. We're hoping he'll be able to return home. I've decided that now that I'm retired, I can dedicate myself to look out for my brother.I have the time, and it's needed.

Amazingly, I seem to have taken my brother's place with his friends, who speak to me as though they've known me my entire life. It's very moving, I find comfort in their voices and I am perfectly at ease with them, as though they were my old friends, too. All throughout the ordeal, I only cry whenever I speak to my brother and realize he's having a bad day. This is new. I'm ashamed to confess that in my life,I have shed more tears for cats I have lost, than for estranged relatives, including my own mother. Maybe now I'm being given the chance to atone for my intransigence of the past. Maybe this whole episode, with its wonderful cast of characters, has restored my faith in humanity.

Organic Hispanics

(Art by Stacey Torres, Etsy.com) Well, here we are, and it's Hipanic Heritage Month again. Time for ethnic dance troupes to put on their garish costumes and go hopping around in public, while spectators snicker under their breath. Time for Professional Hispanics, non-profit types who profit from government funding as self- proclaimed community leaders, to come out and promote themselves on local news shows. Time to be reminded of Hispanic role models who raise the bar so impossibly high for the rest of us, they might as well not exist. (Sonia Sotomayor? Really?). To me, Hispanic Heritage Month is about underscoring US Latinos' status as Other. People who whites are comfortable with as long as they can laugh at us, our accent or our appearance. As long as they can remind us that we are different. And they will, often. You can be light-skinned, educated and accentless, and some white

person will always greet you with a hearty "HO-LA, A-MI-GA"! Being categorized as "other" means you're not really equal, that you're not allowed to compete on an even footing with people whose gifts you may exceed. It reduces the arena to work related to your ethnicity, so you end up trying to out-Hispanic each other for crumbs off the mainstream table. And then there's capitalism, the drive to turn Latinos into commodities that form a huge consumer market within the US. So there are powerful forces at work keeping US Latinos as "other". Worse,too many Latinos buy into the stereotype. I've found that in New York, if you're not short, dark and manifestly ignorant, other Hispanics look at you askance -- never mind that you can curse in Spanish and shake your ass with the best/worst of them (while also knowing about your literature and history and speaking and writing the language correctly because you didn't learn it second-hand in some ghetto). It's a reverse discrimination of sorts. But we're not all bookies and churro ladies, so deal with it. Somewhere between Carmen Miranda and Cameron Diaz,there are millions of people like me: educated, integrated Hispanics who grew up in the US., who retain their ethnic identity but feel no neeed to flaunt it. They are a "market", too, why won't anyone here see it? While there are plenty of black and brown pundits on English language news TV, I notice a dearth of Latino spokesmen. That's because Latino viewers are supposed to be watching Univision and Telemundo, right? WRONG! Many of us find it boring, embarrassing and, yes, primitive--largely produced in countries that are foreign to us.

That's why I was overjoyed to see Jose Diaz-Balart get his own show on MSNBC this month. Jose, a second generation Cuban exile, is exactly what I'm talking about. He speaks with a trace of an accent. He wears his ethnicity lightly, like a second skin. He comes off as refined, professional. Unlike Black pundits, who take every chance to trumpet their Blackness to guests and viewers, as if it were not obvious, Jose is never heavy-handed in his projection. He treats his Latino guests with understated familiarity,like they're all members of the same, exquisite, secret society. Every now and then, he'll drop in a quick Spanish phrase to underscore this. His presence gives me hope that finally,someone is bothering to go beyond stereotypes in order to appeal to a segment of the public that's been ignored for way too long. Felicidades, Jose.