Eternal Questions

Imagining a literature composed of nothing but questions, one sees the potential for depth, resonances, that cannot be reached by other means. Questions echo. They ask for the reader to enter their space; they embrace, not distance. Maybe someday I write something using nothing but questions. Maybe it will qualify as literature. But not today. This is just a list of questions.


Why does Nelly insist on kissing me, vigorously and annoyingly, on the face while I'm trying to do a downward dog asana?

What's with all these ladybugs?

Why is gas so much cheaper in New Jersey? (Is it a conspiracy to keep their disproportionate numbers of SUVs on the road?)

And why is it against the law to pump it yourself there? I mean, what's going to get hurt?

Why did the New York Times decide to make the paper narrower, thus eliminating some of its content, and then decide to blow up the table of contents so that it now spans three pages and eliminates the content there, too?

What profession should I practice now that people will no longer be able to afford books because they have to spend every cent they have at the grocery store and gas station?

What is all that product filling the tables at Barnes & Noble?

Why do dogs hump people?

Why can't days be 36 hours?

Where does our daily increasing population live while no one is buying new houses anymore?

Why do people insist on thinking that if their dogs never taste fresh meat they won't ever want to kill anything?

Why do people drive Ford Explorers?

Why, in the middle of one of the country's largest apple-producing states, are the only organic apples available at the store flown in from New Zealand?

Why is it always one of your favorite socks (rarely one of the ones that never fit quite right) that goes into the laundry room's black hole--and has anyone ever found this cache of a billion orphan socks?

Why does Nelly scream as if the world is coming to an end when I leave her home or in the car, but when we're out on the trail, no distance is too far to be separated?

What the hell was that that she rolled in yesterday??

Pancakes for Nelly

Last night, I returned to childhood. I was transported there by a thought. As Nelly pressed her weight against my leg in bed, an imagining bloomed in my head. I was suddenly her. Looking through her eyes, seeing what she saw. It caused my brain to jolt, the way it used to when I was eight and looked up at the sky and tried to conceive of infinity. It hurt. It was exhilarating. It was profoundly weird.

How does she experience living?

Quite different from me, obviously. Obviously: this was just a few hours before I woke from a dream in which someone was pushing a knife into my back. I felt it slowly pierce my liver, my pancreas. The pain. I woke as I was dying.

I suspect Nelly dreams of other things. But being inside her head, for that moment, was to have the universe open up. Actually, it opened, it widened, it deepened, simultaneously. The whole thing vibrated. I could almost taste it. Inside Nelly's head, it seems, is nirvana, where all is the experience of this moment and every sense fires at once. People take really dangerous drugs so they can feel just what Nelly feels, being her doggy self curled in slumber against a warm leg.

Of course, I would especially love to be Nelly on the Sundays I make pancakes. That's because I always make dogcakes too, always have ever since I've had dogs. I see their noses lifted, palpating the air, as the butter spreads in the pan. Who can turn from the sight of that, that anticipation of future joy? (Who says dogs don't have a concept of the future? Watch them in the kitchen.) So: buckwheat, with a touch of nutmeg. Nelly waits by the stove with breath held, eyes glinting. She will wait till I tear her small pancake into pieces, and then she does her stuff. Ask nicely. High five. Talk. Quiet. Put your head down. Roll over. On your side. Wave. Those are it, all the tricks I taught her a couple of years ago now. I hope to teach her more soon. But I just lost eight months of my life into a black hole (boy, was it black) in which I did little that would qualify as living, much less teaching my dog new tricks. She's not averse to teaching herself some new ones, though they are not what I would necessarily consider fun and valuable. She does, however. We live in different universes values-wise.

My son and I eat our pancakes with maple syrup, and Nelly does not. Later my son lies in bed, and I see he is inhabiting that eight-year-old mind that is more akin to Nelly's than to mine. "Do you ever think what it would be like to not be you?" and I know he is experiencing that delicious dislocation of perceiving beingness, the I-in-space. And I was there too.

Here, and Gone

She rises up, dark and looming. Her fangs are eight inches long. Bigger and bigger. It's . . . it's Nelly, her shadow on the wall, thrown by a reading lamp. Yet that is in some ways her truest self, epic, ferocious. A wolf in Nelly clothing.

How cute! How pretty! Such a sweet little dog! they exclaim. They didn't see her today, trotting down the rail trail with a decapitated bunny in her mouth.

Let me hasten to record that she was not responsible for the demise of this truly cute, pretty, sweet little creature. Not this particular one, at any rate. A half hour before, I heard the inimitably excited bark she employs only on wildlife sightings, and then saw Peter Cottontail speed by through the trees, Nelly still far back trying to figure out the scent trails, doing demented figure eights. Then she returned to me, practically sighing.

This one was just lying there, already headless, as we walked back to the car. Nelly was on leash, for once. So I allowed her to pick it up and carry it for a while--and there is nothing like the emblematic pride of a dog carrying a dead animal: they were made for this. The carriage goes up; the step becomes impossibly light, like a dressage horse doing a passage. I don't want her to get the idea that she better run fast because I'm always going to snatch away her prize. Even though this is exactly what I intended to do. But let her have her few minutes of glory first. (I had just given her some expensive and caustic wormer last month to get rid of the lovely tapeworms that were colonizing her gut and the hair on her behind, and I was not eager to have my stomach churn again like that so soon. Or hers.) So I give her the thing she'll remember: What a nice mom, to let me have my bunny. Just like when I let my child stay up late or eat too much ice cream. What a nice mom. Then I revert to being the gatekeeper to homework hell.

There are benefits to having a small dog. Like the ability to pry her jaws apart with relative ease. Not so with Nora the great big Leonberger with jaws like a trap. Not so with Nora the big dog who then picked up the headless bunny when it was freed from Nelly's grasp.

She carried it back to the car with the same great pride. And got in, and proceeded to eviscerate it. Long glistening strings decorated the upholstery. This unhinged Nora's owner. Curiously, though I am the vegetarian in the pack, the sight of red globules disappearing quickly down the throat--hmmm, that's interesting: wonder what bit that is?--didn't bother me at all. In fact, I was thinking instead how Nora had just had the ideal meal, one that would have cost eight bucks at Adams! I would never spend that much on Nelly; she gets chicken feet and gizzards, at 30 cents a pound.

The dead flesh in cellophane is what really makes me queasy. Precisely because it doesn't make most people sick. And because I know that that is exactly what I would like after the butcher got through with me and loaded the white styrofoam tray.

From the high electric wire spanning our road, a long pine bough dangles. It blows back and forth, suspended by only one small twig. It has been there for months, looking as if it might fall at any second. A breath could bring it down. It might be there forever.

I walk Nelly down a road of permanence, a road of impermanence. Tumbling down the bank to the beaver swamp is a rusted car half. It must have been there since the forties. The person who once drove it has been in the cold ground lo these many years. He is forgotten. We look at his car, though, as we go by, Nelly very much alive.

It is our expectations that are the most durable things of all.

Perhaps we are at the same remove from death, she and I. Perhaps not. You never know. You never know.

There is a church-ish mystery in the phrase "This too shall pass." I have had cause to say it to myself a lot of late; I uttered its calming syllables to a friend in extremis the other day. But the thing is, it's not true. Only some things will pass; others will stay, swaying in the wind, forever. Context will die before they do.

But I find myself wondering. What kind of creature takes only the head of the rabbit?

Home Sweat Home

Spring is coming. You know how I know? Because as it is really about to arrive, it feels as though it'll never get here. March is the longest month. Sixty days of wishing.

Right now, I'm under the gun. I'm pushed to the wall. Big changes afoot. The closet, both metaphoric and real, unloads its contents on my head when I open the door. I've got a real estate broker breathing down my neck, sending me articles on how to properly "stage" a house for sale, with such uplifting tips as "Don't neglect your cabinets! Be sure that all the mug handles are turned to face the same direction."

But wait. Maybe she was just trying to cheer me up by sending me a satire, and I didn't know to laugh. I told her I was just hanging on by my fingernails, and she soothingly told me everything was going to be all right. I think maybe I will use my imminent arrival at the snapping point on her--if she calls one more time to propose a visit to "just check in," or in other words, see how close I've come to transforming a house inhabited for eight years by two people of decidedly pack-rat-ish tendency into a vacant showroom. I have been smiling silently at everyone who asks, "So, how's it going?" or simply saying I don't want to talk about it. So unlike the normally over-voluble me, spilling my guts at the merest prompt by even vague acquaintances (one of them got it between the eyes last week in the library, when she innocently mouthed the pro forma question and got in return the full waterworks; you should have seen the dismayed look of shock on this near-stranger's face: Oh, my god, remind me never to say "How are you?" to a woman whose husband has recently left her!).

I'm just putting my shoulder to the wheel now, and in three days I'll allow myself to stop, look up, and see how far the cart has rolled. Halfway to the destination? Almost there? Only two feet out of a hundred? Who knows. But I assure you, I'm not arranging the mug handles.

At some point, I will have time to do my writing again. I will be able to comply with my assignments. I will resume delivery of the newspaper. I will phone back my friends. I will start internet dating. (That's just a joke. A very bad joke, OK?) I will walk Nelly--Sorry, my dear Nelly: You don't know what's going on here, do you?

Or maybe I just assume there's some "normalcy" to return to. Yet the economy falls to pieces while I pack books. Bats fall out of the sky as I scrub the bathtubs. (Indeed, I picked up a dead bat from the driveway yesterday, folded up as if lifted from a perfect sleep and deposited in the cold daylight of death.) I clear out the Augean stables of a utility closet, and a million more babies have been born so the balance of a sustainable population tips ever more precariously, if it hasn't already clattered to the floor.

What security do I imagine I will return to, once I have found a new home that will be mine, and not what I am coming to view as the rotted-out shell of a defunct dream that was both wrested from me mid-sleep, and an untruth that I will be so happy to put me behind me, as the moving van takes us away. (See, it is both; two opposing truths: a violent theft, and a relieving gift of wonderful freedom. How strange.) We always think we can go home again, at least. At the end of the day, we know where we'll be.

So when you're about to leave your home forever, you posit a new one in your hopeful mind, so you can go there. I can't imagine it in every particular, but I assume when this is all over, I will have a place just for me, Nelly, and my son--and I hope it's not a trailer. Nothing against your home, if it happens to be a trailer; I'm just saying that. I hope it won't be a tar-paper shack. How's that?

The other night I cleared the table, then looked back to see that my son had just poured chocolate milk all over his face. Deliberately. My first impulse--bad Melissa!--was to say, "What the heck? Why'd you go and do that? And would you STOP IT?" But something caught me. Instead, I went to look in his eyes and lowered my voice. "Is it making you sad, honey, all the changes that are going on around you?" In a tiny voice, he said, "Yeah, it makes me sad." Then he was able to wipe his face and get up. My heart went, Crack.

His assumptions are different from mine. I have lived in six or eight places I've called home; he has only this one. His notions of something called "the future" are hazy. They are, in fact, based largely on what I tell him. And I've been spinning that, hard, let me tell you. Happy, happy, happy! So uncharacteristic of me. But maybe it's put a little spin on my outlook, too.

This, too, is Nelly's only home. So long as you don't count the plastic kiddie pool that was her birthplace, in a West Virginia basement. I wonder how long it will take her to know her new place as home, every curve and turn on the road to which she knows and anticipates, standing up on the console between the seats in the car so she can see where she's going. Soon, she won't know. I wonder how long it will take for me, too? --Before it becomes the chimera of security floating above the shifting insecurity that we have made of our world, this once solid place.

Well, I'll take the chimera. I need it. A place to which I hope I'll always return. I have some great decorating ideas. To dress change upon change.

Gratitudes III

It seems appropriate, on the eve of tomorrow, to resurrect the idea of thankfulness. (Also of idiotic humor.) There's a lot to feel happy about, even if the economy is tanking in a spectacularly frightening way; especially the idea of a second chance. There's always another one of those, isn't there?
Here are just a few of the things I'm grateful for.

• black jelly beans
• the rainbow of variety of dogs (as seen, say, by the hundreds in Prospect Park), the way nature persists in making her works of art with living beings, each mutt a one-off the likes of which will never exist again
• green heads of daffodils emerging from the cold mud
• the nice sheets on comfy beds offered with hospitality by dear friends
• chocolate Easter bunnies (shared by a child)
• a glass of pinot noir at the end of the day, with the newspaper
• hope, and its gorgeous persistence
• any day I don't have to pick either ticks or burrs off Nelly (or both)
• e-mail (I admit it)
• Netflix (ditto)
• the Magic 8 ball, when it tells me exactly what I want to hear
• mothers, the kind who still want to take care of you even though you're grown
• a new season
• karma--as exists in this lifetime, because that's enough
• nostalgia: it brings me back to places and people I then find I don't have to leave behind
• plastic eggs dotting a field, waiting for excited children to find
  

Captivity

In Patrick McDonnell's strip "Mutts," there's a character I can barely stand to look at. McDonnell intends this; he's picturing the untenable. The animal is just called Guard Dog. No name, of course. He strains at the end of a short chain, and only when he dreams is he ever free. This is his life. And this is the life of countless dogs. Solitary confinement, for no crime. No exercise or mental stimulation, no communication, no pleasure. What possesses us?

The organization Dogs Deserve Better (No Chains!) has a brochure that is equally painful to look at. On the front is an ill-kempt beast with a forlorn look in his eyes. And then you read: "You see me with your eyes . . . Now see me with your heart." By this point you're on the floor. I must leave it to the psychologists to explain the disconnect that permits us to do things like this.

Like, cage anything. Guinea pigs, rabbits, rats, or (as Blake contended put "heaven in a rage") birds. Every one of them is actively suffering under the unseeing gaze of their captors. Some of these captors, too, are otherwise good people; some of them are my friends. (And you should know that I do not exclude myself from the ranks of the hypocrite or the unheeding; I am, oh, I am. Just ask my shrink. Or my friends. Or the cows whose dairy products I eat even though they suffer for it. I'm a wicked hypocrite.) But I avert my eyes when I go to their homes, because seeing an animal in a cage--alone, lonely, bored--actually makes me hyperventilate. I can't look or I'm going to have a panic attack. Nor do I feel I can say anything: Who am I to judge? That is not an entirely rhetorical question, as I've just mentioned. And even if I were to say something, I already know the response: Oh, don't worry. He's very happy.

This answer veers from ignorance of animal behavior, I believe, into the precincts of denial. Or at least the convenience of wishful thinking. Plantation owners went a long way on the Happy Slaves myth, remember. We see what we want to see. We do not like to consider ourselves jailers, so we say they are not imprisoned. A simple solution.

I'm not sure if it's more generous to allow that willful ignorance is at play. The kind that permits a dog owner to aver, as his dog stands stiffly with hackles raised, tail erect and vibrating, and a hard stare--beyond any doubt the canine way of saying "Make my day"--"Oh, my dog's friendly. He's just playing."

A lot of dogs have gotten hurt because their people didn't intervene before it was too late with these types of "friendly" dogs.

Yet it is the dog on a chain who is probably the saddest creature on earth. And I am sorry to bring up this depressing subject, when all we want is to be happy and forget about sadness and banish people who harp on "negative" things. But I wonder, Whatever is the point? Imagine locking a child in a room for years. No playmates, no hugs. Food pushed past the doorway three times a day. How is it possible such a social creature could be happy, or even not entirely ruined in the mind as well as spirit? Not possible. So why is it legal for people to keep solitary dogs penned or chained for their entire lives? Why? Is it because we have no morals? I may note that the AKC takes no formal stand against this practice. Now you know what to think of them.

Of course, I'm enough of a nutcase to think we might consider legally requiring off-leash activity for our dogs as well. A dog who never gets off-leash is a little like a child who, yes, gets out of the room, but has to hold Mommy's hand while he does so.

Instead, at the moment, seemingly every community is facing ever more legislation toward keeping dogs leashed at all times. It's even happening in hippie (okay, "hippie-ish") Woodstock. If it can happen here, man, it can happen anywhere. I lay this at the feet of our stupidly expanding population--there are simply too many people, and thus too many eyes. You can't just slip under the radar anymore, do as you please so long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Now there is always someone to see you, and one of those someones is likely to be secretly afraid of dogs. So they get on the horn to the town council, and then the end is near for the mental and physical well-being of lots of dogs. And the owners who love them.

Now where am I going to go to give Nelly a run, listen to the burbling creek, and have some of those serendipitous meetings that begin in the parking lot in mutual admiration of corgis and setters, Aussies and mutts? Dog people really are more interesting than the usual run of human, you know that? What an opportunity lost. For everyone. But especially for a woman at, um, liberty.

I guess I'll have to go back to Prospect Park. Ironic, to have to go back to a city of eight million people in order to let my dog run free. But next week. A few days of irony never hurt anyone.

Socialized

I had a wonderful experience this week. I joined a writers group. Those two words used to make me itch; I'd avoided such things for a very long time, harboring all sorts of misconceptions about them (prime among these the idea that I didn't "need" one). But as I'm lately discovering about pretty much everything, we condescend to or sneer at only that which scares us. I had been frightened. But that night, in the company of some very smart, very fine writers (two of whose literary reputations and book sales both I would have to live to a hundred to ever hope to approach), I found some of what I'd been needing. Very badly. Also, some truly great photography; just a lagniappe.

But that's not the wonderful experience I wish to report. It's that I brought Nelly with me, and there were no disasters! She did not snark at the two resident pugs; she did not guard me--by sitting in my lap and making ugly faces, the doggy equivalent of sticking out your tongue or giving out a raspberry--against the two resident labs. Instead, she wandered around the house (must check to see where cat is), sniffed things, made a brief effort to see if she could get on top of the table to see if the fuss over hummus and Terra chips had any implications for her, and then fell calmly asleep on the rug by my feet as we all read from new work.

Hallelujah! Another longstanding dream of mine coming true. --To have a dog I can take places. A normal dog. (That's "normal" by the wishful standards of a person, that is.) You don't know how much I wanted this--or how impossible it seemed in the early years of Nelly's life. I believe I've informed you that Nelly is a screamer. All it took was going indoors (the effrontery!) somewhere new, and she'd start whining, whining, escalating all the way up to a piercing shriek that froze the room, all heads swiveling in stunned (and pained) silence to see whence such an unholy sound came.

Nelly, of course.

Once upon a time, Nelly was going to be a European dog. The kind that lies patiently under the cafe table, oblivious to the fact that butter-laden pastry products are being consumed by mouths other than hers right above her head. The kind that's content to move on whenever her family pays the bill and decides where to next, without consulting Rover. She would walk carefully down the Parisian sidewalk, minding her own business, no other agenda than to exist at the end of a six-foot lead. On occasion she could visit a hilly simulacrum of nature in one of the great city's estimable parks, and perhaps we'd let her off leash to discuss matters with squirrels. Of course, this means she might end up like the dog of the Parisian woman we met one dusk in a park, frantically searching for the dog we had seen five minutes earlier tear by us, personless, frantically looking for her. It didn't look good on either side. Of course, if it was Nelly, she wouldn't be looking for me. She would be desperately searching for baguette ends.

After thinking that Europe represented the dog-owning ideal--people took their dogs everywhere, into restaurants and public buildings and on the trains!--seeing the reality changed the fantasy perception. Dogs were entirely incidental to their people's lives: they stopped and stayed stopped when friends met on the street to chat; they lay under tables whether or not they were hungry themselves or would have preferred napping on something softer. Their needs did not rise above the visible horizon. I don't believe Paris has many dog parks.

So maybe it doesn't matter if I can't take Nelly with me when I go out for brunch. I must be careful not to bring her to friends' houses that also harbor cats or guinea pigs. Or low cocktail tables. Mustn't forget that. Yet she is a member of my family, and my heart always sinks to receive an invitation to go places that exclude her. My mother does not understand: she thinks my dog is an obligation that prevents me from going on vacations to spas (ha!) and by airplane. She thinks Nelly "holds me back." But I believe Nelly propels me forward, toward inclusion and togetherness and comprehending the nature of borders. I would rather be in those places, psychic and real, than staying back--"back" meaning the same place I've already been. Although I do admit that hot-stone treatments are quite something.

Any time I bring Nelly someplace where she does not scream, or launch herself like a stealth missile into unsuspecting diners' laps in order to be closer to the butter plates, or pin the resident pooch with a fearsome growl, I feel like we are one step closer to the world I want: anyplace that is not the past; anyplace that resembles an integrated Melissa-Nelly world. The cross-species, cross-purposes gap bridged by togetherness. In my dreams.

Nelly and Platypus in togetherness heaven: photo (c) Andrew Garn. Thanks, Andrew!

White

Once, I knew a person who saw nothing to like in nature. There was nothing "of interest" there, and he could look out upon the world that made him and his kind and be utterly unmoved. Only the works of man gave him anything to consider. (But what are the works of man made of? A reworked fragment of the root and whole that is "nature," perhaps?) He would turn his face to a scene of such powerful beauty it could knock you cold, and not feel a thing.

I don't think I'd want to live inside that head for a minute--or, well, in the interest of science, maybe a second, to see what it feels like--especially on the days of winter like today. The snow is loving the earth. It falls and falls. I wish more of it. Outside is a rare privilege for the poor likes of us.

{Oh, I'm a little liar, grandly overstating my case. The shoveling does get tiresome. The plow guys have stopped coming, it seems, which I guess is okay since I can't pay them anyway. I rely on my shovel (excellent for an upper-body workout!) and the kindness of strangers and friends. I suppose I should be offended that some men in the neighborhood have been helping me out, but I'm not; I'm touched by the old-fashioned gallantry. And if I owned a truck with a plow, I'd be gallant too.
My neighbor spent a long time out in the sleet the other day clearing a space for my car at the end of the drive. Then I went out with my shovel and unburied the mailbox. I heaved some of the wet snow out into the roadway, where it would melt in short order. Later that night, I came home with a carload of groceries after dark, suddenly dismayed to remember that I'd have to carry them down the long drive by hand. But even more dismaying was the sight, illuminated in the headlights, of a four-foot mountain of wet snow that had been painstakingly constructed in the exact middle of my cleared space so I couldn't get in. I wanted to weep. Not only for the additional work it would cost, but for the meanness. Turns out it was the town road crew, who don't like it if you throw any snow in the road, and who retaliate the way a ten-year-old would.
But all this was redeemed, and then some, on Wednesday, when I took my son--and, as is frequently the case these days, a shovel--out to wait for the school bus. I used the time to dig out the gate so it would open, the end of the drive from the rill of road-plowed snow, the mailbox (again). The snow was wet, icy underneath, and heavy. My struggle must have been pretty visible--and audible. My son tried to take the shovel away from me to help, but I couldn't let him, because I needed to get it done, and I knew I'd be out there two hours at least. I looked up to see him turned away, head down. "Honey?" He looked at me, pain on his face. "I don't like to see you work so hard, Mom. It hurts me."
Compassion. The greatest of all virtues? It must be. Without it, how can one truly love? And my child, filled with it . . . }

Of course, I speak of winter as a citizen of the twenty-first century, which has provided me with electric power, a fuel oil burner, the delivery by truck (not personal saw and maul) of cordwood for the fire, teflon-coated snow shovels, ample supply of Trader Joe's excellent candles, and full cupboards courtesy of Hannaford (aka Cantafford). And when I venture out, I can wear a jacket branded Killy--remember Jean-Claude? oh, how we swooned when we were thirteen!--with more features than a 757 and made of fibers that came from a test tube to keep one impervious to sleet or north wind.

Do you not wonder how it is that our fur-covered friends can be perfectly comfortable indoors at 70 degrees and then outdoors at 20, with no change of costume? Puts that Killy to shame.

But I can go out and bathe in this peculiar beauty--it is deeply interesting, to me, at least--knowing that I will return to my artificially heated world. Such are the limitations of humans. The air is soft and the quiet has a presence, a weight, a sort of hum about it. It makes you want to close your eyes and fall over, in faith that the angel of snow will catch you. It makes you want to be a child again.

Nelly too returns to--what, exactly? Something in the snow, anyway. It gets her juices flowing. In a torrent. It sends her into paroxysms of craziness. She crouches, gets a wild look in her eye. Then she springs, springs again, like a demented child's toy. She boings all over the yard. Butt in the air, her nose goes like a shovel, submerged past her eyes in the white. Then up she pops, looking at you in surprise--Wha --? There is a little snocone perched on the end of her nose. Cute.

What is decidedly uncute is what happens when she becomes possessed by the snow demon and my child is out. Aha! she thinks: a full-size tug toy! She goes barreling toward him. No neophyte to this treacherous attack--because that's what it is to him, a tug-of-war to the death--he tries to arm himself with a snowball, but often it's too late. Nelly goes for his gloves, his hat, his jacket sleeve. Anything she can get in her teeth. And she goes into a frenzy the likes of which she only does in snow. He screams and pulls back, as a child is wont to do, which has the unfortunate effect on Nelly (Emeril in training that she is) of making her kick it up a notch: bam! By this point he is crying, and she has likely made tooth contact--though not on purpose--with his skin.

When your child is in distress, it unleashes something in a mother: that fabled power that will not stop at anything to save him, even if it requires removing a two-ton vehicle. Or a twenty-pound Nelly.

I have never hated her except in these icy moments.

The trainers among you are shaking your heads. And you are right to do so. I know what I need to do in order to manage this, or retrain a new behavior. It's more work than shoveling. But if I want to preserve my fantasy of our little family out enjoying the snow, I must.

I am reading the journals of Edward Abbey, which he aptly called "Confessions of a Barbarian." I do not think I would have liked him: a classic manic-depressive, like so many of the great writers, ensuring he's driven as an artist but pretty much of a self-serving shit as a person. But he was fearlessly connected to the larger world, I mean the world larger than man and his works. A writer to the last, he wrote, "There are, after all, several things more important than art. Like a pine tree on a mountainside. Like a juniper in the red desert. Like air and sunlight."

He said, "My concern for wilderness is not aesthetic but physical, sensual, empathic, spiritual, political, but above all moral: all beings are created equal, are all endowed by their Creator (whatever--God or Evolution or Nature) with certain inalienable rights. . . . Humanity has four billion desperate advocates, but how many has the mountain lion, the snail darter, the eagle, the bighorn, the ibex, the Siberian tiger, the eland and the elephant?"

His idea of "monkeywrenching" to destroy the destroyer's works is basically an adolescent dream of revenge: so alluring, vengeance against the powerful unjust, imagining the big kaboom in blowing up a dam that's laid waste to some holy beauty. But one can surely forgive him that. Among other things, he loved the snow.

Bonded (not Insured)

This is an interesting topic for her at this particular moment, you're going to say. Yeah, I'm transparent.

When I rode motorcycles and favored Guzzis, I had a secret affection for their nickname, at least in English-speaking countries where they don't "get" Italian: Goose. As a card-carrying sap, I find geese inordinately touching, because they mate for life. You can see it. There are always two, unless there has been some Macbethian drama recently. (The other quality those in the Moto Guzzi fold admired was that if one member of the flying wedge dropped out, they would close the gap up again--perhaps they are among the animal aestheticians I spoke of earlier, and they don't like their compositions marred.)

Geese are not the only ones. Red-tailed hawks, beavers, gibbons, and prairie voles also mate for life, and the disappearance of a partner is a devastating event. I have seen mourning squirrels, shocked by the sudden loss of a mate under the wheels of a heedless car (redundancy, sorry), running in confused circles around the body, expressing in aimless darting the crisis of the emotions.

Biology has answers for humans' vagrancy in the matter of partnership, but I'm not sure it does on the subject of why we are so inconsistent, both across gender and the ranks of individuals. Why do some of us stay partnered for the long term and others . . . You thought I was going to say, "and others not," right? No. I meant only to say, "and others calmly accept what the abundant evidence puts forth": that just under half (currently 40 to 45 percent) of us can't stay for the long haul. Maybe this portion is made up simply of novelty junkies--I know the feeling, at least when it comes to dog walks; I can't do the same hike day after day, even if Nelly could. I'm even getting a little tired of breakfasting on the fantastically supremo muesli they sell at Aldi for a mere couple of bucks. (There. Don't tell me I never gave you anything.)

I think for humans--and here I go contradicting myself, for all my caustic preaching on the fundamental sameness of us to the other animals--our bonding inconsistencies represent the mucking up of solid biology with personal psychology. And I should be clear: it's possible it's those who remain tied to each other, rather than those who go from mate to mate, that are the ones whose polygamous natures got mucked. Maybe it was watching Lady and the Tramp at too tender an age, who knows.

But I find myself wondering why we all nonetheless seem to deeply want, and expect, our matings to last forever, if it is in fact contrary to our nature? Why install a faulty chassis on a perfect engine? You get a teary vehicle every time.

Oh. Bad metaphor.

But there's still the sense that we were put together fatally wrong at the factory: that some of us got the heads and hearts meant for others, and vice versa. We're mismatched no matter what we try to do, like the children's books with partial pages that can be flipped so the bottom half can be paired with an ill-fitting top. For a laugh. It's always worth a laugh, if at any time so many of us weren't weeping over, or grieving, or raging at, or even killing the one who strayed (this week's paper carried a particularly ugly incident of this, though since the guy who murdered his duplicitous wife and then himself was a white supremacist, we held in abeyance most of our tears).

[Gosh, it's interesting, isn't it, when an amateur pontificates unknowing on a subject that has no doubt been explained in full by naturalists; only in well footnoted books from university presses that she seems to lack the brain cells anymore to tackle, eh?]

What I want to ask is if any of you really know what's going to happen between people. And if not, why do we persist in feeling as if we do? Why do we set our lives, our hopes, our expectations, our caps, for "true" love that is going to last as long as we do? Come on. Admit it. You do, right? From where I sit, I wonder why we retail this damaging fiction--and I also wonder why for some people it is no fiction at all, but the reality of their days. What 7-Eleven can you go to to buy one of those lottery tickets, the ones with the matching numbers?

Dogs, as we know, are not monogamists. They love, and they lose, and they love some more--sometimes all in the same ten minutes at the dog run. They are put to shame (in the sentimentalist's mind) by their progenitor, the wolf, who mates for life. But neither do dogs make promises that they're going to be (not to mention accept gifts of china and duplicate crystal vases). Maybe that's the difference. That's the kind of creatures they are. That's the rather chilling message behind the gift-shop mugs you can buy that say, "May I be the kind of person my dog thinks I am." Chilling, because you look in the mirror and know you're not. But want to be. So badly want to be.

Special Delivery

I had just finished eating my cup of Yo Baby (someone got paid a lot of money to come up with that name, and in my opinion earned every dime of it). My son is too embarrassed to be seen eating something so called, but I am not; besides, it's what passes for lunch in these parts. What is embarrassing is that I was eating it while sitting on the bed, which is where--second only to the living room floor in front of the woodstove--I do most of my work. Imagine: at my age, a Slacker! Slacker mom. Slacker dog trainer.

Nelly lay at my feet, drilling me with the intensity of her stare. If a gaze had the power of an act, this one would have caused gobs of whole-milk banana yogurt to arc through the air and land in her mouth with a decisive splot.

She was lying there so quietly, so intently, because I had trained her to, back in the day several lifetimes ago when I had the time and will to train my dog; to cut up a billion tiny pieces of lamb roll, to locate the clicker, to sit and focus on only my dog for ten minutes. (Ten whole minutes! Wherever did I lay my hands on that much time?)

I trained her to lie quietly, and hope patiently, for tidbits to be thrown, any time anyone in the household was eating, because the alternative was worse. When she came to us as a puppy, the sight of people eating at a table and not inviting her up onto it was a dreadful, horrid situation that caused fits of uncontainable emotion in the wee hairy beastie. She would shriek, and dance around on her hind legs, and finally chew the edge of the table in her frustration, and then shriek some more. Oh, the effrontery of the humans.

I quickly asked training guru Jolanta what I could do, because I love my dining table dearly, and also guests thought we were Terrible Dog Parents, the kind who didn't know how to lay down the law. (What law? says Nelly. I know no laws. I am stateless!)

Jolanta said I could easily train an alternative behavior: reward whatever it was I did want her to do. And what was that? All I could think of was quiet: no one can long retain their sanity in the presence of Nelly, um, vocalizing. (Did I mention Nelly is a screamer?) So I shaped quiet: quickly clicking for a brief cessation in the noise--she had to catch her breath before the next aria, after all--and being a smart, quick sort of doggie, she got it. I didn't much care what she was doing with her body, so long as it wasn't hurling herself at the legs of a dinner guest or chewing the edge of the table. Soon Nelly started trying everything she could think of to make the treats fly faster: sitting, standing, lying. "Down" has become a default position for her; she's gotten more tidbits for that, by design and happenstance both, so that's the behavior she throws first when she doesn't know what else to do. Hence, at dinnertime, she did a Down, was quiet (my only objective), and got a treat. The birth of a behavior. The "down" here is what they term a "superstitious behavior"--don't you love that? It occurred in conjunction with the other behavior she was being rewarded for, so she assumed it was part of the deal.

Do you have any superstitious behaviors? Of course not. You are rational; I should have known. But this is True Confessions Land for me. When I rode motorcycles, before my reincarnation, it was a time when my fashion was to wear my mother's Vassar College Class of 1952 gold ring, which had been passed on to me upon my own graduation from that august institution. (I mean that, too.) One day, early in, I realized that on every occasion I went riding and wore that ring, I hadn't crashed. Ergo, it was the ring that had prevented my becoming grape jelly on the pavement. I mean, smart, right? Very soon, that ring had to be on my pinkie, under the soft Italian leather gloves I'd treated myself to, every time I rode, or else I'd get the vapors. I swear, if I had lost that ring, I might never had gotten on my bike again.

I think I might start wearing that ring again.

Anyway, I had believed I would soon shape another behavior in Nelly--like, say, going to lie down on a rug in another room as soon as the dinner plates appeared--because, let's face it, having a little dog at your feet holding her breath and pinning you with her eyes for an entire hour doesn't make for peaceful meals, either. But what with one thing and another, I let it go on. Entrenched. Firmly there. Not to say that I couldn't change it now, but . . . It's a whole lot of work.

What I am aiming to do instead is to let this behavior extinguish, because I will remove the reward from it. No more little tidbits for lying quietly. And hope that she doesn't replace it with a reversion to the old habit of singing for her supper, since I'm too depleted to actively train a replacement behavior. (When will I learn that you reap what you sow? Gah.)

I ate my yogurt in two minutes (it's such a baby cup anyway, yo) and ignored her stares, then set the cup on the end table next to me. The heavy spoon wanted to tip it, but I balanced it against a stack of books. Nelly sighed--What the heck is going on around here now? They don't give me any food anymore!--and jumped off the bed in resignation. She curled herself up in her bed on the floor next to the table, and I reached again for my pencil.

I touched the stack of books, which nudged the spoon. The cup toppled. Nelly woke from her nap to find the yogurt-fragrant cup an inch from her mouth. All she needed to do was stick out her tongue and contact the sweetness of life. She looked up at me: Whence came this bounty, straight from a dream? She started licking.

For the first time in so long, I actually laughed out loud. And spoke to my dog: "Nelly, sometimes opportunity drops right out of the sky, and lands in front of you." Sometimes it's as obvious a treasure as a sticky yogurt cup. Sometimes it's more disguised. But sometimes, every once in a while, the skies rain nourishment. And all you need to do is swallow.

You're So . . . Artistic

It's a commonplace of all discussions of animal intelligence (meaning the other animals; it goes without saying that we're the measuring stick and thus our intelligence is not under question . . . OK, I'm back. Had to go wipe the tears of laughter out of my eyes) to eventually get around to this: "Of course, no animal has
yet produced the work of a James Joyce. . . . " Whereupon I throw back a spitball at the teacher's head: Really? Well, which one do you mean? The James Joyce of Dubliners? Or the James Joyce of Ulysses? Because it's possible that a troop of macaques somewhere, given enough typewriters and ribbon, just might produce something as unfollowable as the latter.

Oh, yes, I jest. I have to! In the face of something as fundamentally silly as the supposition that just because no jackal has emerged as a direct rival to Van Gogh then it's clear that humans have a lock on that mysterious ability known as creativity.

But how would we actually know? I mean, if what another species creates is done on an entirely different aesthetic grid? If their language is primarily physical (and primarily not understood by us), then how could we know that perhaps the family pet were the canine universe's equivalent of Aaron Copland or, for that matter, Yo La Tengo? For all the millions of us who use our language as a means to compose grocery lists or notes to the third-grade teacher about what our children will be bringing to the Valentine's party, there are only one or two who can use it to lay down the syntactical amazements of a Faulkner, a Hardy.

The few pictorial dictionaries of dog language we have now are to me breathtaking, not necessarily for what they are--just the beginning, even if a two-hundred-page one, of an understanding of the richness and breadth and subtlety of their physical communication--but for what they suggest: that all the nuance we experience in the use of our own language may well exist in theirs. That for all the millions of dogs who use a combination of tail carriage, ear position, eyes, lips, and body orientation to say, "Hey! You can leave that vole carcass alone because it's mine," there may well be one who uses something like the poetry of Melville to say much more. Maybe even to expressing the transporting joys and sorrows of vole-ness in this world where they become sodden blots on the snow two days after violent death in the jaws of a little dog, their souls having ascended sadly to vole heaven.

Maybe your dog is a lyricist of the tail wave, admired by the astonished mass of other dogs who can only wonder, "How does she do that with just a tail, and the air, and the small suppleness of her spine? Sheer magic."

Maybe when Nelly comes at me, flying low over the ground, having set up the opportunity by first going so damn far away I'm a nervous wreck, she is really writing a poem on the joy of return. It would contain lines about exerting individual will inside a paradigm where it is all but curtailed (domestic dog imprisoned in human environment). Maybe she is doing much, much more than experiencing the momentary bliss of that act, which is what we often celebrate in dogs, and what I frankly see in her face, her smile, the energetic burst of her movement. Maybe she understands paradox. And paradox is the single origin of all great art.

At the very least, Nelly is much more creative than most people would realize. She has found all sorts of ways to use me, the big bad human who purportedly calls all the shots. Ha. It dawned on me one evening as I sat reading on the floor in front of the woodstove, the station I man in the cold months. She picked up the giant knuckle bone she was working on, it having slid all over the floor as she pursued it, and it banged to the wood again and again as she haplessly tried to reposition it to stay. All of a sudden she purposefully walked over and deposited herself in my lap, then paused to look at me. I don't know how I knew what she wanted me to do, but I did know. I held the bone in my hand for her, and she went back to work on it.

I was a bone holder. Nothing more. A BA, an MA, and all I had amounted to in the end was a bone holder. I must say, I was the perfect tool for the job. No more sliding across the floor or banging out of reach. The bone was now held firmly so she could really go to town on it.

Let it not be said that I lack breadth, however. No, there are times when I far exceed the bounds of the single-purpose human. Sometimes, see, I am door opener! Treat dispenser! Bed bolster! Chauffeur! I can be so many things: Melissa, Swiss Army knife. The kind with tweezers and toothpick, too. Nelly has even discovered that she no longer need suffer her tongue to hopelessly scrabble with a piece of gristle stuck in her teeth, for if she comes to me and implores with her eyes, I will use my fingers to swiftly remove the offending bit. They're good for something after all.

I thought about this recently as I finished reading Merle's Door by Ted Kerasote, a book that is both hugely affecting and maddening, in a let-us-test-the-restrictions-of-narrative-nonfiction kind of way. Kerasote puts words into his dog's mouth, and much of the time they feel right: Merle was no doubt saying exactly what his owner thought he was saying. But human language, as expansive as it may be for us, is too limiting, I suspect, for a dog.

Maybe Merle was an artist, creating symphonies or songs his owner could not hear, because his ears were already full of speech. We may never know what concerts we have missed, because that particular orchestra does not play for us.

Treats

It is not often that I have hosted a triple playdate, but last Saturday was not a usual day. It was a day when chance came calling, and I happened to be home to answer the door. The phone, rather.

It was Anna, calling to say her pal Andrew was on the Thruway, and when he arrived would be eager to take Platypus for a walk. Platypus, you say? Platypus is a dog. (Andrew favors beautifully off-kilter names for his dogs; his previous best friend was Slimpuppet.) Nelly is glad Platypus is a dog, and not a platypus. She remembered him from meeting in the city a couple of months ago, and then another visit on home turf a while later. It does not take long to develop a crush, so it was a romantic reunion. And she has good taste, I must say: Platypus is a gentle, slithery sort of dog, a setter of black and white and brown with a slowly waving tail and dreamy eyes.

Anna and I each have boys who are playmates too, so while the adults might do what we think is fun--yammer--the boys could pretend they were knights, bearing sticks for broadswords, and the dogs could pursue their own doggie interests. We arranged to meet down at the cornfields. Just as all three cars arrived, another was seen bumping down the pot-holed dirt of Fording Place Road, and--oh, you're kidding, if it wasn't Janet and John, with Willy and Dixie. If we'd tried to coordinate a get-together like this, we surely couldn't; only under the auspices of serendipity could it have occurred. The meeting of all the canines and the humans, across the generations, as we spilled from the cars was joyous. And then we set off across the winter fields, moving as quickly downwind of the rat shit as possible. I refer to the mountain of it that is stored here for fertilizer, and let me tell you, it must take a frightening number of rats to make a pile this monumental. Every time I go to the farm market, I pray I am not buying corn that was grown in rat shit.

The four dogs bounded away--this territory was the possession of three of them, they come here that often; this being the closest place to walk free, free I say free and unfettered as the wind HAH!--and we slipped on the ice-bound ripples of the cornrows. The river followed us, gliding silently, to our left.

Then came another happy event, as if this was not enough to fill my heart: an opportunity to go grocery shopping with a girlfriend. Of all the admissions ever made here that reflect poorly on my general character, the one that going grocery shopping with a friend (and not, hallelujah, with our children) brings me a warm glow of happiness is perhaps the most damning. Anna and I even shop at the same leisurely pace, reading labels and commenting on the palatability of various foodstuffs. This hour in the store was what passes for a vacation these days in my life, so that gives you a basic idea.

Andrew was charged with taking the boys, along with Nelly and Platypus, back to the house. It was getting dark. Dinnertime approacheth. At the store, we selected foccaccia, shrimp, salad, spanakopita. Oxtails for the dogs. We were in an indulgent mood. Then I started worrying about how Andrew was faring in a strange house, with strange creatures to care for. We called him from the parking lot. "Tell him to make a fire," I instructed Anna. She hung up. "He already has."

There's nothing like the familiar made new. The house shed its yellow light on the dark snow as we drove up. I wanted to be in that warm place--whose lovely house was this? Andrew was sitting in an armchair reading a book from the shelves, the fire burning in the woodstove in front of him, while the boys spread out wooden train tracks and toy villages all over the floor. Nelly rose up before Platypus to embrace him, his neck in her front legs. Holy mother of god. Couldn't you just die.

And Andrew even went and got the groceries out of the car. Because I made him.

A bottle of prosecco, empty dinner plates, and two hours later, we were still talking, no doubt indiscreetly, for little pitchers have big ears, but we had too much to dish to keep quiet, immature as we are. Nelly had taken Platypus's marrow bone and was now standing over it and looking daggers at him. --Her new boyfriend! He decided he might like it back, then decided against it, because Nelly was now sounding like a badly tuned lawnmower. Her bared teeth transformed her; sweet little dog with the funny crooked tail no more. Platypus held his head still in an assiduous look-away, the canine way of saying, "That's OK. Really, it's OK. I'd prefer it if you didn't kill me." If I didn't feel fairly confident that she wasn't actually about to rip his ears off, I would have been deathly afraid. That's what she wanted. Well, not for me to be afraid, but him. Her romantic idol. Oh, the fickleness.

No, the resource guarding. This is who Nelly is. I had been terrified I might end up with a dog who would resource guard against humans--to me, hands down the most frightening possibility, because it is so volatile, unpredictable, and easily triggered by children who drop cookies and then reach to pick them up, by which point the dog has already decided they belong to him. Then bye-bye face. So I did my best to temperament-test Nelly for this before I decided to take her. Either it worked, or it was a fluke. But she does not resource guard against humans. Only, it has turned out, against dogs. She will guard the dirty dishes (my dirty dishes, says she) in the open dishwasher against Juni, a dog nearly five times her size, and with pitbull heritage. Not wise. But she follows her passion.

Don't we all. My passion is to have more days like last Saturday, when potential arises out of nowhere. To realize it, all we need is cornfields on a winter day, dogs, exquisite luck in timing, and a bottle of something sparkling. Oxtails don't hurt, either, say the dogs. (Oh yes they do, say the ox.)

Blankets

"We're all looking for security," Janet says to me on the phone, a truism that would otherwise be like a brick wall to the progress of the ear. In other words, unhearable because heard too much. But for some reason (some reason? ha! there is only over-determination, kids. Remember that) this time it opened sheaves of understandings to me, the kind that are nestled inside each other like paragraphs within pages inside of chapters between covers. The more you go on, the more there is to go on to. Yes, security is the great goal for most of us. And for the rest, the aim is an insecurity that feels secure because it's familiar: those are the people you know who court chaos and disaster and always have. The drive for security is as hard-wired as the drive for nourishment--and directly related to it.

A couple of days ago I said to my son, "Oh my god. If we get another Republican president, I'm afraid we'll have to leave the country." [Barack, OK; Hillary, please please no.] I was not sure if I was joking or not. He went suddenly quiet, and I looked closer at him: his lower lip trembled, and the water level quickly rose behind the locks of his eyelids. "But I'll miss my friends!" Leaving the people among whom he is learning, at eight, to be a social member of his species, the tools and mirrors with which he is forging the character that he will come to know as "self," would feel as devastating to him as, well, some of the losses he's already sustained. Big.

How we go about attaining security--ah, that is another matter. The routes are many, and sometimes we go west in order to get east, like Columbus. The map is handed to us early on by the particular collection of experiences we have, duplicated for none. One man's security is another man's prison.

Although perhaps in the end it's all a chimera--don't look to another for security, you bloomin' idyot!--putting in the time, and time alone, with someone builds what can sure feel like security. (As I wrote that last word, sitting in the armchair with Nelly next to me, punctuation came in the form of Nelly resting her head on my thigh. A sweeter, warmer, heavier, richer period never ended a sentence. So let me revise that: you may look to a dog for security; it's just the humans you need to watch out for.)

I think with dogs, you need between three and four years to really know them. Bonnie says, of Malcolm and Nora (flat-coated retriever and Leonberger, respectively), who have been with her for many years, "I've finally got them where I want them!" That means she knows them, in minute detail, and what they will do at any given turn; no surprises. Security. Comfort out of security. Water, food, play, sleep, repeated over and over. It will always be like this. Security feels like immortality.

Finally, at four, Nelly, in her unpredictability, is becoming predictable. I know where on a particular trail she is going to do her disappearing act; sometimes I even know where she is likely to reappear, though she is wont to push the envelope a little farther each time. In this, even, I now know her well. There are still surprises left to come--my life lately has been defined by nothing so much as the kind of surprise that knocks you back so far you hear the crack of skull on sidewalk: never think you know someone. Never. But dogs, as I say, are a little different. And now the process of watching Nelly for all these years has revealed a useful secret: she can't bear for me to go into someone's house and leave her outside. So that's where I have to go if I need to get her back and on-leash, something I can't do otherwise even if I give her raw steak every time she performs a recall. That's because to her, in this situation, steak is not the ultimate reward it would be in, say, the kitchen after doing her cutest trick (I think "High Five" qualifies here). Hunting freely is. Nothing I have in my pocket on a walk trumps that.

(And I know what the respectable trainers say is the solution to that--control the resources. If the environment is reinforcing her behavior, then I am not. A reinforcer is what she determines it is, not me. Out loose, she is in thrall to her little rodent-addled brain. So if I persist in allowing her behavior of running around madly an uncomfortable distance from me to be reinforced, how can I not expect it to continue? God, sometimes I hate the logic of behavior.)

Why does the action of going in a house freak Nelly to the point that she will emerge from the brier patch (though not necessarily the rabbit warren, because when only her butt and her tail are underground, she misses seeing the door close) to stand, waf-waf-waffing outside, demanding entrance? And it's quite a demand--akin to having a bamboo skewer poked incessantly into your eardrum, I'd say.

The anthropocentric school of interpreting dog behavior, alas the prevalent one--"He knew I was in danger and was trying to protect me!"--would say she didn't want to be apart from me. Flattering, I admit. I am so highly attractive, aren't I? I'm guessing it has something to do with her belief that there's a good chance there are bowls of cat food inside most unknown houses. And where there's cat food (Hey, this stuff isn't half bad!) there's going to be a cat. (Cue the theme from Bonanza.)

And I hope I'm not going to jinx my ace in the hole by mentioning this, in the same way I did last week by proudly telling people how great I suddenly felt, after months in the various rings of hell. I suddenly had a new perspective, powerful, positive, happy outlook, the antidote to feeling worthless. It lasted four days. I talked about it, and then, splash, into the soup again. Next time I start feeling good, I'm keeping my mouth shut.

But I've lately learned that it almost always works, absent a house I can disappear into, to go sit in the car. After five or ten minutes, I'll see Nelly through the windshield, a white mote in the distance, gradually getting bigger (though never that big, wee doggie that she is), running her little heart out. Through experimentation, I have discovered that it does not work to merely stand next to the car. She'll stay away all day. I must get in and shut the door, and the windows too.

What goes on in her little Nelly head? I cannot presume to know. Only that, possibly, she is looking for security. And inasmuch as she gives it to me, I am only too pleased to be considered a source of it for her. Even if it really means primarily that she can rely on me for chicken backs with pureed fresh veg. It doesn't do, in this world, to hope for more than that.

It Is Now Winter

To everything, there is a season. You've heard that somewhere before? I really like the song, and the sentiment, sad though it ultimately is, reminding us there is an end to all things. Nostalgia (the longing to return home, etymologically speaking) is called up. This is not a dirty word to me, as it is to some: it is merely the most appropriate response sometimes, and if you don't feel it, then there's something a little wrong. Don't you feel nostalgia for seasons past? Literally--those hot summers in childhood at the beach, your feet burning on the boardwalk, the thick air stung with the sharp smell of some unnamed shrub in flower. Figuratively--the age when you had endless time to give to the pursuit of something that felt good to you, as opposed to someone else. (Yes, I am thinking of motorcycling, all right?) Now it is, and apparently must remain--life is finite, after all--in the province of nostalgia, where you can merely visit from time to time.

The current season, in all senses, is winter, something that so many people hate, although that is like saying you hate life. Don't the Buddhists say life is now? It is the time for waking one morning to find the gray world transformed with cleanliness and glitter, white and still, persuading you too to become white and still. Then there is the simple joy of feeling warmth after cold (provided you do not live in a refrigerator box under a bridge overpass). Contrast, which is how we experience everything.

The season of youth is a time to test the limits of one's narcissism, when you are the master of your own ship as it sails alone through the wide sea of your days. Mine was given up to-- Oh, my own nostalgia here bores even me at this point. When I first got a dog, I started to see the pleasures of not serving myself alone. Since the day was finite, and there had to be a certain amount of work in it, what was the rest to be devoted to? Me, and my need to change the oil? The insistent request by the machine that I finally figure out how to calibrate the carburetion? My dog was a puppy when I found the compulsion to ride to the end of the road suddenly not terribly compelling anymore. The roads became shorter. I found myself whispering my private pet names for her aloud, repetitively, behind my helmet, a song of her that was calling me back. The season was turning, and I wanted to be with her. She, too, wanted me to be with her.

The calories I used to burn off battling an October headwind or, not a nostalgia-clogged memory, pushing my 450-pound nonresponsive vehicle along the shoulder, I now disposed of on long walks with her. Uphill was best for this. She needed the walks, and soon I came to too.

The bike was sold. I assume the new owner couldn't find tires that fit the rims, either.

In my life now I have three things, and this is their season: my child, my work, and my dog. All my hours go to them. I wish I could tell you the last time I read a book "for pleasure," not for work; I wish I could tell you the last time I went to a movie. Last Sunday's Times sits still unread as this Sunday is about to dawn; I literally cannot find thirty minutes anywhere to give to it. The idea of spending one hour, much less a day, on myself in the form of that old motorcycle-related madness seems now, well, like madness. This is not to say that all I do is selflessly give. No, I selfishly give as well.

The walks I give to Nelly are not for her alone. They are a significant portion of my social life, without which I would become as dried up as a piece of white bread tossed on the hard February ground. (Strange simile, you say? Yes, it is. But I've seen it, old bread curved like a warped board, stiff, become the antithesis of itself: cannot be eaten; repellent.) On these dog walks, I multitask. I give Nelly the exercise and socializing she needs--actually, she socializes for one to two minutes, screaming all the while, as she gleefully greets her packmates, then shoots for the hills to search for some game either currently dead, or alive and soon to be dead. I'm lucky if I catch sight of her once or twice during the hour, darting through the distant bracken. But I get the exercise and socializing I need, too. Isn't it nice when life provides perfect solutions like this? I just don't know which came first, my belief that there is no sadder creature on the planet than the dog who lives his life attached by rope to a lumbering human, or my discovery that there's nothing like walking through the woods with a couple of dear, kind, funny, and smart friends who are willing to hash out problems while we cheerfully march on, oblivious of and helpless to prevent the mayhem our dogs are causing. Still, we're all having fun.

The centrality to my life now of my dog's needs and the fulfillment of her biological urges may be the cause of my over-identification with her. When she gets ill, I suffer hypochondria on her behalf. It feels just like my own.

Last Saturday, I noticed her drinking water. A lot of water. Far, far more than normal. I let her out at 10 p.m., and when she returned, she went straight to her bowl and lapped and lapped. This meant that she had to go out again at 11:30, whereupon she drank more and more. And so at 1 a.m., and 3. I fell back into a willed and fitful sleep, as is my wont anyway these days, but twenty minutes later I was suddenly awake again, a dreadful realization on me. I felt hot as it washed over me in a wave: kidney failure. That's what was happening, and I had done it. I had killed my dog, through my negligence in not having given her the antibiotics against anaplasmosis that the vet had prescribed a month earlier. I won't give all the excuses now that I gave myself for not doing so. I just never gave her the pills, is all. Now I was lying there in a sweat, the vet's words coming back to me: " . . . can result, if untreated, in kidney failure." Now it was happening, and as always with terrible events, it was the middle of the night on a Saturday. Sort of like the furnace breaking only on the Friday of a holiday weekend with record-breaking lows predicted.

I got up to look for the two pet health books I had, which both confirmed that excessive thirst and urination signaled kidney trouble. Then I got the phone book and dialed the emergency hospital. I guess not many other dogs were in crisis at this particular moment, though there was the sound of miserable whining and crying in the background at the other end, because a vet tech spent twenty minutes talking me down from the heights. We had to ascertain whether it was really Nelly or me dying, since a minimum charge of $300 not to mention a full night of lost sleep hung in the balance.

Freud's concept of hysteria was a gender-related displacement mechanism. I just want you to be aware of this.

By forcible suppression, I decided I would not rush to the hospital, but I would watch Nelly carefully through the next day. By Sunday evening, she was back to normal again. And then I remembered how on Saturday we had laughed, Bonnie and the fellow who joined us on the walk in Woodstock with his exuberant rubber ball of a Rhodesian ridgeback puppy, at how consummately Nelly had vanished almost immediately, to stay gone but barking audibly to us her "I found something and if I bark at it long enough, maybe it will jump into my mouth" alarm call. She was gone for at least twenty minutes, quite long enough to consume something either fetid or salty or both.

My vet was quietly chastising and ordered us in for a blood test on Monday. Ninety dollars was the price I paid for the merging of my mortality worries with the health of my dog. Still too much.

Nelly's on the antibiotics now.

Someday a new season will come. Perhaps I will one day become engrossed in the knitting circle at the library or something, and give it all the time I once gave to the hedonistic pursuit of two wheels and alluring maps of twisty two-lanes. But for now, I like what I have. The winter suits me. Oh, and to be truthful, I do go to yoga once a week, and take neither my child nor my dog. Work either, come to think of it.

And well, yeah, we went skiing yesterday. But I'll try not to let it happen again.

Good, Dog

And I say unto you: Yea, verily, there is no god!

Certainly, if there was one, in all his millions of years of existence, in all his marvelous powers, wouldn't he have slipped at least once and left some concrete evidence somewhere on this planet? I know he's supposed to be omnipotent and all, but it is also said that he made humans in his own image. Draw your own conclusion.

There is biology, behaviorism, and Darwin, and they make miracles enough for me.

So you will be left to wonder why, in the past five months, I have had recourse to the following: various horoscopes; Guatemalan trouble dolls; the 8 Ball; tarot cards; Chinese fortune sticks. If I had a Ouija board, I probably would have used that too: it worked at grade-school slumber parties, where we would scare ourselves into idiocy by levitating one of our companions in her Lanz nightgown using only two fingers. (Well, yes, two fingers each of eighteen hands, but . . . ) I have a milagros for a broken heart taped to my front door. Every night I burn a Lucky Candle ("alleged fast luck 7-11," as the legal counsel puts it). And then there's that business with a phoenix.

I prize logic. I never said I manifested it.

I have also made use of the services of three different psychotherapists (and sleeping pills, antianxiety drugs, and maybe a touch more than a soupcon of pinot noir, but let's not go there, shall we?), which is perhaps just voodoo of another sort. Yet the most useful of all, in helping move me down the road toward something that seems mystical but in fact is as tangible as the wind that comes out of the north in winter and, meeting the cells at the bottom of your lungs, wakes you up to a new truth, the full slap of reality, is talking with friends. Speaking of mystical, there are some people who seem to suddenly appear in your way just to give you the map through the rocky high pass in a blizzard. When you come out the other side, valley blooming before your feet, you marvel that this must be the result of some power in the universe who knew you needed exactly this person at exactly this time, their uncanny ability to cut to the heart and then to the bone. (And save you all that money at the shrink's.) But I know that my sagacious and giving friends, some who newly glimmer in importance to my ability to get through a day or a crisis, whichever comes first, are not the products of the clouds, angelic though they may be (I'm speaking of you, A. And you, J. And you, S. Seraphim all.). They are instead like the new word you learn, then suddenly see everywhere. It was never there before! Ah, but it was: it was simply not seen. So, with the truth. So, with what you have hidden from yourself for many long years, but now, in a flash of internal light, see.

Thus all those divinations are really a format in which to talk to yourself. My first true love and I used to throw the I Ching all the time, and lo and behold if it didn't tell us the most precise, breathtakingly true answers to the puzzles that faced us. (And he was a Yale student of comparative literature; not exactly the kind of vacant moron who believes he will necessarily hit the lottery if he just goes to 7-Eleven often enough; um, like me, maybe, that kind of moron?) What the I Ching told us, those coins on the floor, was how to Read Into. Exegesis. If the answer did not already reside within us, we would not have been able to find it in some words of ancient Chinese first set down three thousand years ago. Yet here it is! The answer to "Should I write my master's thesis on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?"

The I Ching is, after all, subtitled "The Book of Changes." Everything I need to know about living can be rephrased everything I need to know about changing.

I want to be better. I want to be a good person. Oh, gosh, I sound pathetic, don't I? I sound like the chirpy Christian columnist in the Kingston Freeman, which is the most shocking revelation I think I've ever had.

But it can't be helped now. In order to be a good person, one must first and last be a kind person. Of course, you don't go around prattling about this in a public forum; who are you, Christ or someone?

Anyway, the foundation of kindness is to turn the other cheek. Meet anger with kindness. Meet wrongdoing with kindness. Meet hostility with kindness. Meet cruelty with kindness. I'm not at all Jesus-like, but Christ, I want to try.

How did I figure this? Maybe it came to me in a dream. Probably courtesy of those trouble dolls under my pillow.

When Mercy used to jump on the counter and "steal" our food (Look, Dick! See the loaded terminology, Jane!), onlookers would say, "Oh, what a bad dog!" Polly the Original Great Trainer taught me to respond, "She's not bad. In fact, she's quite excellent at what she does. Never misses a crumb." Counter surfing is one of the most difficult behaviors to dislodge, because it is built on an intermittent reinforcement schedule (and delicious reinforcers at that), the most powerful insurance that an installed behavior will continue: Sometimes there's pot roast up there, and sometimes there's nothing; so I gotta keep trying, 'cause I just love pot roast.

You know who else is on an intermittent reinforcement schedule? All of us, when we sit in front of our e-mail programs, hitting "Receive/Send" like a banana-addled monkey. Sometimes, just often enough, it rewards us with a funny or productive or much-awaited message. Hey, next time I'm going to be even more persistent with that button.

Dogs are good at what they do. Are they therefore good? When Nelly kills a rabbit, which has happened just often enough for her to be extremely persistent ("persistence furthers") when she gets around the brier patch, is she a bad dog, for killing a creature she does not need to kill (although you should ask her biology if she "needs" to kill or not), and one moreover that already has a hard enough life, what with the coyotes and foxes and hawks and SUVs? I have often been amused by an owner's insistence they have such a good dog, because said dog will pass by a coffee table filled with cheese and crackers and not avail himself of the food he presumably knows does not belong to him. (And if you can explain the mechanism whereby that knowledge was gained, you win the Nobel.) This does not strike me as good; this seems rather to indicate the dog is aberrant. Or just hasn't checked the coffee table often enough. Secretly, I wonder if such dogs aren't actually intellectually sub-par; I have a grain of a theory that superior food thievery skills in a dog correlate with extraordinary intelligence.

Nelly, by the way, is polishing her skills in this department, and if she was tall enough to counter-surf, might well be gunning for Mercy's laurels.

As long as I'm admitting unsavory details about myself--and wanting to be like Jesus is as unsavory as they come, don't you think--I will cop to a belief in karma. And sorry, I still snicker impolitely, and unchristianly, at people who believe in multiple lives (though I keep having dreams about being poled down the Nile in this beautiful gilded barge . . .). No, I know I only get this one chance. And that chance happens to be fleeing merrily away. If I'm really lucky I may only have another thirty years--peanuts!--in existence to do all the things I want to do. Do you ever do that, count your remaining years? If you're over fifty, you can give yourself a right good scare and the need to re-up your Prozac. It is justifiably depressing: time already goes like a barn swallow flies, and then to think of it as far fewer years than you've already lived? Because it is only blackness for you once they lower you into the ground, or load you into that furnace--though, hey, now you can look into the option of green burial. (They still won't let me do what I've long wanted, to be tossed deep in the woods as dinner for the coyotes. The good coyotes.)

I mean karma in this life. One who gives, always receives. Always. By offering only kindness, ever kindness, even to those who would hurt you, how can you go wrong? It's the only foolproof way to live. Think about it for a sec. Perseverence furthers. Eh, Nelly? Eh, Dr. Skinner?

Or Else

A book that has become one of the most important foundation resources for a certain set of dog trainers does not even contain the word "dog" in the index. It mentions everything else in our human world--our social structures, religion, law, family life--and this is the basis of its power: it seems to explain everything. It is a Bible for comprehending, and divining, why we do what we do, and the often enormous prices we pay for living such unexamined lives.

The book is Coercion and Its Fallout by Murray Sidman, a behavior analyst who published it in 1989. Have you ever heard of it? Yet it is the kind of work whose stunning truths--in every sentence!--floor you, and then immediately after, when you've picked yourself up and are dusting off your knees, you wonder, Why did I discover this so late? Why is it not on the bookshelf of every household, or better yet, every school, court, church, and therapist's office, in America? Why did I first learn of it from clicker trainers?

Of how many books could it possibly be said that its precepts, if followed, could effectively eradicate a majority of crime, personal woe, war, and even . . . workplace inefficiency? That must be, then, why the ideas in this book must be generally ignored. And don't ask me for further reason why, because I don't have the big answers; I am liable to say something like, "Maybe it's change? We don't like change?" (But of course, Sidman himself gives the answers, and they have to do with the way we are essentially coerced into accepting, and perpetuating, coercion.)

But since this book is based on the explorations of B. F. Skinner into the mechanics of how we learn, which is to say, how we live, and because Skinner has been so completely and apparently willfully misunderstood and reviled, something in it clearly scares us. I will also leave the "why" out of this for now, and perhaps forever: I am supposed to be writing a book on this very subject, but for now I will simply avoid crossing the wide ocean in my dinghy and instead stay on the shore, letting the wavelets tickle my feet.

I am, after all, no Sidman: I can't explain it all between two covers. As soon as I say one thing, I see the lines radiating out from it like fractures on struck glass, and I don't know which to follow first. For instance, just above, I was going to launch into a subject that's been dancing around in my head for some time: the equating of the behavior analyst's view of psychology (and with it the solutions to our problems) with, say, the Democrat's. And the Republican's with--what? The tarot card reader? The flat-earther? Opposed in solutions, because opposed in basic understanding.

But rather than pursuing that, I'll let Sidman speak a bit, in his unpoetic, concise manner, on various topics. It's hard to pick. See, I jump up and down at practically every sentence in this book:

* "From both a practical and personal point of view, perhaps the most significant thing to remember
about the first side effect of coercion is that people who use punishment become conditioned punishers
themselves. Others will fear, hate, and avoid them."

* "Acceptance of coercion is so pervasive that some will find it hard to believe they could influence others
effectively with positive reinforcement, without threats of dire consequence. Our own experience with
coercion gets in the way, making us more secure in our ability to punish than to reward. An overworked
and incorrect bit of folk wisdom pronounces the carrot to be of no avail unless backed up by the stick.
But the carrot can do the job all by itself."

* "When used effectively, positive reinforcement is the most powerful tool we have. Many teachers know
this, even though they barely heard it mentioned during their training."

* "Intuitively recognizing separation and divorce as escape, children often blame themselves for a parent's
departure. . . . Escape from the family has a way of perpetuating itself."

* "Verbal warnings have not sufficed to keep up the level of avoidance that the original atomic explosions
generated. Behavior analysis provides good reason for this slippage. It is characteristic of avoidance
that success breeds failure. As we go longer and longer without a shock, avoidance automatically
seems less and less necessary."

Behind every example Sidman gives, and the fundament of all the knowledge contained in this book, is science. That is, quantifiable laboratory results. Laboratory experiments on animals other than humans.

There. There's a big answer for you. The reason for the marginalization of life-changing ideas. We will do anything to differentiate ourselves from other animals, even if it means consigning ourselves to a prison cell of ignorance, unhappiness, and fallout. And Republicanism.

This is at the root of one of the more disturbing bits of news in the paper last week: a report that all the states that carry out the death sentence do so using an antiquated and difficult to administer three-chemical dose that can result in intense pain. And why? Because the single-dose alternative, known to consistently provide a "humane" death, is the one that is used for animal euthanasia. (See, maybe, poem below.) We don't want to treat one another as if we were pet dogs, do we?

Unconscionable.

This is also the way I feel about my own coerciveness. It causes a wave of revulsion deep in my gut to recognize the ways in which I have sometimes emotionally battered my loved ones because I was overcome with my own sense of frustration or fear. It goes against everything I believe, everything I know, everything contained in this book. I am so deeply sorry for every instance, I could weep.

That is how it was when I saw it this week in a perfect microcosm. As usual, Nelly showed the way. I got on my coat and went to the door, and Nelly went too, as always. She looked worried; there was the possibility that I might leave and not take her too. This happens on occasion, actually. She voiced her discontent (did I mention that Nelly is a screamer?). To convey the news that she was not going this time, I reflexively made that "no" sound deep in my throat. Didn't even have to open my mouth: "un-hnh." She looked at me and stopped. Then her head dropped lower, her tail sunk. She turned and walked away, dejection all over her body.

The sound was a conditioned punisher. And she turned away. She escaped the unpleasantness that long familiarity with that sound--how could I be so little aware of how often I use it?--has taught her will ensue. And the unhappiness of this necessity made me unhappy, for her and for everyone else I have ever punished too.

Seeing that I do this makes me feel lower than . . . an animal.

With Nelly, at least, I can offer a marrow bone. And the promise to do better, to be more conscious. I am hoping that will do the trick. It'll be a new one for me.

New Year's Revolutions

To be a dog.

That was Tony's recommendation to me on the phone tonight; I can't claim it as my own. But it represents the highest wisdom, the most ached-for attainment. Tony (who should know, he who is faced with the greatest of consuming fears every minute of his days, and he who lives with two exemplars, each in their own divergent ways, of open-flowered dogness) offered this possibility to me as I recounted the past few hours to him: a twilight walk with Nelly through my favorite woods, a gift to myself, during which I felt inexplicably happy, full of hope. I found myself smiling. I allowed myself, knowing that to do so--even if only to the dark-stained tree trunks rising all around me--would be to intensify the effect, as well as the cause; smiling begets happiness, even as happiness begets smiles. They release intoxicating brain chemicals every bit as tastily fizzy as the first sip of prosecco (pop). I thought: This is OK. And Life is OK. People were right when they told me, no, promised me, I was going to be OK. So I smiled at the people I passed on the trail: we are simple, we humans; we can be bought for a facial expression. It changes everything, maybe the molecules in the air. People like you, when you like them first. The dogs greeted each other, exchanged their business cards, then disengaged to go see what was next in this interestingly scented universe.

Be a dog.

Then, an hour later, I'm on the phone with Tony, and the tears push up and over the dam, spilling in a crystal arc of never-ending liquidity. "What's the matter with me, Tony? Just a little bit ago, I was happy. I didn't know why, but I felt like I had gotten somewhere, and it was good, and now here I am, like something you'd need a lot of paper towels to get up off the floor." In his hard-won sagacity, he tells me I'm on a roller coaster now--oh, this I know!--and this is simply what life will be like for a while. But we're all on a roller coaster. From birth, which is the moment you get strapped in by the attendant. That's why "roller coaster" is the Number One Cliche. "You've got to turn yourself into a dog," he goes on. "Then you can be there, in the happiness, and not think about what's behind or ahead." "What's ahead" seems, at this moment, to consist largely of tears.

I was reading Time magazine, which is not something I recommend, even if you are in the fifth grade, which is where its reading level is aimed. The cover story was the obligatory gee-whiz look at the evolution of morality in humans. (When Time does a "think" piece, watch out: your world is about to be rocked!) I would prefer to always place "morality" in quotes: I think it's another of those fictive rationales built to retroactively paper over something a) we don't want to countenance (like, for instance, the idea that everything we do is biologically based, so we cannot possibly be separate from the rest of biological creation); or b) something we wish were true, but is simply not supported by observable reality. Hey, that's OK. Make a construct! Works every time!

Terry Eagleton, one of my early intellectual crushes, points up a) above nicely (see why I liked him?) in Harper's recently when he writes, "The structure of biography is biology. For all its tribute to the individual spirit, it is our animal life that underpins it."

The article on morality was written in the same infuriating, self-cancelling style that has become the New York Times's stock in trade: "fair," "balanced" journalism apparently means you say one thing, then in the next sentence you find something to contradict it. No matter if it's patently idiotic.

But I digress, as usual. Boy do I. (But dogs digress, don't they? Isn't that rather the form of their lives, one long digression composed of digressions?)

At least the magazine calls it by its proper name: it is "vanity" to think we are unique among animals. Then it goes on to say, "What does, or ought to [my italics, to show I don't comprehend this one whit], separate us then is our highly developed state of morality." But why do we NEED to be separated? Why do we insist on it, like a child hugging to its chest the blocks it doesn't want to share? Could it be . . . vanity??

Do we behave in so-called moral ways because we revere the notion of right, or because doing right works for us? This would be B. F. Skinner's view, I guess, and Jean Donaldson's, too, if we can extrapolate the motivations of our own behavior from that of dogs. (And here my cri de coeur is "Extrapolate away!") Be a dog.

If this is true, then, morality is really a cover story for selfishness. (Or what Time calls, in a bit of poetry that clearly escaped a sleepy editor's delete key, "a mercantile business" called reciprocal altruism.)

I make a vow that in the new year I will think more about this; I will arrive at theories, conclusions, revolutionary new ways of seeing humanity, earth-altering understandings of our condition. Then I will go on dog walks. I will shake off my self-absorption, if only for an hour or two a day, then do some clicker training with my dog. And I'll write here about a more proper subject than this incessant whining about my personal heartache. It will be a relief for all of us.

There are more resolutions to come.

Nelly ate her lapin tartare on the lawn for lunch today. This is one way in which I will not be a dog. While she undoubtedly found it the most civilized thing to do--the height of her civilization, that is--I found myself in a strange state of mind as I wrapped a plastic shopping bag around my arm and then felt the interesting weight of a recently live being's refrigerated innards in my hand. It was a transporting experience. Where exactly did it take me?

The Holly and the Ivy

I received my Christmas present early this year, and it's all I really want. Oh, well, all right. That's not true. I do have a small list that I have conveyed to the powers at the North Pole, a few items relating to fame, fortune, and the like, but I doubt that Santa is going to get Javier Bardem wrapped and under my tree in time. I'll just take yesterday's gift.

The snow has a nice hard crust on it, so it fools your foot every darn time. "I can walk," you think; "No, you don't," says the snow. After a moment's hesitation on the surface, crunch, down it goes, so that every step is twice the expenditure of energy as usual. But that's for a normal-sized person (as well as for the poor deer, whose sharp hooves cut through the crust, too, so you see them these days taking paths of least resistance on the plowed roads; alas, this is not the time of year they want to be expending their hard-earned calories on commuting). For Nelly, at twenty pounds, the foot of snow merely makes her taller than she is used to being. And that means she can now reach the point on the fence where the gauge is big enough for her to squirm through, or where a sag at the top permits her to go up and over. Please recall that her probable father is a dog named Houdini, whom no fence can contain. Where is the fence-scaling gene in the canine's makeup, I wonder?

In the morning when we go out to wait for the school bus, Nelly comes too, but stays inside the fence, noodling around, sniffing the tracks of whatever visited our yard the night before. It's her version of reading the morning edition. My son and I sit on the bench (at least we do when there aren't five-foot-high banks of snow pushed against it) and read together. It's a lovely time. It wasn't a lovely time yesterday when I watched Nelly scrambling over the fence and running to our neighbor's. They are my dear friends. Plus they have chickens, whom Nelly is very interested in meeting on a far more intimate level. I'm standing there helplessly watching this, both because I can't leave my eight-year-old to stay by the road alone so I can traipse all over the neighborhood trying to catch a Nelly-who-won't-be-caught, and also because it would be, as I just mentioned, bootless to try. It always is.

When she was finished there (no fresh chicken breakfast, thank goodness), she came trotting down the road toward us. Then, she had a thought. She stopped, considered something. Then gave me The Look. Her friend Willy gives The Look, too, at the end of a walk when he's trying to decide if he's going to give his human mother a heart attack as he turns to trot down the road to explore several miles of backyards. Nelly's look said, "I don't think so. I'm not through, just yet." Whereupon she crossed the road, and bounded up onto the wooded hill opposite. Then she found the carefully planted excuse of several squirrels to follow, and did so, finally disappearing out of view up and over, far away.

She is a white dog. Smaller than the snow piles that line the roadway. No one would see her before they were on top of her.

Everyone told me the holidays this year were going to be hard for me. I did not know what they meant until they were nearly on top of me. The analogue is that when I was pregnant, everyone said, "Your life is going to change in ways you could never dream." Yeah, yeah. What did they think, I was an idiot? I'm smart enough to figure that out on my own, thank you.

I wasn't. The truth of the prediction hit only when I had taken that baby home. My life was to change in ways that blew my little unsuspecting, yes, idiotic, mind. And so it is now. The holidays are hard. I keep getting thrown into the past like litter against a storm fence when a semi blows by at 80. Just putting the ornaments on the tree--the ornaments that represent a collective past, and the promise that they will always be in the box in the attic for the future collective Christmas--brought down a sadness that was so crushing I wanted to do anything to avoid feeling it. I recall depressions of the past, how psychic pain can feel so much worse than physical pain that I understand (though don't get me wrong, I am not contemplating it) the urge to wash it away with the spilling of one's own blood. The holidays are hard. They make you remember. They make you wish for what you cannot have.

After the bus came, I reluctantly turned away. I could not see Nelly; she had obviously gone far down the road, up on the hill that skirts it. I left the gate open a foot, and told myself to give myself up to a higher power: the one called luck. Because that was what was needed to bring Nelly back safely across the road when she decided to return home, luck that she would choose a moment when no car was barreling at ridiculous speed, as they often do around here, around these blind curves. I had to give up the sense that I could prevent anything, that I could change fate if fate was to visit this day. I was not entirely successful in letting go, however, because I was writing a little narrative in which the woman who has just lost nearly everything then loses the little dog who is much of her comfort in a time of mourning. And right before the holidays, too. I admit to being morbid and hysterical. Yes, indeedy.

But still I walked back to the house. I made myself: an act of leaving. I was going to go in and shut the door, go about my business, try to tamp down the hope that I would soon hear Nelly's sharp bark asking to come back in, saying, I'm done out there for now.

I approached the porch steps. Something came toward me from the back of the house. Nelly stood and stared. I stared back. How did she get here, appearing from the opposite direction she had disappeared? How did she get back into the yard, when the only way to do so from the road is to come through the same gate I had just come from?

It was a Christmas miracle. The only explanation is that there can be no explanation. That I have to let that desire go, too. The holidays are going to be hard. This gift was easy.

Nearer, My Dog, to Thee

When did I realize that I love Nelly so much? That I have the kind of dog others call "so sweet" and then I get a bit oozy inside?


It happened slowly, that's why I can't afix a date. Real love grows at about the same rate as a rubber tree. Try watching one to see. But new leaves do appear. The trunk gets slowly bigger. Or, to switch metaphors, since one is not enough to cover this topic, you build up to 60 mph, you don't start there. I wish I knew the mechanism by which this occurs. It has something to do with time, and important experiences shared. In the case of Nelly and me, or indeed anyone else I've ever loved, "important" experiences are designated by the amount of danger they contain. This can be physical, or it can be emotional; danger is danger, and sets your heart to racing all the same. And oh lordy, we've been through some times together! I had initially thought I'd be writing here primarily about Nelly's close calls, maybe rating them on a scale of, say, one to five mortar shells. By now, mysteriously, I am suffused with love for her, especially when I look at her from some distance, which gives the ideal view. Then I see her.

Those cumulative hours I have waited in the cold, the dark, the wet slowly seeping into my boots, the briers scratching my face as I try for a shot at getting her tail at least; those minutes ticking by, piling up, are the blocks that build love. Finally they accrete into a mountain, and you are there, standing elevated above the world, risen to a breathtaking view, by love.

There is the thing we call "love at first sight," and believe me, I am not immune to its especial charge. Gunpowder, it's packed with. The eyes start the spark, then boom. Anyone who would like to deny we are merely a vessel for the wash of chemicals released by various glands, triggered by currents in the brain, has never caught the eye of someone at a party or on the subway and felt things running through the body that are among the most extraordinary feelings we can feel. I don't have words for them, sorry. They are way beyond words. Somehow, "chemistry at first sight" doesn't do it. But you know the zinging, the pinging, the dear hope, the rocketing possibilities, that all spring into being in this shattered second.

The particular breed bias I have--I've got border collies on the brain, you have your "type," be it goldens or pugs--is a form of this. It works with human breeds, too. To my final day, I will feel a jolt when I spy a curly-haired Jewish poet-philosopher type, because he will remind me of someone long ago: a love at first sight that grew into the real thing. They don't get better than that.

Maybe breed bias is a sort of manufactured love at first sight. I see a BC, and am brought back to the memory, physically imprinted on my being, of the love I bore for Mercy-the-mostly-border-collie. By the time she was ten years old, it encompassed the world. I have a friend who lost her son at sixteen. I don't have words for this, either. But she described the love of a mother for her child as a great engine, which stirs into life on the day of birth. Each subsequent day, it gathers power. The pistons are fired faster and faster; the steam builds. Hotter, faster, hotter, faster. Every day, that love chugs and chugs and chugs. Finally the clatter, the great breathing muscle of power, is going so hard you wonder the machine doesn't explode. That's love.

Nelly has become a piece of me. I need her, want her, to be near. I don't sleep as well if she is not pressing her small warm weight against my body. Without her, something is missing, and I feel it even if I don't name it. She still goes on heartstoppingly extended walkabout--she's a canid, after all, and has some 100-proof brain chemicals (the ones that say "rabbit in vicinity!") even stronger than those that make hearts grow fonder. But she too, increasingly, wants to be with me. She eventually, eventually, comes back. And when we are together the earth starts its revolutions again. I don't know if I would die without the love of a dog. I only know I don't want to live without it.

The Place You Love Is Gone

When I lie in my bed, all I need do to enter the past is turn my head. In an instant I pass through years. Through the window I catch a slice of a great red barn, silver metal roof, that has been standing a hundred years or more. It is itself made from parts of other, older barns, so its history encompasses others' histories; in this respect it is like me. It is only steps from the house, but I think of how far it is on a dark and cold winter night, one perhaps deep in drifting snow and sharp wind. I have read that people had to string ropes from their homes to their barns so that farmers wouldn't be lost forever between them in the swallowing snow when they went of a dark morning to tend the livestock.

It takes only a small sleight of mind to imagine this lonely scene out my window, so unreconstructed is the view out back of the house. This is one of the many gifts this place has given up: the ability to live in the midst of a past so easily called up it is almost here.

Looking at this scenery, devoid of much human mark except for rail fencing, depending how you allow your eyes to frame it, inspires inexcusable bouts of corniness. I will try to suppress them. But it almost hurts to be here now, now I know I must leave.

We got this place through the misfortunes of the family who preceded us in it. I have felt the weight of this sometimes. Our luck. Their loss.

When I looked about, I saw dreams to come. The old shed by the mulberry tree, where in the late spring we would wade out in the tall grass and fill buckets with warm berries, and eat half of them before we could even make it back up onto the porch. The shed would become a playhouse for our son, a place of his own.

The barn, I wasn't sure if it would become home again to horses and goats, or if its new reclamation should make it a temple to creativity: we could show our friends' paintings, have readings, host children's plays, and barn dances of course. It was already a temple anyway, a temple of space, rising up to the heights of the great roof, making you rise with it.

The gardens were struggling, and every spring I would add one or two perennials, every fall a handful of bulbs. Someday, I imagined, they would look just like those English cottage gardens, laying down swaths of color, packed in and blurring like an Impressionist canvas.

Most of all, this place has been a Disneyland for dogs: due to its exceptional topography, once we fenced and gated the road side, the back could be left open--no dog was going to leave home via a swamp. And so it has been Nelly's playground, and also the foxes', the deer's, the coyotes'. We were all here together, and what a privilege it's been.

We are pack animals, too. Nelly's excitement on seeing Willy and Dixie, or Nora and Malcolm, or Juni and Izzy, boils over like pasta water on a hot stove (did I mention she's a screamer?). She needs her mates, her community. And I need mine. I found it on this road. Bonnie, Pam, Jeanette: dear friends, dear friends. We have the keys to one another's houses. We give each other as emergency contacts. We share our produce, sometimes our eggs. We lend our ears and our shoulders. "Could you please take my dog for a walk today?" "Can you come over for a minute; I need to talk." "I'm going to the store, can I pick up something for you?" This is the ideal village, the one they always talk about being lost. I found it.

And because of the same misfortune that now has befallen us, someone else will have the luck to find this place, its beauty that was like nutrition to me. My loss, their luck. Perhaps it will be a weight on them, sometimes.

Change is inevitable, so they say. I know this; I accept this. Right now, I embrace it, in moments--it's like knowing your birthday is on the horizon: Oh, damn. Another year, resting on my shoulders, as your years do on you (I sometimes remember to remind myself that all of us currently on the planet are aging at exactly the same rate; it makes me feel a little better about hanging out with the occasional fashion model friend). Still, hey--presents, cake, a party! But let me invite you in to the particularities of this change. In the future, I will also fill you in on the unexpected gifts of what is unseen, but waiting.

I'll leave my flowers; someone else will watch them bloom. I'll leave my fountain, the sound of which made me feel cool in the summer. I'll leave this dogs' paradise. I'll leave my pack, and I can't imagine finding one again as tight, as perfect. I'll leave behind the unfulfilled dreams, the tumbledown outbuildings; the treehouse whose site was selected but remains a pencil drawing in the brain. My head, at any rate, comes up with plans at a rate that the most dedicated construction crew could not keep up with even if I'd kept them on retainer and housed them in the barn (which they'd have had to have repaired first).

On Halloween, I had a bonfire party out by the barn, a big fire blazing in the fire circle. We ate chili and cornbread; we talked, as fires tend to make us do. I had titled it a Burn the Past bonfire; this sounded brave to me, the announcement of a ritual when a ritual seemed so desperately required. Everyone was encouraged to throw into the flames something that reminded them of something that was over. I had my contributions. I went through the motions, as rituals are comprised of motions. But it felt hollow. It felt like whistling in the dark. I wanted it to be true, that I could forget as soon as the mementos were ash, but I couldn't. I didn't let anyone know, however. At the end, someone remarked that maybe they would host the same party next year. I spoke up brightly, "Or maybe I'll do it again here!" They were silent. I had forgotten I would no longer be here. They looked at me as you would a person with terminal illness who insists on talking about the future.

My son had painted a picture of the phoenix that is to rise from these flames. The phoenix, I trust, is me and him together. The phoenix will be the new house into which we will move soon; I imagine it to resemble the wish house I have carried in my mind's eye for twenty-five years now. I know the dangers of having dreams that are too specific, too much like a shopping list. I cannot picture the person who I hope one day will allow me to trust, and to love, again. If I do, I may walk past him when he, unrecognizable, appears.

I know we can find a place that will be good and happy for both of us, and for Nelly. I daren't hope we could find one whose landscapes, framed by every window, would make me feel so goddamn lucky. I daren't hope we could find a pack as fine as we have belonged to here. But maybe. And other flowers. In summer.