I'm thrilled to welcome
Guilie Castillo to the blog today and honored to be part of her tour for
The Miracle of Small Things.
Before I get to her post, I also want to congratulate Guilie for winning the Grand Prize in my "Who Roams Here?" game for the Realms Faire. Congratulations, Guilie! And thanks again to everyone who came by here and visited my ghosts and me throughout the week. We all had a great time.
And now I will turn this over to Guilie, who is sharing a post about a subject dear to my heart, dogs and animal rescue.
Can I have a round of
applause, please, for hostess extraordinaire Julie Flanders? Julie, what an
honor to be hosted here at your space. Today is the (sort of) halfway point of the
MIRACLE tour, and this deserves an extra-special post.
The
subject of Al, the 100-lb dog that gets rescued by main character Luis
Villalobos, has come up often on the tour, but as a sideline. I thought it was
time to give Al the spotlight. What better place to do that than here, at a
fellow animal-rescue advocate’s blog?
Al
and his eleven siblings were born behind a shed in the yard of the family his
mother belonged to. The children discovered the puppies a week later. They
weren’t cruel, the children, but they were rough, and their little hands
sometimes grasped too tightly. They laughed when the puppies cried, and the
bigger humans kicked at the mother dog when she tried to protect her babies.
The
puppies went fast. The mother had passed on her regal size and bearing, and her
blue-black coloring, to all twelve; people thought they’d make good breeders.
Here in Curaçao black dogs inspire a special kind of fear (bonus points for
size). Which translates to a tidy side income.
Al
was the last to go. He became very close to his mother. She taught him to hunt
lizards, to cross streets, and to dodge the big male human’s kicks.
Eventually,
another big male human came and took him away in a crate. He felt the scent of
his mother fading along with the sound of her desperate yapping, and knew
helplessness for the first time.
For
days he refused to leave the crate. Different people peered in at him, offered
things that smelled incredibly good, pleaded with him. But there was no
violence, even when he growled. He couldn’t help himself. It was fear, but also
despair. Where is my mother?
But
she, too, faded. And so he forgave, and forgot, and came out of the crate to
discover a dreamland of lawns and soft beds, of endless, delicious food, and a
child that played with him not as a toy but as a friend. And never hurt him.
The
family, in the military, was reposted to Holland. And the dog had to stay
behind.
At
first the neighbors fed him, but then he was forgotten. Hunger drove him to the
streets; he was eight months old, huge but still growing. He hunted lizards,
and remembered his mother. He would go back to her.
He
was big, but not savvy. Gangs of dogs bit and tore and chased him away. He grew
thin, then skinny, then mangy. Ticks infested his ears. Humans threw rocks and
firecrackers, tried to run him over with their cars.
He
lost all sense of direction, and of purpose.
And
so it was that, a year later, he chased an iguana over a wall and into a
chalkstone patio. He almost had her, could almost taste her, when someone
shouted and threw something and he had to escape. He waited, just outside the
wall, and when it was quiet he jumped over again. That iguana would be his
first meal in days. But she was gone. And he had no energy left.
That’s
how Luis found him. Sitting on his patio. A monster of an animal, so rangy his
head looked huge, malformed. But a dog, nonetheless. And Luis, who’s never had
pets (never wanted any, really), will take him in and give him a name: Al,
after Alfred Prufrock. (That’s another story.)
Al’s
story, for all its wretchedness, isn’t unique. In a place like Curaçao, with so
many temporary residents and little culture of animal welfare, abandonment is
our daily bread. It’s such a disconnect for me that so much suffering should
exist in places we tend to think of as “paradise”… How can our paradise be a
hell for others?
Several
organizations are at work to make Curaçao a paradise for humans and animals. These are some of them, in
case you want to check them out (and a follow on Facebook goes a long way):
Are you involved with animal advocacy
in your area? What challenges do you face that you feel are specific to your
community? Do you have a rescued animal at home?
Julie,
thank you so much for your warm hospitality! Al sends his love. (He actually
sent liverwurst treats, which I tried to explain probably wouldn’t mean to you
what they mean to him, but… His heart is in the right place.)
ABOUT
THE MIRACLE OF SMALL THINGS:
Mexican tax lawyer Luis Villalobos is lured to the tiny island of Curaçao
anticipating a fast track to the cusp of an already stellar career. But the
paradise we expect is so rarely the
paradise we find.
ABOUT
GUILIE: A Mexican export who transferred to Curaçao “for six months”—and,
twelve years later, has yet to find a reason to leave. Her work has been
published online
and in print anthologies. THE MIRACLE OF SMALL THINGS is her first book. Find
Guilie on Facebook
and Twitter,
at Quiet
Laughter where she blogs about life and writing, or at Life in Dogs
where she blogs about… well, dogs.
ABOUT
THE TOUR: To celebrate the e-book release, THE MIRACLE OF SMALL THINGS is going
on virtual
tour.
Several blogs are hosting Guilie throughout November to talk about writing, the
book, its island setting and its characters — including a 100-lb. monster dog
rescued from the streets — and some of the issues MIRACLE touches on, such as
the role of large and small things in the realignment of our values, and the
power of place in our definition of self.
