There you are!

After a month of floating in the great beyond, Sancha finally arrived in a dream. It was a very unremarkable guest cameo--my dream self didn't notice that she had died, or perhaps my dream self is over a month younger than I, and she wasn't the main character in the dream. I don't really remember it--this post would have a lot more details if I hadn't waited 12 hours to type it out--but somewhere between my usual repertoire of being naked in public, unprepared for class, and overflowing toilets, I distinctly recall a Sancha. I hope this is the beginning of a recurring guest role.

And while I'm on the subject of Sancha: I was often tempted to buy one of those doggie DNA kits that match your dog's sample against a breed database and inform you of all the branches on your dog's family tree (or of all the dog's that have peed on the family branch?). Yet I never went through with it, partly because I would cringe every time I drove past a homeless person knowing that I had spent $80 on a doggie DNA test, and partly because I believe in the American dream (in theory) of casting off all that Old World ancestry baggage and making your own tribe. Cada uno es hijo de sus obras, and all that. Also because, as with a striptease, the fun is in guessing what is only half-revealed. When I first adopted her we were guessing Chihuahua-kangaroo; later she seemed less kangaroo-ish (until she was in the hospital, sitting upright but the casts on both back legs making them stick straight out in classic kangaroo pose) and more Corgi.

But now I have a new theory: Chihuahua-Fennec Fox.

RIP Frosty the Snow Goat

When Sancha's back legs started to go bad, and then when she broke them after the fall but it looked like she would recover, visions of Frosty and other mobility-enhanced creatures danced through my head. I imagined Sancha going all-out New Orleans, with a fleur-de-lis-festooned, glitter-encrusted, black gold and pink little wheelie cart.



Alas, it was not to be, for Sancha or for Frosty. I think Chris P. Bacon is still going strong.

In the unlikely event that today is your b-day

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SANCHA!

Today Sancha would have turned 15. Or rather, today I would have celebrated Sancha turning 15. It is unlikely that Sancha was 15, and very very unlikely that she turned 15 today, but when you adopt an adult dog, you have to pick a story and stick with it. Which, in fact, I didn't do either, as Sancha's birdthday was over the years a movable feast. Like Easter, if Easter had at some point been moved from April to October.

I adopted Sancha on January 23 and the shelter estimated her to be 3 years old. For a few years we celebrated her birthday on successive January 23s, but then we (I) decided that for a girl whose favorite activity was a long walk and who did not enjoy the cold, January 23 might have been a lovely birthday in Perth or Buenos Aires, but in New York it was a crappy day for a birthday. Plus what were the chances that I had adopted her precisely on her birthday? So somewhere around 2007 I moved her birthday 6 months ahead, which happened to land on my grandfather's birthday and thus made it easier for me to remember that too. Except that what with summer research trips, or rainstorms, for most of her life June 23 ended up being an inconvenient day for a birthday, and so we would move it back and forth a few days or weeks as needed. When I made the switch I had the option of advancing her a full year in 6 months or letting her remain the same age for 18 months; I chose the former because a vet who had looked at her teeth after the adoption said he thought she might be older than three. But then in 2011 when Sancha was getting all of her various check-ups and exams prior to accompanying me to Spain,  a different vet said Sancha was the youngest-looking 11-year old dog she had ever seen, so I considered revising her backwards a year, but then I liked the idea that this was another thing we had in common--at 36 I still get frequently mistaken for an undergraduate--so I left it alone. The last chapter in the mystery of Sancha's birthday occurred posthumously, as the pet cremation people, when they were confirming her info with me to make her little death certificate, had somehow acquired an entirely different date and year for her entry into the world. I have no idea where it came from, unless Sancha had in her youth acquired a fake ID to get into doggie clubs or something. (Now that I think of it, her being conveniently "3"--i.e, 21 in dog years--when I adopted her seems a bit suspicious).

Birthdays, hers and mine, were a relatively chill affair (a walk and a tasty treat), and age, hers and mine, have always been a subject of much confusion. (One year in college theater I was cast as 8 year old boy and an 80 year old demented granny. The week of my 36th birthday I was pulled over for looking too young be driving and received an AARP card.)  In any event, I remembered to call my grandfather to wish him happy birthday, and hopefully somewhere wherever you are, Sancha, you are enjoying a walk and a meat product and aging gracefully.

The Bright Side of Love

Romantic love is really underappreciated. Like, why doesn't Hollywood make a movie about that?

And now, some pictures

The closest we got to a professional photography shoot produced this:

And from last Xmas, in LA. Not a good picture of me, but a lovely pic of my mom and Sancha looks ready to play her part in the Nativity crèche (she had in fact attended midnight mass the night before. No crèche, but the choir director brought his poodle.)

Me, watching myself react to 90s pop

I don't know where I  read this, or whether someone told it to me, but an editor at some publishing house said that a good 50% (60? 75? Remind me not to tell this story when I'm a guest on Late Night....) of fiction manuscripts were blatantly autobiographical stories that the author thought he/she could pass of as fiction by changing first person to third. These manuscripts went straight into the reject file, although I don't know if the implication was that you shouldn't write about yourself or just that if you're going to write about yourself, admit it.

I often have the opposite reaction: I will read a first-person account of some experience and I will think: that might be good for a novel, but there is something presumptuous in thinking that the world will find your experiences revelatory or exemplary. Great fiction is filled with bad relationships, I would never tell Tolstoy otherwise. But why should the world care about Elizabeth Gilbert's boyfriend troubles?

So if I start minutely examining my own emotional reactions (or lack thereof) to a departed dog, it is with full knowledge that this for me, myself, and I. That nothing I say here will be more interesting or profound than anything you (you, dear reader who is not me and may not exist) have observed a million times, or read on the back cover of a grief self-help book. I'm gazing at my navel online, watching myself breathe in...breathe out...

(Side note: Did all of my writing follow the This American Life structure--seemingly random anecdote leads into theme, approached from 3 angles--- before I started listening to This American Life?)

As I have written earlier,  I went through an initial and very brief "proper" grief stage. During this stage I was a raw wound. This was the stage of tears, the stage where clichés became truth. Then I  scabbed over, as I do. Everything that had briefly moved to the emotion part of my brain retreated to its usual home in the reason quadrant. I am somewhat ashamed by how quickly this happened, it doesn't feel appropriate to how deeply I love(d) Sancha. It doesn't even feel appropriate to call it grief. I'm sure I didn't have my passport stamped at each of the 5 stages.

But, there is one little square of sensitivity, a spot that hasn't fully scabbed over.

Backtrack: I am not a person who is particularly "into" music. My tastes are horrible, completely out of alignment on the avant-garde spectrum with my tastes in literature and film. (If you made a Venn Diagram of Abbas Kiarostami fans and Eminem fans, I would bet the overlap would be fairly small). I like things you can hum in the shower or dance to, although I neither hum in the shower nor dance (and I definitely don't dance in the shower, I'd kill myself). I like angry drug-addicted guys accompanied by electric guitars and drums, although I am neither a guy, a drug-user, nor prone to anger. Like most everything else in my life, it's a secondhand emotion---I like to listen to people having (pretending to have) emotions, rhythm, sex appeal, style.

My relationship with Sancha had exactly zero: men, anger, dancing, drugs, sex appeal. If my relationship with Sancha had been a movie montage, the soundtrack would have been Enya. Or Mozart.

Enya and Mozart do nothing for me. But  create a Pandora Third Eye Blind channel (Offspring, Oasis, Green Day, Linkin Park etc etc ) and damned if I don't get all weepy. (Semisonic "Closing time/ Open all the doors and let you out into the world....I know who I waaant to take me hooome" Jimmy Eat World "It just takes some time/ Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride/ Everything will be all right/ Everything will be just fine" WHO KNEW ALL THESE SONGS WERE ABOUT DOGS?)


Partially it's because these songs are about love and loss. But what songs aren't?  I think it's no coincidence the songs that get me came out in the 90s, when I was in plena adolescencia, maxima vulnerabilidad y crisis emocional. In fact, I only listened to these songs, and listened to them over and over and over, during the two hospitalization stays that bookended the 1990s for me (at home I listened to Bach and Zeppelin). So for me they are like a portal to the two times I have had to feel intensely and constantly. Times that were hell, but a hell for which I am prone to feeling nostalgia.

I guess I should count my blessings that the hospital radio wasn't set to Kenny G.

Where oh where has my little dog gone?

One of the advantages of being an agnostic is that, since all scenarios for the afterlife seem equally (im)probable, you can choose the one that you would like to imagine to be true. (At first I wrote "that you would like to believe in" but of course if I could really believe in it, I wouldn't be agnostic any more). I have heard lots of suggestions for where Sancha might be and what she might be doing right now. At some point a few years ago I started hearing people talk about pets crossing "the rainbow bridge" and now it has become the go-to scenario for pet passing. Even when my cliché valve was open as far as it could go, this struck me as too goopy. Unicorns may cross the rainbow bridge, but if Sancha was going to cross a bridge, it would be a nice, sturdy one. Probably the George Washington. We used to like to walk up there.

Most of the scenarios take it for granted that she, or her spirit, is somewhere up above, and the question becomes what she is doing with her time. Eating a lot, undoubtedly: hot dogs and chicken bones and Trident gum with xylitol. Does she shed now? I am imagining clouds covered in Sancha fur. She would be burrowing into a massive cumulus formation. Can she hear? It would seem cruel not to restore her to top form, but in truth she seemed to be more mellow without the distraction of noises. I do imagine that her back legs have recovered their youthful spring, and she can jump and run with ease. Although she was always more of a "el camino se hace al andar" kind of girl. Is she with other dogs? My aunt, whose dog Samson passed away last year, suggested that they would be hanging out now, but I kind of doubt it; Sancha was, with a few exceptions, not that into her fellow canines. But I don't want her to be lonely. And, let's face it, if the scenario I'm choosing is based on what gives me comfort, then I want to believe that she was happiest with me. And that even surrounded by frankfurters and pillows and nubile Corgi studs.... she would miss me.

So I would rather keep her a little closer. I would rather she was keeping an eye on me. I think about her a lot, but more and more I am directing my thoughts--my never-ending internal monologue of emails and conversations and letters to the editor--to her.  What I most wish is to see her in my dreams, but so far I'm still working through the usual repertoire of teacher nightmares, breaking teeth, and naked-in-public scenarios (sometimes all 3 at once). Apparently when you consciously choose the afterlife you prefer, your unconscious isn't automatically informed. I can wait. In the meantime, I am going to imagine her reading this blog.

So, Sancha, first this blog was you writing, occasionally about me. Then it was me writing about you. Maybe now it will be me writing, about anything, but to you. Feel free to leave a comment.

Remembering Images

Rather than go to a therapist, I spend a lot of time trying to make sense of myself. I would rather be thinking about more productive things, but it's where my mind wanders to. I guess it's the subject I think I have the greatest likelihood of actually mastering, although so far most of my theories have been disproven. But I mention this to explain why many of my posts here do not seem to be about Sancha, or if they end up being about Sancha, they take a tortuous windy road through my childhood, dreamscape, and reading on the way there. This post will be no different. ´

I was very good at math in high school. Correction: I was very good at high school math in high school, and was under the impression that because of this, I was very good at math in general. High school math went up through a first year of calculus. Calculus was a little harder than what had come before because you had to think in three dimensions sometimes, but there were enough rules to follow and ways to translate three dimensions to two that I made it work. When I went to college, I enrolled in the logical next class, which was Multivariable Calculus. In retrospect, I take issue with this name. I mean, if I buy a "multicolor" shirt, I expect to get a shirt with four or five colors, not a shirt with an infinite number of light wavelengths. Pre algebra had been 2 dimensions. Calculus was 3 dimensions. I had a reasonable expectation that I would be gradually introduced each year to an addition dimension or two. Nope. When counting math-style, apparently it is okay to go 1, 2, 3, n. And then n +1, which just adds insult to infinity. I was lost. I studied. I got tutoring. I even enjoyed it, which was the strange thing. But it was all for naught--I got a very generous C- and thus ended my career as a mathematician.

What I learned from this experience, aside from empathy with my future students who tried as hard as they could to learn a new language and could not get it, was that my mind does not do more than 2 dimensions. I think primarily in language, but I don't have an entirely non-visual imagination: it's just that my visuals are photographic rather than cinematic or 3-D. My head doesn´t spin. This is true when I think about people as well. If I try to imagine what a particular person looks like, even if it´s someone I have recently seen in person, I almost always imagine a photo I have seen of them. If I haven´t ever seen a photograph of that person, it´s hard for me to get an image.

And here is where we come back to Sancha. Even though I saw her pretty much every day for 11 years, in my mind I saw and see her as she was captured in the various pictures I have taken and used as my avatars, screensaver, etc. When I visited her in the ICU, even when I thought she was going to recover, I very deliberately did not take any pictures, because I did not want to remember what she looked like all tubed and shaved and drugged. The worst image was after her heart stopped the first time, and they inserted the breathing tube, and she was stretched out on a table and in so much pain. There is sound associated with this image--she was bleating, making a noise that reached directly into my heart and made me not want to live. It didn't last that long, they gave her drugs and she went under again. But they told me that she had been "vocalizing" (vocalizing? Are you fucking kidding me?  Humming in the shower is vocalizing. Baby gurgling is vocalizing. She was screaming) every so often. So in my mind I knew that it had not been just that once, and that thought is almost unbearable to me. As images and sounds go, it´s not as bad as the one her poor petsitter is dealing with, which is her jump, but it was an image I didn´t ever want to have to see once, and definitely didn´t want to ever see again.

So this is why I´ve been so obsessive about getting photos of her, and staring at her sleepy image, her surfing image, her smiling image. My understanding, based on the kind of science that filters into NPR shows like Radio Lab or Science Friday, is that each time you remember something, you activate the same neurons that light up in the original experience of an event. I stare at this:

to crowd out that other image, to make my neurons forget how to produce it, to make it like it never happened.

Chihuahuabunga

One of the recurring themes when I reflect on my life with Sancha is the question of our sameness, and whether we were two peas in a pod and that's why we chose each other, or whether we mutually molded each other in our own image. Either way, for at least the last 10 years I would say that neither of us did anything that the other hadn't already anticipated.

But I would be lying.

Backstory: Sancha was a resolutely non-aquatic dog. She didn't need to be bathed often, as she was pretty delicate about dirt and puddles and her fur had a preternatural self-cleaning (i.e, massive shedding) function, but when she did: she did NOT enjoy it. She would submit to the torture, but it was always with her patented ASPCA look and surreptitious escape attempts when I relaxed my guard. Over the years she got better about doing her business in the rain, but she was very clear that once her business was done, she wanted back in a dry, warm sweater box. And while I don't think I ever tried to take her swimming, her body type did not suggest she would be aqua-dynamic. I am not a swimmer, but it never occurred to me that I was projecting my own water awkwardness onto her.

In summer 2013 I spent 10 days doing research in Spain and Sancha stayed with her amazing petsitters. I think it was the first time. They posted frequent pictures on their Facebook page of the dogs in their care, and although I felt guilty/paranoid about checking Facebook in the National Library of Spain, I legitimately had nothing else to do while I waited for my books to be disinterred and delivered from library's inner recesses. (It's not an open stacks library.) So while archivist gnomes hunted for my demonology guides and histories of confessions, I glanced around to check that no Franco-holdover guards were patrolling my row, and when the coast was clear, headed over to FB. Dogs playing. Dogs eating. Dogs on couch. Sancha on couch. Very cute, absent mother's mind at ease, just about to click away....and then I saw:

 

 

I don't think I have ever been so surprised in my life. I nearly fell off of my chair. Was it photoshopped? Did Jason have another dog who looked just like Sancha? When I had recovered the use of language, I wrote a quick email to the petsitters. Nope, Jason replied: that was Sancha alright! Apparently she not only surfed, she swam like a little "furry torpedo."


As soon as I got back home I tried to recreate this experience on my own. I didn't have a surfboard, but I took her to the exact same spot and prepared to launch my furry torpedo. Furry torpedo behaved exactly as I would have expected had I not seen these pictures. I.e, she gave me the "Do I look like a dolphin?" face and paddled desperately to shore. I tried once again a few weeks later and had the same results.


I have never really figured this out. Jason's theory is that it was a pack activity, and since I didn't bring along 5 other dogs, she wasn't into it.  My suspicion is that there are some things a girl will do when a hot guy in swim trunks is encouraging her that she just will not do with her mother.

And that I can relate to.

Passing Love

This perhaps falls under the "dark side of love" topic I mentioned in previous posts and haven't gotten around to following up on, but it wasn't what I was thinking of when I wrote that.

I have unsupported and unsupportable deep convictions about how the world works sometimes. How my world works, anyway. This is the mostly pleasant residue of my nightmare OCD year (age 11), when I thought every word I uttered or step I took was essential to keeping disaster at bay. Now that direct control fear/fantasy is mostly limited to determining the fortunes of my Tigers, but I also retain a broader belief about cosmic balances of good and bad, success and failure. In a nutshell: life never lets you--or perhaps just me--get too many bad things, or too many good things. I have one year of almost uninterrupted disaster per decade, but that opens onto 9 years of good fortune. Even in the good decades, though, I can't have it all. Job, love, economic security, health, friendships: I get to bat .750 or so.   I have little control over how and when the substitutions and compensations occur (in that way, it's the opposite of the OCD/Tiger fan delusion of control, but they share a belief in a sympathetic connection between events that has no basis in logical thought)

I'm not going to trace out how this principle has worked throughout my whole life, just its relevance with respect to Sancha. I adopted her in January 2003, as a long-term relationship ended. I can't say she nursed me through the breakup, because I was the breaker-upper rather than the breakup-ee, but in my view of cosmic compensation, she was the love and companionship that I was meant to have, in place of the human kind. I didn't miss dating or a sexual relationship--on the contrary, I had broken up with M because it became clear to me that I wasn't cut out for that kind of intimacy with another human. 10 years passed without me noticing its absence. But about 3 years ago I decided to go back to the pool (the pool I had sent M off to, so full, I promised, of  other fish). It had been 10 years of academic success, good health, relative freedom from my "issues," good friends and family relations. Lacking: human love, of the maternal and conjugal variety.

Cue disaster year. A child (not my own, but como si fuera) and a love were gained and lost.  Job, self-esteem, home, and important family relationships got wiped out as well. Through it all, the one constant was Sancha (Sancha and a few dear friends). If before Sancha had been the counterbalance to M,  now her little furry figure was the only thing left on the good-things side of the see-saw, holding her own against a pile-on of shit.

The year passed. New job, new home. Sancha walked me through the transitions and the change (we always knew who was walking who). A new life, new self-esteem, new contentment, new routines, same old Sancha. And left on the bad side of the see-saw: a profound belief that I was too odd, old, inflexible, unattractive, unloveable and worse, unloving, to ever find human intimacy.

In March I met someone who feels right. He met Sancha once. She didn't exactly invite him to move in, but she seemed to give him a tacit lack-of-bark of approval. I had them both for just enough time for the handover of fortune to occur. I will never relegate Sancha to the status of a bridge between men. If I could go back, I would reverse the exchange. But Sancha, I do have the sense that there was a hand-off. And a week later, I want you to know--although I suspect you already did--that I think you delivered me into good hands.*

*Obviously, it's still very early. But as you will recall from our meeting January 21, 2003, I have a good record with first impressions about love.

Fun Walking the Dog

Since you were a deaf dog for your later years, Sancha, I doubt you would much appreciate being memorialized through music. And even in your hearing years, I don't recall you expressing any musical preferences, aside from a profound dislike for emergency vehicle sirens. (At least I think it was dislike. You sang along, but not in a getting-down-with-the-groove kind of way.)

If I were to make a Sancha soundtrack, it would be all clicks and jingles and snuffly sighs. Given all the times I talked about the wonderful peace-infusing power of your snuffly sighs, I wonder that I never recorded them. Regrets.

But although you couldn't have heard it when you were here, and most of me is convinced you wouldn't be able to hear it now, I wanted to dedicate a song to you, Sancha. I was working on...the things I work on...and I put Pandora in the background. I don't know why it loaded immediately to my "Fun" channel, as it is not first on my list, but it did, and the song it chose, which I had never heard before, was peppy and optimistic and catchy and I liked it immediately. And when I opened the Pandora window to express my encouragement via thumbs-up, I saw that it was this song:

http://www.songlyrics.com/fun/walking-the-dog-lyrics/

I think they wrote it for me. For you, for us. You too were peppy, optimistic, and catchy. And nothing was more fun than walking you.

 

If you could see me, whoever I am
It's not like a movie it's not all skin and bones
so come on love (come on, come on, come all and go)
nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah
I will not let you go
nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah
I will not let you go

 

Comments

It has come to my attention from my one (known) human reader that she is unable to comment on posts. This is very mysterious, as Sancha's posts had comments from multiple canine readers. I am looking at the settings and see no option to enable or disable comments based on the species of the commenter. Perhaps it is the BlogSpot settings equivalent of a dog whistle.

The good news is I may have a guest dog for a bit (just for a few sleepovers; I know I will get another dog at some point but it is still too soon) who could hopefully be convinced to guest blog and guest de-activate block on non-pawed commenters? Alternately, I know that my human reader has two adorable cats, perhaps one of them could type for her?

Impostor!

I lost my phone a year ago and with it many of my Sancha photos. Most of them were identical shots of Sancha curled up in my laundry, as each evening I would be struck that this was the absolute cutest image ever, and only later came to realize that this was both true and false (in the way that everyone is unique in their own special way, and other paradoxes of comparative superlatives). But I asked people to send me any photos they had of Sancha that I might have emailed them, or perhaps photos they had on their own cameras, and folks have sent me many lovely and wonderful pictures. Among the emails, however, came this "photo of Sancha" from my stepfather.

That is most definitely my mother, but that is NOT SANCHA.
Many questions are raised. I don't know who you are, cute little dog, but welcome to my blog.
Russ (stepfather) -- nice try, but time to go back to doggie identification school.

Why write

Everything is related:

In my academic work, I am thinking about a bunch of texts that do not seem to have been written for anyone but the writer. Not diaries as we recognize them now, with their ordered chronological structure, but mostly incoherent accounts of prayer regiments and mystic experiences.

I often reflect on why we write. Lately it would have been more appropriate for me to reflect on why I do not write, as not a lot of writing was getting done. Sancha's death has opened up a textual floodgate. It feels good to write; it is something to focus on, the words come predictably the way that tears and comfort don't. I haven't written like this in a long time: without editing, without re-reading, without footnotes. Without readers. (There may be readers. Obviously I entertain a fantasy of readers because I am putting this online and I have sent the links to a few people. But I am not writing for readers. I am writing to write.)

A dear friend who has also recently lost someone dear to her sent me a link to a new blog (an old blog brought back to life), and she expressed a similar sentiment. Writing about pain, writing through pain, writing transforming pain. Mostly writing to write...but not wanting the words to fall into the abyss.

Part of me is glad to have spent approximately 33 years writing (My Book About Me, my autobiography from age 3 3/4, was largely dictated, but does feature a few lines done in my own hand) such that it is now so second nature that it is a comfort. I don't drink, run, or paint, so it is good to have something. But part of me thinks: how solipsistic. In the end, it comes down to telling stories about me for me. Like I have finally completely closed the circuit of myself and made myself extraneous, utterly excisable from any human or cosmic community.

Symbiosis

My mother found this photo and I think it captures  my relationship with Sancha  (as well as our exciting exciting lifestyle) pretty perfectly. Who is leaning on who? (Update: scroll down, the post was originally just this note and the picture, but I came back and got Proustian)

I had assumed this was in my mother's bedroom in Los Angeles, but my crack reading public of one has identified this photo as one I sent her titled "Alabama." Now it is all coming back to me: this was from the road trip I took with my mom moving from New York to New Orleans. I have always loved cheap, anonymous, middle-of-nowhere, truckstop motels (I was into them before Foucault)--, and when I was 12 and we moved from Arkansas to LA, stopping in Washington DC and New York for the summer, after what had been an unremittingly awful year that culminated in my mother trading in our beloved car Eleanor without telling me the day of the trip (a sweet, loyal, gentle, little old white car...am sensing a pattern here), my only solace was the prospect of a week of anonymous hotels with cable TV. Until I was betrayed again by 6 out of 7 nights being spent at my mother's friends' houses along the way. (The one night we stayed at a hotel featured one of my favorite memories of my mom and one of the stories I make her tell me over and over, but I will set that aside for another paragraph, as this one is one anecdote away from derailing entirely). I hold grudges. So in early 2012 I flew from NY to LA for less than 24 hours to attend my stepfather's surprise birthday--I couldn't come early because it was a surprise and I couldn't stay because my mom and stepfather were heading off for a romantic getaway. I demanded in return (no such thing as a free surprise birthday attendance) help in moving to New Orleans and a commitment to spending each night on the road in the no-starriest, truck-stoppiest of motels, watching at least one full episode of a law/forensics/cop show per evening.

So this is from a roadside motel in Alabama, probably between a Chevron, a fireworks store, and a 100% transfat buffet, probably after hours of watching Forensic Files and The First 48. Sancha was the most adaptable dog ever. I will eventually post about her trip to Spain, in which she did to adaptability what Ripken did to consecutive games, but it really didn't matter where I sent her or how we got there: as long as she found something soft to lie on, she was set. I wish I could say this was another thing we had in common, but in this case it was something I admired because it is a quality I lack entirely. We are (fuck. were) both creatures of routine, but she could recreate her routines in the midst of a chaos of change, whereas I demand exact repetition, stability, and monotony in order to feel at ease.

Of course the problem now is that Sancha was one of the essential elements to my routine. My stuffed raccoon is a good backrest. But he's crap to take on walks.

 

Paying for the end

Darla Landry and Jason Lotz, the petsitters who took such great photos of Sancha and were with her at the end, have started a FundRazr campaign to help with her vet bills. I had some money saved and am not in dire straits, so please don't give if you need the money for your own family or self. But if you are able to donate a little bit, it would help and I appreciate everything so much.

Sorry for the ugly link but I can't figure out how to embed this more artfully:

https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/2mMr2?utm_campaign=new-campaign&utm_medium=email&utm_source=05-2014

Buried Treasure

So I will return to more indagations (is this an English word? Spellcheck thinks not...) of the dark side of love soon. But for now I wanted to follow-up on yesterday's post about Sancha's spaces. But first a transition, by way of seemingly unrelated anecdote.

After my father died (2002, suddenly and unexpectedly), my mother found a locked safe in his closet. My parents led very separate lives (my father had converted the basement of their house into his own gym and study), so it is entirely conceivable that my father could have skeletons in his closet (literally) and my mother wouldn't know about it. Anyway, my mother didn't know the combination, so they had to call a safe-breaking company to come blast it open. This takes a while to coordinate, and in the meantime, there was much speculation and anxiety. What was in that safe? Porn? Meth? Jimmy Hoffa? In the end, it turned out to be guns and survivalist/paramilitary catalogs. All legally registered (the guns, I don't think you have to register catalogs). My dad was ex-military, and he liked to go shoot for target practice, but he was also very pro-gun control and not a Unibomber type at all. So this was his dirty little secret/hobby/little-boy fantasy.

So, back to Sancha. As I mentioned yesterday, she had in the last year occupied my Target tub of sweaters. I resigned myself to never wearing those sweaters again (fortunately they aren't too necessary in New Orleans) and that was her space. Sancha never showed any interest in toys or balls, but she loved a good rawhide, and I always had some in store to give to her when she seemed interested. I often saw her devour them to a gelatinous stub, but I do admit noting that the outlay of rawhides often exceeded the gelatinous stubs discovered around the house. I didn't really pause to think about what she might be doing with the rest, just assumed she chewed them when I didn't see. Going through her sweater box today, however, I found some decidedly non-sweater objects buried like ancient indigenous potsherds at various levels going down to the bottom. Here is the result of today's archaeological dig:

 

I wonder if she forgot about them, or if it gave her comfort to know that they were there. As I look at my bed, I note a laptop, a stuffed raccoon, and three books. We had a lot in common.

 

 

Canine organization

A young dog fills your day. Play, walk, feed, train, clean, shop, be surprised, recount, repeat.

An old dog doesn't actually require that much of your time. But she still structures your days. She bisects them in at least five: morning bathroom run, morning food, mid-day walk, afternoon food, late night bathroom run. Nothing away from home can last more than 6 hours. Even when you are away from home, you have a little internal clock that goes off after about 5 hours and beeps "Check on the dog, check on the dog." You occasionally resent this 6 hour bungee cord tethering you to your home, but when it's off, you find there's nothing you really want to do for more than six hours except hang with your dog anyway.

Dogs also structure your space. Sancha and I were both creatures who nested, and we were both creatures of routine. So we had our designated nests and our routines around those nests. Each move required a re-configuration, but generally there was the bed: top half reserved for me, bottom half available for Sancha, (but always under a hefty supply of blankets.) This wasn't an imposed demarcation, she just preferred the bottom half, and especially the crook in my knees as I lay on my side. She needed her own space, though, and that was currently the plastic tub I used to store all my (formerly) nice wool sweaters. The tub was resting at the side of the bed, where it could conveniently serve as a step up when she decided to switch resting spots. Sancha's other space this last year was under our house (raised, because New Orleans). I have no idea what she did under there. My friend L suspected she had a home office and was filing and catching up on e-mail. Pretty much every day she would disappear under there ---I could always hear the little jangle of her collar so I didn't worry--and emerge 10 minutes later, giving with no clue as to her activities. One time she got disoriented and went under the neighbor's house, and I had to crawl under and drag her out, but other than that I didn't ask questions. It was her space. Kind of like the time my mother came to my apartment in Brooklyn to help me move and I had been charged with cleaning up beforehand. I cleaned up everything I could think of, but when my mom stepped in the first thing she saw was dog toys everywhere all over the floor. "I thought you cleaned!" she protested. I did...but it hadn't occurred to me to pick up things that didn't belong to me. The floor was pretty her space too. It only seemed fair, as she was so close to it.

 Life in the house was a repeated choreography: dog from sweaters to bed, Dale from bed to fridge, dog from bed to fridge,  Dale and dog from fridge to bowl, Dale from bowl to bed, dog from bowl to sweaters. A frenetic hip-hop dance moment when Dale came from outside to door: wild figure eights, jumps, usually extended to the back yard, back in, and then to the leash and out for the walk. My neighbor who sits on a chair on his porch all day every day and observes the world would  joke when I came home from work that he'd see me in 30 seconds. With a dog you never come home once. Our other routine was the bathroom: if I went to the bathroom, the rule was I left the door open, Sancha came in, put her paws up on my legs and I rubbed her tummy. This was pretty much the only access I ever had to her tummy, as she was a very low-center-of-gravity girl and she did not like rolling over.

Last semester I had both my undergrad and graduate seminars on Friday, which meant leaving her for a long afternoon alone and, if I had a faculty meeting in the morning, leaving her at doggie boarding. So we developed a new Friday afternoon routine: get dog from house or Zeus's place, go to McDonald's drive-thru, order a hamburger and a large soda. Soda was my treat (I've stopped buying them), wait a few minutes until the burger cooled and then give it to her, bun with pickles and mustard for me. I am a vegetarian and pretty much vegan, but Sancha is emphatically not. And then home, to the weekend.

Dogs structure your interactions with people. Most days I took Sancha down our street to the coffee shop on the corner (about 3 blocks down), where I would offer her water from the bowl they keep outside, she would refuse it (she was very particular about only drinking from her bowl), I would tie her leash to one of the outside tables,  go in and order my same small medium roast (I don't even have to order it anymore, on occasion both baristas have independently had it ready for me when I come in), untie her, and we would proceed back. There are several retired/self-employed/unemployed guys who live along that route, and one house that always has somewhere between 2-4 kids playing outside, and the conversations at each as I went by were always pretty much the same. One of the little girls had seen a movie about Chihuahuas and was quite the expert, she always came running out screaming "Chi-huaaa-huaaa!" and the two girls would pat Sancha delicately, the two boys would pretend to be afraid of her and touch her and then run screaming, they would all ask to take the leash and walk Sancha a few steps (Sancha was always so patient with little kids, although I had to walk too or she wouldn't go with them), we would chat about dogs or the Chihuahua movie for a moment, and then I'd go on my way. The raeggae musician who lives across the street from them would always say "Going for a walk?" and I would say "Yup". Obviously no information was being exchanged here, it was just the thing we said to show that we were neighbors and it was a nice day. Call-response. Sometimes I walked to the coffee shop to work inside and wouldn't bring Sancha; invariably the raeggae musician would say "Where's the little one?" and I would say "Inside taking a nap." Today I walked down the same block, managed to avoid the little girls but the raeggae guy was out and asked "Little one taking a nap?" and I had to explain, and then the barista peeked out the window and asked where my dog was... It's like I'm dancing without a partner. A tango. And you know what they say about tango.

I have a ton of things I should be doing this summer, but I don't have to teach, and the deadlines are flexible or self-imposed, and the days and the house and the world just looms like a formless, unstructured void.

Sweet, sweet sap

Have you ever ventured into the Grief section of the Hallmark display and lamented how clichéd and treacly all the cards are? Have you ever looked at the poems people write about loss  and wondered how anyone could find the slightest bit of comfort in such tired, formulaic sentiments?

Well consider yourself lucky. These are sure signs that you are have not recently lost anyone.
There is a valve in our brains that opens up when we are in wells of deep emotion and pain and it magically makes every singe one of those poems and cards meaningful and personal.

I look forward to a future when the valve closes and they are once again trite clichés.

The dark side of love

It is hard to find a dark side to my relationship with Sancha. I know I am not nostalgically sugar coating anything when I say that 99% of our time together brought out the best in both of us. But in reflecting back on my time with Sancha, it has struck me how there was something of a dark side to many of my most joyful experiences with her. Not a dark side in the Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde sense. More an ethically complicated side. Perhaps  I am just by temperament given to deconstruct and over-analyze everything, to refuse to acknowledge bliss when it licks me on the nose. Or perhaps there really is no such thing as a free lunch or a morally pure emotion.

I spent my first year in New York without a dog, per roommate insistence. I had had dog(s) since age 10 at home, and then lived with my childhood dog my year off of college (mid-sophomore year) and then he rejoined me my senior year. And the years at college I didn't have MacBeth I worked as a dogwalker and dogsitter. So I was desperate to have a dog again. And when the roommates moved out after my first year, I was rarin' to adopt. I recall applying with various private rescue organizations and having them turn me down because I didn't have a fenced-in backyard. Also small young dogs are at a premium in New York. Hundreds of pits and pit mixes languish in the shelters (or rather they don't languish, they get put to sleep), but a good poodle/terrier mix is hard to find. Anyway, I was visiting Animal Care and Control (the kill shelter in NYC) to check on offerings and I remember riding up the elevator with a family that was straight out of a 50s sitcom (a Dominican 50s sitcom anyway). Mom, dad, adorable gap-toothed approx. 8 year old little boy, all excited about getting his first dog. (You can hear it now: "I promise to walk him" "I will call him Fluffy and we will build a clubhouse and he will be my best friend.") Lovely people, and I totally saw my 10 year old, about-to-get-first-dog self in this little boy. They also wanted to a smaller dog. Anyway, we parted ways in the shelter, and although I was dead-set that I did NOT want a Chihuahua, because I DO NOT LIKE Chihuahuas, because Chihuahuas are anxious, shivery, not cute and climb all over you, I saw this dog labeled "Chihuahua" and she was affectionate, and seemed poised, sturdy,  adorable, weighed a solid 15 lb., and she beamed at me from her cage, and I WANTED.

She had just been spayed, and couldn't be adopted yet. I don't remember why I was unable to "reserve" her, but I filled out some initial paperwork and the shelter just told me to come back in 2 days and that as long as she was still available, I could start the adoption process then. As I left, I saw the Dominican-American family taking her out for a walk. And I forget if I overheard a conversation there or maybe we re-encountered each other in the administrative offices, but I somehow knew that they also had their eye on the soon-to-be-Sancha.

Anyway, fast forward two days. I got to the shelter at 9am sharp, to make sure nobody beat me to my dog. And sure enough, as I was entering the elevator, I saw the same Dominican family, just entering the building. And I can see it slo-mo: the kid's hand reaching out saying "hold the elevator!" and ...I am not proud of this but I started pushing the "Close door" button frantically, and the family drew nearer, and the doors began to close, and I pushed more, and the doors shut, the elevator engaged and began to rise...and the rest is our story.

 I never saw them again. I hope they found their own Sancha. I suppose I feel bad. But I would do it again every time.