Walking Softly

 

The most popular resident of Oakland's Uptown district is Ballari the dog.

Ballari (Sanskrit for "walking softly") is a Siberian husky who lives with his owner, Sarah Kidder; her roommate, Uriah Duffy; and a black-and-white cat named Enkidu.

Everyone in the neighborhood looks forward to a visit when Sarah takes him on his daily rounds, including the firefighters at Fire Station No. 15; Jori, Justin and Mike at Inkwell Tattoo; Pete Ajemian, owner of Soja Martial Arts; Jeff Lee, co-owner of Oakland Mitsubishi; and the toddlers at Broadway Early Head Start, who jump up and down, wave and call, "Hi, Bell-Bell!" because "Ballari" is still too hard for them to say.

"He's the mascot of 24^th Street," says neighbor Oscar Ayala. "Everyone loves him."

"He's turned this neighborhood into a really warm place," says Sophia Chang, owner of Kitchener, a commercial kitchen for food startups. "We’ve all become much better friends because of him."

One of Ballari's favorite stops is Oakland Mazda, where service advisor Helen Bermudez always has a stash of doggie treats waiting for him.

"He stops first at my colleague Jack Barbieri's desk to get his daily scratches," she says. "Then he marches over to the drawer where I keep my stash and leans his nose against it to tell me it's snack time."

But his favorite stop of all is the trendy restaurant/bar Mua, where he's the center of attention on Friday and Saturday nights,

"He's the biggest chick magnet in town," says bartender Dave Buckner.  "He brings joy to my co-workers, and the customers absolutely adore him. My security guard likes to pretend Ballari is his pet, he loves him so much."

All this is especially gratifying because Ballari was a very different dog when Sarah rescued him a year and a half ago.

He had spent the first six years of his life tied by a rope to a stake in somebody's backyard, completely neglected 24/7.

When Sarah first got him he wouldn't look you in the eye, didn't know how to play, and got confused whenever anyone tried to pet him.

Today, he's a sweet, gentle bundle of love, especially with little kids.

Sarah and Uriah had a lot to do with it, but so did the neighbors, who have watched him come out of his shell and blossom into the charmer he is today.

You've heard people say it takes a village to raise a child? It took a whole neighborhood to heal this dog.

And Ballari has returned the favor. When Sarah moved into the neighborhood three years ago, a cop warned her it was "borderline sketchy."

Not anymore it isn't, because everybody knows each other and watches out for each other. Uptown is like a small town in the middle of Oakland. And Ballari deserves some of the credit.

If this were fiction I'd stop here. But this is real life, and I regret to report that the owner of Sarah's apartment building has decided to move in himself, which means they'll have to find another place to live.

But that doesn't mean Ballari will lose his support system, or that they'll lose him.

"Hey, I still have a car," Sarah says. "We might not be able to get over here every day, but we'll definitely be here every week."

All Creatures Great and Small

(Above: Alan (l), Rick (r) and a happy patient)

Q: Why are veterinarians the best doctors?

A: Because they can't ask the patient, "Where does it hurt?"

It's an old joke, but there's more than a grain of truth in it. And the best vet I know is Dr. Alan Shriro, co-owner (with another great vet, Dr. Rick Benjamin) of Berkeley Dog & Cat Hospital, the oldest veterinary practice in the East Bay.

Berkeley Dog and Cat was founded in 1878 as an unnamed livery stable for Oakland Police and Fire Department horses. In 1907 it changed its mission to small animal practice and assumed its current name.

It's also the Tiffany's of local veterinary practices. It's no accident that some of the finest veterinarians in the Bay Area, including Dr. Gary Richter of Montclair Veterinary Hospital and Dr. Rene Gandolfi of Companion Animal Care Hospital in Castro Valley, got their start there.

Alan and Rick bought the practice from the legendary Dr. Fred Farr in 1976, and I started taking my cats to them a few years later. And they kept all of them alive far longer than I had any right to expect.

Partly it's because Alan is such a brilliant diagnostician. He diagnosed a tumor in my first cat, Eliza, without even seeing her. I happened to run into him at a party, and he asked how she was.

When I said she was meowing a little more than usual, he said, "Hmmmm. Better bring her in. That can be a sign of a thyroid tumor." Sure enough, it was. And because he caught it so early, it was easy to fix.

Best of all, he treats the patient, not the disease. He's guided by what's best for the animal, not what will make an interesting article in a medical journal.

And when the time finally comes to let go, as inevitably it must, he'll look you in the eye and level with you. And then he'll grieve with you afterward.

I've learned many things about animals from Alan, but the most important one is this: Go with the flow. I learned it by watching the way he treats his own pets, especially his late cat, Nigel.

Nigel was the fattest cat I ever met, and I mean obese - 30 lbs. at least.

"But you're a doctor, Alan" I said. "Aren't you afraid he'll get diabetes or a heart attack?"

"I figure it this way," he said. "I can have him absolutely miserable every day for 15 years. Or I can have him a year or two less, with every day a joy. It's a no-brainer."

Nigel died a few years later - of cancer, which meant Alan was right again: Putting him on a diet wouldn't have helped a bit.

Last week, Alan quietly retired without any fanfare. As much as he loved working, he's discovering how much fun it is to hang out with his wife Lorna, indulge his twin hobbies – skin diving and underwater photography – and play with the love of his life, his little granddaughter Flora.

But for me, it's the end of an era. I can never thank him enough for everything he's done for me, especially the kindness he showed me last spring when my cat Phoebe was dying. But let me say it anyway: Thank you, Alan.

Big Sisters

            (Above: Kaia and part of her fan club)

Kaia Block Shepard of Richmond is a lucky little girl.

Her dad, Darren Shepard, is a marriage and family therapist intern. Her mom, Karen Block, is the former director of the Children's Theater program at Children's Fairyland in Oakland. She's the center of their world and the light of their lives.

And to top it off, Kaia, who is 20 months old, has a whole slew of surrogate big sisters who adore her. They're the kids who were in the program when her mom was running it. Now they're her babysitters.

I talked with five of them: Katie Roy, a sophomore at Merritt College; Alyssa Houston, a freshman at the University of Hawaii; and the Love sisters – Ana, a junior at Cal Poly; Alli, a senior at Oakland Tech; and Katie, a sophomore at Oakland Tech. And they all love Kaia to pieces.

"I have a whole album of pictures of her on my phone that I show to people all the time because she's so cute," says Alyssa. "She's just a little ball of joy."

And Kaia returns the sentiment. When Alyssa was back home over Christmas break, Karen drove Kaia to Fairyland for a reunion, and Kaia kept chanting, "Alyssa! Alyssa! Alyssa!" all the way to the park.

The girls – now young women – are also grateful to Fairyland, especially the Children's Theater program, for the difference it made in their lives.

"So much of what I am today goes back to Fairyland," says Ana. "It gave me the confidence to be who I am."

"It allowed me to imagine and believe, and without that I would not have the motivation I now have to go into teaching," says Katie Roy.

Every year, Fairyland chooses 30 kids ages 8 to 10, both boys and girls, for the Children's Theater program.

They perform fairy tales at Fairyland's Aesop's Playhouse, greet visitors to the park ("Hi. I'm Snow White. Welcome to Children's Fairyland.") and serve as Fairyland's ambassadors to the outside world by marching in the Oakland Holiday Parade and the Piedmont July 4^th Parade.

"They always warned us to watch our step when we walked behind the horses," recalls Katie Love.

"But my favorite thing was the jobs you got to do between rehearsals and on your lunch breaks," says Allyssa. "Some of us helped feed the animals in the Corral, some of us painted flowers on the little kids' faces, and some of us volunteered at the puppet shows to make sure the little kids didn't cross the Magic Pink Line in front of the stage."

Why?

"We told them that if they got too close, the puppets would get scared and run off the stage, but the real reason was if they got any closer they'd be able to see the strings."

And that, to me, is the heart of the Children's Theater program: Big kids being nice to little kids.

"We just treated them the way Karen treated us," says Alli.

Fairyland will hold auditions for this year's Children's Theater program on Jan. 26 and 27. You can register online at www.fairyland.org, and call 510-452-2259 for more information.

Your child will learn a lot of performing skills. But more importantly, he or she will be entering a culture where it's cool to be kind.

Lift Every Voice and Sing

As we look forward to another Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and prepare to inaugurate our first African American president to a second term, I'd like to talk about the Civil Rights Movement and what it meant to my generation.

It was the inspiration for everything that followed, including the Latino, Asian, peace, women's, student, environmental and LGBT movements.

Our country is immeasurably better for all of them, but the Civil Rights Movement was the most important of all because it tackled America's original sin – the sin of slavery and its successor under a different name, Jim Crow.

Unlike other immigrants, Africans didn't come here looking for freedom or opportunity. They were kidnapped and transported here in slave ships.

As many as half died during the voyage, but the slavers still made a handsome profit. And if there was a storm, so much the better: They could simply toss the slaves overboard and get full reimbursement from the insurance companies for their lost "cargo."

Here in America, the slaves were at their master's mercy. If he wanted to rape them, kill them or sell their children, he could. And the government would back him up.

That was supposed to end with the Civil War, but it didn't. Historians like to say that the North won the war but the South won the peace.

When I was a kid in the 1950s segregation was the law of the land, and not just in the South, either.  Even liberal Berkeley didn't desegregate its schools until 1968.

But it was worst in the South. Working hand-in-hand with the elected authorities, the Ku Klux Klan was conducting a reign of terror against any African Americans who had the temerity to ask for their rights.

But, as Dr. King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. With no weapons to counter the KKK's armed terror, the brave pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement turned to the only tools they had: marches, sit-ins and anything else they could think of to hold a mirror up to the country and force the American people to watch what was being done in their name.

There was a terrible cost: beatings, bombings, arsons and countless murders. And instead of going after the Klan, the FBI went after Dr. King, even trying to drive him to suicide by threatening to reveal evidence of his extra-marital affairs.

But, like the early Christians, the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. On election night 2008, 40 years after Dr. King died, Barack Obama was elected our first African American president. And I cried tears of joy.

"I can't help it," I explained. "I've waited so long for this (expletive deleted) to be over."

I was ridiculously naive, of course. The hateful reaction to Obama's presidency over the last four years shows that racism is very much alive in America.

But he still won in spite of it. And that means racism might still be alive but it's far from well, especially among the younger generation.

So God bless Martin Luther King's memory. He not only made life better for African Americans, he made my life better, too.

Thanks, Dr. King.

Have A Nice Day

In a New Year's tradition that goes back to 1976, the Unicorn Hunters, a group of language conservationists at Lake Superior State University in Michigan, have released their annual List of Words Banished From the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.

And the number one banished word of 2012 is - slight drum roll, please - "Amazing!"

"LSSU was surprised at the number of nominations this year for 'amazing' and surprised to find that it hadn't been included on the list in the past," say the Unicorn Hunters. "It seemed to bother people everywhere, as nominations were sent from around the US and Canada and some from overseas, including Israel, England and Scotland. A Facebook page – 'Overuse of the Word Amazing' – threatened to change its title to 'Occupy LSSU' if 'amazing' escaped banishment this year."

Coming in a close second was "baby bump," followed by "shared sacrifice," "occupy," "man cave," "the new normal," "pet parent," "win the future," "trickeration," "ginormous" and "thank you in advance." "

The Unicorn Hunters were founded by W.T. "Bill" Rabe, the school's public relations director, as a publicity gimmick to put LSSU on the map. And he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Over the years, the list has been expanded to include such groaners as "more bang for the buck" (1996), "bring the evil-doers to justice" (2002), "don't even go there" (1997), "teachable moment" (2010), "back in the day " (2008), "BFF" (2011), "chill out" (1980), "if ____, then the terrorists win" (2002), "no problem" (1980), "in my humble opinion" (1992), "baddaabing!" (1994), "politically correct" (1994), combined celebrity names such as "Brangelina" (2007), and "your call is very important to us" (1996).

After Rabe retired in 1987 the university, which knew it had a good thing on its hands, copyrighted the name and continued the tradition.

The very first phrase on the very first hit list in 1976 was "Have a nice day."

"It's not that we wish anyone ill," Rabe explained. "But this has become so overused, telephone operators use it even when people call funeral homes."

                                   * * *

Meanwhile, looking for a fun read to gratify your inner techno-geek? Have I got a book for you!

It's "Mad Science: Einstein's Fridge, Dewar's Flask, Mach's Speed, and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries That Made Our World," featuring 365 of the most amusing anecdotes from Wired Magazine's popular "This Day In Tech" column.

The editor and author of many of the entries: San Francisco journalist Randy Alfred.

"Mad Science" ranges chronologically from January 1 (1538: First New Year of the Gregorian Calendar) to December 31 (1938: First breathalyzer test – just in time for New Year's Eve!).

In between are such gems as February 14 (1929: Al Capone uses cutting-edge technology – the Tommy gun – to wipe out the Bugs Moran mob), May 4 (1538: First use of the "@" symbol), August 24 (2006: Pluto demoted from planet status), and September 21 (1982: First use of the smiley-face emoticon).

The earliest entry is April 24, 1184 BCE: Greeks Use Wooden Horse to Defeat Trojans' State-of-The-Art Security.

"'This isn't a book meant to be read all at once from cover to cover," says Alfred. "Ideally, it should be read in short amounts while sitting down in the smallest room in the house."

 

Bashing Teachers

(Above: Madame)

Two weeks after the massacre in Newtown, I still can't stop thinking about the 20 little children who were murdered – or the ones who survived, either.

But today I want to talk about the teachers. Not just those who sacrificed their lives to protect the children in their care, but also the others, who saved hundreds of other kids by following the safety plan drawn up by principal Dawn Hochsprung, who lost her life trying to tackle the shooter.

They locked doors, hid children in closets and cabinets, and desperately did anything they could think of – leading the kids in drawing, coloring or singing softly – to keep them distracted, even as they knew that other children and their own colleagues were dying nearby.

Teachers deserve all the praise that's being heaped on them today. But how soon will it be before we go back to insulting them, paying them peanuts, slashing their pensions and benefits, crushing their unions, cutting their school budgets so they're forced to dig into their own pockets to buy such basic school supplies for their students as pencils and paper, making them teach to standardized tests instead of imbuing the kids with the love of learning, and blaming them for everything that's wrong with the education system?

We claim to love our children; but we pay teachers, who spend more time with our kids each day than we do, less than we pay plumbers. The obvious conclusion: We care more about our toilets than we do about our children.

We entrust our children, who are our very future, to teachers to be educated, nurtured, comforted and socialized. And, as was demonstrated in Newtown, sometimes teachers are even called upon to throw themselves into harm's way to protect them.

They do all this because teaching is a labor of love. (It sure ain't a way to get rich.) And the kids appreciate it, even if we don't.

Let me tell you about a teacher much closer to home named Sarah Wadsworth. She taught French at Petaluma High School, and she was the strictest teacher in the school. She was tough as nails and held the kids to impossibly high standards, and they adored her for it.

As my young friend Lesley, now a junior at Cal, put it, "You always made sure you did your French homework before you did anything else."

"Madame," as the kids called her, was constantly on their case for dressing like grunges. She herself was always turned out perfectly, like a typical Frenchwoman. A familiar sound in the hallways was the click-clack of her high heels.

Last Feb. 1 Madame died suddenly and unexpectedly from a brain aneurism. She was only 51.

The next day, all her students showed up at school dressed to the nines, including high heels. And they all took new names.

Lesley's younger sister, Sierra, a senior, is now calling herself Eponine, after a character in "Les Miserables." All her friends have taken similar monikers.

And they plan to dress the way Madame would have wanted them to next Feb. 1, the anniversary of her death, and turn it into an annual tradition.

I can't think of a lovelier tribute – or a better demonstration of the difference a great teacher can make in so many young lives.

Tragedy In Connecticut

Charlotte Bacon, 6.

Daniel Barden, 7.

Olivia Engel, 6.

Josephine Gay, 7.

Ana Marquez-Greene, 6.

Dylan Hockley, 6.

Madeleine Hsu, 6.

Catherine Hubbard, 6.

Chase Kowalski, 7.

Jesse Lewis, 6.

James Mattioli, 6. 

Grace McDonnell, 7. 

Emilie Parker, 6. 

Jack Pinto, 6. 

Noah Pozner, 6. 

Caroline Previdi, 6. 

Jessica Rekos, 6. 

Avielle Richman, 6.

Benjamin Wheeler, 6. 

Allison Wyatt, 6.

Rachel Davino, 29
Dawn Hochsprung, 47
Anne Marie Murphy, 52
Lauren Rousseau, 30
Mary Sherlach, 56
Victoria Soto, 27

 I want you to read their names one last time before we forget them forever, as we surely will. Within a few weeks we'll have moved on to more important things, like Lindsay Lohan, the Kardashian sisters and the NFL playoffs. And all the brave talk about finally doing something to curb the proliferation of guns and the glorification of violence in our culture will be swept away like New Year's Eve confetti on New Year's Day.

Until the next time. Then we'll repeat the charade all over again.

Do I sound angry? It's because I am. Angry at the shooter, of course. And his mother, too. She knew she had a troubled kid on her hands, so what did she do? Instead of taking him to a psychiatrist, she took him to the shooting range. Great parenting, mom.

But I'm also angry at you. And me. We keep allowing these things to happen. We elect politicians who are scared to death of the gun lobby, and then we wonder why they do nothing except mouth pious words about this not being the right time to talk politics. (Translation: Let's put off the discussion until memories fade and people don't care anymore.)

I've been watching this dance going on since President Kennedy's assassination almost 50 years ago. You'd think that would have been enough to convince people that we were on a slippery slope, but it wasn't.

Neither were all the tragedies that followed, including the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the attempted assassination of President Reagan, the massacre at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the shootings at Gabby Giffords' town hall in Tucson, or the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. or the shopping mall in Oregon or Virginia Tech. The pattern was always the same: a lot of breast-beating in the immediate aftermath, followed by business as usual.

If anything, the trend is going the other way. The night before the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Republican governor of Michigan signed a new law making it OK to bring concealed weapons to schools, churches and day care centers, and other Republican-dominated states are poised to do the same thing.

As for President Obama, he talked a good game during the 2008 election, but the only gun legislation he's signed in the last four years is one making it OK to bring concealed weapons into the national parks, although his speech at the prayer vigil Sunday night gives hope for improvement.

So spare me the teddy bears and the balloons and the  flowers. Spare me the prayers and the solemn vows. I'll believe we're serious when we actually do something, not before.

Think I'm being too cynical? OK, prove me wrong.

Please.