You will have to believe me that a magnificent buck was outside my window this morning. I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back he had melted into the camouflage of leaves and bark, still, invisibly, there.
I have come to believe that the invisible things are often the most important. These are the things we feel intensely and sense around us: maybe passion, maybe tension, maybe danger, maybe the proud buck in the trees.
Advent is an invisible thing, too, covered in mystery and in the deepening darkness of the earth. I don’t think it’s contradictory, or even surprising, that in this time when the earth stands sleeping we should await, with hope, the promise of light and new life. Because whether you accept the theology or not, those things are coming, literally and visibly.
But it is the invisible that beckons, that clutches the heart and draws us deeper.
And as winter comes, that silent moving of the universe is the darkest, deepest mystery of all. What is eternal? Can some part of us be eternal, too? What is this thing that I am, that wakes, and dreams, and sees the stars, and speaks to the souls of the trees? Why am I here, this small thing, trembling at my mortality while soaring out to meet the edge of sky?
The human soul has seasons, and the earth, wheeling through darkness and light, prepares us for them.
We live in the country. So, when the temperatures dipped into the teens this week, of course, that brought an influx of mice.
Mice are a houseowner’s horror. They are destructive, filthy, and carry disease. But—and I know how this sounds—I cannot bring myself to kill them. I see their big black eyes, and their tiny feet, and they are so frightened and vulnerable. They are like very tiny puppies.
By the way, did you know that mice sing to one another?
So I buy humane traps, bait them with the dogs’ freeze-dried liver treats, and early each morning load my catch into the car and drive out to a cornfield a little more than three miles away. It must be three miles, because, apparently, mice can find their way back over any smaller distance.
Yesterday I caught three. My 13 year old grandson willingly accompanies me because we stop for a doughnut afterward, and he then gets a ride to school. It’s a bit of an adventure.
Last night I set three regular traps, and something new: a bucket trap, with a little ramp and a trap door. I filled the bucket with dried leaves for a soft landing, and smeared the top with peanut butter with dog treats stuck into it. Although I can’t be sure whether anyone is in there this morning, there is a hole in the center of the leaves which suggests there might be. I’ll know when we get to the cornfield. When I dump out the bucket I will be sorry to lose the cache I’ve saved of dry leaves for soft mouse landings, but it can’t be helped.
I don’t know whether the farmer has noticed a car stopping by his field in the early mornings, but it’s a nice field, with corn stubble and lots of kernels scattered in a mouse-friendly way. I have some minor concerns about whether the mice are too cold, but I am doing my part. They are on their own now.
Dad’s working late tonight, but I have lovely company. Since Auggie’s illness the Germans have grown more affectionate with one another. I see them through the kitchen window as they’re playing together, and it surprises and delights me. They romp and hide and pounce on one another just as Moses and Auggie used to do. I’m not sure what’s different, but maybe dogs share with human beings the appreciation of things almost lost.
We are in bed with a fire in the fireplace and some Irish whisky to go along with a good book. The dogs are not particularly interested in whisky or books, but they do enjoy comfort.
Life is almost back to normal. Auggie’s fur is growing back, and he’s full of spark. He does have one wilting ear, which we think is the result of wearing a cone for a month and accumulating moisture. Back to the vet we go! I’ve suggested to the clinic receptionist that when I call he should respond “Now, what?”
Auggie in a rare quiet momentEli couch-shepherding deer A Mid-romp Pause
We traveled for the holiday, and while it is always good to see family, it is also good to be at home in your own bed, and then waking to watch the sun rise, with the silhouettes of deer and turkeys in the woods, and the sweet soft breathing of big dogs nearby.
When I had a day job my Sundays were filled with dread. On Monday mornings I would stand at the big windows of my bedroom looking out at the beauties of the woods and sky, feeling bereft at having to leave for the demands of the classroom or office.
Now my schedule is mostly my own. And because I have always hated that Sunday feeling, I try to never schedule anything on a Monday. I write in the mornings, and reserve afternoons for appointments, errands, exercise, and domestic tasks. Lately, however, in what seems to be some kind of mechanical conspiracy, we have been on a breaking-down appliance spree, so my autonomy has been interrupted by lengthy bouts of dishwashing and repairmen who schedule their appearances in five hour appointment windows. Today, I have nothing planned except writing, walking the dogs, and making beef stew. There will also be a long, fragrant bath. A perfect day. I hope.
But we never know, do we? Our expectations of perfection are mostly disappointed, and since disappointment is a form of ingratitude, it would be graceless not to appreciate the imperfect blessings of our real lives, no?
And this brings me to My Dog Pete, the children’s book I finally got around to publishing this year after more than a decade of leaving it to languish in a file in my office.
My husband, who is a man of deep insights, recently pointed out to me that the book contains the philosophy of a happy life. I heard this with some surprise, because I was only telling a story, not trying to convey a moral. In the book, a little girl wants a perfect, golden dog who will be handsome and admired. Instead, she gets a mixed-breed, mischievous shelter dog who was probably abused, leaps as gracefully as a gazelle, and smells a little funny. She doesn’t want him. But–spoiler alert–against all her heartfelt preferences, she falls in love with him.
So often in life, when things don’t live up to our expectations, we are frustrated and disappointed. And yet, most of the time, what we get–even though it isn’t perfect–is still something good, and we are lucky to have it.
We must notice the good things we are so blessed to have. Ingratitude is a sin, and in most theologies perfectionism is, too, because it is a focus on self-will and the ego. And also because for most of the world, sadness and misery is a normal day. So now, when one of us doesn’t get exactly what we hoped for or expected, we say to one another: “I wanted a golden dog.” And we remember to relax into the reality of imperfection that is still filled with many beautiful things; many blessings.
After all, in real life we didn’t expect it, but we got Pete. And we wouldn’t have changed him for any other dog in the world.
Hoping you had a Happy Thanksgiving.
Pete, in one of his (many) stubborn moments.My Dog Pete is available exclusively at Amazon.
A friend and I went to a local greenhouse to make Christmas decorations with greenery and red trimmings in big outdoor pots. It was a lot of fun, and felt like the beginning of something both old and newly sweet. In the spring and summer, the seven greenhouses overflow with plants and flowers, but now everything smells like balsam and spices, and there are poinsettias, and garland, and wreaths, and hanging balls made with evergreens and sparkly things. It struck me sharply how much we need the presence of green things amid the darkness and cold of winter.
The family who own the nursery are fifth generation in the business, and the current manager told us of her great-grandfather who had been buried alive in World War I, and survived in an air pocket, eating the shoelaces of a dead comrade. He came home to his wife who had been told he was dead. Together, they began nurturing growing things, which seems both beautiful and significant.
In my family we have keepsakes: furniture, Persian rugs, silver, an ancient Bible, paintings and photos. And we have common threads, too: a love of learning, of literature and art, a passion for freedom and an expectation of basic decency. But I think about what it must be like to be upholding the family’s work in such a particular way, with all the significance and restrictions, resentments and pride that must come into the mix. All the generations–male and female–were represented at the nursery; they all seemed skilled and cheerful: laughing while disagreeing about the right way to place the boughs in a planter, teasing one another, singing along with the corny Christmas music, putting floral stakes and tape on pine cones and big shiny ornaments, and helping us create the right shape for our arrangements. They worked well together.
As we were leaving, we stopped to look at this old stone building next to the gravel parking lot. It was a poignant reminder of a family’s history.
Writing bad poetry is a pastime shared with youth and age. I will spare you mine, but intense emotion always draws it out of me, and I hide it as if it were an addiction to drink or pornography. I am so grateful that Auggie is home. And he is back. This is not redundant.
His stitches are out; the cone is off; his obsession with balls is unabated; he is romping nearly at full speed, and he seems to have a new appreciation for home, and bed, and snuggles. He is insatiably hungry; all I do is feed him. I don’t even need to tempt him. He is healing and his body needs to rebuild.
We almost lost him more than once, and we are so grateful to have him back, whole in every meaningful sense of the word, and sound. But he seems to have muted just the smallest bit, noticeable only to those who know him, and suddenly he is no longer young and immortal, but middle-aged and vulnerable like the rest of us.
We took him in for a check-up and sat studying the veterinary wall chart on dog sizes and lifespans. At six, Auggie is now well into middle age, and his life may be more than half over. His family have lived to twelve and fourteen. While that makes me vulnerable to hope, those ages are not common for big dogs, and Auggie is a lean 112 pounds. Mortality lingers in the background for all of us, but dogs have those first sparkling years, and then the slow sadness creeps in too quickly.
I used to scoff at people who said they couldn’t endure the pain of losing another dog. Now, I’m starting to get it.
But meanwhile, here they both are: vibrant, restless, and ready to run. I’d better go.
A few months ago a new book came into the world without much notice or fanfare. That’s on me. It came during a month-long houseful of family, amidst all the cheerful jumble and chaos that entails, and also as the final process of signing and shipping and accounting from the previous book was wrapping up. This wasn’t a first book, or a last book; it wasn’t even an author’s first kind of book. And so, like so many middle children, it has had to make its way along with not much help or notice. But now, as I am settling into the coming winter, I look back with clarity at the season past, and there it is: alone, abandoned, but not un-loved.
It is, like my last book of essays, Reflections on a Life in Exile, a very personal book, written mostly amid the ennui of the pandemic. Some of it is funny, some is melancholy, some of it may be slightly mad–a bit like living through the pandemic itself. In whatever mood, I hope you find it companionable.
You can order it from your favorite bookseller ( some of mine are here, here, here, and here ) from Barnes & Noble; from Target; or from the guys in Seattle. Or you can visit your local library and ask them to add it to their shelves.
In any case, I hope you’ll look for it, and if you like it, you’ll leave nice reviews in various places. And if you crave to be the first, no one seems to have ever purchased it from Target.
And, once again, if you still occupy the world formerly known as Twitter, please share with my tag @audacityofgoats.
This piece will appear in my new book of Essays And Still They Sing coming soon from Beaufort Books.
There comes a moment in grief when you begin to feel that you are being judged for it. People tell you that life goes on; that you need to stop looking back. I know that, because although I would never say it to anyone, I have often felt impatient with people who get into their problems and lie down in them. I have wanted to tell someone to get over it. In my own life, after various hard blows, including some difficult losses, I have managed to accept, to pick up the pieces of my life, and to move on. But it’s closing in on two years later, and I still have not gotten over Moses.
Life has a way of teaching us our faults.
His full name was Moses, Prince of Egypt. My husband and I argued about the name all the way to Iowa when we went to pick him up for the first time. I was insistent. It had to be Moses. It wasn’t a particularly religious choice. I had just watched too many reruns of The Ten Commandments, and wanted to be able to shake my head sadly at a naughty puppy and say “Oh, Moses, Moses, Moses.”
The name suited him. Despite having been bitten by one as a child, I had wanted a German Shepherd my whole life. I had even made a German Shepherd a character in my novels. Readers who met Moses always assumed that my character Elisabeth’s big dog, Rocco, was based on him. But Rocco was really an expression of longing. He came first. Then came Moses. Sometimes I have the sense that I willed him into being.
And he did, after all, lead us out of the wilderness. Our beloved Golden Retriever had died after a futile battle with lymphoma. Our other dog, Pete, was grieving, and our house felt empty, so we decided to sign up for the twelve to eighteen month waiting list for the perfect German Shepherd. Within twenty minutes we heard back: there had been a cancellation. Did we want a puppy on Saturday? I had the sense that it was meant to be: unplanned, the result of a series of unforeseeable events. And isn’t that what Fate is? The inevitable coming together of paths that seemed intended to diverge? Does it always have to be a human story?
From the beginning, I knew he would break my heart. I loved him too much. I can’t even explain exactly why. All I know is that there was a kind of destiny, an inevitability about him that I always felt. We belonged to each other. He was my soulmate. How to convey how much I loved him? How much I love him still? I know most people won’t think it normal. I can’t help that. It just was. It just is.
When he was only a few months old I sat in our living room, holding him on my lap, hugging him and whispering endearments. He was already too big to really fit, but I had my arms around him like a baby. My husband walked into the room and said casually: “You love that dog too much. You know he’s going to break your heart some day.” To the surprise of us both, I burst into wild sobs.
I was afraid of him at first. I’d never had a German Shepherd before, and I didn’t have confidence in how to handle him. By the time he came along I’d trained four dogs, and felt that I knew what I was doing. But when he chewed a shoe and I slapped the floor with it, scolding to show my displeasure, he avoided that spot in the kitchen for three days. That’s when I realized how delicate his sensibilities were. If I hurt his feelings, I could lose him forever.
But the moment that really frightened me was when, at 9 weeks, I tried to pull him off the bed he had no permission to be on. He growled and snarled at me, and I was struck with fear that I had a dragon in the house I could not control. I called my dog trainer that day, and begged her to let us start early. He earned his first obedience title at six months, and his second not long afterward. It required retrieval and he did not really take to retrieving, but he obliged me because that was what he did.
This is not to say that he was a tamed creature, tied to my will. Quite the contrary. Moses did things because he knew he should, and when I asked him to do something that was wrong for both of us, he would flat out refuse. One night, in the dead of a Wisconsin winter, I had an emergency call about my elderly mother. It was well below zero, and I had to meet the ambulance at the hospital. Moses knew I was upset, and he saw his job as being with me no matter what. But of course, he couldn’t sit outside in the car for hours in sub-zero temperatures. He followed me out to the car, refusing to let me leave without him, and trying to climb onto my lap. My husband gently put his hand on Moses’s collar to pull him away, and Moses turned and very meaningfully put his teeth on my husband’s arm. He did not bite; he nevertheless expressed his feelings very clearly. Moses knew his duty, and he was not easily dissuaded from it. I had to drive away from him, knowing we both felt betrayed by the separation.
I felt so much pride having this magnificent animal walk beside me. Moses loved going to the Fourth of July parade. The parade begins every year with a long line of historic fire engines, followed by the latest and most innovative, as the proud company of volunteer firefighters marches along. Moses would sing with the fire engines, a long, lovely howl that made people turn and smile. He would sit upright and bark at the three gun signal that began the parade, and he would duly accept the admiration of anyone who stopped to see him. When the parade was over, we would walk with the crowds down the street toward the park, and people would reach out their hands to touch him as he walked by, like Aslan in the resurrection.
There was a fierceness about Moses that is not in my other dogs. It lay beneath the surface, but it was right here for anyone to see. People respected Moses. As he deserved.
While we were remodeling our house, a five man insulation team arrived one morning without notice. My husband and I were at work, and only the carpenter, who adored Moses, was there. The insulators opened the door and walked in. According to the carpenter, who laughed while telling the story, Moses chased all five of them “screaming like girls” into the powder room, where they all crowded in, slamming the door behind them.
They called their manager while Moses waited outside the door.
Moses had a passion for butter. When he was young, he would steal whole sticks of it from the plate on a high shelf next to the stove. After we broke that habit, he sang for his butter, his paws dancing as he looked from the butter dish to my face and back, carefully explaining what he wanted.
More than anything else, Moses loved the lake. He was the first of our dogs brought up to swim, and he took to it immediately. But it wasn’t swimming that was his passion; it was splashing. His jumps to catch the water we splashed at him were stupendous. He leapt out of the water like a mythical beast, and his yearning to splash was relentless. If I were lazy and lounging on the dock, he would swim around the edge to me and paddle his paws to splash me, hoping to start a game. If I ignored him, he would urge me with increasingly louder moans of protest and pleading, splashing harder. He was impossible to resist.
There’s a Christina Perry song from a silly vampire movie that I used to sing to Moses. I remember the last time we were at the lake, a few months before he died. The music came on, and I whispered it to him, holding him in my arms, tears rolling down my face.
I’ve loved you for a thousand years.
I’ll love you for a thousand more.
I see now that I knew at some level it would be the last time we splashed together. Somehow, some part of me knew he was dying.
He had been in pain from an injured back, and it was slowing him down. I took him for exams. I asked every medical professional we saw—and there were a few—to reassure me that he would be all right. He’s not going to die, is he? He’ll be okay, won’t he? They all, with varying degrees of patience and curiosity assured me. Why would I even think that? He was only 7 years old. His back hurt. That was all.
But they were wrong. Somehow, in the deep connection Moses and I had with one another, I sensed that something, but it was nothing that showed up on any tests. It was just arthritis pain from a back injury, nothing more, I was told. Of course he didn’t feel well if his back hurt. We did acupuncture, chiropractic, and laser therapy. I took him for swimming therapy. He had varying levels of pain meds.
But he didn’t look right. His eyes were glassy. His fur seemed without luster. And all the while, the tumor was growing unseen, waiting to break his heart, and mine.
What hurts me most is that I wasn’t there. We had slipped away for three precious days to spend Christmas with our new baby granddaughter. While we were away, Moses had an upset tummy, but, like so many German Shepherds, he often did. We used to joke about such a big scary dog having “princess tummy”. We also live in the woods, and the dogs tend to eat things that require periodic doses of antibiotics.
He was sad when we left. He knew what suitcases meant. But we were unconcerned because he would be in his own home with his brothers and someone who cared for him. Over the course of our trip I spoke with the dog sitter multiple times. She was kind and reassuring. He wasn’t sick, but he was moping. He wasn’t eating, but he was drinking a lot of water. I was more worried about reassuring her than I was about Moses. We’d dealt with these tummy troubles before. I called the vet and arranged to pick up some antibiotics on the way home from the airport. We didn’t know he would already be there, cooling on a metal table.
Our dog sitter, never imagining we would go to the vet first, waited at our house, dreading our return. She didn’t want to tell us on the phone.
The one obligation of a soulmate is to be present when you die. But I wasn’t there. Instead, while we were in the air, Moses lay down next to our dog sitter, put his paw on her arm, looked into her eyes, and let out a long sigh. Then he died.
I know it sounds overly-dramatic, but I will never forgive myself. People have tried to tell me that he knew he shouldn’t die in front of me. I don’t buy it. He felt abandoned. He didn’t know where I was. I let him down. I, who sang love songs to him, who loved and trusted him, for whom he would have laid down his life, wasn’t there when he needed me most, and he died not knowing whether I would ever come back.
Looking back on that last year, I almost did the best I could. I didn’t miss his cues. The mistake I made was believing everyone—good people who didn’t know him as I did— who told me he was okay. I should have trusted my own heart. He was telling me, and I didn’t take his word for it.
Grief is one thing that never dies. I will be haunted by his loss forever. My only hope is that those insipid rainbow bridge poems are true, and that someday he will run to me, and I will be able to kneel down, gather him into my arms, and whisper my love into those big fierce ears.
(From my talk as officiant at their wedding in Istanbul)
Anyone can fall in love. And most of us who have been married will acknowledge that it helps if love is the first requirement. The ancient vows that Sahar and Jeff are about to make confirm it: We promise first “to love”.
But, as we here make a commitment to support Sahar and Jeff in their marriage, we understand that love is not enough. I want to say “mere” love, although that would be at odds with every philosophy and theology in the world. But love can be a fleeting emotion. That’s why when we experience real love, most civilizations suggest that we add something more. We want to vow that our commitment is forever, and that we mean more than only how we feel.
Love, Honor, Comfort, and Keep. They are ancient poetic words, and they bear testament to an essential truth: Marriage is hard.
It would seem at first thought that in the commitment that they are making today, the challenges Sahar and Jeff face will be accelerated by their different cultural heritages. But this is only a detail. Because in many ways every marriage is a melding of cultures…of family…of values…of male and female.
Our work, as married people, is to accept the alien nature of the other. And, come to think of it, isn’t that the work of us all?
Because the fundamental requirements of all human relationships are those we practice first at home, and so, the relationship of husband and wife reflects our relationship with the whole world. That is not a coincidence.
We start with the imperative to love, with all that it entails, but there are also these other requirements:
Honor.
Comfort.
Keep.
Together, they form a hierarchy, with each of these actions dependent upon the other.
Honoring…it means we don’t hold one another in contempt…that our familiarity breeds, instead, respect, and generosity, and patience, and understanding.
And we cannot comfort without honoring, because offering comfort requires an essential respect of our beloved’s individual humanity and need.
Comfort requires, too, understanding the value of offering not what we need, but what someone else needs—which is almost never the same thing.
Comfort is an act of solidarity, but also an act of empathy: a moving out of ourselves and our needs, and into the needs of someone else.
If I need solitude, maybe I need to understand that at the same moment my partner needs affection. And the efforts we make to frame the world based on someone else’s needs is key part of marriage, and, indeed, of any relationship.
And “keep”. What does that mean? We keep watch; we keep time; we keep chickens.
But to keep one another….
It’s vigilance, isn’t it. It means we hold one another in esteem, with honor. We comfort. We pay attention. Sometimes at cost to ourselves and our pressing priorities. But…it also means to give shelter. We smoothe paths…we encourage… we understand foibles…we attempt to care, not just for physical, but for emotional requirements.
Come to think of it, it is a bit like chickens.
We nurture.
We protect.
We keep.
Which brings us back to love. These vows are all encompassed in the act of loving; they are the recipe for all human relationships: To Love, Honor, Comfort, and Keep.
It is more than a philosophy. It is an action; an endeavor; our daily work. And it is a challenge.
A healthy marriage—the keeping of these vows—requires fierce dedication, determination, and commitment, all entered into in the endeavor of love.
Sometimes blindly, sometimes fervently. But deliberately, reverently, joyfully, and not just with our whole hearts, but with every fiber of our beings.
J.F. Riordan 