012 - Actual People - Finding Elijah - Mother's Day Edition

In this special Mother's Day edition of "Actual People," host Chauncey Zalkin shares a real-life story of serendipity and chance encounters in the mom era of her life. 

Three weeks ago, a Saturday morning bagel run turns into an unforeseen adventure when our host and her daughter Sky discover Elijah, a scarred, malnourished, and beautiful older pit bull, wandering the streets in the rain. This episode delves into how they react to Elijah, reflecting on the broader themes of care, compassion, and the complexities of motherhood.

This episode contemplates intuition, personal ethics, and decision trees as well as the day-to-day life of a single mother doing the most.

Mentioned in This Episode:
- "White Collar" - a so-so TV show Chauncey watches with her daughters.
- The role of routine and organization in managing a busy household.
- The emotional and practical aspects of adopting and caring for a rescue dog.
-  John Galliano 
-  Dog Poop

Join us next time on "Actual People" where we continue to explore the powerful narratives that shape creative lives.

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Transcript

  Welcome to Actual People, a podcast hosted by me, Chauncey Zalkin, dedicated to meaningful conversations about the evolving landscape of our lives and the power of our own creativity and imagination to make magic. 

 Welcome to actual people. Mother's Day edition.  So I started drafting this episode a few weeks ago as a heartfelt girl meets dog story. It wasn't a mother's day story. But now it's a bit messier. It's exhausting. It's conflicted. It's filled with joy, but also uncertainty. And honestly, that is what motherhood is like. Even at this very moment, one of my daughters is trying to talk while I record this.  

So here's what happened three weeks ago. It was a gray and chilly spring Saturday. My daughter's sky. And I went out to get bagels and we were on our way home  and it started to drizzle. We are almost at the house when sky yells out, turn around, turn around. There's a dog in the road.   I made a U-turn and there on the side of the road was a brown and white pit bull wearing a choke chain. He, we now know he's a he, was ambling along at a slow trot with his head lowered, looking dejected and confused. He wandered into a yard, which I assumed was his yard, so I pulled into the driveway and I honked a few times, but no one came out and then the dog walks right back out of the yard and onto the street again, and heads towards the busy road. That's when my daughter hopped out of the car and ran ahead of him to guide him away from the road. 

Even though he was a pit bull, there was nothing about his demeanor that felt threatening. He barely seemed to notice my daughter other than to let her lead him back to the sidewalk. As they walked along, I followed in my car slowly. At the next block, she guided the dog toward a side street.  As they walked in front of me, I pulled out my phone and called animal control. I explained the situation and I gave her a location, all that stuff, and they said, don't get too close to the dog. Well, you know, that ship had sailed.  

Of course, I'm wondering to myself, am I making a bad parenting decision here to let my petite daughter be so close to a strange pit bull? I had a fancy little lapdog for 18 years. It was a Japanese chin very much like what you'd see in a 17th or 18th century painting of a lap dog.  I lived in New York neighborhoods with lots of pit bulls that were like status symbols of toughness.  I was always trying to navigate my dog away from those bigger, tougher dogs  I know pit bulls get a bad rap, but there are also quite a lot of incidents of them being aggressive. Anyway, as I trailed my daughter and the dog up the side of the road, a police officer pulled over.  I thought she might've been dispatched by animal control and she thought we'd lost our dog. and wanted to know to know if we needed help. I explained the situation, he wasn't ours, but my daughter wanted to make sure he was okay.

She said, well, why don't you just tell your daughter that I am animal control and that will take care of it so you guys can just go home. I looked at her and her words were a barometer of my feelings about the whole situation.   What she was suggesting was so foreign to me. Both lying to, my daughter and abandoning this dog in the rain.  This is where I started to feel a decision tree was starting to take shape. One, stop for the dog. two. Don't take the suggestion to pretend the dog was saved. And now three.  I'm watching from the car, I call animal control . , I say, hi. .So when you come to get the dog, I want to make sure that he does not go to a kill shelter.  The woman on the other end said, ma'am. They're all kill shelters. So I immediately cancel animal control. I called my neighbor. I asked if she would meet us with a dog leash. She shows up a few minutes later. We easily attach that leash to the choke chain. No amount of bagel pieces though, would get him into the back of my Outback. I later learned it was because he's old and he's arthritic and he can't jump up into a car. He tried. And I learned the hard way cause he fell on his back. So at this point,  He's not jumping into the car. My daughter walks him back to the house and I follow alongside. It's just a few minutes up the road.  And I'm still feeling nervous about the whole thing. But I know this is the right thing to do. So now at this point, we take him into the house. We load up laundry baskets, toy bins, the microwave, and whatever else we can find to barricade him into the breakfast room which is surrounded by windows. 

It's a pretty little room in the back of the house.  We put chair cushions and towels on the floor. My daughter dried him off with towels.  We put out a huge bowl of ice water and we gave him some  food and he  inhaled that and just crashed. I watched him as he slept.  It was like that deep sleep that you only have after a 20 hour flight, you're just. dead tired. He was sleeping so peacefully and so soundly. But he was also shivering. So I covered him with a handmade Scottish blanket that I had bought in Northern England when I was pregnant with my girls.  When I draped it over the dog, the shivering stopped. 

Decision number four, naming the dog. It happened to be Passover and we were invited to dinner at my cousin's house.  On the way over there, I thought, let's call him Elijah.  Elijah was the prophet invited to passover feasts.  He was a symbol of hope and redemption.  

I said to the girls, let's just call him that, you know, temporarily. The next day, I took him to the vet where I found out he wasn't chipped and he wasn't neutered.  The vet said he had an enlarged prostate, and  he was malnourished. She wanted me to do all the shots, all the things, but I couldn't spend hundreds of dollars on a dog I found the day before, I'm just in no position to do that. So I said, okay, let's just take this one day at a time. I'll get him a rabies shot. And we'll take a heartworm pill. 

On the way home, we had to stop by the store anyway, and at that store, there was a bed on sell for $29. One of those  huge beds  perfect for a dog like Elijah.  I reason we could just reuse it in the future, whether he stayed with us or not, it wasn't a bad thing to have.

So I got the bed and I got a flea color. This felt like step number five and a narrative toward dog ownership. But this is not a clear cut story. We have two cats and a dog who are not so pleased with this whole dog serendipity thing. One particularly bad day, I thought I just couldn't take it. How can I be on the top of a pyramid as the only caretaking adult of two kids, two dogs and two cats running a podcast while trying to build up a business in an uncertain time.  I went to the shelter just as a fact finding mission.  I said, okay. 

I have to at least go. Cause I'd been told that if you left the dog for five days and no one reclaimed it, then I can come and adopt the dog and I could pay a lower price for chipping in the neutering and all of the tests. The whole way to the shelter with my kids in the backseat, I felt like I had a  stone in my stomach but I told myself, this is just a fact finding mission. And I just want to see if this is the right way to  📍 go. 

When I got to the shelter, they told me they were near capacity and that there were no guarantees that the dog would not get euthanized since I was not the original owner. So we  made an about face. We all piled back into the car and went to a pet store on the way home. At the very least Elijah should have a proper collar and a leash when that was comfortable and dignified.   I ditched,  the choke chain and I got him an iridescent, cranberry colored, nylon color, and matching leash, more food, and a few bully sticks. 

That was a definite step six. And I knew it, but it just couldn't be any other way.  

 That following Saturday. We took them to another pet store and we paid to give him a bath and on our way out, we stopped by the counter and saw that they had that little machine where you can make ID tags. So I said, okay, it's only $14. We made him an Elijah ID tag and it sits right next to his rabies tag on his new collar.  

And then I met a woman through my cousin. Who's on the board of the county shelter. She also happens to foster pit bulls and she connected me to an organization where you can apply to get a $40 voucher. It's an organization called pit stop. So I did that and we got approved and Tuesday. Elijah has an appointment to get neutered, chipped and vaccinated.

. In the meantime though, Elijah has been barking when we don't want to play. Usually when we are all sitting down to watch TV on the big screen. Usually  we're all utterly exhausted and need to just be quiet with blankets and pillows and each other.  That's when the loud barking begins, which gets my other dog barking too. 

And a few nights ago something happened. , but let me first back up.   In another era of my life, I lived in cities.  New York, Paris Barcelona.  I was always swept along by serendipity and chance encounters,  almost every day in New York. Also in Paris and Barcelona. But a little less, so, but as soon as I say this, I think about this time when I went out with a bunch of students from a clown school and went home, singing loud with my headphones late at night, all the way from Canal Saint Martin to my apartment in the Marais.  I was overcome that night with a sense of independence and freedom.  Also in Paris, we'd go to a place  called La Perle. It was very close to where I lived  it's also the place where John Galliano famously ruined his career with anti-Semitic remarks. We'd go there and then we'd go to this great after hours spot that looked like any other little cafe on a corner, but where locals, old timers and all kinds of interesting people would show up when La Perle would close.

Before all this motherhood stuff, before single motherhood, before marriage, before cohabitating.  Every day, there were chance encounters. Life was full of serendipity and dramas of all kinds. 

 And now not so much routine is the backbone of my life. Each morning begins  writing for about 20 to 60 minutes, followed by preparing my kids, lunches, water snacks, and getting them off to school. Then it's back to my desk to grind away at some form of content creation until I go, okay, I have to stop doing this creative work and I have to start going about the business of doing the things that make me money in a more direct way. I send off emails. And then in the afternoon I have zoom calls and I record this podcast until it's time to go pick up the girls .  Somewhere in there, there might be a yoga class or a walk around the lake. but  the day is short.  

Before I know it. I go pick up the girls and they immediately play outside with other kids if they're not  an afterschool activity.  So I go back to my desk until I pry myself away to go make dinner, which is usually way too elaborate. Through all this,  I am just spent, we often watch a TV show while we're eating together. Don't judge me for this.  We spend so much time talking, weeding together, doing crafts. That   in our schedule, it feels completely fine for us to watch TV during dinner.  When I grew up, that was an absolute no-no, but I spend a lot of time with my kids. and we eat really fresh home cooked meals, at least six nights a week. So we watch a show whenever we find one we can watch together.  And right now it's this bromance FBI procedural called white collar, which is predictable and completely implausible, but Hey, there are only a handful of TV shows that I can watch with my 10 year olds that are not seeped in sex and violence and this is one of them.  

Other shows we've watched as a trio are ghosts, which is very clever, actually not dead yet about an obituary writer and starring Gina Rodriguez whose face I just love to watch, but the show has been canceled, it was never that great. Home economics, which was really great, but it's also canceled and of course, avid elementary. And so right now it's white collar, which is really a show centered around how handsome the main character is. Like really, there's nothing else going for the show,  except for blue eyes and a crinkly smile. But anyway, by the time we finished dinner and I've gotten them to load the dishwasher while I clean the counters and sweep the floor. It's amazing the mess that has made in one single day with twin 10 year olds. I am so exhausted that I delay putting them to bed because I need to rest. On the couch before repeating over and over, brush your teeth, put on your Pjs.   Recently , , I'm working on adjusting my schedule to try to end work an hour before they get home so I have 30 minutes to get my bearings in the house before collecting the kids. The idea is I do a little housework. I meditate,   this  process is a little by little. I already moved from waking up at six 15 to 5 45. For example, the aim is to get to 5:00 AM.  Incremental change. But  the more quiet time I have to write and work the better.  

Routine order organization. 

It's almost a religion in my life. If my house is clean and neat, I feel in control. The days after the housekeeper come are almost sublime. That phrase cleanliness is close to godliness makes just so much sense. So this is all really a long way to say in my mom era, living in a small city, living a life governed by balancing creativity and time with my beautiful children and earning money and keeping the house clean and planning affordable vacations. 

There are not a lot of surprises. In fact, I don't think moms really want a lot of surprises in the crazy world that we live in, stasis is good.  Stability is good. Let's just keep things running smoothly and create safety and security. That is job number one... 

So back to Elijah, the pit bull. We're living with Elijah and he's absolutely irresistible. He's this big oafish dog that tramples on us and. digs into us with his big claws when he tries to sit on our lap, like a lap dog. He's got those little ears, that point straight up and then flop over and he doesn't really know how to play catch, but he definitely tries. 

And I found out that he can both sit and give me a paw,  there was someone out there that loved him at some point. . Every day, I think about a possible alternative to the narrative of Elijah.  But it isn't easy. The barking isn't easy. The pending expenses, vet bills in my future, it slows everything down.  Every day, I'm just not sure. And every day I don't want him to leave.  

So one night. I've gotten my kids off to bed, I've stepped over the Squashmallows .   I've given them both kisses and back rubs. I can hear the washing machine  the dryer, and  the dishwasher's  all humming along the lights are off, the simplest save alarm is on.  , the light is off in my room and I go into my bathroom and I brush my teeth and wash my face and I'm walking to my bed, and I take two steps. before I feel a warm, wet gush of ooze.  

The recognition is immediate. 

Dog shit. 

New dog dog shit. 

I hop one more step and sit on the edge of my bed, holding out my poop covered bare foot.  And I just take a breath. and I get back up and I get to the business of multiple Lysol wipes, dish soap, disinfectant, taking the trash out of the house, washing the foot again. Washing the foot 13 more times. opening up the window to make sure there's no residual poop smell that I'll be inhaling through the night.  

This is a far cry from dancing with clown school students, or going to Parisian, nightclubs, listening to daft punk. Or running my trends during fashion week at fashion shows. This is motherhood. This is single motherhood to be specific, which is like motherhood on steroids. And I am at the top of a chain of two kids, two dogs, and two pretty pissed off cats in a very pretty little house in a small mid Atlantic city. And I can't tell you with any certainty  whether or not Elijah is going to be part of our story this time next year.  But I will not let him go to a shelter and I will not  let him go back to the place where he got all of those scars  that encircle his legs or the three slash marks on his nose. 

And I can also tell you that on this mother's day, I'm pretty eager to wrap up this podcast and put my arms around that sweet little senior pit bull that we've found on the side of the road on a drizzly. early spring morning, 20 days ago, and give him  a big kiss. And then go on a bike ride with my kids. And go to another mom's house and have dinner. And just feel the joy of this crazy situation and know that my decision tree will continue to evolve. every day using intuition and love. happy mother's day. 

  You've been listening to Actual People. This show is written, directed, and executive produced by me, your host, Chauncey Zalkin. Show sound designed by Eric Aaron. Click on the link below to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode. And don't forget to leave a review. I'll be sharing my favorites.  You can find our socials and all links to deeper dives into these topics at chaunceyzalkin.

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