Gravity

My daughter the happy artist (欢艺) sent me this drawing for Father's Day. Blue giraffes I can accept--that is mere artistic license. What struck me was that when children represent the world, gravity doesn't matter. Or maybe giraffes have suction cups on their feet like squid. It doesn't matter whether it's real--what matters is whether you can imagine it. It's sad that we forget this as we grow into adultness, as if gravity flattens our imaginations over time.

I cleared a lot of stuff recently, including a pile of drawings that H drew a few years ago. She would have been about four. They were coloring books and sheets of paper that she had drawn on--doodles and primitive drawings; I kept the more humorous ones, but I felt something about the coloring books--they had to go of course--they contained nothing but scribbles, but leafing through them I got a vague sense of the innocent joy of filling shapes with color. This is probably universal to everyone when they are young, and eventually we forget about innocent joy. I suppose we convince ourselves over time that other things are more important--and they are--but as we become more and more busy fighting the gravity of life, joy is crowded out. The good news is, there's no reason we can't have it back at any time. We simply need to reach up and grab it--like a beach ball floating on the surface--though the water is murky and we rarely see it.

As it turned out, however, my speculations were incorrect. I put the drawing on the refrigerator next to Band-Aid Man (who most unfortunately fell asleep on a nest of Fire Ants, and had to but over a hundred band-aids all over his body). I called H and talked about the giraffes. She said that they were not actually walking on the ceiling, they were just drawn upside down. I've succumbed to the gravity of my situation and am utterly unable to understand the subtext of the drawing.

The Dog Who Loved a Story

Ever alert

We called him the great communicator, the dog who loved a story.

When I was in my twenties, I read Thomas Mann's long story (really a novella) called "A Man and His Dog." It's an enjoyable story, but it could hardly be published nowadays. It's an extended yet dense pastoral narrative of the long walks taken by a man and his dog. No doubt the Iowa School types would find it intolerably long-winded and pointless. I myself had trouble comprehending its message. The point was, like man's relationship to dogs, it is what it is.

Perhaps this will be my Man and Dog story. I've written about my remarkable dog Fritz before, in End of an Era and On the Long Walk Home. But the first was a raw elegy mustered in a difficult time, and the second was a fictive watercolor of my emotions. It has taken me a year to distill these memories into a proper memoir, but more importantly, to attain enough distance to write it. I wanted to treat his memory with dignity, yet also with humor, for dogs have a sense of humor. He was a terrier with bushy eyebrows. It is not well-known, but terriers communicate with their eyebrows. When he was holding a ball, he would alternately raise one eyebrow, then the other, the alternate back and forth to tease you into grabbing for it, then at the very last second he would swipe it away: "Aha! Fooled you! Aha! Fooled you again!" And dogs are one of those creatures for whom a jest becomes more humorous the more it is repeated.

Giving you the brow

Fritz understood a large vocabulary of words, all of which meant something was in it for him. For example, I had to be sparing in my use of the word "pizza" because if I ever mentioned it, Fritz would walk over and "nose" me--meaning stick his nose in my calf to indicate subtly that he wanted something--usually an excursion. If we didn't respond to nosing, we got an indignant stare, the sort that only a terrier can radiate. And then a series of low woofs and chirring which was his impression of human speech.

You must understand, to Fritz, the pizza shop was just another house that, when we visited, they give you food. They were okay with Fritz coming in and usually gave him a little pepperoni--which, of course, he came to expect.

Because of Fritz's response to human language, I came to believe that dogs also have their own functional language, somewhat guttural and direct, but by no means lacking in grammar. It's largely nonverbal, but if we were to vocalize it, it would come out somewhat with this sense:

Give to me

Pee on, now belong to me

Meet the Jaws of Death barking squirrel

Go now, get pizza

Let's celebrate--I chew, you watch

I chew, you watch

Following from language comes the dog's sense of story. Fritz very much relished stories such as this. I would hold a stuffed ferret toy and make it climb up a tree or post and say: "I'm climbing I'm climbing I'm climbing I'm up here I'm looking at you I'm looking at you I'm gonna jump I'm gonna jump I'm gonna jump waaahhh!" And then the ferret would fling itself into the Jaws of Death. This actually never happens in nature, but it is one of a dog's most cherished fantasies that the impudent, incessantly barking squirrel shall suddenly fling itself off its perch straight at the dog like a kamikaze.

Ah, a tasty meat-a-ball

Then there was the epic known as the Sockaballa Story. We found that his very favorite toy was not one bought in a store, but rather a well-worn, preferably unwashed sock with a tennis ball inside. This pendulous toy would divert Fritz without end. The histoire of sockaballa went like this, and it was best delivered in an Italian accent: "Once upon a time there was a bigga bull, walka down the street... his bigga ball dangle behind him... Dangala dangala... A little dog say oh look there's a tasty meataball! Dangala dangala... That's why he have only one ball... poor old bull! Moo! Moo! Dangala dangala..."

Poor old bull... where'd his ball go?

Fritz could hang from that sock for minutes on end. He was not a large dog, but pity the uninvited intruder who ventures into the house at night. Twenty-two pounds of terrier hanging from your jewels wouldn't be comfortable. In prison he could tell the story of why he has only one ball. Poor old ball.

Fritz did more to improve my mental health than years of therapy and meditation. He accompanied us on most of our walks, loved to stick his nose out the window on drives, and would wag his tail and dance when I came home from work. When I came home and he'd do that dance, how could I be angry or resentful? Not only did he know how to enjoy life, he taught me how to appreciate it.

Not all dogs are water dogs, but Fritz was. Lakelands were bred in the Lake District of England, on the borderlands of Scotland. If they see a hole, they will tunnel right in, searching for a rodent. Back in the day their tails were used to pull the dog back out of the hole if they got stuck. They're hardy dogs. A famous story is told of the Lakeland that got wedged under a deep rock formation and could not be dug out, so they blasted the rock with dynamite. The terrier emerged, tail wagging. If Lakelands see water, they splash right in. They love to frolic in snow.

Hoza-yobi

And so I discovered that a stream of water from a hose would drive Fritz insane. He found it endlessly amusing to leap up and bite the stream of water. If I stopped the water and teased him about it, he'd stand and put his paws together in a begging motion, imploring me to do it again. Then the water would let loose and he'd dive at it acrobatically. We called this game hoza-yobi. It's a kind of pidgin Japanese term roughly meaning "hose day"--hoza (hose) and youbi (a day of the week), because we usually played with the hose on Saturdays.

Being a terrier, his leaping powers were amazing, and the hose gave him a good workout. But in 2005, he started to limp. His back legs became very weak, and eventually he could hardly stand. We were very worried about him, and the first few diagnoses didn't land on the cause. We saw two or three vets before it was diagnosed as immunoarthritis. They prescribed Azathioprine, a medication that humans also use to treat arthritis, and he stayed on it the rest of his life. It enabled him to walk normally, maybe trot, but his running and jumping days were over.

That didn't keep him from relishing life, however. His main passion was food, and his very favorite was roasty beast (roast beef).

We gave him many names, dozens, because he had so much personality. Because he was so wooly and beastly looking, most people couldn't place his breed and thought he was a fortuitous mix of one or more shaggy dogs. He was, in fact, bred from champion Lakeland Terriers and his official AKC name was Snowtaire's Fritz Liebling. The breeder sold him because he was hopelessly short and stocky--which made him look all the more like a little bear. N's nickname for him was Bud. When he was a puppy I called him Spanky; most of his life Wicked, Wicky Boy, or Wackabu. This is a partial list of his many nicknames:

Liebling
Fritzikins, Fritzi-kun
Bud
Spanky, Spancticus, Horatio Spank
Wicked Dog, which became Wicky Boy, which morphed into Wackabu
Jaws of Death
Gacky
Snorky
Lurky Boy
Puffy (later Farticus Maximus)
Clever Lumpkin
Breath Weapon
Gentle Fang
Beastly Boy
Snifticus
Peanut
Peabody
Sir Drippabeard
Beardo

As Fritz grew into the old age of dogs, he never lost his passion for food, and walks, and drives in the car--anything that involved doing things with his people. He remained fairly healthy albeit rather lame in the last few years; some days he could climb stairs, others, I carried him. Oh, that reminds me of another name, Loado, sometimes Lodo Baggins, because he became heavier and more of a load in the latter days. But he was highly alert especially where food was concerned. He didn't want to miss out.

Nadine left for Pittsburgh in Dec 2010, and I think that her absence puzzled him. I could tell that he was concerned. He would lie near the bed on her side. He knew she was elsewhere, and accepted to wait for her return. But the days turned to weeks, then five months. When she returned to tie up loose ends, he was certainly happy to see her. I suspect that he had been sick for longer than I knew. Directly after she visited, he showed serious symptoms. I took him to the vet; they performed blood tests and an ultrasound. He had cancer throughout his liver. It was as if he waited to confirm that she were all right before he passed on. Surgery was an option, but the cancer was diffuse--highly unlikely it could be completely excised. The surgery itself might kill him or if not, at his age, a recovery would be very difficult. I didn't want him to suffer.

For the last week, I arranged my life around doing the things he liked. The day before he passed, we went to Golden Gardens, a splendid beach park and marina past the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. It had been his very favorite walk when we used to live in the city. As always, it was blustery. The wind almost tipped him over, but when he got weak, I simply carried him. We sat on a bench and looked out at the wide grey horizon and listened to the endless waves for a very long time.

We never want those moments to end, I suppose. But each moment turns to the next, and the next, then tomorrow is today, and we're left, not with each other, but with memories.

It was a comfort that I took Fritz to Golden Gardens the day before, because that had been the last day he could walk. Now he was so weak he couldn't even stand. I put my feelings into a box that day, for I had a job to do. I took him to the vet. They had a cushion laid out on the table to make him comfortable. More than anything else, I was touched by this small gesture.

I called Nadine and Heidi on my mobile phone as we waited; I held the phone up to his ear as Nadine talked to Fritz, and she told him his favorite story, the story of Puffy. It was the story of how we went to get him when he was a puppy, and on the way back, we stopped at McD's and gave him a few french fries, which made him fart so much that we almost named him Puffy.

Then we all sang "Wooo-eee Fritzi" and Nadine and Heidi said goodbye.

I laid him on the cushion and he was very relaxed, very content just to lie there. Dogs know when their time has come. I was there by his side, put my hand on his head, and recited the 23rd psalm under my breath. When I came to "My cup runneth over" the vet said, "He's gone." There was no sign that anything had changed. He simply passed out of existence.

Fritz Liebling Trenton 1996 - 2011

I apologize for ending the story this way, but it was bound to happen. It had to be said, though, so we could understand that he left this lesson for us: On that last day, as I drove to the vet, I had the car window down because it was early May, the first nice warm Spring day after an interminable season of drizzle and chill. Fritz had been unable to stand for even a few seconds. Astoundingly, he got up, walked over my lap, and stuck his nose out the window to sniff the air as he had always liked to do. I held him up with my left arm so he could fully take the air as I drove. He was still fully engaged in life, wicked and living to the fullest, right up to the very end. We can learn from him... that maybe we can go out with style yet.

Tell me about the squirrel that jumps into my mouth again

And so my man and dog story ends, though it isn't told only for our benefit, but also for Fritz, the dog who loved a story well told.

Signals

Who among us, save the most encrusted materialist, has not longed for a sign--from above, from beyond, really from anywhere but here.

I have a strong conviction that "signs" are all around us, and seeing them is simply a matter of keeping an open mind.

Strangely enough, this week I found three receipts from April 21, my birthday, on three consecutive years: 2010, 2011, and 2012.

The first receipt indicated that my birthday in 2010, found us taking a leisurely drive to Chelan, WA, in the Columbia River wine country, and having a wonderful dinner at Sorrento's, a splendid Italian restaurant. It's hard to believe how we took such things for granted.



Lake Chelan

The second receipt was from a garage in Issaquah--on my birthday in 2011, my car wouldn't start and I took it to this shop to have it repaired. They charged me the extravagant sum of $260 to poke around and replace the battery--which didn't address the real problem in the least. It was in fact a starter problem. But you're paying $75 per hour for expertise, don't you know. I also remember walking four miles to the shop to pick up my car, and having plenty of time to consider my career options, as I had lost my job the day before. That's what I can recall of my birthday, 2011.

The third receipt was from Ivar's, a chain of fish and chips restaurants in Seattle. I drove into town the weekend of my birthday to take care of several tasks, including a trip to IKEA. Every trip to IKEA is a rather surreal adventure. This time, I had a pleasant and extended phone conversation with N & H while walking through the Blue Valley, a quiet, shady courtyard between the two parking garages. It was one of those banal interludes that doesn't seem special at the time, and yet that you'll likely never forget.

Then I drove to Ivar's for fish and chips. I was so busy that I couldn't think of a better place to go--but that's a compliment because I know I always enjoy their food. I also had a nagging headache, and fish and chips is a sure cure.

IKEA's "Blue Valley"

What do I glean from this? Prior to 2011, I was having economic challenges, but my family and economic life was still largely intact. In 2011, the structure of my life had largely fallen apart, and my birthday became the nadir of that drawn-out catastrophe. From that time through 2012, I gradually put my life back together, and had learned to enjoy life's simple pleasures.

Signs are a presumption of the mind

And I'm more careful now not to draw solid conclusions about where my life is headed, based on a few signs. We often misunderstand how events unfold. We fail to understand the difference between "quick" and "sudden." God's action is sudden; everything lines up as necessary, a crisis point is reached, then change happens somewhat catastrophically. But the alignment might take weeks or months or decades, or happen at uneven rates. We expect the relationship of signs and events to be presented in a causal manner, when in actuality they're synchronistic. "Signs" are a subjective presumption of the mind. Instead, we need to open our minds to the subtly and suddenly unfolding.

The mistake we make is that signs are not explanations, but encrypted bread crumbs left along the way. Perhaps we look for signs when we are actually receiving signals.

Things Fall Apart

I commiserated with myself for quite a while about whether I should post this. To be blunt, it's very personal, and not at all within the scope of what I'd intended for this venue. But I am worth little if I don't understand myself, and this essay describes a time of critical change in my life. It might also come to pass that I never have a chance to explain these lessons to others, especially my daughter, Heidi, so I've determined to record this here and now.

Last year (2011), Easter fell on April 24. It was a very tough time, and I attended Good Friday, Saturday night Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday services. I strove to keep a strong faith and sought solace and understanding. It helped me to gain understanding, but it didn't prevent episodes of intense grief and depression. Since the previous Fall, I had lost two grandmothers, Nadine left and took our daughter Heidi to Pittsburgh. I lost my job on my birthday (the day before Good Friday), and just after Easter I discovered that my dog Fritz was gravely ill with liver cancer.

In the long run, it was good that I moved on from that job, but it fell at a time when I was terribly vulnerable. I lost all confidence in my skills and felt that my career was over. Relationships no longer seemed to work out. It was a false perception, but I could only see the rejection and failure of recent history. I felt used up, just a crumpled-up piece of paper.

Because I was experiencing loss so acutely, I came face to face with its reality. I wasn't just facing it, I was drowning in it. I had always tried to maintain an awareness that losses would inevitably come--over time, I would lose grandparents, parents, friends and other loved ones, pets along the way, and then I would go.

Of course, I was aware that these things happen. But I expected it to unfold in a more drawn out way, not clustered, as this was. The question I asked was not why me, but why all this, all now?

On a particularly hard day, right before Easter Sunday, I realized that I'd have to let go of the things I treasured, and release attachment to the people I loved in my life. Eventually you are going to lose everything, one way or another. Even though I had acknowledged this from time to time, it was an academic acknowledgement--now it was dense and ponderous and imminent. It was less a conscious realization than a palpable sense.

During this time, I had no idea that Fritz was ill. Ironically these thoughts were a prelude to his passing.

I tried to find notes on this, but I guess I'm not surprised that I wrote hardly anything at the time. The fortnight between my birthday and Fritz's passing is a black hole. All I remember was arranging my life around making the most of my time with him and trying to do all the things that he enjoyed most.

The day after Fritz passed on, I moved to a new apartment and later that month, started a new job. My life took a sawtoothed yet gradually upward trend from there. It's taken a year to get proper distance and perspective to write about it. I can look back over the long rough road, yet I still resist optimism as purest folly.

This year (2012), during Lent, I kept an open mind, hoping for insight. I had my usual ups and downs, and I realized two things: One is that you have to uphold your faith when it's hard to do so, when things are dark--it's not just for sunny days dressed up for Sunday brunch. The other is that your emotions about events don't actually matter--the events occur anyway. It's not that God doesn't care, but He's hands off, quiet, always behind the scenes, the subtlest operator. It seems harsh, but it's the way the world works. And it's our responsibility to understand the world and its workings, so that we can live in it.

Then on Easter, I meditated on how far I had come since last year--I called it the Easter Crisis, as it seemed my life was falling apart around me. And it literally did. Over and over I obsessed on the infamous line from Yeats' "Second Coming:"

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...

My former life is no more. I'm not the same person I was a year ago. I see things differently; I act and react with the world differently; I approach problems and challenges differently.

Now, when I'm confronted with a problem that seems overwhelming, I remind myself: it's not a money problem... it's not a career problem... it's not a house problem... or whatever the problem seems to be... it's a mind problem. Then I can deconstruct it and break it down into chunks that can be done one by one.

And this year I set commitments around goals like: Build a stable foundation. Be effective. Move on. Get help. Face your fear. It's working. I stand in a different relationship with the world and with people. I'm far less impressed or obsessed with material things. I wasn't terribly in love with money to begin with, but I certainly fell into the trap of thinking that buying "this one thing" will solve a problem. Yes, sometimes you need tools or materials to help you accomplish goals, but it's really all about skills. And I now see wealth more as a means of sustaining yourself and your family, and as a bulwark against hardship, legal attacks, and transgressions against your rights and property.

Most of all, I understand that I would never have changed had a catastrophic turn of circumstance not awakened me. I was so profoundly flawed in some ways that only having my life shattered and rebuilt brick by brick would restore me.

As I was, I would never have fulfilled the potentials that God intended for me. It sounds perverse, but the more I think about that, the more I see that God truly cares whether I realize my potentials.

Winter Hours

Deer voyeur, Feb 2012

Before turning in, I wanted to share a few thoughts.

It's been a tough week. More like a tough month. Or a tough season. Not to whine, but here's the weird thing about The Valley... People think Winter is the hardest season. It's not. Winter is wonderful here. Spring, however, sucks. Especially March. We have a phenomemon here called "Winter Hours" which means "Everything's Closed." And it lasts until Memorial Day.

The anniversary of what happened this time last year has been weighing on me. It was preceded by a Winter with 100 consecutive days of rain, lasting well into March. Then it went down as follows: April 20, lost job; April 21, Happy Birthday!; April 25, found out Fritz had cancer; May 4, he was gone; May 5, moved to a new apartment. I call it the Black Fortnight.

However, things went better after that. Much better. Got a sane job that went well. The next apartment was great. I eventually had to move out here because I couldn't afford both rent and mortgage, but that went fairly well most of the time--with many hills and hollows.

It gives me comfort and hope to know that things can turn around so dramatically--but also I need to remember that it hasn't all gone steadily uphill--and it will continue to go up and down.

I must admit I've felt very isolated. Be that as it may, I'm going into Seattle this weekend to spend time with friends for my birthday, then the second week of May I'll be starting a new job and will be in town much more often.

Sometimes I wonder if I drive myself to extreme peculiarity by trying to make sense of it all. Some things make no sense. I don't believe God causes adversity to torment us, but he wants us to trust Him in the face of adversity. He created a physical world where--raining hellfire, shit, piss, and corruption--things can go wrong. Things fall apart, they fall down, they burn up, we can get hurt--and so can our feelings, even when something bad hasn't actually happened. But wonderful things can happen too. These possibilities were built into the world from the very beginning.

What keeps me going is a desire to move on. There are people to meet and places to see. I hope, when I get settled, to adopt a dog. Fritz would have wanted that. Actually, he wouldn't have--he would have viciously chased the other dog away and eaten his food. But he'd want me to move on and enjoy life, because he sure could enjoy life. He went for the gusto.

Not sure why I said this, I just had to say it.