Dogville

Whenever my dog, Ralphie (named after the “A Christmas Story” Ralphie) and I are in the backyard, I am usually reading (today it was a book of essays by Elisa Gabbert) and Ralphie is usually busy gnawing on a branch that has appeared because of something called sudden branch syndrome, which apparently happens in summertime. Healthy tree limbs simply snap and fall off and Ralphie is always trying to bring me the branch (which is actually a limb) to fetch. Except, that because it’s a limb and is twice the length of her body, and because she knows somewhere in her dog-ability that a game of fetch is out of the question, she saunters away into a shadow and gets back to gnawing her way back into happiness.

I don’t always watch my friend when we’re outside, and sometimes I will leave her alone just so I can go back inside and finally vacuum (a rarity, but it happens when I’m suddenly hit with domestic motivation)—impossible when Ralphie’s around because she thinks the vacuum is a monster and won’t stop attacking it. And, then again, I don’t always watch her because of the reading and getting lost there or lost sometimes in transcendental meditation which I’ve been doing for some time now, but took a long break from it this year and am just now trying to get back to it.

Something else happens outside, other-worldly, kind of, which is, the moment where watching my dog actually becomes looking for my dog because she has simply disappeared. I scan the yard the way I would scan my bedroom from childhood to make sure the man with horns who appeared one terrible night was definitely not there anymore. Ralphie’s gone and, of course, not gone, because in the second look around the yard, she’s back, and always in a place I am certain I covered the first time. But what could have been worry actually puts me in a state of exhilaration—that I’ve discovered one more thing that proves my dog is magical. All dogs are magical because after needing their company as much as they need our company, they invite us into a moment that only exists in the present. They don’t look back or forward. They don’t know they are going to die.

I grew up with dogs, but don’t remember a lot of bonding there. Alfred E. Newman was a dachshund who kept trying to bite me and I’m pretty sure my parents got rid of him. Dinky (where did that name come from?) was a deaf boxer who liked to lay down in the middle of the road and feel the vibrations through his body of cars approaching. And Muscles, with whom I did bond, but only posthumously, was hit and killed by a truck he didn’t have sense enough to stop chasing. Then there followed a period of years where there weren’t dogs until I was an adult alcoholic living in Hell’s Kitchen with another adult alcoholic and we decided our drinking needed a dog to revive compassion, so we adopted a mutt we named Olmo, after the protagonist fighting fascism in Italy (played by Gerard Depardieu) in Bertolucci’s masterpiece, 1900. And now, and so, because of fascism again chaotically foisted upon us when Freddy Kruger was elected a second time, I told Andrew that we had to get a dog—this, after a year of still mourning our loss of Ruby, who we had the unfathomable task of having to put down the same day we were told how sick she was.

After Ralphie, another kind of moving through this current Nationalistic Awfulness that I’ve come to, finally, is simply not looking at the news and getting back to things I used to be afraid of doing, the way it was, for a lot of people, during lockdown—like getting my new book into the hands of people who could talk about it to other people, and reaching out to writing centers across the country with pitches for teaching classes remotely, and working privately with a few writers working on first attempts at memoir or poetry, so that I can finally stop supplementing what I get from teaching and social security and Substack with door dashing. It shocks me to think that it took until I hit my 70’s to believe that something that feels as light as a wish like the heart’s desire is actually tangible.

I told somebody recently about my shaky financial situation and door dashing and her response was, “Oh, that is bad,” a counterpoint to another friend saying when I told her, “How heroic!” At the beginning, of course, driving mostly at night to the mansions and the ghettos that make up Newport, RI, made me ashamed at what I was doing. How did I get here? Why did I ever leave New York? But after a few months, I made the job way more interesting by discovering new music through playlists and becoming somewhat obsessed with taking pictures, mostly of houses at night, when the country roads are so dark that whole neighborhoods seem to disappear. Like Ralphie.