Goldengrove unleaving
These nights the Goldendoodle named Sebastian, Sebby is what we call him, often sleeps next to my bed. I have a dog bed there for him, and sometimes he curls up sweetly in it, a c-shape of golden fluff, and sometimes he sleeps in-between the dog bed and my bed, where there isn't much room, so that I have to scoot to the end of the bed to get up in the middle of the night if one of the boys cries out. This companionable sleep arrangement is new, Sebby only recently having been sprung from the puppy crate he slept in for the first year-and-a-half of his time with us. This morning Elijah came into the room, despondent that the weekend was over, and he curled up with the dog.
The crate is still up in the office, and Sebby often bends his head and goes back into it if I am working on the computer. He's there right now.
Of course the wonder of dogs is how sure their love for us can be. And the tragedy of dogs is that their lifetimes are contained within ours--they all die, too soon, and getting a dog is asking to have your heart broken, to introduce death into your child's life (of course that's on its inevitable way, but for me and for many other lucky children, the death of my first dog was my first death).
When my last dog Scout, a ridiculous, wonderful, dim-witted Rottweiler--when Scout died, it was on me to make the decision to put her down, which is a terrible euphemism. Scout had cancer and had stopped eating anything much but the grass in the backyard, which is apparently something dogs do when they are grievously ill. I still wonder if I should have waited a little longer before the vet put Scout to sleep (that phrase is no better: I don't think of death as sleep, especially now that I think of death all the time, in the same way I used to think about work, in the same way I still think of my family)--Scout was so good natured, it was hard to measure her suffering. My memory is already clouded on this point. I wasn't sure I could ever allow another dog into my life, because everything about Scout's actual death was awful, and I couldn't see letting that kind of pain, inviting it really, into my life again.
But of course, I started wanting a dog to walk, a dog to curl up in a dog bed next to mine. I can't say that the twins were clambering for a dog, although they were delighted to welcome her, especially Elijah. I know some of my older kids initially thought it was a mistake. Maybe because I already had cancer, and it was a stretch to think that I would outlive this dog. But now that we have him, all the children, to varying degrees, have fallen in love, or at least in like, with Sebby, who, like Scout before him, is graceless, not bright, loyal and overjoyed and absolutely without judgment. And now that spring has arrived, Sebby and I are back at the bog, which was treacherous in the dead of winter, with its ice and thick snows.
Spring in New England is an unsteady performance. We saw a great heron wing across the bog the other day, the deep blue pond ice thin in the shadows. The boys are slowly letting go of basketball and enthusiastically turning towards baseball. Sebby and I espied an actual worm this morning. It is ice cream time. The peepers were a deafening chorus as I walked into the evening yoga class I attend (in a gentle instructor's low-lit, spacious studio deep in the Carlisle woods); children slough off their winter jackets before the bus has even turned the corner in the morning.
I'm less sure I will be here next spring. I spent so many years wary of death arriving from the outside; it turns out it was biding its time inside me all along. Of course I now think I have superpowers against other deaths. It's unlikely, I say to Kyle, that I'm going to be kidnapped and die in the trunk of a car, which is how I honestly used to worry. That would just be a bridge too far.
In the book Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett, a woman looks with dismay at a man who she hasn't seen for years and years--he has cancer and is 83--and she says "Cancer really is the devil's handshake." That was a new one for me, but when I tried to find out more about the saying, all I could find were articles on Tasmanian devils and contagious facial tumors, which was interesting because another character in the same novel leaves her Swiss meditation retreat for the first time in years and reads a New York Times article about, you got it,Tasmanian devils dying of oral cancer. Which really makes you pause and think about the process of writing. Did Ann Patchett google the origin of "Cancer is the devil's handshake" and learn about the plight of the Tasmanian devils, or are these two events only connected in my universe? When I was in graduate school, this kind of trajectory was frowned upon--in a post-structuralist, post-modern world, it was very lowbrow to talk about the actual author, intentionality, the writing process. It was all about the text. Now we worry about authors in a different way, frowning upon writers who write about certain kinds of experiences they have not themselves experienced. Of course, some experiences are allowed--no one gets worked up about historical fiction, for example, asking how can so-and-so write about that era when it happened a hundred and fifty years ago? But we don't like the oppressor writing from the perspective of the oppressed, and there are all manner of categories of oppressed in this intersectional (nod to my Aunt Rose) world, hence all kinds of minefields. Who can speak for the Tasmanian devil? The NY Times and Ann Patchett, anyhow.
The Tasminian devil is an animal I will never see in its natural habitat, although I have seen them in Looneytunes cartoons and I think I saw one once in a zoo, because I remember being vaguely disappointed in it--so calm, so low-to-the-ground, so four-footed. I will never see a giraffe loping across an African plain, or a blue morpho butterfly iridescent in the canopy of the rainforest. I will never go to the moon, never traverse the Mare Tranquillitatis. When I was a child, the future looped out in broad, generous swaths. I hoped I would be swept off to Narnia, a queen like Lucy. I thought I might become a writer, like Stephen King, save I would write about what terror is for a woman. Not demented clowns, and cats that come back from the dead, but lost children and the body in pain. I am not fussed about the giraffes and the butterflies. What I am grateful for is to be on this earth at the same time as so many people I love--that's what I pine for: more time with them.
I have read, and I am sure you have too, that the 1968 photo of the earth rising over the moon, taken by the astronauts on Apollo 8, changed the way humans think about the planet, introducing a eerie recognition of the beauty and fragility of the earth which ushered in the modern environmental movement. Brian Skerry, a National Geographic photographer, says it's the most important photo ever made, likening it to humanity seeing itself in a mirror for the first time.
Who can speak for the Earth? We are oppressors and oppressed, all at the one, in battle and in love with the only place we can ever call home.
Last borrow of the day, I promise. "And in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make." The Beatles song, I have to point out, because time has passed. The idea of love in measures, some kind of equation that squares us all up, might not appeal to everyone. but I've always loved the idea of this kind of endless, equitable giving and receiving of love as a frame around one's life. If you think of love as the fullness of heart you are allowed when the heron takes wing, when your child rests her head on your shoulder, when your partner turns to you, despite everything, because of everything, when the earth hangs, marbled and alone, in the night sky, available to you only because other humans dared to hurtle themselves into the starry sky, well. I can only hope I have given as much as I have taken, because I have taken so much love in this small commonplace journey of catastrophes and miracles.
We all have cancer, the deep blue polluted oceans so beautiful in the lonely darkness, framed by the grays and whites of the surface of the moon, the furred Tasmanian devil, me. And yet, and yet.
The crate is still up in the office, and Sebby often bends his head and goes back into it if I am working on the computer. He's there right now.
Of course the wonder of dogs is how sure their love for us can be. And the tragedy of dogs is that their lifetimes are contained within ours--they all die, too soon, and getting a dog is asking to have your heart broken, to introduce death into your child's life (of course that's on its inevitable way, but for me and for many other lucky children, the death of my first dog was my first death).
When my last dog Scout, a ridiculous, wonderful, dim-witted Rottweiler--when Scout died, it was on me to make the decision to put her down, which is a terrible euphemism. Scout had cancer and had stopped eating anything much but the grass in the backyard, which is apparently something dogs do when they are grievously ill. I still wonder if I should have waited a little longer before the vet put Scout to sleep (that phrase is no better: I don't think of death as sleep, especially now that I think of death all the time, in the same way I used to think about work, in the same way I still think of my family)--Scout was so good natured, it was hard to measure her suffering. My memory is already clouded on this point. I wasn't sure I could ever allow another dog into my life, because everything about Scout's actual death was awful, and I couldn't see letting that kind of pain, inviting it really, into my life again.
But of course, I started wanting a dog to walk, a dog to curl up in a dog bed next to mine. I can't say that the twins were clambering for a dog, although they were delighted to welcome her, especially Elijah. I know some of my older kids initially thought it was a mistake. Maybe because I already had cancer, and it was a stretch to think that I would outlive this dog. But now that we have him, all the children, to varying degrees, have fallen in love, or at least in like, with Sebby, who, like Scout before him, is graceless, not bright, loyal and overjoyed and absolutely without judgment. And now that spring has arrived, Sebby and I are back at the bog, which was treacherous in the dead of winter, with its ice and thick snows.
Spring in New England is an unsteady performance. We saw a great heron wing across the bog the other day, the deep blue pond ice thin in the shadows. The boys are slowly letting go of basketball and enthusiastically turning towards baseball. Sebby and I espied an actual worm this morning. It is ice cream time. The peepers were a deafening chorus as I walked into the evening yoga class I attend (in a gentle instructor's low-lit, spacious studio deep in the Carlisle woods); children slough off their winter jackets before the bus has even turned the corner in the morning.
I'm less sure I will be here next spring. I spent so many years wary of death arriving from the outside; it turns out it was biding its time inside me all along. Of course I now think I have superpowers against other deaths. It's unlikely, I say to Kyle, that I'm going to be kidnapped and die in the trunk of a car, which is how I honestly used to worry. That would just be a bridge too far.
In the book Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett, a woman looks with dismay at a man who she hasn't seen for years and years--he has cancer and is 83--and she says "Cancer really is the devil's handshake." That was a new one for me, but when I tried to find out more about the saying, all I could find were articles on Tasmanian devils and contagious facial tumors, which was interesting because another character in the same novel leaves her Swiss meditation retreat for the first time in years and reads a New York Times article about, you got it,Tasmanian devils dying of oral cancer. Which really makes you pause and think about the process of writing. Did Ann Patchett google the origin of "Cancer is the devil's handshake" and learn about the plight of the Tasmanian devils, or are these two events only connected in my universe? When I was in graduate school, this kind of trajectory was frowned upon--in a post-structuralist, post-modern world, it was very lowbrow to talk about the actual author, intentionality, the writing process. It was all about the text. Now we worry about authors in a different way, frowning upon writers who write about certain kinds of experiences they have not themselves experienced. Of course, some experiences are allowed--no one gets worked up about historical fiction, for example, asking how can so-and-so write about that era when it happened a hundred and fifty years ago? But we don't like the oppressor writing from the perspective of the oppressed, and there are all manner of categories of oppressed in this intersectional (nod to my Aunt Rose) world, hence all kinds of minefields. Who can speak for the Tasmanian devil? The NY Times and Ann Patchett, anyhow.
The Tasminian devil is an animal I will never see in its natural habitat, although I have seen them in Looneytunes cartoons and I think I saw one once in a zoo, because I remember being vaguely disappointed in it--so calm, so low-to-the-ground, so four-footed. I will never see a giraffe loping across an African plain, or a blue morpho butterfly iridescent in the canopy of the rainforest. I will never go to the moon, never traverse the Mare Tranquillitatis. When I was a child, the future looped out in broad, generous swaths. I hoped I would be swept off to Narnia, a queen like Lucy. I thought I might become a writer, like Stephen King, save I would write about what terror is for a woman. Not demented clowns, and cats that come back from the dead, but lost children and the body in pain. I am not fussed about the giraffes and the butterflies. What I am grateful for is to be on this earth at the same time as so many people I love--that's what I pine for: more time with them.
I have read, and I am sure you have too, that the 1968 photo of the earth rising over the moon, taken by the astronauts on Apollo 8, changed the way humans think about the planet, introducing a eerie recognition of the beauty and fragility of the earth which ushered in the modern environmental movement. Brian Skerry, a National Geographic photographer, says it's the most important photo ever made, likening it to humanity seeing itself in a mirror for the first time.
Who can speak for the Earth? We are oppressors and oppressed, all at the one, in battle and in love with the only place we can ever call home.
Last borrow of the day, I promise. "And in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make." The Beatles song, I have to point out, because time has passed. The idea of love in measures, some kind of equation that squares us all up, might not appeal to everyone. but I've always loved the idea of this kind of endless, equitable giving and receiving of love as a frame around one's life. If you think of love as the fullness of heart you are allowed when the heron takes wing, when your child rests her head on your shoulder, when your partner turns to you, despite everything, because of everything, when the earth hangs, marbled and alone, in the night sky, available to you only because other humans dared to hurtle themselves into the starry sky, well. I can only hope I have given as much as I have taken, because I have taken so much love in this small commonplace journey of catastrophes and miracles.
We all have cancer, the deep blue polluted oceans so beautiful in the lonely darkness, framed by the grays and whites of the surface of the moon, the furred Tasmanian devil, me. And yet, and yet.
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