Buna

In response to: "Your dog, Boo Boo, has been found"

Dear jahanshah,

i remember the "booboo" incident well, but the real story is a little better.

when i left everything in new york in 2000, a bar friend (sophies-5th and ave.A, lower east side, where my name had been transformed by the locals from buna to booboo, and i liked it and have gone by booboo since) bought me a one-way greyhound ticket to san francisco just to get me out of his basement. so i got to cousin bella and nersi's house after a 72 hour bus trip, and they put me up for two months while i worked painting houses. i saved enough to buy a ticket to my sister adrianne's in spain and start a new life =$2000. i flew out of sf after a new year's eve party at friends ali and yekame's place on the morning of 1/1/01 and at 1pm i looked out the window of the plane and saw lake michigan and chicago, my place of birth. i spent 9 months in spain teaching english and getting rid of the monsters in my brain, the monsters that roost there after years of drugs, and met some czechs and decided to try the czech republic.

once again bella and nersi came to the rescue, they have always pulled me out of the holes i have dug for myself. i really dont know what would have happened to me if i couldnt have gotten out of the states.

bella and bersi had a black cat then, it was named booboo, at the time the monsters in my brain laughed and said, "see we told you the whole world is making fun of you!" like i said, i had been called booboo for a couple of years now, but bella and nersi hadnt known that, but! i had been off drugs for a few months and was struggling not to think too much about coincidences, and with the help of niusha (bella and nersi's youngest son) and his magic anti-schizophrenic healing herb, i was well on the way to recovery by the time i left for europe (but alas i know now there is no full recovery).

so bella's cat booboo had a berkeley city collar metal tag and they had to change it for some reason so i think i actually grabbed the old one from the garbage basket, it says, (and i am reading this from my dog's collar right now, it's still on her neck), "Booboo, ... Ave, Berkeley, CA, ...." during the bad times of my life i think about berkeley and bella and nersi and all the happy times ive had there, its my happy place to go to when life gets sad.

so the tag was a memento that i cherished and kept in my mandolin case (a gift from bella) until i moved to poland for a year in 2002 and my neighbor's, who shared the yard, had a small dog who had 5 puppies, and being that they were a musical family, they named the dogs, who were very small dogs; A-minor, B-minor, C-minor, D-minor and E-minor was the runt.

the vet said that the mother, nudka, was too small to raise 5 puppies and 2 of them had to be put asleep, so yashek, my neighbor, at midnight went to the garage and chose the two smallest and did whatever he had too. fortunately for me, it was dark and yashek chose c and d minors for execution and e-minor (emollka in polish) survived and one day when it was old enough to leave its mom, it followed me home (next door). she is the greatest dog in the world! i take her everywhere, to school, restaurants, bars, concerts, etc and she is the most beautiful doggie in the world.

a few years ago my friends and i were doing a protest walk across charles bridge, playing our instruments and wearing death masks (it was an anti poison in our foods things, the orginizers of the march had measured the amount of poison in the chicken eggs at local supermarkets and found it to be astronomically high) when for the first time emolka got lost (oh i forgot, she didnt have a tag in the czech republic so i had put "booboo's" tag on her to make her look legal), i guess with the death mask and the amount of tourists on charle's bridge (biggest tourist attraction in a big tourist city) she couldn't follow me and she has never been on a leash! so at the end of the bridge we realized that emollka was lost, what to do? we had no idea! EMOLLKA WAS LOST. we looked around for hours and couldnt find her, i had lost the most beautiful and loving dog in the world.

it was a sad few days until i got an email from nima (bella and nersi's older son) with the letter from the us consul general in prague!! whoopie!, i found the pound and got my dog back. it was a little confusing when i called. they kept saying booboo is here and i kept saying "i am booboo", but of course everything turned out okay. one last bit, they said they had to give her tests for rabies while she was a guest of the dog pound because she had bitten the policeman who had found her in the street and brought her to the pound.