Old Dogs

Today I packed my car for the ride east to the island, each item on my list accounted for, my music, laptop and food cooler stacked in the passenger seat, all the myriad items I’m transporting wedged and strapped into place behind me. And yet I can’t help but feel something is missing.

My co-pilot Ben. Our beloved dog.

Though it’s dimmed a bit, each year as I pack the car and pull out of the drive, I feel absence. I miss seeing Ben’s head pop up in my rear view mirror. I miss his shivery-body anticipation of departure, as though he knew this was no mere trip into town but a 1,300 mile journey to what I’m convinced was his favorite place on earth. What for him, too, spelled most fully home.

True, in his last years, when his arthritic spine and hips caused him so much discomfort on a long, confined ride, he’d slink away from the car as boxes were hauled to it. Hunkering in a corner of the garage, he’d have to be persuaded to let me lift his 70 pounds onto a fleecy dog bed spread across the back seat – a repeat, huffing-and-puffing performance each time we stopped for gas and “other essentials” and for our one-night stop over in a Red Roof Inn near Buffalo. But even in his dotage – he was nearly 16 our final summer together – the road home transformed him. Turning onto 175, a crowned, curving roadway whose dip and sway my own body recognizes and telegraphs each time I’m away that I’m almost home, it was as if years were stripped away from Ben. By the time we slowed atop Caterpillar Hill, arched over the bridge, S-curved the length of the serpentine causeway, he was up, teetering, nose working the air, the bristly exuberance of his youth, even if only briefly, restored.

My first trip back to the island without him – now, a surprising five years – the trip was lonelier, longer. Sorrow mixed with joy as I pulled into our lane. Some part of me expected to see him under the oak tree, or peering out of my study window. As if he’d been waiting for my return. Even now, it’s a feeling hard to shake – that he’s still waiting. Somewhere just off stage, in the wings. Maybe in some bigger Elsewhere.

It’s said family and community make a place home. I contend our beloved dogs do, too. They help create place. For each of us lucky to have or have had them, they help make more knowable a part of the landscape, whether it’s our own yard, a particular stretch of road or shoreline, the causeway beach, a trail in the woods. Like friends or the human members of our families, they, too, are part of the stories, of the fabric that binds a community.

Recently, two more friends have lost their dogs. I was happy to have known them. They each identify for me still a part of our road and on the other side of the bay a swathe of yard and garden bordering a cove. Remembered of one: the dropped, slobbered tennis ball welcome. And the greeting of the other: the wiggly restraint of having been trained “no jumping” even though each synapse is firing “yes!” They’ve joined Ben and all the other island dogs that, over the past several years, have been lost to us. A pantheon of old friends.

Serendipity was surely at work this week, or maybe it was my reward for attempting, while packing up, a long overdue culling of my study. Because there, going through some old issues of The Sun, I came upon this very fine poem by Dalia Shevin. And in it, for this old dog lover anyway, there is comfort and joy.

             In My Good Death

I will find myself waist deep in high summer grass. The humming

            shock of the golden light. And I will hear them before I see

them and know right away who is bounding across the field to meet

            me. All my good dogs will come then, their wet noses

bumping against my palms, their hot panting, their rough faithful

            tongues. Their eyes young and shiny again. The wiry scruff of

their fur, the unspeakable softness of their bellies, their velvet ears

            against my cheeks. I will bend to them, my face covered with

their kisses, my hands full of them. In the grass I will let them knock

            me down.

[Your Name Here]