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?