Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  After my restless night, she’s gone. I begin asking some questions. It turns out it’s not as hard as I thought, according to our new American friends who live here half the year: a clean bill of health from a Mexican vet is the basic ticket out. Is it actually possible that we could, in twenty-four hours, get her to a willing doctor, certify her, get an appropriate crate, arrange for her to travel on two airplanes, and arrive with her in New York on Saturday night? Perhaps. But we don’t do it. For one thing, there’s Arden, at home with our friends Patrick and Cordelia, who’ve moved in for the week to take care of him. In truth, our trip has been darkened only by worrying about him. We haven’t left him with anyone since his illness, and reports from Cordelia haven’t been good—he’s sleeping badly, panting with anxiety, and when she must leave him alone, he usually knocks something over, trying to break something in the house. We know he’s happiest when Paul and I are in bed together, with him in between us, one of us resting a hand on his flanks; then he knows where we both are; then there is no need to search, no occasion for confusion. How could we expect him to deal with a new dog?

  Soulful though she might be, she’s a girl of the streets, too; a new acquaintance here says the street dog he adopted bit him twice. We have no idea who she’d turn out to be. Well, that’s not quite true; I trust that moment, the weight of her small head in both my hands; who she is, in that instant, became perfectly clear. You can know an animal—or a person, for that matter—in an instant, really, though your understanding can go on unfolding for years. And she’d be fine in New York; here in San Miguel, too many people and cars are held in a space designed for the seventeenth century, and the result is a density of population and vehicles not so unlike Manhattan, after all.

  Then there’s the matter of not knowing where she is. I buy some biscuits, just in case we see her. I think maybe I glimpse her down a block, in the afternoon, but it’s too far away to be certain, and then the yellowy-ochre shape is gone.

  But I am not really looking, because I understand that this time I cannot help. And that something has happened, she’s brought me something: that encounter, on the sidewalk, that dear, needy paw extended to my hand, that surrender of weight—it has opened my heart. I understand that it is a cliché to say so, but how else to describe it? We lock the gates of the self against pain; it is inevitable that we should come to do so, for who can live without protection in the world of time? A saint, I suppose. A bleeding Cristo. For the rest of us, the wounds of loss, the nicks and cuts made by our own sense of powerlessness, must form a sort of carapace, an armor.

  But what I learn, that night on Calle Canal, and afterward, sleeping fitfully in our room, and the next day, packing up, walking the streets to buy some gifts for friends, shipping a box of our purchases home, is that my armor has changed.

  Once, having built myself a carapace against despair, I sank under the weight of that protective encasement. But that shield has been slowly falling away. What I feel for this naked creature on the streets of San Miguel isn’t despair. It’s compassion, pure and simple, grief for her situation, sorrow for her lot. Feeling this makes me more alive, not less so. It doesn’t make me feel hopeless.

  Why not? Of course her prospects aren’t good, and it cuts to the quick that I can’t come to her assistance when she asks for help with such grace and dignity. Even so, she is able to ask for help. I am able to stand with her and feel a pang of longing, and carry that sorrow with me, and still not feel the world is a hopeless place. She and I are both vulnerable, equally subject to the predations of illness and of time. I have my privileged resources, but they only protect me to a point; the animal self is always subject to destruction, no matter what. She might come to a better end; the brief extension of my hand to her might have made some little difference.

  I accidentally leave the bag of biscuits I’ve bought in the Pak-Mail shop. I come home to the elderly, grateful, slightly ridiculous creature who has depended upon me for years. I understand that I have turned some corner now, that I am willing; that I will not harm myself; that I have work to do in the world; that I am grateful to have felt even this sharp sadness. That to give one’s attention to the image of a suffering Christ is to make it clear that one is not afraid of pain. Despair is one note in the range of feeling that will pour through me, over time, but I do not have to be frozen there, locked in that absence of futurity and of hope. Animal presences remain for me, as they have always been, a door toward feeling and understanding. The dog on Calle Canal awakens me; she shows me that I have come through something now. I write to bless her delicate head, the paw raised in hope. How should we know ourselves, except in the clarifying mirror of some other gaze?

  Entr’acte

  Second Wind

  Stanley Kunitz says someplace that if poetry teaches us anything at all, it is that we can believe two apparently contradictory things at once. Emily Dickinson is the great teacher of contradiction. She understands that no single position tells the truth, that the representation of human experience requires contradiction, polarity, the free movement between opposing points of view.

  And thus she gives us, after the terrifying wind that blew not from the orchard but from some far source of devastation and erasure, a gust of entirely different air.

  Of all the Sounds dispatched abroad—

  There’s not a charge to me

  Like that old measure in the Boughs

  That phraseless Melody—

  The Wind does—working like a Hand

  Whose fingers brush the Sky—

  Then quiver down—with Tufts of Tune—

  Permitted men—and me—

  Inheritance it is—to us

  Beyond the Art to earn—

  Beyond the trait to take away—

  By Robber—since the Gain

  Is gotten, not with fingers—

  And inner than the Bone—

  Hid golden—for the whole of Days—

  This wind is the music of the world, entering us, and though it’s “phraseless”—a music without measure—it quivers down to us, it comes in bits of melody. It’s our inheritance from the world, that sound. Like poetry itself, such music seems a gift, one you can’t quite earn nor have stolen from you, since it has no materiality. The “Gain” of music or poetry becomes, once really heard, an internal possession, something that is, in a beautifully eccentric phrase, “inner than the Bone.”

  And because such music—the internalized cadence—becomes part of us, Dickinson goes on to a startling speculation:

  And even in the Urn—

  I cannot vouch the merry Dust

  Do not arise and play—

  In some odd fashion of it’s own—

  Some quainter Holiday—

  When Winds go round and round, in Bands—

  And thrum upon the Door—

  And Birds take places—Overhead—

  To bear them Orchestra—

  Surely that is a speculation that, were he granted by nature the ability to understand poetry, Mr. Beau’s spirit would approve of: that the joyous wind of the world could stir even the remnant ashes of the body to play, that even in death the music of things might fill us with delight.

  In this vision of things, one is not, emphatically, a “fool to stay”—or even to leave, since joy is so much a characteristic of the world’s operations that it follows us even into the Urn.

  Dickinson wants to make sure that all the living hear the air with her, and so her poem concludes

  I crave him grace—of Summer Boughs—

  If such an Outcast be—

  He never heard that fleshless Chant

  Rise solemn, in the Tree—

  As if some Caravan of sound

  On Deserts, in the Sky

  Had broken Rank—

  Then knit—and passed—

  in Seamless Company—

  Fleshless, descended from the sky, the wind comes, breaking away from whatever sky-crossing caravan it once belonged to, the
n rising and joining again. That, at least in this poem’s terms, is what we also do: join a seamless company, held in the music that is the world’s delighting motion.

  The question is, that wind that I heard blowing through the bed into the ether beyond it when Wally died, the wind that blew Beau into whatever it was that came next—was that the wind of contingency and disruption, or could it have been the wind of joy?

  Are we certain, Miss Dickinson, dear teacher speaking from Amherst one hundred and forty years ago, as clear and confounding as if you wrote these words this morning—are we sure that these are two different winds?

  Chapter Sixteen

  The old man who lived on my block in Provincetown devised a method to help his ancient springer spaniel walk, when the dog became too old and weak to lift himself up. Antony made a rope harness that he’d slip around Charlie’s torso, and he’d haul the old sad sack up, a few inches off the ground, and then the dog could move his legs on his own, and together they’d go for a walk.

  This always seemed to me a synthesis of love and art; craft found a way, for a while, to keep the beloved other in the world.

  Love and art—those two towers can’t be knocked down, can they? Though you can, for a stretch of time, lose sight of them.

  Wherever Arden’s anxiety came from, it faded as mysteriously as it had come; where he had seemed distracted and out of focus, his clear, direct gaze was restored, that curious brown look—filmed by age but still imminently recognizable: curiosity, a readiness for enjoyment, an interest in seeing what comes next. I’ll catalog his late-life pleasures, alphabetically:

  Going to the BEACH. Unable, now, to walk down to the water, or do his old fling-yourself-on-the-sand-and-roll routine, but able to hobble from the parking lot over to the edge of dune and lie down at the first spot where he could see the water. Then, pleased as any living thing might be, sit with the wind in his ears, sniffing, observant.

  BISCUITS.

  Riding in the CAR. He knows when we’re packing for a trip, even a little one, and begins to snort and express excitement. It’s hard for him to wait till we’re ready; he’d prefer to be bundled into the car first, and sit in the back, happy and panting on his blanket while we load everything else. That way, it’s clear he’s the most important item to be brought along.

  DEMONSTRATING, through a nonstop, willful exertion, the figure of determination, that he can still climb the three flights of stairs to our apartment.

  There are a number of FRIENDS who visit Arden and help us out, in these late years. Genine, who comes to visit in our longest days at work, when Arden has to be by himself for hours, and sketches portraits of him, and invites him to go out for a walk, though he usually refuses. Sarah, a poet from my class at NYU, stays with Arden while we’re in London, to the complete happiness of all parties involved. And the person he comes to love best, Kathy, a poet and teacher who seems to have precisely the right energy for old dogs, who seems to be on his wavelength. I am at a loss to explain this, exactly, but then why should the particular sympathy between any two creatures lend itself to explication? Though the bond between them sparks one to try. Paul is convinced that it’s because Kathy is from Wildwood, New Jersey, a honky-tonk strip of motels, boardwalk, and amusement park along the shore, and that she thus carries something of one of Arden’s favorite places, those New Jersey beaches, about her very person. Paul’s fascination with his native state is so intense that it has perhaps resulted in just a bit of projection. My sense is that she has all the qualities Arden likes: she is affectionate but not overly attentive, down-to-earth, and likes to read in bed with him. She is confident, unfussy, and enjoys having a routine. Arden’s quite adaptable, having been a country dog and a city one, having shied away from small-town crowds and then taken pleasure in urban scenes—but he likes to establish a pattern that we’ll repeat for a while, at least; that’s one of his pleasures, too, knowing what to do next, because we did this same thing yesterday. In this way, he’s come to know the path to the Cuban coffee shop in Key West, the stores in Provincetown that offer biscuits to passing canines. In this way, Arden’s very like me—he likes having a routine, and then he likes for that routine to change, in order to keep things interesting. (Now who’s projecting!) Kathy has herself lost an old father, not so long ago, as well as an old dog of her own; she seems to understand something about physical limitation, and about keeping company. I don’t know what it is, but after they’ve been together, Arden is completely, unmistakably fine; I may have been off running around, worrying about him in between engagements, but I step through the apartment door, and he’s placid and at ease, having been perfectly comfortable in the company of his friend.

  Exercising entire HEGEMONY over a motel bed of his own.

  Paul’s parents’ summerhouse, a little place on the JERSEY SHORE. There’s a chain-link fence around the backyard (a detail I include here to Paul’s regret; even as children, he and his brothers lobbied their parents for some more attractive boundary) and, just beyond that, a small dock and a lagoon. Occasionally, a boat goes by, but mostly what passes are egrets and seagulls, herons and time. Arden is content to lie all day in the grass beside the detested fence, watching the lagoon, moving into the shade awhile if the sun’s too hot, then back to watch the water some more. In fact, every time we drive through the Holland Tunnel and make our way south of the refineries, he does seem delighted by New Jersey. And then, at the exit on the Garden State Parkway for Somers Point, he lumbers out of his rest, head to the glass, sniffing the salt air, brimming with anticipation.

  OCCUPYING a great deal of space in our bed—lying on his side, all four legs stretched straight out, so that we must fit ourselves in around the edges and, when we have had enough, gently but firmly fold him up.

  His PAUL—that’s how we put it, Arden loves his Paul. I am pulled away often on business of one sort or another, making a living, but Paul has a steadier schedule, and Arden’s learned to count on him being around, and loves nothing better than to give him one of the demonstrations of affection he likes best, what we think of as Arden’s version of a hug: he buries his face in your chest, as you kneel in front of him, and pushes the top of his head against you, as if to express your love for someone is to disappear into them as far as you can go. Beau’s notion was different: he liked to push his hindquarters against you, so that you’d scratch above his tail, while he delightedly looked outward at the world. Arden thinks love is expressed by focusing solely on the object of your affection.

  Going out to the SIDEWALK in Manhattan, letting the life of the street swirl around him. Two years ago, we’d walk to the bakery on Eighteenth Street, for coffee and a shared muffin. Last year, we’d walk around the block. Then, just to the corner, and now, we go, really, nowhere—out to the sidewalk. Arden lies down and waits to see what will take place. His best friends on the street, like him, are slow on their feet, unsteady in the hips. They say, “How’s he doing?” I say, “A little slow today.” And, invariably, they’ll laugh and say, “Oh, me too.” They beam at him with unguarded affection.

  SLEEPING in the garden, in Provincetown, under the shade of a sprawling Montauk daisy, no matter how hot the day. At night, too, I’ll hear him push the sliding screen door in the kitchen open with his muzzle—he long ago made a hole in the bottom, expressly for this purpose—and then he’ll wobble his way out to that same spot, and lie in the cool darkness under leaves and stars.

  A TOWEL DRY, given after going outside in the rain; marvelous, being rubbed all over with a slightly rough cloth.

  TRIUMPH, his favorite food, reliably delicious; he has never been known not to finish a bowl.

  WATCHING a mouse on the floor of our apartment, one who’d crept out to look at him, and sat staring up at the dark giant who has no intention whatsoever of doing anything about its presence, who is merely interested.

  Drugs for Arden, part two:

  Glucosamine, a daily supplement to keep the joints working. Does it help? I never
know, though, once commenced, it seems a bad idea to stop it.

  Rimadyl, an anti-inflammatory, enables those tender old joints to flex, and it works for Arden for many months, a long time, allowing a leg to lift, creaky hips and thighs to get to poise in that necessary retriever squat.

  Enalapril, heart pills. For a while now, he’s had a cough, and we learn from Dr. Kaiser, his gentle Provincetown vet, that the congestion’s caused by the arrhythmia Tandy Tupper noticed years ago. (Funny to think she thought him on the brink of the grave back when he was ten—which would be, if you believe that one dog year equals seven human ones, forty-two years ago.)

  Adequan, an injected drug first used for horses with joint problems caused by running, powerful stuff that could cause cartilage to regenerate. Dr. Kaiser gives him just a few shots, one a week, and it works awhile, until it doesn’t.

  Deramaxx, another generation of Rimadyl, a bit better, and once again, the stuff keeps an old boy moving longer than he could on his own.

  First, he falls on a few stairs on the way down to the street, missing his footing. The lightbulb’s burnt out on the landing, and he seems furious about it, trying to find the step; perhaps, to his dimmed eyes, that dim hallway’s really just darkness. Then, a few days later, even with new bulbs illuminating the way, he stumbles going up, and actually tumbles down nearly a whole flight to the landing, scaring Paul half to death. Happily, Arden seems partly made of rubber, his limbs twisting akimbo without any apparent harm. But the day comes when the stairs to the apartment are impossible; that old right hind leg just seems a delicate, withering thing, and there’s simply no way he can manage. We carry him, but it’s ridiculous to try to lug him up and down every time he needs to go out, even when I remember to keep my knees bent. And it’s doubtless awful for him, one of us trying to lug seventy-five pounds of dog up and down the stairs every time he needs to go out. He does feel lighter now, in the way that old men get stringier and less meaty, but there’s still a lot of him.