c h a p ter sevent een

A Fall

O ne Thursday afternoon, in mid-January 2023, in the quiet neigh-

borhood near Salem, Massachusetts, where my husband has a little
place where we hang out when we spend time with my wonderful step-
son, I foolishly decided to go for a run with our new puppy.
After we had mourned Mushroom for six months, we realized we
could not manage without another little dog, and we found a new crea-
ture to bring furry mischief into our home, in the guise of little Loki.
Loki is now ten months old. He is a “Shi-Poo”—a shih tzu–poodle
mix, an adorable combination.
Loki is very different from the much-mourned Mushroom. Where the
late Mushroom was, certainly in his elder years, a judgmental, eccentric
Oscar Wilde character, Loki is all a young Jimmy Stewart; wide-eyed inno-
cence, good intentions, purity of heart.
Brian keeps up a narration of the excited, tolerant inner monologue
of Loki, just as he did with an equally funny, finicky, and censorious inner
monologue for Mushroom. Where Mushroom would gaze at us with
relentless hostility until we broke down psychologically and yielded any
delicious human food in our possession, Loki’s voice is something like: “I
see you guys are having steak tips! I’m having puppy chow! But that’s cool!
I love you!!”
Loki has long hind legs like a rabbit, and he runs like a rabbit—with
joy in motion. I began to run with him—as who could fail to want to share
in that delight? And I made the mistake of using a long extensible leash, as

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he loved to cavort about with all that length. Had I done more research, I
would have known that that was a recipe for an accident.
I was racing with him on the uneven sidewalks of the town, a few
blocks from Brian’s little flat. The next moment, I realized that I was on
my back on the icy sidewalk, in an agony unlike anything I had ever expe-
rienced in my life, and probably screaming.
Worse still, I could see that Loki was about 100 feet further away from
me on the sidewalk, with the leash, fallen out of my hapless grasp, trailing
near him. He was looking back at me in confused concern.
But I was unable to get up, and I realized with horror that I could not
move my left arm or hand at all. Loki could easily wander away and be
lost or hit by a car.
I started shouting, “Help me! Please help me!” I put all my will into
those screams, and I prayed someone would respond before I passed out,
or before I went into shock, which would mean that my puppy would be
in terrible danger.
Amazingly, I soon felt someone kneel by me. A woman had come out
of her nearby home, having heard my screams. She sought to calm me, as
someone else called 911.
“Please get my puppy,” I begged. Miraculously, another woman
appeared, from another house—I believe from across the street. I heard
two voices then gently luring Loki back toward where I lay, and then
my heart was in my throat until one woman was able to seize his leash
handle securely.
“Please tell my husband what happened,” I managed to say between
groans, and I gave that woman our address. Her wife also, I believe, called
911 on my behalf.
Amazingly, this neighbor took Loki three blocks away, accurately
located our address, knocked on our door, gave Loki safely to Brian, and
let him know that I had fallen. Amazingly, too, another neighbor, an older
man, appeared out of nowhere, while all of this was happening, a look of
concern on his face, bearing a pillow and blanket.
The neighbors deliberated about not using the pillow, as they decided
that they should not move me. Meanwhile I felt myself start to sink into
shock—I felt my heart rate slowing, and I grew colder and began to

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tremble. I felt that sense of, “My body and mind can’t take this pain any
longer; I am about to lose consciousness.”
Then the four neighbors, working together, put the blanket gently
over me. The sidewalk was frozen, and my body temperature kept drop-
ping; keeping me warm, I am sure, prevented me from going into shock
or hypothermia, and their decision not to move my head also helped me
avoid further injury.
The first woman who had come out to help me, knelt beside me and
asked about my dog’s breed. She kept chatting with me. This could not have
been pleasant for her, as I was still inarticulate—howling and groaning.
I realized, even in my increasing confusion and agony, that she was
making small talk with me in order to keep me from passing out.
My husband arrived, and the ambulance arrived as well, and
the EMTs wonderfully took over, loaded me excruciatingly onto a
stretcher, and whisked me into the most painful ride of my life. They
cut off my winter coat, so that there were feathers everywhere in the
ambulance interior.
By now I was screaming unreservedly.
“We are in Massachusetts, so there are going to be potholes,” one of
the EMTs explained, and indeed I shrieked aloud with every jolt—he was
not kidding. But they got me quickly and efficiently to the ER, where,
after I underwent agonizing X-rays and MRIs, Brian and I were told by a
cheery ER doc that I had broken my shoulder.
But I was so lucky. I had not lost consciousness. I had not gone into
shock. I had not been left on the wintry sidewalk, my vital signs steadily
dropping till someone finally reacted, perhaps too late.
What I mean to say is that four strangers came out at once into the
freezing street at the sound of a human voice in distress. Four strang-
ers stayed at the uncomfortable, no doubt upsetting scene, prioritizing
a stranger’s and a little pup’s visible risks over whatever else they had
been doing at that moment, and over their own cozy comfort; strangers
patiently lured, then secured, and thus saved the life of my little dog. A
stranger patiently brought him home, and let my husband know I was
hurt. A stranger had held my good hand and talked to me of random
subjects, in freezing temperatures, for quite a long time, so that I would

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not pass out. A stranger had brought me a pillow and a blanket of his own
and put the blanket down for me on the icy, gritty sidewalk.
The decency of these people—who themselves may not have even
known one another—created an instinctive choreography of goodness,
which was lifesaving.
Then, once my dog and I were safe, these strangers melted away, back
into their lives, asking nothing of the moment—not even my thanks. I
don’t even know their names.
These four strangers may indeed have saved my life, or at least kept
me from a much more serious injury. And they certainly saved the life of
my little dog.
Five days later I walked—very carefully, and without Loki—and now
wearing a sling supporting my shattered left shoulder—around the cor-
ner, to see where it all had taken place. There was the ridge in the uneven
sidewalk that I had not noticed as I had been running. There was the place
I’d fallen.
I looked around—these kind people must live nearby, but I literally
don’t know where to find them to thank them.
Our little community showed that it was emotionally and morally
healthy. In a healthy community, humans save each other.
These people had in each one of them a moral compass and a sense
of selfless compassion that led them to act together with such a beautiful,
positive outcome.
That is the society, the community, that sense of unity, we all used to
have—at least as an ideal.
Human communities’ ability to save one another, to save the com-
munity itself, out of values of internalized decency and compassion, is a
resilient, effective, powerful, unstoppable thing.
That is why when others wish to take power from us, they create poli-
cies to keep us apart, unknown to, and in fear of, one another.
That, of course, was the damage that lockdowns sought to do—to
dissolve the communities that allow us to save one another.
I don’t mean to politicize a great blessing I received at the hands of my
neighbors, but I can’t help considering that if, God forbid, this had hap-
pened to us during lockdown—or during some time of global messaging

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about our fellow humans being untouchable, or somehow dangerous to

others—I might have lost consciousness, or frozen to death, and Loki too
surely would have been lost.
And that risk is true for anyone in times and places that treat some
humans as “others”; a person of color injured or fainting in the wrong
neighborhood in the Jim Crow era; someone suspected of being HIV-pos-
itive, if injured or losing consciousness, during the bad old days when we
were asked to shun those with AIDS.
The poet William Butler Yeats’s beautiful lines from “Easter, 1916”
reveal the risk to us of losing compassion:

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part. Our part
To murmur name upon name.1

My neighbors did their human part; they seamlessly together mani-

fested the ancient human miracle of compassion; they saved one of their
own, saved indeed two sentient beings, purely out of kindness.
If we are to survive all of this, we must defy any pronouncements that
seek to make “a stone of the heart.”

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