The Rake Magazine

May you be forgiven.

May you be given a second chance:

May you come back as a dog.

May you be lost.

May you be found.

May you be loved.

May the whole world smell wonderful.

And may you know the touch

of gentle hands and the soft

voice of someone who sees

and knows and needs you,

to the end of your days.

Hence comes the four-legged friendships of so many of the better kind of men, for on what indeed should one refresh oneself from the endless deceit, falseness, and cunning of men if it were not for the dogs into whose faithful countenance one may look without distrust?

--Schopenhauer, Ethics

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

treasure in it. I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receeding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

--R.S. Thomas, "The Bright Field"

You were born thirteen years and seven months ago, in the middle of a January night so cold the defroster in my old pickup truck wouldn't work on the drive to the emergency clinic. You were the last pup born, the runt of the litter, and I watched in exhausted wonder as you were delivered and held aloft like one more beautiful wish that had been granted, a dream made flesh, at a time when so many beautiful wishes were being granted and dreams being made flesh that I thought my life was charmed beyond measure.

It was. And in a way that no one who has not shared their life with a dog can ever understand you were inextricably tangled up with every one of my dreams and blessings. You spent your first days in a box in my little attic apartment on Pleasant Avenue. You were the first of the litter to figure out how to scale the sides of the box and make your way to my bed, and that was when I knew you were mine.

Throughout our life together, you went everywhere I went. You traveled, swam, ran, hiked, and rambled with me all over the country and up into Canada. You were always nothing but at home, whether in the backseat of a car or at a five-star hotel.

You spent a lot of time in the backseat of cars.

When you weren't in the backseat of a car, you were right by my side, or moving with your calm curiosity somewhere in front of me, connected either by the tether of your leash or simply by your unflagging connection to me, and to us.

You were our guide dog. You took us places we otherwise would never have gone, compelled us to pull aside in out-of-the-way towns to investigate and allow you to nose around. You forced us to seek lodging in places interesting enough to welcome you as a guest. You were our ambassador, our introduction to all manner of oddballs and genuinely wonderful people.

At home you would settle into your green chair while I sat on the floor beneath you, rummaging through books and listening to music and trying to tell stories. We kept that vigil together, night after night, too often into the early hours of the morning, and eventually you, too, learned to live on Hong Kong time. You learned to sit patiently through some of the thorniest, most bracing music ever committed to tape, and in time I honestly believe you grew to enjoy Roscoe Mitchell and Albert Ayler and Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor. They, and countless others like them, were the soundtrack to our long nights together in that room crowded with records and books.

You had a lot of names: Willis. The Cheetah. Cheetah Boy. Buddy Klunk. Buddha. The Boy. Good Boy.

You had seven original Sweet Dreamers who slept by your side: Hairy Man, Snowman, Bumble, Pork Chop, Monkey, Alf, and Creature. Dozens more piled up next to your bed over the years, and each one was assigned a name. You remembered each of those names and could keep them straight, which was one of your many peculiar gifts.

You had many peculiar gifts. You had many gifts, period.

You could run like no dog I'd ever seen, and had an extra gear which could be exhausting. But you knew when gentle was called for, and would instinctively attach yourself to the most vulnerable person in a room.

Time after time you demonstrated conclusively that you were a dog who was most at home in the country, where you could ramble freely, but you never raised a fuss. You never strayed. You couldn't stand a mess, and couldn't bring yourself to destroy even things that were made for dogs to destroy. Or eat. You would carry a rawhide pretzel around, but you would never get around to untangling it.

You were patient. You were calm. You laughed and sang. You would sprawl with your head in my lap for hours at a time, and the smell behind your ears became one of my favorite smells in the world. You gave me birthday cards and Christmas presents, and every day during the month of December you would go and sit beneath the advent calendar in the kitchen to see what wonders waited behind that day's window.

Honest to God, you did. I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it every year.

We had a secret place --Dog World: like all the best places not quite imaginary, not quite real-- that we explored together.

I routinely wrote things on my hand that I wanted to tell you, places that I wanted to take you. One such note is written there now.

I often told you that I was together as long as you breathed.

I often told you that evolution could mean nothing to me when I looked into your blue eyes.

There were times --many, many, many times-- when you were my only lamp in the darkness. At the bottom of every day we prayed together to the God of the Seven Sweet Dreamers, and every time at the conclusion of our prayer you gave me two kisses. Always two kisses. Even tonight, as I held you in my arms in the wet grass and you prepared, with your characteristic patience and dignity, to die.

Even tonight, when I had finished with my prayer to the God of the Seven Sweet Dreamers, you raised your head one last time and gave me my two kisses.

And then you left another hole in my world.

I know how weak and hungry you were at the end, so I put food and water out for you when I got home tonight, just in case.

And now I'm not sure I know how to go about the world without a dog at the end of my arm.

I wish you peace, my boy. I wish you nothing but sweet dreams. I desperately want to believe that you will live forever.

I don't much care if there's an afterlife for humans, but this morning, just as every other morning, I will throw my head back, show my teeth to the God of All Sweet Dreamers, and pray that there's a heaven for dogs, and that you are running there now, and remembering us.

Yes, boy, I could sure go for some beef stew and a chicken bone. That's it.

--Last words of Christopher Newton, whose execution by lethal injection in Lucasville, Ohio took nearly two hours (May 24, 2007)

I summon you now

Not to think of

The ceaseless battle

With pain and ill health,

The frailty and the anguish.

No, today I remember

The creator,

The Lion-hearted.

--May Sarton, from "For My Mother"

You've been gone for five years this morning, but if you were still here I know you'd be driving through the night, headed in my direction even as I type these words, and at some point in the next couple hours I'd expect to hear your knock at my door.

Five years ago this morning I walked out into a world without you in it for the first time, and I know how much it would pain you to know that that world has been wobbling under me ever since.

I'm not blaming you. You gave me plenty more than I needed. I watched you long enough that I should for damn sure know how to go through life with a smile on my face and enough grace, good humor, and compassion to get me through any day. And anybody who spent enough time with you and logged long hours in the hospitals where you left so many years of your life and got so many of them back should have gained enough perspective to spend every one of their remaining days counting their blessings.

It's been really hard, though. I'm tired, and I've failed.

Your last words to me were, "I love you. I'll see you soon," and those words have haunted me. I wish you could stand here before me and take at least some of them back.

I wish there had been more, of course --of you and from you and for you. And for me. And for all of us.

Tough shit, though, which I fully realize is not a sentiment you'd ever endorse.

I remember reading something long ago by Thomas Carlyle, an essay, I think, about heroes. A hero, Carlyle said, had to be first and foremost sincere. Not merely honest or earnest, but fiercely sincere. He had to have true conviction in what he said and did and believed. And a hero had to have heart; he had to be stout-hearted, yes, and brave, but also and especially tender-hearted, pure-hearted, compassionate, and capable of real love.

I might be making this all up, or confusing my writers, or even just imagining things, although the sad truth is that I'm not having much luck making things up or imagining things anymore.

I do know, though, that using that definition, or those definitions, and virtually any other definition I can come up with, you were a hero.

My hero.

Ours.

I couldn't afford to lose you then, and I can't afford to lose you now, even as I seem to be losing things right and left. Including, I sometimes fear, you.

--Abel Pann

By the time he was my age he had four children and a literally broken heart.

He did what he could.

He taught wonder.

I used to sense him coiled like a discus hurler behind every one of my best intentions.

His blood was the blood that called me back to this world each time I crawled away disgusted.

His were the words of forgiveness I was always surprised to find crouched at the back of my tongue. The tenderness, unexpected, that seized me when I was in the presence of suffering or helplessness, that also was him feeling through me.

My biggest dreams were his.

He pointed out the stars, and taught me to appreciate the gorgeous example of upholstery that is a baseball mitt. The short trigger, the hatred of condescension, the intolerance of cruelty, his compassion and affection for the little guy and the underdog, all those things he gave me.

He could not, unfortunately, give me his unbridled optimism, his undying faith in human goodness, his stiff upper lip, or his genuine willingness to just let the world be the world.

But his capacity for love, his sense of loyalty, his appreciation for a good road trip, and his eagerness to play the fool --What can I say? I was his boy.

He showed me again and again how to live.

Some nights lately I've sat up in the middle of the night, half expecting him to knock on my door.

I've forgotten so much already. I'd give anything if he could come back for just one day, for just one hour, for just one cup of coffee, to help me remember.

He's not coming back, though.

He's waiting for me to come to him.

...if people who expect nothing come away empty-handed, then there really is no hope.

--William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

The dead flicker like candles around you. They are burning their memories for warmth.

--Kelly Link, "Flying Lessons"

This world is full of war criminals, many of whom have never fired a weapon in their lives. Most of them don't commence their truly devastating assaults until the enemy has laid down its arms.

What good are fighting words in a world where there are no longer any fair fights?

At any rate, let me start by thanking you for a few moments of your time. I'm genuinely grateful. I always try to be genuinely grateful.

My fingers have all been broken and my tongue was nearly cut from my face.

Listen: hear that? Yes, that's right, almost silence. I've let the clock go. It was the sound of another time, other nights, a soundtrack of sorts for the strange, confusing, often magical nights behind me.

I've moved on.

The pygmy with the long shadow --a sort of giant pygmy, if such a thing is possible, and I'm here to tell you that I believe it is-- has gone off to swing its wrecking ball at other targets.

Protege of a Shar-peian witch who had a prodigious and legendary libido and kept a stunted oaf captive in her cellar, the pygmy was a dog killer and a ferocious biter, a sociopathic narcissist trapped in the amber of its own damage, prisoner of its obsessive routines, haunted childhood, and self-created myths; a spectacular creature, really, but one must ultimately be willing to pronounce a monster a monster and leave it at that.

Oh, make no mistake, the pygmy was remarkably gifted so far as monsters and myth-makers go; alas, as an imitation of a human being (which it seemingly aspired to be) considerably less so. Still, yes, no getting around it, a marvel, a chimera, an absolutely indestructible (and destructive) beast who was able to go about the world in a carefully contrived costume of vulnerability.

It's amazing how many people are charmed out of their shoes --sometimes literally-- by the appearance of vulnerability.

I tip my hat, really I do, even as I am somehow both relieved and saddened to be rid of the monster once and for all.