Spoiler alert: Auggie gave us another scare this week, but instead of the worst possible news, it turns out he is experiencing the aches and pains of a middle-aged athlete.
You know how difficult it can be when you’re waiting for someone’s medical diagnosis. You flip restlessly through a book, if you have one, you play games on your phone, if you do that sort of thing, or you ruminate madly about worst case/best case scenarios. It’s important to find something to do.
As I waited for the surgeon’s diagnosis, there was an odd little stand with a drawer in the exam room. I had been in this room at the hospital before, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had never looked in this drawer. Part of it, maybe, was just knowing it was none of my business. But then it occurred to me that maybe it had something meant to be helpful: a pack of tissues, a roll of lifesavers, hand sanitizer, Gideon’s Bible…so I opened it. It was disappointingly, boringly empty.
I had come equipped to wait, so of course I had paper and pen, and I was very much in need of a distraction. So for some reason it occurred to me to do this. Too bad I didn’t have a packet of candy or something to add. I wonder how long it will take someone to find it—someone else who’s worried, bored, and needs distraction.
Auggie was a good boy, but he’s learned to be nervous about these places. Luckily, happily, joyfully, all was well, and we went home together, armed with a little bottle of pain pills. We played ball when we got there.
I had a busy night planned. It involved cleaning out a cupboard where mice had been and sanitizing and rescuing the framed family pictures that had been stored there when I repainted the stairway a year ago last November. I was planning to hang the pictures—about a dozen or so—in the repainted hall. I wanted to tackle this disgusting job so I wouldn’t be ashamed in front of my cleaning lady. (It was, in actual fact, another clever procrastination technique in my novel-writing avoidance scheme. But I digress.)
Instead, as I was elbow deep in sanitizing wipes and thinking words that would have shocked my mother, my husband called my grandson from upstairs—and me—to come into the kitchen. My husband has a mischievous sense of humor, and is fond of calling me on the phone from upstairs, or summoning me from various tasks to show me something entertaining. I was not amused. “I am in the middle of something,” I said, forgoing the opportunity to explain the precise substance I was in the middle of.
“This,” he said, “is serious.” He then read aloud an email from our grandson’s math teacher.
Only yesterday we were celebrating an excellent report card. But something had gone awry in the past four days since grades were closed, and we were exhorted to ensure that tomorrow’s test did not reflect yesterday’s quiz.
My husband, whose confidence in me is sometimes misplaced, assured my grandson. “Grandma is great at math. She will be able to help you.” Some of you may recall a note from a few days ago in which I explained my loathing of accounting. Which is math.
I need to say that it has been…some time… since I did basic algebra, and when I saw the graphing equations and the formula for slope ( y=mx +b) I was a bit shaken. The required physics course I took in college was affectionately referred to as “Physics for Poets”. There was no math. Opera singers don’t use much algebra, either.
So we turned on the lights in the dining room. “Get pencils and paper” I told my grandson. He brought two sheets. “That’s not enough.” There was no way I was wasting my precious writing notebooks for this.
And so, we began—both somewhat irritable—to review the past two weeks of eighth grade math. He was gleeful when I made a mistake, and sullen when I was right and teacher-y. And that gave me insight into how to help. So, I told him I couldn’t remember how to do it—which was sometimes true—and he had the fun of explaining to ignorant me just where I had gone wrong. Sometimes I genuinely was wrong, and sometimes I had to be right to explain where he had gone wrong. Old Person Sidebar: Why don’t they teach kids multiplication tables anymore?
But I have to admit, even if he dramatized how much he hated it (“Why do I have to do math? I’ll never use it.”) I was positively joyful that I could access the algebra file drawers in my brain.
Later, I told my husband the kid had better never take Calculus because I wouldn’t be able to help him. We giggled.
After two hours, we had gone as far as we could in one evening, and when my grandson came back downstairs in his yellow pajamas, he had hot chocolate, and I had two whiskeys.
I feel I earned them.
***
And now your gratuitous dog photo.
A friendly battle over Pink Pig, who was revealed under the leaves yesterday.
The adults on my side of the family are in a quandary about Christmas gifts. We don’t see each other very often since I am the only one not on the east coast. Some of us love the spirit of the thing, and love the connection of everyone giving something to everyone. Some are concerned about the cost. Some of us live carefully edited lives, either by choice or by circumstance (i.e., a tiny NY apartment). Some of us don’t edit, and therefore have too much stuff.
What to do? If any of you have come upon a nice solution beyond simply exchanging names, please offer your advice. Lest you think we are keeping this to the last minute, we are.
But we’ve been debating since last year.
***
Today’s gratuitous dog photo:
He has an itchy nose.
By the way, it can be complicated to comment or like a post here. But if you sign up for WordPress and/or get their app, it is much simpler. Just a thought.
My niece and her husband—both executives at a big company—run a paperless home. They don’t write notes on paper; they receive and pay their bills electronically, and, well, I don’t know what else, because I cannot imagine living that way.
This is not a criticism. It is a confession.
My husband and I are writers. But while we both use computers most of the time, we do regularly make handwritten notes. When I need to download information for myself, I find that the simple writing of lists in a notebook is somehow refreshing to my mind. My notebook sits next to me now as I write, and on my bedside table at night. I carry it with me into the grocery store and prop it up on the seat of the cart. It often sits on the passenger seat in my car. It travels with me, so I can write on the plane when electronics are prohibited. I will use my phone to make notes if I have to, but I always prefer paper.
My preference for paper extends to a preference for a particular notebook, which seems no longer to exist anywhere in the world, but of which I have an extensive backstock. Occasionally in an idle moment I still search for them, but my hope is gone.
I like pens, too, and I am particular about them. This is not to say that I prefer anything expensive or fancy. The office cheapo store has perfectly fine pens. But they have to feel right in my hand, and they have to move across the paper in a certain way. When I had a day job and traveled often, there was a certain luxury hotel in Washington D.C. whose conference room pens I absolutely coveted. I still have two, and try to spare them for special occasions. The truth is, I love office supplies of every kind, really. Since childhood I have enjoyed a leisurely meander through the aisles of paper, pens, and whatnots. I have always been drawn to those bound accounting books, even though I have an absolute horror of accounting. I don’t buy them, but I eye them speculatively. I am also drawn to boxes of crayons.
But the thing is, we are drowning in paper. Most of it comes in the mail, and it is of no interest whatsoever. That’s easy to get rid of. But aside from the advertising stuff or the solicitations for donations, much of it—despite its unimportance—is unsafe to throw away. It has account numbers, or personal information that you really don’t want floating around. I used to have a shredder, but after a few iterations the shredders went the way of my robot cleaners: Fun while they’re working, but that’s not for long. And so the paper sits around on my kitchen counter, and later slithers out of the bonfire burn bag in the closet and escapes under the door, making a mess in the back hall. You know why I can’t wait for snow? So I can have a big bonfire and get rid of it all.
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 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.
J.F. Riordan 