Have I mentioned that, in addition to being brought up in a Barn, I grew up in Greenwhich Village? Not only that, I went to Little Red School House, a bastion of lefty education, for ten years before we migrated to the Berkshires. That’s Greenwich Village and LRSH in the sixties, yo. Part of the process of growing up has been figuring out a way to hold on to my liberal hippie ideals while acquiring property and a family. The result is a big, stinkin’ pile of liberal guilt (which guilt is complicated by the fact that I am way lazy, and not always inspired to do what I believe to be the right thing if it means stirring my inert butt).

So.

Across the street from our house is a little green area. It’s a narrow strip, roughly triangular and about a block long, sliding down an embankment to San Jose Avenue, with trees, a fence, the odd flower, and grass that grows unchecked until the Parks Department sweeps in for one of its infrequent seizures of grooming. Periodically skunks, possums, raccoons and birds that wander through it. The Emily Dog can spend half an hour just sniffing the various trails. It’s her local watering hole, so to speak–the venue for a quick squeeze, first and last thing of the day. Our front window looks out on the little green, and Emily frequently sits and observes the passers-by, making the world safe for…us? Who knows what’s in the mind of spotty dogs?

In the last week someone has taken to sleeping down the street in the greenest, most tree-shaded corner of the green. He or she is swaddled up in a sleeping bag, with empty bottles piled on one side and some clothes and a backpack on the other, all rather tidily. This person (gender unknown) is there from roughly ten at night until about eight in the morning, so that when I bring Em out for her first-and-last walks, there he/she is. I don’t feel any particular menace from this person, even at 11pm. Mostly I hesitate to make a lot of noise to wake him/her up. But to Emily this is all menace all the time. She bristles. The short hairs on her neck stand up in a line. She growls. It’s possible that if I let her go over and sniff the bag and the person therein she would feel less threatened. As it is, I spend most of the walk wishing she’d just evacuate before we wake this other human being up.

In a five minute walk, morning or night, I go through a full range of feelings about the new neighbor. On the one hand, this person needs a place to sleep. The weather is relatively mild these days; from the look of his/her possessions, the person is organized and relatively functional. Should I offer help, all unasked? At eleven pm with a skittish dog on leash, maybe not such a good idea. Should I report him/her? To whom? For what reason? Because I’m not comfortable with his/her lifestyle? Because he/she is a blight on the neighborhood between the hours of 10 and 8? Because my dog doesn’t like having someone there?

So mostly I feel guilty. Guilty that, all things being equal, I would prefer not to have a homeless person sleeping, however inoffensively, across the street from me, on my dog’s favorite toileting-spot. Guilty that I don’t know what to do about it: assume that this person is following an eccentric bliss, or that he/she is in need of social services fast.

The problem with vice-grips, of course, is that they make movement impossible.