'They know what you've done for them'
A MAN SEATED next to me on a crosstown bus told me that when he started feeling really sorry for himself, he'd walk himself straight to the emergency room of the nearest hospital and just sit there, observing, until shame overtook the clammy grip of self-pity, and compassion overtook the punch-in-the-gut of shame.
I remembered that conversation with that New Yorker when, last August, I went too far inward and decided all was woe. Then the more useful thought occurred to me: Get outside yourself, you tedious ninny. So I packed a bag and drove 10 hours to Angel Canyon in Utah.
That's where the country's largest sanctuary for abused and abandoned animals is located, about 1,800 of them at any given time, dogs and cats and birds and horses and goats and rabbits who've been saved from circumstances that were often so appalling, the details were too wrenching for me to hear about.
For several days I was a dust-coated volunteer with big globs of sweat on my shirt, massaging the aching muscles of elderly dogs and taking lonely canine newcomers home with me at night to my motel room.
By the time I got back to L.A., I was a tolerable human being again, rescued from the vulgarity of self-indulgence by animals who themselves had been rescued from the far more profound abyss of cruelty and indifference.
Six years ago I was doing volunteer work for the Heart and Soul Animal Sanctuary in New Mexico, raising money to keep the place going.
Two weeks before Christmas we had a silent auction. About seven or eight young dogs had been brought in by a local shelter, and one looked so depressed, and so beleaguered by the others pouncing her, that I scooped her up and let her sleep on my chest for the rest of the evening. Chooch had severely bowed legs from lack of nutrition, and so I fostered her to try to get her healthy again so she would be adoptable. Her legs eventually straightened and she was eventually adopted -- by me.
I would keep on adopting if I could; I wouldn't even count the number. I've never had a pet who wasn't someone else's castoff, and I've never been more appreciative that they were thrown my way, however heartlessly. But my appreciation for them seems a limp and pallid thing compared to that of any of my pets for me.
Adopted animals "are eternally grateful. They know what you've done for them," one of my vets told me when I asked why Callie, another of my foundlings, practically sang arias in my presence and gave me misty-eyed looks that put me in mind of Nancy Reagan gazing at Ronnie.
