His Name is Dexter.

Thank you. We re-did the election yesterday and came up with a vastly better result than Donald Trump. You named the new puppy on my block in Washington D.C. It was a close vote, but “Dexter” won over Jesse, Norman and Walter.

Dexter is eight weeks old and he will be a fine, strong dog.

I think we are judged as a society by how we treat the most vulnerable among us. Humanity unites us. Cruelty, as we have come to understand, divides us. Dexter is going to be a happy fella. He has a loving couple taking care of him, and that’s all he needs. It’s all we all need — I hope.

On the weekend I asked you to tell us the worst thing you have personally gone through, and the results have been so heartbreaking I don’t really want to subject you all to them. I do believe we are in a time of national mourning, and we are in for a terrible four years. Thank you for sharing your pain: not just over the election, but other personal tragedies. I don’t know what I was thinking when I asked for this, but I am making a judgment here, and deciding to spare you from it.

Let me just publish this one, from a reader, because it is so simple and eloquent:

“The worst? Thing? That happened to me? Recently? Women electing a rapist, and people of color electing a white supremacist into the most powerful position on Earth.”

Yeah. Nailed it.

The Washington Post carried this story this week, about a part of Northeast D.C. called Kingman Park. It’s the area around RFK Stadium. The story said that in all of Washington, in the entire breadth of the city, this neighborhood was the one that moved most dramatically from being strongly Democratic to … Trump. It’s still Democratic, but much less so. It is the neighborhood in which I live.

This is an aggressively integrated neighborhood, roughly half Black and half White. I really like my neighbors. A lot of us feed stray cats, because it is the right thing to do. I once wrote this story about a guy in my neighborhood named Buster, because it embodies who we are. I wrote it for a national audience:

The mayor of my town is dead.  He died last month. His given name was Sherman M. Bodner Jr. but everyone called him by his nickname,  Buster.  I loved him, but Buster was a piece of work. 

I live in Washington D.C., which already has its own duly elected mayor, but like most big cities, Washington is also an amalgam of neighborhoods – towns, really – each with a distinctive name and personality. Some sound reassuringly like towns (“Tenleytown,” for example) but others don’t, except in ironic and / or entertainingly revealing ways.   “Adams Morgan” is a funky, seedy enclave, filled with jubilant self-awareness, so, of course, the center of its soul and of its throbbing, steamy nightlife Is a bar and restaurant roguishly named “Madam’s Organ.”  Another neighborhood – “Friendship Heights” – is a gentrified, segregated, snooty, bloated-mortgage area that is the precise opposite of the heights of friendship.  Likewise, my neighborhood, Kingman Park, is not kingly or even princely.   It was once known principally for  its proximity to the city dump. Kingman Park was built up from excrement, and it needed the genius of civil-design experts to turn it turn it into something even vaguely habitable, and so it was named for its savior, a man named Kingman, who had been the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Not classy. 

That is where Mayor Buster came in.  He was never elected to his position but was universally recognized as our chief municipal authority – the title was his, by acclamation -- because he embodied Kingman Park, which thumbs its nose at the larger, far more pompous city in which it squats.   What he represented, more than anything else, was a lack of pretension, a lack that Washington needs the most.  Other cities – Salt Lake, for example – do not have this need.

My city owes its fame to metonymy, which is the phenomenon that occurs when one word or phrase comes to signal a greater and grander principle than itself.   The most common literary example of this is in the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,”  in which “pen” signifies writing and “sword” signifies brute power. This line was written by the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, forever infamous for the start of an unfairly maligned, perfectly serviceable opening line to one of his books: “It was a dark and stormy night….”  Bulwer-Lytton, a man of no meager talent and accomplishment,  was cruelly misunderstood, as was Buster, who lived his life, and gave his life, for the liberation from self-importance.  Buster  lived in Washington, D.C, and died in love with it, and in defiance of it, much like Socrates, in Athens.  But I don’t wish to overstate.   

Very few cities achieve metonymy.   The only ones I can think of are “Detroit,” which is  taken to mean “the American automotive industry” and “Paris,” which means “the global fashion industry” and a few politically mighty world capitals, including, Washington, which embodies the government, and full power, of the United States of America, the entirely of this country’s illustrious history, including a man on the moon, the cure for polio, defeat of the Nazis, so forth.  If you live in Washington, you have pretension.  

Bulwer-Lytton also coined the expression “the great unwashed” to designate the unfairly maligned multitudes.  He was not an elitist. His point was that the masses can be oppressed  only so much, and then they revolt and defy.  Three hundred years before Buster, he was referring to Buster.

Buster was a hobo.  He lived on the streets, and he lived entirely through his guile. 

Everyone in the neighborhood assumed Buster had no fixed address, though I know he did. It was across the street from me, an address that I will not enunciate here, in his respect.   The first time I met him, about seven years ago, he introduced himself and asked – believe me, I am not making any of this up – what was for dinner.  As I recall, it was chicken livers, and we had plenty, with much to spare.  I grew up Jewish.  You make extra. Mine featured onions and croutons and mushrooms.   Buster consumed a great deal of it, and then – wordlessly -- departed. 

Buster embodied the hobo spirit and if you are younger than, say, 100, this might seem odd – he never really asked for anything unless he offered something in return.  He didn’t have much, but he gave what he had.  I once paid for surgery he needed – a couple of thousand dollars – and he repaid my girlfriend and me by delivering hot meals to our doorstep for weeks.   He never stayed around for the meal ; we understood why. We had an understanding and it did not include a requirement of repayment or gratitude.  We kept no tallies.

This is a complicated neighborhood.  I love it, but it is not easy to comprehend.  The architecture of the area is of negligible beauty, except for one thing.  Once every two years or or so, beneath a tree, a makeshift shrine will  appear, in honor of a neighbor who died of a gunshot. It will be surrounded by empty bottles of liquor, consumed together, and left in tribute.  There is one just a block from my house right now, to a guy nicknamed Juice.  Every day, on his birthday, there is a toast and bottles.  No one ever removes them. 

So there are tensions, complicated ones.  Buster breached them, to the point that he eliminated them.  He was embraced by my neighbor Beulah and also my neighbor Jenny.  And, also, by me. I am not going to tell you what color Buster was, because that is sort of the point.

Buster died, as he lived, owing nothing to anyone. More than anyone I have ever known he lived life on his own terms. Most of us don’t.  We tolerate people we don’t really like, we toil at jobs we don’t really love, because life Is compromise.  We make accommodations with ourselves.  Buster never did.   He promenaded on the strength of his character and likability.

He died of a lung and heart disease.  It came on suddenly, and my girlfriend and I got him to the doctor, but there was nothing to be done.  As he died, she kissed him on his nose.  He’d always hated that, but always tolerated it.  He was such a good boy,

The meals he’d left for us were newly dead rats. Uneaten, but appreciated.  He was “Sherman Bodner’ because that was the name of my best friend in college, who was my co-editor at the daily newspaper at NYU in the 1970s.  One  night, after putting the paper to bed at 2 am, quite unacceptably pickled, I dashed an entire glass of Michelob in Sherman's face, and told him, “You stink of beer.”  A guy can react a lot of ways to that but Sherman just laughed.   He became a newspaper publisher.  I became a newspaper writer.  Life is compromise.  He’s still my bud.

Buster's spirit lives with me, still.  He taught me things I will never forget. 

In a few days, Buster’s headstone will arrive from a place that specializes in making things like that. It’ll be carved out of a stone, and his ashes will be buried in our front yard, underneath it, with the headstone facing outward.  Buster didn’t belong to us.  He belonged to the neighborhood.  It will be inscribed: “Here Lies Buster, 2009-2022, the Mayor of Kingman Park, and One Damn Fine Cat.”

—

So that was the story of Buster. This is the continuing story of Kingman Park:

Just yesterday police arrived at the house next door to me, to resolve a loud domestic dispute. People are in agony here, a new agony, but they are also deeply divided, more so than ever before, I think. How there can be such a divide over such a simple issue I do not know. Pundits are asking the questions, and propounding theories, but I think the pundits are full of shit. I’m not sure we really know what is going on, but it is ugly as hell.

Hate has oozed in to this neighborhood, and the country as a whole. I don’t get it. I’m not sure any of us do.

—

Okay, then. That’s it for today. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll is not about politics:

Addendum: I never actually buried Buster; his ashes are still in a box in the basement because difficult logistics intervened. I’m ordering the headstone today, though. A monument to better times and hopes for the future. And to little Dexter, for a long and happy life.