For Wilshire Baptist Church
I called a telephone hotline for the first time in my life. It was the Dallas Coyote Hotline.
It started on an early Thursday morning. I was sitting in traffic when a coyote darted across Lovers Lane and then Skillman Avenue and disappeared into an apartment complex. I tried to get my phone camera up but I wasn’t quick enough. A few hours later, I remembered that Dallas has a new coyote hotline so I gave it a call. They let you know up front that you have to leave a message, so I did with the basic time/date/place details they asked for as well as my phone number.
A week to the day later, I got a call back from the hotline with a real person asking real questions. Some of her questions were a verification of the time/date/place of the sighting, but others included: Had I seen this coyote before? Did the coyote see me and react? Could I tell anything about the general health of the coyote? Did I get a picture? Before we finished, she let me know they are tracking the locations and travel patterns of these critters and my information would be added to the database.
The hotline was created in response to the serious injury of a child in Lake Highlands from a coyote bite. I’m glad something is being done to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I’m glad we have a coyote hotline, but our species has plenty of other problems that need attention. Just Google the word “hotline” and you get a long list: AIDS, alcohol, child abuse, crises and suicide, depression, domestic violence, eating disorders, gambling, medical, poison control, pregnancy, rape and sexual assault, runaway, substance abuse. These are serious problems and mostly are things we are doing to ourselves and to each other.
I know I’m fortunate to have not needed to call one of these hotlines. A lot of that is just good luck, but some of it is good discipline growing up and surrounding myself — or being surrounded by — family and friends that provide good support and positive reinforcement. Some of that is from church, although churches and church people aren’t totally safe as recent news stories remind us. But in general, staying close to church and having strong families and relationships can help protect us from a lot of self-inflicted problems.
I call these lifelines because they are more constant and direct than hotlines. They are like an umbilical in the womb that keeps us fed, but these lifelines keep us fed with knowledge, common sense, good manners and habits, courtesy and decency, respect and appreciation, perspective and balance. And that diet can benefit our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.
It felt awkward to call the coyote hotline because it seems to me we are complicit in their unrest in the midst of our urban sprawl. Weren’t the coyotes here before us? We’re complicit, too, in the ills of our society if we aren’t offering real help and real solutions. Hotlines are great, but we need to provide lifelines too.
So, while we’re tracking coyotes, let’s not forget to keep track of our human needs and those of our family and friends. Maybe we could care enough to provide a lifeline and not just a referral to a hotline.