The Weekly Essay

It’s Another Story.

Fire And Ice.

It’s warm for February, a meteorological island where I don’t even need to put on a jacket before going out. The weather’s been brutally cold, and we’ve even had an unusual amount of snow, so this sudden spike, while nice for those of us who tend to be more cold-blooded, is also unsettling. February shouldn’t feel like May, though the coming May will probably, at least at times, feel like August, when it really should feel more like September. It’s even possible that May will feel like February, which will be even worse.

There were times like this when I was a kid, brief warm spells in the middle of winter, the bare trees and beige spiky grass contrasting sharply with the ambient warmth. My parents insisted I still go out wearing at least a jacket. It was still winter, after all. That’s what the calendar said and that mattered more than the thermometer. At any moment the heat could break, like a fever, like the time my own temperature spiked and I stayed in bed all day, shivering even as my body burned,a thick quilt pulled up to my forehead, and hours swirled away into a dark funnel. And the heat did break, eventually, cold rushing back into the world the way it did on those late nights when I’d open my window to listen to the darkness.

The sky then was always cloudy when it was warm, another disjunction. The sky looked like winter even if the ground didn’t feel like it. It’s cloudy now, too, the flat dull gray of cold weather, of a sky that doesn’t have the energy to do anything but spread itself out and close its eyes. 

This afternoon, though, there was a change. The clouds curled up, still swaddling the sun but there was an azure expanse overhead. And off in the distance there was the faintest rainbow, barely together, a block of the spectrum against a flat backdrop of ash.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. We have words for how the winter cold makes us feel, and the summer heat, but a warm February has me tongue-tied. How should I feel? I ask the sky as though I need some external guidance, something to tell me what it means. But I know what it means. The world is in flux, in motion, and things will change even as I am, for the moment, frozen.

 

Winter Stillness.

There’s no silence like that of a late winter night. It’s not muffled, as it’s so often described, though if you’re out on a late winter night you may be wrapped up in layers of wool and cotton. The silence of a late winter night is as clear and smooth as the surface of a frozen pool, and can be as sharp as the cracked edges of that same ice. Even the water in the air clings to the ground so that even a cloudy sky is deeply detailed. The stars are brighter, crystals shimmering. Jupiter directly overhead is like a lamp, and even Saturn, hanging just a few degrees away, is so distinct its rings seem like they must be visible even without a telescope.

In spring, summer, and even into late fall every night is alive all night. Crickets and katydids sing to each other, tree frogs blurp away on damp limbs, and as the night spins toward morning, even before the first hint of sun, birds start to chirp their annoyance that they’re awake before daylight. In winter there’s mostly silence. There may be the snort of a deer in the trees, the rustle of a possum or coyote, the cry of an owl. Lonely cars may hiss along the road. These sounds disappear as quickly as they come, swallowed by the stillness. It’s possible to stand outside on a late winter night, see a meteor flare across the sky, a whole world burning, and feel only the numbness. It’s possible to stand outside on a late winter night and believe that the world has dropped to absolute zero, the state where matter itself ceases all motion. It’s possible to believe the world is no longer living but is like the moon that slides like a scythe across the sky. It’s possible to stand outside on a late winter night and believe time itself has stopped.

There’s a folk tale of a man who went to the town square on a late winter night and confessed all his sins to the sky. There was only silence, his own voice muted by the stillness. When the spring thaw came his words dropped from the air, heard by everyone; for months they’d been frozen in place.

It’s only a story but I can stand outside on a cold winter night and believe it’s possible, that even words can freeze and hang in the air. There’s the threat of frostbite, of numbness, of hypothermia. I don’t want to stay out in it long but I can stand outside late on a cold winter night and feel there’s true magic in the world, that it comes to the surface when everything else is stilled.

I just wish it weren’t so damn cold.

The Love Of Dog.

Everybody loved Teller.

Dalmatians have been described as “aloof” and “polite but reserved with strangers”. Teller never met a stranger and thought reservations were for snobby restaurants. My wife called him “the social butterfly” because he loved being in big groups of people and going around saying hello to everyone and telling them how happy they were to see him. It’s why people were happy to see him, though it helped that most of the people he was around were dog people. We had a neighbor who was indifferent to dogs. He didn’t dislike dogs but he wasn’t interested in them either. Teller would stand at the fence and stare at him and wait to be acknowledged and after a few minutes of being ignored Teller would give a disgusted snort and wander away to do other things. On the other hand when we took him to the vet’s office people in the back would literally come running when they heard Teller was in the building. He was just as happy to see them. If they had treats that was a bonus but if they just wanted to pet him and tell him what a good dog he was that made him happy. He was that way right up until the very end, which made it hard to say goodbye.

Early in October we took Teller for a routine check-up and one of the veterinary assistants greeted him with, “Hey, old man!” Because Teller was, mostly, still his funny, outgoing self, I had managed to ignore the toll the years had taken. I knew he slept a lot more. I knew he’d lost weight. He’d always been slender but as he got older he lost muscle, as most of us do, though he always had a healthy appetite. I knew getting up in the bed wasn’t as easy for him as it had been even just a few years ago. Sometimes laying down wasn’t easy for him either; arthritis splayed out his hips and going out into the yard he didn’t always run so much as bumble along. He was still a mighty pursuer of squirrels, though, and always a clown who’d go around and mark several trees and wait for me to say, “Are you finished?” before he’d give me a wry smile and stand in one spot and pee for what seemed like half an hour. I’ll always believe he did it because it made me laugh. Teller loved laughter.

He was also an intense dreamer. Most dogs twitch, shake, and even occasionally bark in their sleep. Teller, especially as he got older and his sleep got deeper, would lie on his side, usually taking up half the couch, and go at a full gallop, maybe chasing imaginary squirrels. Fortunately I’m a heavy sleeper so if he did it in the bed he rarely woke me up. When I did wake up he was right there next to me. Sometimes what woke me up was that he’d pulled all the covers off of me to build himself a nest. And his head would be on the pillow next to mine. Half my body would be cold. The other half would be warm, Teller pressed up against me.

The end was also full of surprises. Teller had a heart condition that we’d managed for years, but the last check-up revealed a tumor on one of his kidneys. If it stayed it could rupture and cause a massive hemorrhage at any time, so of course, in spite of his age, it had to go. Things seemed fine for a couple of days after that, then he started panting heavily after we’d gone to bed. My wife took him to the pet emergency clinic where he, of course, was a favorite of all the staff. And things seemed fine after that. He didn’t seem to mind wearing a canine onesie to keep him from chewing or licking his stitches. It was better than the big plastic cone of shame. When my wife took it off he had bruises on his chest that were initially diagnosed as a clotting issue that could cause internal bleeding. We were told he had a matter of days, maybe hours. That was early November. He seemed fine so we took him to a dog agility event where a couple of vets said any dog with the clotting issue would be lethargic, but Teller was his usual self, wagging his tail as he made the rounds, saying hello to everyone. After a few more days the bruises disappeared and he was still a happy dog.

As long as he was happy and able to get around everything was fine. Well, not fine, really. He refused food more and more and he spent more and more time asleep. He had to be helped off the couch, and onto the bed. As long as he was able to amble around the yard, as long as he still ate string cheese out of my hand, as long as he wagged his tail and smiled at us, we let him be. Keeping a dog in pain alive is a selfish act but it would be just as selfish to deprive Teller of one happy day, even one happy hour. And then came the day when it was obvious he wasn’t happy. Teller, named for the silent half of the magic duo Penn & Teller, told us when he was ready. From the moment my wife brought him home as a puppy, when he popped out of the pet carrier and licked my face, I knew we’d have to face this point eventually, but there was no way to know when. There was no way to know we’d be lucky enough to have him for thirteen years.

Even though I’ve dealt with it before every loss is different because every dog, every cat, and, for that matter, every person is different. There are some things I’ve learned are true in every case, though. I know this is going to hurt for a long time. I know it’s going to still hurt even after I stop looking for him, even after I see things that remind me he’s really gone, after those reminders send me into a breakdown. I know that every loss leaves a scar.

I also know that, even though I’m dwelling on the end now, it’s going to be the first thing I forget. A year from now, maybe, his last few days won’t be as clear in my mind as they are now. What I’ll remember are all the things he did that made me laugh: the time he pulled out a dog toy he’d ignored for years and destroyed it, how he’d paw at the quilt on the couch to make a cozy spot then curling up on the opposite side, how he leaned sideways to listen when my wife talked in the other room. I’ll remember how happy he made us. That’s what Teller would want. That’s what Teller deserves because he loved us.

Jagged Little Pill.

Cold weather has finally settled in, signaling the arrival of winter. At least that’s the way it is for now. Next week we may be back up to summer, or at least late spring, temperatures, but at the moment it feels like winter outside. That prompted me to do a thorough review of my daily regimen of pills. Because for most of my life I didn’t have any major health issues and got lulled into a false sense of complacency, I never got into the habit of taking any drug regularly. Every once in a while I’d buy a bottle of multivitamins and take one a day for a week or two I’d miss a day. Usually it seemed like I’d remember on my way to work that I’d forgotten to take my morning pill and I’d figure the effects, whatever they were, would last another twenty-four hours, and that I could return to the routine the next day. Of course by the time the next day rolled around the routine had been broken, my mind was already on other things, and the bottle would languish in its spot in the corner of the kitchen counter. Sometimes I’d remember it and pick up the habit again, but I couldn’t stick to it and a ninety-day supply of vitamins would sometimes last more than a year.

Now that I’m older and even though cancer is a good decade behind me—hopefully I’m not tempting fate by saying that—I can’t afford to be so casual about my pill-taking. On the bright side I still don’t have to take a lot of medications. Not currently, anyway. I’m getting older all the time and my pill intake may have to rise at some point so it was good that, following my time in treatment, I forced myself to develop a drug habit. After cancer I developed high blood pressure. Actually during cancer I had high blood pressure and I remember one nurse commenting on it and asking me, “Do you have anything that’s making you feel stressed right now?” And I asked, “You mean other than cancer?”

After chemotherapy I had to have major surgery and the high blood pressure continued for months after that so I got to see a cardiologist who explained that it was likely that during that surgery part of one of my kidneys might have been damaged and that it was dying. She added, “It’s not quite dead,” and, you know, when a doctor quotes Monty Python at you it either means the situation isn’t anything to worry about and we can joke about it or it’s so bad that we have to joke about it to relieve some of the tension. In this case it was the former, as she went on to explain that while it was likely only a small part of the kidney it was probably stimulating the adrenal gland. She prescribed some blood pressure medication and it worked.

A few months later I went back to her for a follow-up and asked if there would be a point when the damaged part of my kidney would stop affecting the adrenal gland. She said yes and, thinking about how I am with pills, I asked if I could stop taking the medication.

“At your age,” she said, “anything that keeps your blood pressure low is a good thing.”

Thanks, doc, for reminding me I’m constantly getting older—my age and my blood pressure both went up while I was thinking about that but, thanks to the pills, one of them came down.