Beginning in the late sixties, Helmut Kentler placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. In a report submitted to the Senate in 1988, Kentler described the program as a “complete success.”
Categories
Dog Bites Childhood
My most vivid memory of the now-famous Dave Portnoy involves running down the side of his house while his family’s dog, which I don’t think was big, barked at and chased me. I remember tears in my eyes. I was probably eleven or twelve years old. We had gone to his house either before or after Pop Warner football practice. That was the last time I ever went to Dave Portnoy’s house.
I remember walking down the hill across from the basketball court with my best friend beside me. We’re maybe ten or twelve years old. A sleek black dog shoots out from a driveway across the street to our left. Without care for my friend, I drop the basketball and streak down the hill. Before my heart beats twice, I am down the hill, across the busy street, and through the fence to (what I somehow imagine) is the safety of the basketball court. I don’t remember what happened behind me, but I know the dog did not attack my friend.
I’m maybe fourteen years old. I have a job washing dishes at a pizza joint within walking distance of my parents’ house. My oldest brother, a pizza-delivery driver, got me the job. Except for the owner, everyone who works there is from the neighborhood. I’ve known all of them (at least by reputation) my whole life.
The walk from work to home takes me past backyards I’ve played hide-and-go-seek in. I know which neighbors don’t mind kids on their property and which ones will yell at you. I’ve lost a good number of toys in these trees. This is my neighborhood and has been for (maybe?) fourteen years.
But for some reason, I don’t know the dog whose owner hasn’t tied it up on a property that doesn’t have a fence around it, nor do I expect the dog to dart from the shadows of those thick bushes like a monster from my nightmares; but my body knows it needs to run.
I decide which closest mother in which closest house will save me, and I run to her. I spent my formative years standing in the back vestibule of her apartment, hovering between the screen door to her backyard and the door to her kitchen, waiting for one of her two sons to come out and play with my brothers and me. Sprinting down the avenue, I hope she’ll be able to answer her front door before this dog, this monster I hadn’t known to be wary of, catches me between its jaws and violently ends my life.
My memory of this terrified sprint begins like a crane shot in a movie. A short, skinny teenaged kid races across the bottom of the frame only to be followed by an athletic dog on the chase. The memory smashes into my first-person perspective as I grab the metal railing at the bottom of my neighbor’s stairs and pivot my direction ninety degrees without losing momentum. I’m up the stairs in a bouncy-camera kind of way, and the camera looks back over my shoulder as the dog clumsily tries to make its cut without the benefit of the railing. Somehow I’ve wedged myself between my neighbor’s metal screen door already, shielding my body from the dog’s sure-to-be-blood-stained fangs. With one hand, I try to turn the black knob on my neighbor’s front door, and with the other, I pull the outer screen door tighter against me. I scream for help and beg at the top of my lungs for the dog to go away. The dog leaps at the door repeatedly. Its nails scrape against the metal; its snout pushes at the screen. The monster barks and barks.
I don’t want to die.
The door opens behind me, and I stumble backward into the front vestibule and into my friends’ mother’s plump body. She catches me before she knows who I am, and then a look of concern and confusion comes over her face as she recognizes me. The dog’s weight against the screen door slams it shut, and the dog barks and barks on the other side of it. I hear its desperate desire to mangle my body.
My friend’s mother looks out at the animal, brushes me aside, opens the door, steps out onto her porch, and commands the dog to go away. To my surprise, it does. It spins and bounds down the stairs with no animosity towards her nor any fear of her authority. From the bottom of the steps, the dog turns and looks up at me, and I realize it just wants to play. I look up at my friend’s mother, and I can see on her face that she’s embarrassed for me. I ask if I can stay for a little bit and catch my breath, but secretly, I’m giving the dog enough time to run back home.
“Of course,” my friends’ mother says.
I choose to wait in the vestibule.
My fear of dogs was a known thing in my neighborhood. The other parents knew that when I came over, they would have to put the dog “away.” Usually, they just let it into the backyard and that was that. If they forgot, I’d sheepishly ask my friends’ mothers if their dogs could go outside for a while or if it could get shut inside a room, and there would always be a look when I asked, a kind of eye roll or a “for god’s sake,” and even as a small kid, I knew they were embarrassed for me.
I remember sitting on the floor of the dining room of my friend’s house. We’re playing with our G.I. Joe action figures. His little gray dog, which they’ve “put away,” scratches on the opposite side of the door next to me. I remember trying my hardest not to ask my friend to put the dog in a different room, one that was farther away. I remember trying to be brave.
But I also knew that if he didn’t stop his dog from scratching at the door, the tiny little monster would rip through it and tear me apart.
My terror overwhelmed my ability to think. Terrified, I leaped from the floor, ran from his house, and burst down his hill. At the bottom, I turned left, dashed up my street and down my driveway. I charged up the steps, through the back door and across the kitchen floor. I sprinted down our three-step hallway, grabbed the wooden banister on my left to support my at-speed-one-eighty, then onetwothreefour double-steps up the stairs, onto the landing, and into my bedroom. I slammed the door shut behind me, creating one last irrational barrier between me and that terrifying, ankle-high, perfectly-loved, little gray dog.
I still don’t know what my friend thought happened.
Now I’m forty-four years old, and thanks to some beautiful people and their animals, I am no longer terrified of dogs.
I got over my phobia when I entered into a relationship with a young woman whose family owned a dog; love and lust can cause many a person to transcend their fears.
I remain in control of the fear because I recognized it as a phobia — specifically (as the Internet tells me), cynophobia. As such, I see it as just another symptom of my Generalized Anxiety and Panic disorders.
I am lucky enough (at the moment) to have (what I believe) are decent handles on my disorders. I still have panic attacks — the last one was bad enough that I woke my wife in the middle of the night to help me. Still, bad ones are few and far between, and the not-so-bad ones only result in an extended period of irritability (which I try my best [and often fail] to curb for the sake of my family, friends, students, and colleagues).
As I write this, our eleven-month-old dog snores on the couch next to me, her neck surrounded by a blue, blow-up, donut-shaped cushion that we hope will prevent her from tearing at the stitches where her ovaries used to be. I love the little bitch with all my heart.
Despite this undeniable, unconditional love, I daily imagine her cute, sharp teeth tearing the flesh and muscle from my cheek [FLASH] my daughter’s cheek [FLASH] my wife’s cheek. I see it clearly: her crazed, wonky, little eye looking down at me as her fangs tear my face. She doesn’t know what she’s doing — the animal has taken over.
Thankfully, though the anxious vision remains, its effect on me has changed. I don’t run from dogs anymore. I don’t ask my friends to put their dogs in different rooms. I put my face up to my dog’s snout dozens of times a day, and I fall asleep each night with her nails poking in my back. I pry Lego pieces from her mouth, hold her when she barks at the mail carrier, and wrestle with her at playtime.
I might imagine her ferocity, but I know: it’s only my fluid imagination (hey!, that’s the name of this blog!).
The love I feel for our dog makes me sad for the childhood I could have had.
My family owned dogs before I was born, but they didn’t have one when I came along. My oldest brother brought home a puppy when I was three or four, but it bit me too many times and was too much work for my parents to deal with (on top of the three boys they already had), so we got rid of it.
If I hadn’t developed my phobia, I might have begged long enough for my parents to try again. I might have grown up with a dog (or two) and learned the kind of love a child only learns from a dog.
Further, I might not have avoided my friends’ houses throughout elementary, middle, and high school and thus not missed out on critical moments of friendship building.
I might have…I might have…I might have.
But I didn’t.
Thankfully, now my daughter can.
Categories
Hot Enough for Ya?
As I write this, a heatwave is devastating the Pacific Northwest, with nearly sixty locations breaking their all-time heat records, including Canada’s national heat record, reaching a peak of 118.2 degrees (F), almost a full fifty degrees warmer than average. It is so hot that, according to the BBC, “even a swimming pool [was] deemed too hot to function.”
New England, meanwhile, suffers under a heatwave of our own. The current temperature is 89° in the center of my southwestern Vermont village. The current “feels like” temperature, which measures ambient air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed to approximate what the weather feels like on bare skin, is 102°. The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory, cautioning residents to stay out of the sun (ideally in an air-conditioned room) and check up on relatives and neighbors.
Bob Williams, the owner of my local hardware store, moved his air-conditioners to the front of his store and offered his mid-range machines at a sale price. He says the sale is to clear out his overstock, but Bob has a history of going above and beyond for his customers when the weather turns against us. When winter storms hit or the river floods, he’ll sleep in the store to make sure his customers can get the tools they need to survive.
The heatwave in the Pacific Northwest has been caused, the weather professionals tell us, by a heat dome, a vast high-pressure zone that settles over a region like a cover on a pot, causing the heat to swelter beneath it, driving out the clouds and pushing up the temperature.
Meanwhile, the heatwave in New England comes from the Bermuda high, a near-constant high-pressure system usually centered over Bermuda. The system “meanders west and east through the summer,” sometimes moving as far west as Michigan. When it comes into contact with New England, heat and humidity soar, making our days hot and sticky like they are now.
As you can see, Pacific Northwest heat domes and New England heatwaves dominate my brain at the moment. I don’t do well in the heat, and the thought of 118.2° scares the shit out of me; writing this post has me on the edge of a panic attack.
Scientists predict that human-caused climate change is likely to increase the number of “extreme summer weather events” in the northern hemisphere by nearly fifty percent before the end of this century.
Examples of these events include:
- 2003 European heatwave (+70,000 dead)
- 2010 Russian heatwave and fires (+55,000 dead)
- 2010 Pakistan flood (+20 million affected)
- 2011 Oklahoma/Texas heatwave and drought (43 consecutive days exceeding 100°)
Here in Vermont, climatologists predicted in 2014 that “the number of hot days reaching 87°F or warmer…[will] increase from about six per year to more than 20 per year.” But here in 2021, we’ve already had six days reaching 87° or warmer, and it’s not even July yet (last July had seven days hitting 87° or warmer).
A heatwave during this same week in 2018 killed four people in Vermont. While my region saw a high of 88° that week, temperatures reached 115° about sixty miles north, killing a 79-year-old woman in Essex Junction and cooking a 57-year-old woman and her two dogs in their mobile home.
Along with the heat, climatologists expect increased precipitation for Vermont, with less snow and more rain (especially in the winter). They also anticipate floods and severe storms to have an increased impact on the state and extreme rainfall to become more frequent and intense.
Because of Vermont’s location in the jet stream, climatologists also expect more “blocking” weather patterns. A blocking weather pattern “occurs when centers of high pressure and/or low pressure set up over a region in such a way that they prevent other weather systems from moving through.”
One example of a blocking pattern is the polar vortex that now seems to regularly settle over the midwest and northeastern parts of the United States. Disruptions to the polar vortex caused a coldwave in 2014 that dropped my local temperature to -17° and caused sub-zero averages for three days straight. The coldwave introduced the term “polar vortex” to the general public, and the phrase became so popular that meteorologists complained about its misuse.
I can only hope that the blocking patterns that settle over Vermont remain wintry in their origin. I can deal with the extreme cold of a polar vortex or the heavy, wet snowfall of a warmer winter.
But I know I can’t deal with increased heat, and heaven forbid we get a blocking pattern like a heat dome.
I know the climate is changing. I know it will get less fit for humans. But man, I can’t stand the heat.
Categories
Post-Trump Politics
President Trump has been out of office for almost 160 days. During that time, I mostly paid attention to the actions of Congress. I focused on the COVID relief bills, the voting rights bills (federal and state), climate-related actions, and Supreme Court decisions. I also followed the lethal attacks on a woman’s right to control her body and an LGBTQ+ person’s right to define the terms of their existence.
I paid too little attention to the COVID situation in South America, Africa, Europe, or Asia (excluding the death tolls in India and Brazil and a vague awareness of the Delta variant), and I paid zero attention to the COVID situation in Australia or the Pacific Islands.
Post-Trump, I’ve reduced my news intake considerably. I have, in terms of Voltaire, taken to cultivating my garden. I try to avoid “the three great evils [of] l’ennui, le vice, et le besoin” (though all things in moderation, I suppose) while also practicing gratitude and kindness (and too often failing at both).
In Candide, Voltaire’s “honest Turk” presumes “that they who meddle with the administration of public affairs sometimes perish miserably, and that they deserve it.” The more I ignore the nastiness of the narcissists in Washington D.C., the more I tend to agree with Voltaire.
Of course, it’s easy for me to ignore the goings-on in our nation’s capital. I’m a white, cisgender, heterosexual male with a full-time job, clear citizenship status, and a fixed-rate mortgage in a rural village in Vermont.
I don’t have to worry about ending my unwanted pregnancy. My skin color probably won’t cause my untimely death at the hands of police officers, biased medical professionals, violent racists, or self-appointed vigilantes. I can leave my house without fear of unwarranted deportation. I can use a public restroom without risking my physical safety. I don’t have a greedy landlord who can jack up my rent. I live far from rising sea levels and in a region that (so far) has been lucky enough to avoid massive droughts, storms, and wildfires.
My ability to ignore Washington D.C. is, simply put, evidence of my privilege.
But it is also evidence of my age. At forty-four years old, I don’t have the passion for politics I once had. I still get mad at the lies and the lying liars who tell them, and I still get inspired by faithful public servants. But the reduction of our representative democracy to an idiotic, self-obsessed punditocracy has destroyed my ability to pay attention.
Add the Republican party’s decades-long nosedive into cynicism, anti-democratic fascism, and blatant white-supremacy to the Democratic party’s inability to pass crucial legislation like a $15 minimum wage or the For the People Act, and you’ll sympathize with my withdrawal from daily politics.
Thankfully, with President Biden in the White House and the Democratic Party (at least temporarily) in control of Congress, I don’t have to wake up terrified to read the headlines each morning. I don’t expect a pre-emptive nuclear strike on North Korea, a national ban on Muslim travelers, or a federal boondoggle on behalf of fossil fuel companies.
In our Post-Trump moment, instead of sparking my anxiety disorder with a daily deep-dive into all the ways our government is ruining the present and future, I choose to sit on my front porch, crack open a locally brewed beer, pick at my ukulele, and escape into a book of fiction.
And for that, I am thankful.
On October 27, 1985, sometime around 2:30 A.M. in my home village in Vermont, Ronald Amadon, a food service worker at the local college, walked from one of the village’s two bars to his parents’ home about a quarter of a mile away. He had worked during the big Oktoberfest on campus and followed that with some celebrating at the bar. As he approached his parents’ home, he was attacked with a knife by John Kugler, a young man from a New York town just over the border who had recently escaped from a mental facility in New York and was now renting a mobile home in my village.
The Rutland Herald reported that a neighbor heard someone call out, “Help me! Help me!,” but the neighbor was too frightened to go outside. “[Amadon] was screaming his head off,” the neighbor said, “He was very hysterical.” Another neighbor said the victim “sounded like a woman,” while a third heard Amadon cry, “Oh my god!”
Amadon went to a nearby friend’s house, bleeding from his stab wounds, and asked his friend to call the ambulance. The friend asked who had stabbed him, and Amadon replied, “I don’t know who he is, but I’ll never forget his face.”
After calling for help, the friend reached out to Amadon’s parents, who lived just down the road. Amadon’s mother joined him in the ambulance on the way to Rutland Regional Medical Center. Tragically, he would not survive the journey.
Ronald Amadon died at 4:21 A.M. of one stab wound to the chest and one to the abdomen, as well as having cuts on his hand and lip.
Police initially stopped Kugler for a motor vehicle violation before arresting him for the murder. According to the Herald, Kugler said to a reporter, “Forgive me.”
In a later affidavit for the court, police alleged that Kugler told them “he killed Amadon when Amadon came walking past him acting like a homosexual.”
Amadon’s murder was not the only act of homophobic violence in the Rutland region in the mid-eighties. Two days later, a Herald story ran with the headline, “Rights Activists Decry Violence Directed At Gays.” The activists noted the homophobic slaying of a Brandon man in February 1984, whose “body was found on the ice at the base of a 120-foot-deep West Rutland marble quarry.”
On January 25, 1986, the Herald reported that a District Court judge ruled that, following a psychiatric assessment, “Kugler was incompetent to stand trial.” The psychiatrist found Kugler to be “suffering from delusions, paranoia, hallucinations, and possibly the scars of severe drug and alcohol abuse.” The psychiatrist reported that, as a teenager, Kugler used to sniff gasoline “until he nearly keeled over.” He later moved on to harder drugs, such as heroin and PCP.
Kugler was committed to the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, where psychiatrists expected him to spend the rest of his life.
Before his attack on Amadon, Kugler had been arrested in New York for assaulting another man with a large rock and a tire chain. Authorities placed him in the Capital District Psychiatric Center in Albany, but he later walked out without being stopped. Despite knowing his whereabouts before his attack on Amadon, Rutland County law enforcement could not return him to New York due to a loophole in Vermont’s laws. As the Herald reported at the time, “Vermont law has no provisions for Vermont officials returning an uncommitted mental patient to another state, as they can with criminal fugitives… With no pending criminal charges, extradition was impossible.”
Six years after the murder, in January 1992, the Herald reported that two psychiatrists found Kugler “was no longer insane and did not pose a threat to himself or others.” A judge ruled that he could be released back into the community but had to remain in state custody.
In July 1994, the Herald reported Kugler escaped from the Arroway halfway house in Burlington and “may be headed back to the Rutland area.” About ten days later, police changed their mind and said he “may be headed to New York.” The police expressed concern that Kugler could “become violent if he is no longer taking his medications” for “paranoid schizophrenia.” He later turned himself in.
But in August 1995, Kugler again escaped from psychiatric confinement, walking away from the state hospital in Waterbury. He had been staying in an unlocked ward and was allowed to roam the grounds. One day, he did not return. Kugler “turned up a week later near Philadelphia, where he was stopped by police for allegedly driving drunk.”
Meanwhile, Ronald Amadon remained murdered, dead at the age of 22, because he “acted like a homosexual.”
As you may know, June is Pride Month. It commemorates the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York, which became the catalyst for the modern LGBT movement for civil rights. As President Biden noted in his proclamation yesterday, “Pride is a time to recall the trials the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) community has endured and to rejoice in the triumphs of trailblazing individuals who have bravely fought — and continue to fight — for full equality.”
According to the Herald, Ronald Amadon “was thoughtful, quiet, and well-liked…a gentle man.” At Amadon’s funeral, Rev. Marshall Hudson-Knapp recalled, “Ron had a love for everyone he knew,” and he recited the lyrics of a song that Ronald had written as a boy, “My name is R-O-N-N-I-E. I’ll love you if you’ll love me. For that’s the way it’s meant to be.”
A friend recalled outside of the funeral, “He was a really special guy. He had a lot of friends.” He also loved antiquing and frequently stopped at area shops to browse. One store owner said, “I remember Ronnie stopping by just a few days before he died. He was a gentle and wonderful boy.”
As my village celebrates Pride for all the LGBTQ+ individuals we call our friends, family, and neighbors, we ought not to forget the ugly, homophobic tragedy that once occurred on our streets. Let us remember the life and death of Ronald Amadon.
Thanks to Monica Allen, who first reported on the case for the Rutland Herald in the 1980s, and to Liz Anderson, who followed up on the case for the Herald in the 1990s.
As part of my job at the school, I do some writing for the school’s blog. I just posted a relatively long article titled, Exploring Some of the Reasons Not To Get Vaccinated:
Unfortunately, millions of Americans still refuse to get the vaccine. With the FDA approving the Pfizer vaccine for every American over the age of 12 (making every member of the LiHigh School community eligible), we want to clear up some of the misinformation around the vaccine.
Categories
My New Side Gig
2021 marks my nineteenth year living in this little village in Vermont (excluding three years when I lived about six miles south of the village). Eight years ago, my wife and I bought a house here, and for the last eight years, we’ve been raising our daughter here. My wife works for the local public school, while I work for the local private school.
In short, this little village is our home.
For the past few months, I’ve had a pretty big itch about wanting to contribute more to the community, and about a week ago, I found a way to scratch it.
There’s a great little company in Vermont (and parts of New York) called The Front Porch Forum. They try to help neighbors connect with one another through an email-based forum, and last week, one of my friends and neighbors posted a job opening for a part-time Website Content Manager for the Poultney Historical Society.
I emailed my friend, met her to discuss the position over a cup of coffee, and yesterday, I spent about two hours in the historical schoolhouse the Society calls home.
Photo courtesy of Poultney Historical Society
I was all alone with the collection, and I couldn’t have been happier.
While there are a lot of tasks to help the Society get the website where they want it to be, I decided to spend my first day just going through some of the archives, trying to find an interesting story to share.
Here’s what I came up with: “Our Partisan Divide is Nothing New.”
I look forward to spending many more hours combing through the Historical Society’s archives, trying to find ways to bring the history of our little village to life.