Dog day nights

Today was Thanksgiving in America (or actually it was yesterday – I’m writing this somewhat late). I took my son over to my parents’ house and we had a proper feast. I was responsible for the turkey, and I made it with an old fashioned oyster stuffing, and I don’t think I’m being immodest in saying that it was spectacular. I also made sausage dressing and brussell sprouts. My mom made what she calls “holiday potatoes” – which are mashed potatoes with a ratio of potato to cream and butter of roughly 1:1, similar to Joel Robuchon’s potatoes but she adds minced onions and it’s far better, since I’ve had the chance to have Chef Joel’s potatoes in a past life courtesy of investment banking expense accounts – and she also made glazed carrots, also spectacular, and candied sweet potatoes, which are so candied I can’t even try to taste them. Oh, and together we made about a half gallon of turkey gravy, which will clog our veins for the foreseeable future.

The dog was excitable all day, which made perfect sense. I have no idea what the mix of breeds inside her consists of, other than that she clearly has some sheep herder in her – she loves to nip heels and forearms when she gets excited – and some sort of mouser breed – when left to her own devices in a field she will leap three feet into the air in order to pounce on some unsuspecting field varmint – and yet she also clearly has some kind of uber-loyalty within her as well. She needs her time to pursue all and sundry outdoors, either herding the large mammals or catching and killing the small, but she also desperately needs some kind of reinforcement from her human companion.

I say companion with intent: I am not her master. I’ve realised this time and time again, where she will abandon me to pursue her herding quarry – usually the small herd of deer out behind the toolshed in the backyard, but sometimes the foxes in the church property across the road, or last week the 10 point buck she flushed out of the nature preserve behind my neighbor’s house near the marsh. She ignores me entirely at those moments, and actually, that’s a foundation for my love for her. I don’t want her to be my dog; I want to be her companion. And I hope that she wants the same from me, and when she dashes out after the buck or the fox or the geese, and she disappears for ten or twenty or ninety minutes but comes back to me, without needing to whistle, only longing for her, I sense – I don’t know, but I sense and hope – that she also wants me as her companion, and that she wants to come back to me, as companions wish one another to return.

Today was a tough day for her because she wanted a long walk and a long run in the woods, but Thanksgiving is challenging. In Maine, this is deer hunting season, and she looks exactly like a white tailed doe when she pops around in the woods, pouncing on field mice and chipmunks, and dashing at an astonishing speed after the bucks that the hunters are looking for. I didn’t bring her orange cloak today so the midday long walk had to just stick to the road and its close by woods, where she could dash to and fro and I could rely (hopefully) on the fact that in my town, you can’t discharge a firearm – either shotgun or bow, rifles being banned on the east side of the Maine Turnpike – within 150 feet of a road. She wanted to roam, though, and I could sense it. Also it was raining all day today – sometimes hard, sometimes soft – and I didn’t have a great desire to get soaked, and most of the day I was inside, manning the cooking stations on the turkey and the gravy and the brussell sprouts. So she was a little restless all day. She was bouncing on top of my father as he rested in his easy chair; she kept interfering with my son and his grandma wrapping gifts “secretly” in the den; she kept nudging her toys under my seat on the couch, making me get up and get down and get them from where she had shoved them, in the absolute most unreachable part of the world underneath the couch.

We had a lovely day with the grandparents and my sister. My son was a bubbly vision of joy – there was nothing but beauty shining from him today. We had an amazing dinner, we talked in that way that only an old family can, with avoided topics cheerfully ignored and the old easy topics tapped again and again for the joy of hearing the old saws at work.

The dog wasn’t altogether happy.

It wasn’t that she needed more time outside, although that would have helped. I took her for a long walk early while the turkey was roasting, when I had a long interval between basting times. My mom took her for a good walk again just after we finished dinner, and when the dog, my son and I got back to our house in the evening, I took her for a good long walk while the boy watched his Disney cartoon, and she clearly appreciated the extended saunter through the now dark neighbourhood. More time outside would have meant more energy expended, more exploration completed, but it wasn’t that that she needed.

I think we’re lucky as late stage humans; we can grab a book, or watch a television, or call up an Internet meme when we need some stimulation. It wasn’t always this way, though. I watched a two-hour documentary on the first few years of the Plymouth settlement, and what occurred to me in watching it was how much time they would have had between events of existential meaning. They had a lot to do – build buildings, plant the first crops, fish and hunt for food – but then months would pass between the First Nations people talking to them, a year or more would pass between visits from ships from London. In our world today, we have the computational luxury of having existential questions posed to us almost daily. In between times, we need only feed and clothe ourselves with the instantaneous gratification available from Amazon and Grubhub.

We used to bubble with the need for resolution, just like my dog does every moment until the combination of darkness outside the house and calmness among us human presences inside the house resolves into a zone where she simply collapses. But we as humans know the universe never stops, so we can’t rely on that – maybe we could much earlier, ten thousand years ago when we still weren’t that far from our canine companions’ needs, but definitely not today. We know the universe moves constantly, evolves constantly, and yet we still bubble with the need for resolution, just as my dog does midday on Thanksgiving when the rain is falling but the turkey is cooking and surely there is something she should can must be doing to assist.

It’s hard for any of us to accept that on a given day, all we should can must do is simply to rest, to contemplate, to reflect, even just to sleep. That’s what she’s doing now, on her side, with her limbs in a kind of mid-stride jumble, her chest breathing in and out, sometimes quick when her dreams demand it, usually slow as her body relishes the aftermath of a lot of tableside turkey meat and a well-earned bone. We humans have learned much but we should still listen to our companions on this earth when they speak to us.

Today it wasn’t just the family and the dog. It was the squirrels, chased by the dog, who clearly were asking me why she was off leash. It was the crows, wet and slick, spiralling, thanking me for not interfering with their scavenging and their quiet; they like the rainy days when the traffic dries up and the people stop their noise. It was the foxes in the backyard, who appreciated me getting the dog back to heel in the morning with the rain falling.

And just now, it was the dark. I took the dog out for a very late night quick walkabout, to water her and let her look at the dark one last time. And she did. I usually do this on leash but tonight I was feeling tired – a lot of turkey, a stupendous 2004 Burgundy, really good oyster stuffing – and I just let her out into the front yard and watched her from the porch. She walked around, watered the lawn, and then she walked to the side of the house, where she could see into the woods, and just stood there. I whistled, called for her, but she didn’t move. I went back inside and watched her from the door.

She stood motionless, quiet, still, in the pitch black. I turned off the porch lights, all that was left was a street lamp a few hundred feet away. She stood and watched into the woods, who knows after what.

I walked into the kitchen, put away some dishes, put some others in the dishwasher, and walked back to the front door. She was still there. I watched some more, and then for whatever reason, she moved her front leg – and the spell was broken. I opened the front door and she trotted easily into the house. Her day was done, all the excitability of a Thanksgiving dinner day, all the activity of people playing and talking and eating and drinking and laughing, all of that in a world she couldn’t really be a full part of but she was present for, all of that need finally bursting in a look into the darkness of a rainy backyard, long enough to see what she needed to see, long enough to stand motionless against a mystery, long enough to break pause, and call it a Thanksgiving Day.

I’m thankful for all of you who read this. I’m thankful for the dog next to me. I’m reminded that I started this website as a vehicle to express my thoughts when I had lost a previous vehicle for doing so, and I’m grateful not only that it seems to have worked, but that others – Mark, Matt, Veronique – have found it to be useful as well. I’m especially grateful for the boy asleep upstairs, who will probably never read any of this – who wants to read the work of your forebears, except the wills? – but whose presence here in Maine, and success here in Maine, fills me with joy. I’m grateful for those who write every day, and for those who no longer wish to write. I’m grateful for the courage to post another one of these essays tonight, regardless of who reads.

But as always, thanks for reading.