corrupt officer chews up speeding tickets in exchange for treats. is also very cute

You are who you are, and you’re not who you’re not

The New York Police Department was my family’s business. My grandfather was a detective. My uncle Bill, for 48 hours, was police commissioner. My uncle Jim and my dad were lieutenants. I grew up around cops, playing with cops’ kids, laughing at cops’ jokes, listening to cops’ stories. (That might not have been the sole influence in me developing the kind of vocabulary that got me in trouble at school, but it didn’t hurt.)

It wasn’t a job. It was The Job, the one my father chose or that chose him when he was 22 or 23, straight out of the Army, and the one he’d have until he retired in 1991. I’m 33. He was in The Job for as long as I’ve been alive.

It raised him, and it helped raise his six children. For all the problems with policing in general and the NYPD in particular that an adult me considers in a broader context, when I was a kid, it seemed to me at base a strong and noble Job. One that, done properly and honestly, could help make things better.

So one day when I was (I think) 19, home on a college break, sitting in shotgun in his car, I told him I was thinking about taking the test once I graduated.

I had about a year and a half of credits toward a bachelor’s degree in English, a two-hour-a-week college radio show, an unpaid gig writing about music for the school newspaper, and no idea what I could actually do with that, if I even stuck with any of it. The Job meant, well, a job. A steady one, one in which you could make enough money to have a family and a life, and one from which you could retire with a pension after 20 years. (Even as a teenager experimenting with ways to destroy my brain, I had the pragmatic bent of the child who answered a creative writing prompt of what he’d do with $1 million by saying he’d set half aside for savings,)

More than that, though, it meant keeping the family business going. I’m the youngest, and my four older brothers and my sister had all gone into other lines of work. If I didn’t go into The Job, it’d be the end of our branch of the Devine family tree in the NYPD. That seemed … wrong? Mean? Disrespectful?

I still had my choice ahead of me, and if I didn’t know what I wanted to do, at least maybe I could do something good. This choice seemed honorable, dutiful. I thought it’d make my dad happy. It didn’t.

I mean, it didn’t make him mad. He seemed flattered that I thought what the men in my family had done with their lives was worth doing, and that whatever professional legacy they might’ve left was worth continuing. But that was where it ended.

“That was my Job, and it was the right Job for me,” he said. “But you can’t do it just because of that. It’s not your Job.”

For a while after that, I felt raw, low and small. I felt like what he was really saying was that the bravery, toughness and instincts that got him through 33 years on The Job just weren’t in me. Like he was saying that I wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, man enough to live his life.

The further away I get, though, the more I think he was giving me a gift.

Yes, finding my own way would be hard and scary, but no harder than trying to make myself something I wasn’t out of a misplaced sense of duty, and no scarier than the things he knew I’d have to face on The Job on the way to remaking myself. No, the kind of stuff I’d gravitated toward – writing about records, writing about movies, writing about anything and trying to get the words right – wouldn’t matter the way serving and protecting matters, but it mattered to him that it mattered to me.

Beyond that, it mattered to him, full stop. I’ve never met a more voracious reader, or anyone happier inside a library. (“Better than the candy store,” he’d tell me. “Doesn’t cost a damn cent.”) He devoured novels and nonfiction, newspapers and magazines, comic books and mythology. He grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as Pete Hamill; in high school, when I asked him what it was like growing up where he did and when he did, he gave me “A Drinking Life” and said, “Like that.” (I’ve never gotten this confirmed, but I remain convinced that the ball-busting, fact-checking, city police lieutenant in the kicker of this AP story was my dad.)

He loved good wordplay, sharp jokes and well-told stories. I remember him talking a couple of times in his later years about writing a book about his life. I’m confident it would have been some fucking book.

My parents drummed into us early the importance of work ethic and having a job, but they’d also spent their lives trying to afford us the chance to pursue a passion rather than a paycheck. He didn’t want to watch me punt on the search for mine just so I could follow his. He wanted possibility for me, an opportunity at something beyond the worn path of his own footsteps. So he told me I couldn’t follow them.

(… He also definitely might have been saying I wasn’t about that life.)

Dad would’ve turned 81 last week. He died in 2003, at the beginning of my senior year of college, before I took my first wobbling steps on the path to making a life out of writing, before I got my first check for it, and before I was able to quit my 9-to-5 to write about sports, one of the other great passions of his life. I think he’d have liked where I’ve gotten and what I do. (Well, maybe not the analytics-y stuff, but definitely the thing about The Dunk.) I’m not the man he was, but I’m the man I am: somebody’s husband, somebody’s father, somebody scared and scraping and struggling and searching, somebody getting by and trying really hard to get the words right.

In the front seat of that car, I thought that wouldn’t be enough – for me, for him, for the family I already had and for the family I hoped I one day would. Now, I think, maybe what he was telling me wasn’t just that it’s enough. It was that it’s all there is. That it’s everything.

My pit mix’s favorite place on earth is the beach and I think you can really see that in her eyes.

I’m going to cry.[x]

My precious doggo, Ema (pronounced Emma. Short for Emerald) 💕 she’s an English Cream Retriever and the sweetest lil bean ever.

((possibly loud))

it’s a cotton ball

jim and jamie dutcher, determined to show “the hidden life of wolves”, lived for six years with a pack of wolves in the idaho wilderness of yellowstone. a constant but unobtrusive presence, the dutchers earned the unshakable trust of the wolves, and came to know them as complex, highly intelligent animals with distinct individual personalities, who are caring, playful and above all devoted to family.

“only a select few other species exhibit these same traits so clearly,” they note. “they are capable of not only emotion but also real compassion. this is the view of the wolf that we want to share. …it is an animal that cares for its sick and desperately needs to be part of something bigger than itself - the pack. the bond a wolf has to its pack is certainly as strong as the bond a human being has to his or her family.”

they add, “rarely did two wolves pass each other without playfully rubbing shoulders together or exchanging a brief lick. so often we would see two wolves relaxing together, curled up beside each other.” the dutchers also recount wolf behavior rarely documented: grief at the death of a pack mate; excitement over the birth of pups; and the shared role of raising young pack members.

but as the wolves struggle to reestablish their foothold in the american west, their public demonization continues.  say the dutchers, “as we see wolves, once again, being shot, trapped and poisoned, we recognize that our unique experience, living with wolves, is unlikely to ever happen again, and for that reason we feel that we have an obligation to share the lives of these wolves with the widest audience possible.”

it’s not just the wolves at stake, but the entire yellowstone ecosystem. wolves keep the elk gene pool strong (no other predator does this); they redistribute elk herds, allowing vegetation to recover along rivers and streams, which provides food for beavers; and they keep the number of coyotes in check, which helps to maintain populations of rodents, antelopes and birds of prey.

Protect all wolves