Our 10-year-old basset hound decided that we were getting up this morning at a little before five. I opened Facebook on my phone while moving between the bedroom and giving our 17-year-old cat her morning medicine. The first post that I saw was one from Hannah, a woman we met 10 years ago while we were living in Georgia. Back then, she had recently lost another dog and had come to one of my programs on gentrification in the city where she lived to look for answers about why her neighbors acted the way they did.
Hannah’s post referred to her dog John Hamilton in the past tense.
Our pets are our family and sometimes our friends’ pets become important, too. I cried this morning when I learned that the dog Hannah adopted a decade ago had died. I know that it won’t be nearly as much as how Hannah will miss John Hamilton, but I will miss her posts about him and her photos of him accompanying her on her many adventures.
Hannah is one of the best things that happened to us in the aftermath of moving to Decatur, Ga. She is one of the few good people in a city of more than 20 thousand. It’s tempting to think that most people are “good” everywhere, but there are some places on this planet where a majority of the people are bad because of their actions or their inaction: silence in the midst of evil is complicity and betrayal. Decatur is such a place filled with bad people, brightened in spots by people like Hannah.
At the program Hannah attended in March 2014, she recounted the recent loss of her dog Heidi. Hannah told me in an interview the following week:
People haven’t noticed that Heidi died. Like why doesn’t anybody ask about my dog? When the two gay guys walk with their three dogs and somebody’s missing, I ask. Uh oh, where’s the other one?
Nothing.
Then a couple of times I’ve noticed that like – now I’m a aware of it and so I say something extra nice and they’re surprised.
Hit by the loss of her dog and the sense of disconnection from her neighbors, Hannah embarked on a mission to create connections, community.
I decided that I was just going to kill them with kindness and say “Hi.” Usually I don’t like the “How are you?” I say, “Hey there.” They’ll either say nothing or “How are you?”
And then I decided that I know and I feel guilty about neighbors that are very close that I have not met and so I don’t bake cookies anymore because I’m a vegan so I’ve made my own homemade deodorants, a lavender scent and tangerine scent, to pass out to those neighbors. And I have a little recipe card with my name and my phone number – not my email – and the ingredients of the deodorant and I’m introducing myself to people. And I get super nervous but I still do it. It’s really fun, though.
She joked about what she should call her project: “It’s really just meet the neighbors but maybe the, ‘Hi, hey there club.’ It’s just me in it.”
Hannah now lives thousands of miles away from Decatur and the city’s social pathologies. I wrote about how we met and her experiences for the History News Network in a 2015 article titled, “Doing Public History: This Is What Success Can Look Like.” Back then, I had to use a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation by her neighbors, the bad people, and in the article I called her “Susan.”
In a way, our pets sparked a friendship. Had it not been for Heidi, I never would have met John Hamilton in Hannah’s small apartment and I never would have met Hannah and learned her touching story.
I hope that John Hamilton was greeted at the Rainbow Bridge by our own Hannah (1998-2012), Emily, Zeke, Ziggy, Emerson, Rufus, Clyde, and Flagler.
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