On Being a Dog

There's a very famous New Yorker cartoon in which a dog is sitting in a desk chair at a computer and he is saying to a friend, 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.'  But it is also the case that on the Internet, sometimes you look like a dog even if you don't mean to or really aren't one. 

Today, I got an email from a gentleman who owns one of the abandoned houses in whose images I have made quilts.  He had been given a link to this blog and probably to a post in which I had written about his house and a farmhouse on APA Road, each of which were showing some signs of restoration.  Unfortunately, he took my post to be one of complaint that his property was something of an eyesore because it appeared to be 'abandoned.'  He explained that he had suffered some illness that had seriously slowed him down and had unsuccessfully tried to sell it.  But he wanted to apologize to me for not appearing to be a responsible property owner.

Now I have to say that if someone wrote about my yard (whose lawn is never mowed, e.g.) as a neighborhood embarrassment, or even implied such a thing, I would think that person was a dog and not a good neighbor.  So I am now acutely embarrassed for having anyone think I would say or even think such a thing.  I have written him to assure him that I meant no such thing and that, in fact, I love the way his house looks, even though it looks abandoned.  It is that which is so appealing to me.  Although I know that people own these properties, my conception is that for whatever reason--and life surely offers plenty of reasons for a property in Pt. Roberts no longer to be a home--the owners can no longer exercise the ideal care that makes a house a home and the houses are now their own custodians, doing the best they can under the circumstances.

It is just because Point Roberts has so many 'abandoned houses' that I wanted to draw attention to them and to preserve them as they slid down their own slide, each one in its own way.  They are one of Point Roberts' things of beauty to me: not only because some of them are of historic importance, but because all of them are of 'historic' importance, even if I know the history only of their last years.

I wrote to the gentleman and explained my views and he offered to call me and tell me something of the history of his house.  His misunderstanding of my motives thus results in his helping me to understand what his house has been doing all these past years, including a previous owner who was a nun (perhaps a former nun, insofar as the Catholic Church doesn't usually have nuns living on their own in coastal retirement communities where there is no Catholic Church).  The Internet triumphs!  Even for apparent dogs.