PEPPER OTILIA

I DIDN'T KNOW THIS WOULD BE ON MY MENU

(Above: with Pepper)

As i head to my surgeon’s appointment here in Santa Fe after having shattered my shoulder in Paris nine days ago when i was on my way to Orly but ended up in an emergency room all night before deciding to fly back to America after my six months in Paris and London in order to continue on my pilgrimage with a more prosaic need to heal kneaded into my spiritual one, a threading of the meta with the physical that thrust perhaps some needed sinew into the numinous, numerous wanderings i had laid out before me, i wanted to honor two angelic creatures from my time in New York last week who crossed my path.

The first was Pepper, she of motley origins who has a sturdy magnificence, a blunt beauty born from survival and a refusal of menace even though menace could have been so easily coded into the DNA of her narrative of being an abandoned cur found injured herself and hobbling on a road in the backwoods of Kentucky. The tenacity it took for her to survive has settled not only into her sweetness but also that which swells within others when they are in her presence and even more so when they hear her narrative. She was adopted by a friend and his husband and their two children through an animal rescue service. The other night on my way to Newark Airport to head out here to Santa Fe, I stopped at their apartment in Manhattan after the planned week with which i still engaged as part of my pilgrimage to pick up some luggage i had left there after checking out of the hostel where i often stay in this new simplified life of mine that just got complicated by injury and the inundation of decisions required in its wake. Pepper has always sort of kept a bemused distance from me whenever i visited after barking a wag-less welcome. But the other night she would not leave my side and wherever i sat she would come and gently rest her head upon my foot; i felt a connection to her that itself was a kneading of needing. At one point she looked up at me, her eyes more canny than canine in their capacity to understand human suffering without being human, the kind of empathy from which religious myths are made. And then she let out the sigh i had been waiting to release myself where it had been lodged inside me as if it were the last softened remnant of the scream that came from me that alerted my body of its impending impact at the bottom of the steep Paris Metro steps when it fell silent as i blacked out - for what is a sigh but a growl grown weary, a shared shred of sound that we beasts with bodies make.

“She understands,” i told my friend as Pepper again nestled atop my foot. “She knows i need to heal. She’s helping me do it.

“You do know that she has a steel rod in her leg where it was broken,” he said

i didn’t.

(Above: with Otilia)

Earlier that morning, i was the first customer at Coffee Project on Seventh Avenue between 19th and 20th when it opened at 8:30. i was settling into my favored corner table when i noticed a second customer arrive. As i was struggling with my one good arm to retrieve my computer from my backpack, the other customer came over to help me then asked, “Shoulder?” i told her a bit of the saga i have now written about in these last two Substack columns. She then told me her name - Otilia - and that she had broken her shoulder once and had it reconstructed and that it took about six months to get back to a semblance of normal.

i told her my name and asked about her cane. “After my shoulder healed i had another awful fall and basically fractured and broke this whole side of my body. i was out for a long time after that fall and didn’t want to come to, didn’t want to come back. I believe in God - deeply believe - and He brought me back because He is not through with me.”

i then told her about my spiritual pilgrimage and how i believed we had been placed in each other’s path that morning.

“i live on 22nd,” she told me. “And i have never been inside this place. i always walk right by it. But it was the oddest thing. i woke up wanting to walk in here today. Felt led to do it. And then i saw you and understood. God wanted me to make you understand you’re going to be okay. You’ll get through the pain. You are going to be all right.”

“You’re an angel,” i said.

She laughed. “i don’t know about that,” she said. “But i am a messenger. I am here to tell you it is possible to heal.”

And then she gave me her AOL address to reach out to her if i ever needed, well, a shoulder.

A hobbled dog who healed and heals. A hobbled human who did and does. A hobbled hope that felt healed by them. i always thought the healing would begin after the surgery but it began before it with a wag-less sigh and a wingless angel.

Onward.

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(note: with my writing now by pecking at the computer keyboard with one finger of my left hand, i have forgone capitalizing the first-person i)