The mystery of the wet snout

Posted on January 9, 2014 by PMcG

With these few words I bring to a close the short series of sketches I have called “Nuggets I picked up from my dog.” My obtuse thinking about the mysteries of life while shadowing the late Coffee J. Dogg over the years, triggered sights I otherwise would never have seen from the window in my basement office.

There are things both useful and flimsy that we can learn about the mystery of life by reading books, or talking to smart friends (dullards will do in a pinch) or watching the Discovery channel. But if you really want to tune into your own mystery theater the rule is that you have to slow down, clear some junk from the oblongata and reflect on the who, what, where, when and why of your reign so far.

Such reflection is like staring into a cracked mirror and seeing multiple images of yourself. Or it’s like catching a glimpse of both the real and the wavering you in a lakeside swell on a sunny day. The picture that flutters back is never precise. Usually what you see is obscure, perplexing, contradictory. Mysterious.

Especially if you’re looking into the eyes of your dog.

In my daily ramblings with Coffee, I would often look into his large brown eyes and see myself. That is to say, I saw a reflection of the author as a solitary little boy filled with faith, hope and fear. Faith that his mother would never leave him; hope that his mother would never leave him; fear that his mother was on her way out the door and wasn’t coming back.

Other than a weird-looking guy with thinning hair and glasses, I do believe the hound saw something very similar about himself reflected in my green eyes.  And thus were we bonded, a man and his dog on equal footing. (True, the dog had two extra feet, but, not wanting to embarrass him, I graciously thought of them as his hands.)

In the meantime, I’ve been wandering the neighborhood alone these days, mystified that I still feel so pained a full 3 years after Coffee’s outbound flight to the stars. I have only begun to sense the wisp of an idea, but it may very well be The Hairful One’s ultimate nugget.

Dare I say it? The mystery of life is really the mystery of love. Not that it makes it any easier to decipher. If there is a four-letter word in this life that is shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding it is the L word—a word that for me, as for many of us, is so difficult to utter, let alone assert.

 Often confused with the F word (Food, to a dog) it actually exists in an alphabet of its own. It is further complicated in that professing one’s love is not the same as demonstrating that love. Somewhere in the Rulebook of Life it is written “Actions speak louder than words.” This is quite important to a dog, whose vocabulary is so very limited.

In every image of him stored in my attic I see in our noble and simple hound a hunka hunka burning and unconditional love. His was the best kind of love: given for free with no hidden agenda, no sales tax, no fine print.

 Easy enough for a dog, you may say, but how can humans possibly do that (especially the free part) and still have time to race around the fast lane, whack every mole and sweat bullets over the portfolio?

 Maybe, as in watching a video of how to play the banjo like Earl Scruggs, one starts mimicking the moves of the master. Eventually, after much tripping and stumbling through discordant notes, with everything sounding dreadfully bad, one begins to feel the rhythm, to hear the melody. Before you know it, you’re pickin’ and grinnin’.

Maybe. Who knows? In the end, love is a mystery that comes natural to dogs but which mere humans can fathom only by living it. If we do not, we may as well be back in the cave with Plato and his campfire, staring at the mysterious shadows on the wall with our mouths hanging open and not a marshmallow in sight.

Anyway, old buddy, I leave you now to enjoy the stars. And thanks mucho for all the nuggets.

Essays in this space will revert next week to the usual zanythink that  also appears here each Tuesday.

For a complete listing of the 22 essays in the series “Nuggets I picked up from my dog,” click on “Nuggets” in the Category list to the right of this post.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2014, all rights reserved

Posted in Dogs I Have Known | Tagged | 2 Comments

Alone with my elephant

Posted on January 7, 2014 by PMcG

I didn’t want to appear complacent. Especially not at a time when just about everyone seems so dissatisfied with their slow progress toward fame, fortune and reality. So yesterday, I called myself into the office and fired me.

Needless to say—but I will say it anyway because I just feel a need to say—I was shocked out of my pantaloons. (Here’s a curious little side question: why have pantaloons come to be known as pants instead of loons?)

By the way: I didn’t use the term “fired” because it just sounds so blunt and cold. That’s not who I am. Instead I said “The company is moving in a new direction and I have already hired a moving van, so get out.”

The moving van was a little white lie, which I immediately regretted because I can always tell when I’m fibbing. And if I can tell, so can I.

“That’s a lie,” I shouted and I had to loudly insist that I calm down or I would call security.

“What crap,” I said. “There’s no security here. There’s just me, a delusional guy in his basement pretending to be on the floor with people. There’s no company. There’s not even a water cooler.

“And for sure there’s no new direction. There’s north, south, east and west. There’s up, there’s down, there’s in and there’s out. Over, under, around and through. That beez it.”

“You’re forgetting milo,” I countered. “North, south, east, west and milo.”

“Milo’s not a direction,” I said. “It’s a crop in the field. Or somebody’s uncle. Of course, I suppose it’s possible to have an Uncle Milo standing in a field of milo. But think of the crazy logistics it would take to arrange that. Not to mention the liability insurance.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” I tried hard not to let me get to me. I can be pretty difficult to deal with sometimes. “Milo is a new direction. Which means it won’t be crowded. Duuuh!”

This had gone far enough. It was time to talk about the elephant in the room.

“Look,” I said to me, “I can’t fire me because I’m me. If I fire me, I fire myself.”

“That’s utter nonsense,” I said.

A silence as thick as a 5′ x 4′ cheese steak–onions, no hots– fell over the room and got on everything.

I became wrought and then overwrought. Wrought iron was next and before I knew it I was holding a 5-iron and looking under the washing machine for my ball. I felt dizzy, my  energy draining, although it could have been the washing machine coming out of its spin cycle.

“I’d like to be alone with my elephant,” I said.

“I sense a disconnection,” I replied. “The best way to fix that in my opinion—and your opinion as well—is a nap.”

I thought it over. It was not a bad idea, but there was one speed bump.

“What happens if the boss catches me asleep?”

“Won’t happen. The boss will be asleep too.”

 “But who’s going to watch the elephant?”

I got no answer, for a very simple reason. The elephant was sound asleep, his carefree snores underlining the very complacency I had hoped to avoid. Life is so hard.

I made a note to hire myself back and closed my eyes, hoping Dumbo would not roll over on me.

 

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2014, all rights reserved

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He knew it and he knew I knew he knew it.

Posted on January 2, 2014 by PMcG

No. 21 in “Nuggets I picked up from my dog,”  inspired while walking the late Coffee J. Dogg.

Once upon a time, Coffee J. Dogg was a used hound in need of a new life.  By happenstance I was a used man grasping for what Jimmy Buffett (the billionaire singer not the billionaire billionaire) called “answers to questions that bothered him so.”

We became a team, the hound and I. He lured me out of my basement think tank for daily walks through the neighborhood. In the process I met strangers who very quickly became my neighbors.

Shortly after Coffee went off to the stars I took a walk alone through the neighborhood and stopped to chat with Jamie, who lives on the corner four doors down the street.

Jamie’s was a well-kept lawn, always thick and cool and green. It was Coffee’s favorite spot. In the last year, as his back legs began to give out, our walks shortened considerably. Often the best he could do was to make it down to the corner.

Jamie and Mrs. Jamie always had something nice to say to Coffee, though he usually allowed me to handle any responses.

Gradually, I began to feel Coffee slipping away: many trips to the vet, changes in pain medication, shorter and shorter walks, ominous X-Rays and then a sudden weight loss. You could feel his bones through his fur.“That dog was a real trooper,” said Jamie. “I think in those last few days when it was hard for him, I think he was doing it just for you.”

Kindly words, but difficult to hear. I know I projected onto Coffee the identity of a little boy once very close to me. It’s why I couldn’t deny him treats and why I sat up into the early morning hours with him when he started his decline. He loved me. I loved him. We were the same and different all at once.

Just after that, Katherine and I drove up to Elizabethtown to spend the afternoon with our daughter Bridey who was helping with a community fair. We strolled around and the very first booth we came to was for the local dog rescue organization.They’d brought along several rescued dogs in need of a home.

Each dog was attended by a retinue of little kids, eagerly pressing the fur and directing wide, pleading eyes at their parents. My own eyes settled on a young black hound who instantly reminded me of Coffee. Bridey caught my gaze and raised her eyebrows.

“Thinking of getting another dog, Dad?”

In my life I have owned and lost three dogs. After each was gone I swore never to get another. The hollow in my heart was too fresh and deep to think about going through it again. But basically, I don’t really want another dog. I want the dog I had.

We moved on to a table that held hand-made wooden boxes. One in particular caught my attention. Six inches square, eight inches tall with a lift-up top. An old-timer approached.

“You like that box?”

I shrugged. “It’s a box.”

“There was a woman here a minute ago,” he said, “and she asked me what she could put in that box. You know what I told her?”

I continued to play with the lid.

“I told her ‘Anything you want.'”

He was part of a group who made objects in the wood shop at the local Masonic homes. He looked like somebody’s great-grandfather. He smiled. I smiled. I was weakening and he knew it. And he knew I knew he knew it.

“How much?”

“For the box?” he asked.

I laughed. This sly old critter was a pro. “For the box.”

“Twenty five,” he said.

I went through my pockets. “I’ve only got twenty-three.”

“Sold.”

Bridey approached me a minute later.

“Was that a pity buy?”

I shrugged. “I have a thing for boxes.”

In fact, I have lots of very nice boxes. But there’s nothing in any of them. My thinking is that they’re special so I can’t put just any old thing in them. It has to be just the right thing for the right box. The right thing hasn’t come along yet. But when it does, the right box will be waiting for it.

We had to pass the rescue booth to get back to the car. The black dog was still there, looking confused. I tried not to make eye contact. When we got home I set the box on my desk. It’s still there. I lift the top up every now and then. It’s still empty.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.

Posted in Dogs I Have Known, The human comedy | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Never say worm to a horse

Posted on December 31, 2013 by PMcG

Every day while driving to a job site at which my services are no longer required, I passed half a dozen horse farms. I was perplexed by the sight of some horses out there in the chill morning wearing blankets while others had none. My inquiring mind wanted to know why they all didn’t have a blanket, or at least a windbreaker. With a hood.

One possibility I considered is that up in the big Ben Cartwright house the in-laws had dropped in for a long visit and some of the horse blankets were needed for the guest rooms.

But after some serious applied thinking I began to draw a different conclusion.

Each day in the stables as the horses head out to the paddock, there’s a guy standing there asking each horse as it passes “Blanket?” Of course he has a stack of them and he hands them out to whichever horses want one.

As logical and reasonable as that sounds, I’ve come to understand that there are those instances when a horse will say “Can I have the plaid one?” And the blanket guy says something like “Marmalade Bob just took that one.” To which the horse responds “I never get the plaid blanket.” The guy says something like “Hey, the early bird gets the worm.” To which the horse replies “Never say worm to a horse, you parasite.” The guy, quite used to whinnying horses, shoots back “I’ll take that as a neigh.”

There is one other possibility and it makes me think of a guy I knew in college. He had a real name but everyone called him Frenchy—most likely because of the beret he often wore.  He was a hail fellow, well met, short and a bit on the stocky side. Well, more like quite a bit, but he carried his weight well.

In the winter—aside from pants, shirt and shoes—all Frenchy wore was that beret and a long, thick scarf, tossed rakishly over his shoulder. Never a coat. No matter how cold or how much snow. Never. Ask him about it and he’d shrug “I’m fine.”

So now, whenever I see an unclad horse in a field, I think about Frenchy–although I’ve yet to see a horse with a beret or scarf. Maybe the guy just has blankets. If a horse asks him one morning “Can I have a beret?” maybe the guy shoots back “Do you want that with or without truffles? Haw!”

Or maybe…just maybe, the blanket guy is wearing a beret and a scarf. And while the horses move out of the stables  without comment, it’s later, over the watering trough, that one hears horses muttering. “Did you get a load of that beret?” asks a big mare named Stan. He immediately drops a whopping load. Amid a chorus of horse laughs someone adds “Geez, I’m glad I’m a horse.”

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.

Posted in News You Can Use (Sort of) | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Panama Limited (Very)

Posted on December 27, 2013 by PMcG

 No. 20 in “Nuggets I picked up from my dog,”  inspired while walking the late Coffee J. Dogg.

I am summoned from my bed by a dreadful keening, a low moaning sound that rises gradually to a howl, like an old dog singing the blues. I come downstairs and find him half sitting, half lying on the hardwood floor, two feet from his soft bed.

I open the front door but he doesn’t want out. Nor does he want any water. Not even a treat. This is a first. Not even a treat.

I sit down next to him and he steals a look at me. I hug him and scratch his belly. He crouches down, lays his chin on his front paws. I get him to lay over on his side and I sit there.

He gets real quiet and closes his eyes and falls into a steady rhythm of breathing. I gently raise myself to my feet and begin a delicate tip toe up the stairs. But his head comes right up, his big brown eyes shooting me a terribly forlorn look of desperation.

So I go back and sit down next to him, and we go through the routine again. I get him quieted down.  

I sit awhile in the yellow chair and wonder what I am supposed to do next. A slight breeze sifting through the front window tickles the curtain and breathes a shadow against the only illumination in the room: a small night-light, meant to keep the easily confused from waking in the dark, disoriented and afraid.

In dog years he has me by about 30, but we’re each more sensitive to the dark than we once were. We’ve each faced and survived scares in darkened, antiseptic examining rooms where murky futures are forecast through the shadowy light of an X-ray box. When those mysterious clouds of gray and white are read like tea leaves and pronounced with a frightening precision, it is very much like waking disoriented in the dark.

I remember the night, eons ago, when Brendan, only 4-years-old, got a terrible cold. I sat up all night next to his bed, listening to him breathe, holding my own breath until he’d release one of his. Not much to do in a situation like that but sit and wait.

At least I knew then what I was waiting for, hoping for. I was waiting for morning or a break in the fever or both. I longed to hear the smooth, blessed sound of tiny lungs going in and out again.

The morning always came in those days. But now I’m not really sure what I am waiting for. I know by now that Coffee isn’t going to come out of his latest long and hard spell of miserable. He has trouble moving his back legs, he can’t go up or down the two steps of the front porch without help, he doesn’t want to eat, doesn’t want me to leave him.

A person, I suppose, will do almost anything to keep from thinking of the inevitable in a situation like that. I close my eyes and let my mind wander.

I find myself channeling the words to a sad, bluesy, going away song from Tom Rush some 40 years back. The one about his girlfriend getting ready to leave him on a train called the Panama Limited. I remember a New York Times music reviewer comparing Rush’s deep baritone to a couple of ball bearings rolling around on the bottom of an oaken bucket. What a great line, I wish I could remember that writer’s name. Instead, that howl in the night has triggered a memory of Rush singing of his bluesy gal:

“She got up a singin’ and a cryin.’

She said ‘Daddy, hey your

Momma gonna leave you now…”

 The gimmick of the song is that Rush, playing slide guitar, makes an amazing variety of train-like sounds from the steel wheels shrieking on the rails as the engineer applies the brakes, to the tolling of the bell as the Panama Limited rolls into Union Station in Memphis, Tennessee.

I played the hell out of that record. I spent hours, days, weeks of my life learning to imitate the sliding steel sounds of his guitar on my Sears Silvertone. One day Katherine’s cousin Martha came to visit and I played the Panama Limited for her, pouring every ounce of my soul into those wailing Union Station notes.

When I finished, Martha was quiet for a moment. A beat too long. “You know,” she said, “when Tom Rush does that song, he makes his guitar sound like a train.”

I get up a singin’ and a cryin.’ The hound dog’s head springs up, he tracks my every move.  I pull two cushions off the couch and lay them out next to him. I lay down and at last he is reassured and drifts off to sleep.

Me, I’m wide awake, thoughts a-churning. In the background I hear the lonesome cry of a train. Maybe it’s just a nearby dog.  Or maybe it’s me.

 As my eyes grow heavier than my heart, I slowly disappear, convinced right down to the toenails of my soul that, cousin Martha’s tin ear notwithstanding, I had that song nailed.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.

Posted in Dogs I Have Known, The human comedy | Tagged , | 9 Comments

One little beer

Posted on December 24, 2013 by PMcG

Today’s meditation addresses one of the most common complaints of those who commonly complain about addresses. To wit “There are so many ways to go wrong.” And, of course, its corollary “But why? Surely one or two ways would be plenty.”

For proof, just look at the road to righteousness. Following it is like walking through a field at night where stray dogs have held open tryouts for sniff of the year. Emerging with perfectly clean shoes is supposedly the single and the only way to righteousness.

Yet isn’t the very purpose of shoes (aside from ‘Hey, Macarena!’) to keep our little toesies from wrongteousness? And isn’t that why Mr. Big invented the garden hose and the potato brush?

Still, would it have killed the staff and management to put up some lights so we can see where we’re going? Blame do-it-the-hard-way Moses for that. After all, he came down from the mountain with ten commandments. Not to speak ill of Charlton Heston, but let us remember: before he went up the mountain there were zero commandments.

Then lawyers got involved and commandments were modified with exceptions, exclusions, and extenuating circumstances. Look at the Matta Boom Ba exception as defined by the law school at the University of Foghorn Leghorn.

“The third—I say the third—commandment says ‘Thou shalt keep holy the Lord’s Day,’ unless thou haveth a hangover like a tiny—I say a tiny—Keith Moon in thy brain going Ba BOOM Ba BOOM, Matta BOOM Ba.”

(Yes, it’s true that you don’t hear people saying ‘shalt’ anymore, unless you count them saying shallot really fast, as in shal’t, which you probably don’t.)

At any rate, the fact remains that with no intentions of going wrong, you’re out for one little beer on a Saturday night, fully clothed and intending to make tomorrow’s 10 o’clock Mass at St. Ned’s of the Barley. Before you know it you’re naked and have to be restrained by six bouncers.

Which is ironic, as it flies in the face of the Ways to Go Right code established long ago by Axel “The Hamster” Hammurabi that has long kept you from sin: “If you’d been in a bar where you belonged this wouldn’t have happened.” Word to wise: it does no good to complain “I was over-served.”

So, what started out as a simple commandment becomes a shaggy law with fringe attachments and inflamed codicils. That is a dangerous formula for going wrong over wrong.

On a bright note: Medical science has taken great strides in the delicate removal of inflamed codicils, using techniques that preserve the sensitive bundle of nerves that allows one to go back into the same bar the following Saturday night, shouting “Now where—I say where—was I?”

 ©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.

Posted in News You Can Use (Sort of), The human comedy | Leave a comment

Snouting the riddle of time

Posted on December 19, 2013 by PMcG

 No. 19 in “Nuggets I picked up from my dog,”  inspired by walks with my late dog, Coffee.

    As he was leaving, the guy who came to fix my computer looked down at the beast stretched out on the floor. He lay snoring on his doggie cushion with his favorite blue blankie, topped with what used to be the sheet to my bed. There was a time when the hound would have bounded up suspiciously at the presence of a visitor and gone straight to a TSA sniff of his junk yard. But he snoozed on, not moving a muscle.

The computer guy looked at him and said “I had a cat.”

 I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to encourage him to go into any detail. I can’t imagine hearing a single iota of information about a cat, any cat, that wouldn’t cause my eyes to glaze over. Or my nose to start running. But, like most cat people, the computer guy didn’t need any encouragement.

“Yeah, my cat was 15.” He shook his head slowly. “I came downstairs one morning and he was stretched out on the floor. Dead.”

A bloodshot eye popped open on the hound.

“He doesn’t like to hear the word dead,” I told the computer guy.

“He was 15,” he said. “My cat.”

“My dog is 15,” I whispered.

“Actually,” said the computer guy, “my cat was fifteen and a half.”

I paused, wondering: Should I raise him to 16? Or stand pat? Since my name is Pat and I was already standing…

“He was a strange cat.”

“No kidding,” I said without a shred of irony. I could sense him building up to telling me the entire life story of his former cat. It was moments like these when I wished the telephone would ring.

“What was that,” I said.

“What was what?”

“That noise outside. Didn’t you hear it? It sounded like gunfire. Lemme check it out.”

That got the two of us out onto the front porch and in no time we were waving good-bye. I was left wondering why so many people, when they see that I have an old dog, feel they have to tell me the story of their own pet’s sad demise.

They don’t do that with people. They don’t start telling you how they found their 80-year-old granddad belly up on the floor the other day. Or that they finally had to put their granny down because she’d started calling the fichus tree Uncle Buck.

The lady who delivers packages stopped by not long ago when the beast was sitting out in the yard, snouting the passing world. She knelt down and gave him a nice head rub and then told me he looked so old. She proceeded to tell me she had just lost her dog. Well not just, about a year ago. And she still hadn’t gotten over it. She gave Coffee a sympathetic look. “He’s not far away from that,” she said. “He’s really old. But he’ll let you know.”

“Let me know what?”

“When it’s time,” she said.

“Time?”

“And it isn’t easy,” she said, leaving me with my package and, I felt, some extra baggage.

Ever since, whenever Coffee groans or moans or has trouble moving, which is often these days, I wonder if he’s trying to tell me something. He is getting old and gray and slow and needful of all kinds of prescriptions for this pain and that delicate condition. He’s suddenly barking all the time when before he hardly said a word. Sometimes he forgets he’s house trained. I took him to the vet and explained it all.

The doctor shook her head. “He’s suffering from dementia.”

“Dogs get that?”

“Just like people,” she said. “Now, there will come a time when you’ll have to let me know…”

 “Let you know what?”

“Well,” she said. “When it’s time.”

Coffee and I drove home. Actually I drove and he sat in the backseat. He was happy, I could tell, to be going home and not staying for the late show. I was just slightly confused by this riddle of time, and exactly how everything worked from here on in. The dog lets me know? And then I let the vet know? It didn’t make sense. What dog in his right mind would let me know?

Then I looked at him in the rear view mirror and remembered.  He wasn’t in his right mind.

Then I thought “Well who is?”

We got home and I gave him a biscuit and put it out of my mind. My right mind. My left mind. The whole damn mind I was going to have to make up. Someday. When it’s time.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2013, all rights reserved.

Posted in Dogs I Have Known, The human comedy | Tagged , | 4 Comments