We can be better from basking in the glow of a fleeting life that gives and teaches, because even when the life is tragically short, the love endures.
We can be better from basking in the glow of a fleeting life that gives and teaches, because even when the life is tragically short, the love endures.
I fooled around and fell in love.
No, not that kind of “in love.” Guys like me who marry up don’t make that mistake if they know what’s good for them.
No, I fell in love . . . with a puppy. And since I lost him a few days ago, there’s a hole in my heart this Christmas.
My friend Jonah Goldberg is about the best writer I know. With that kind of touched-by-God talent, you would think the first thing he’d want you to know about him is that he’s a writer. But no, what he tells you, shows you, and makes sure you know first and foremost is that he’s a dog guy.
I’m not a dog guy.
Never was. Pretty confident I never would be — or would have been confident if I’d ever thought much about it or knew much about it. True, the older I get, the more regret I have about the things I don’t know. I did think I knew myself, though, since I’ve spent quite a bit of time in my company lo these 62 years. Dogs? Not my thing.
This was indifference, mind you, not ingrained hostility. I grew up in Parkchester, an apartment complex in the Bronx where dogs were verboten. Sure, there was the occasional outlaw canine keeper. But, while crime was high in the ’60s and ’70s, people did tend to follow the residential rules because they tended to be enforced without our contemporary handwringing (a neighborly virtue illustrating, yet again, that not all “progress” is progress).
No longer among the uninitiated, I have realized this past year that dog people have usually been dog people from the time they themselves were pups. The tell is the outstretched hand, so unreservedly extended to the maw of even the most unfamiliar hound.
That was not my experience. We had some relatives who had four-legged family members — German Shepherds, Irish Setters — but we didn’t see them that often. To me, dogs were alien and a more than a little frightening. And even as a kid, I was a voracious consumer of news, so I learned that “dog bites man” is our ready metaphor for events deemed non-newsworthy because they are so typical. This fact, as you might imagine, did not raise the canine demographic in my esteem.
Plus, dogs seemed to be an awful lot of work.
In my childhood, small private homes on Parkchester’s immediate outskirts were festooned with “Curb Your Dog” signs — which, I can attest, proved to be ineffective at some of the worst moments. (Yes, Sister Margaret Mary, that was my shoe under the cassock that seemed to be distracting Father O’Shea during 7 o’clock Mass this morning.) As the years passed, and the sanitary conscience was raised, people became more fastidious about these practices. Still, what I most remembered — again, to the limited extent this made any impression on a non-dog guy — is that people were always out walking their pooches, early in the morning and late at night, in the dead of winter and scorch of summer, in high wind and heavy rain.
What was it about man’s best friend that made man’s worst conditions tolerable? I think it was sacrifice, the giving of oneself for the good of another, the thing that renders the joy joyful. I never got that part of it because I had never touched it, and it had never touched me.
With age, my canine aversion gradually — very gradually — softened, more out of practical considerations than any yearning for the dog guy’s life. Earlier, when I was a prosecutor for almost 20 years, there were long stretches when I was on trial, or getting ready to be on trial (which is the huge investment of time and stress for litigators compared with the occasional — and addictive — thrill of the courtroom). As I worked long hours and was often on the road, caring for a pet would have been impractical even if I were inclined. But when I went into my new professional life, I was working from home while my wife was a corporate muckety-muck. We were more settled. By the time our late 40s glided into our early 50s, it was clear that our son at home (who is significantly younger than his brother) was not going to have more siblings. Semi-only children of doting parents can become self-absorbed. We began thinking a pup to care for might be boon for health and companionship.
Still, I remained resistant. Having a dog would be no small deal: The lives of busy working parents and their over-extended kid involved enough travel and coordination and weekends teeming with baseball and hockey games. It never seemed like the “right” time to embark on an adventure I wasn’t too hot for in the first place, and that wouldn’t be fair to a dog if we couldn’t do it right.
But then Covid happened, and the world shut down. Like millions of Americans, as we were unexpectedly home together, we suffered through deaths of some family members and the fear that others could be imperiled. We lost most of a high-school senior year, a baseball season, a prom, a gigantic graduation party, and the professional collegiality for which the simulacrum of Zoom doesn’t quite cut it. We talked about trying to brighten our shrinking world. Though not a dog person, my wife is a horse person with more natural affinity for beasts than I have. As we talked about it, she and my son grew ever more fond of the Saint Bernard breed. I guess I did, too, though it’s possible bourbon may have been involved.
Magellan arrived in our lives at the beginning of February 2021. His father, a striking marvel at nearly 200 pounds (a fact that gave me a wee bit of pause), is called Hunter, so the name Magellan was a natural. But he will always be Gelly to me. My Gelly.
You’re never too old to learn new things, including about yourself — including the things you don’t know because you’ve locked them away.
I lost my bigger-than-life dad, without warning, without any hint that it was time to say goodbye, when I was 13 — unbelievably, 2022 will mark the 50th anniversary of his passing, though in my mind’s eye, he is still 38 and I am still a kid. I’ve carried on, for he and my saintly mom would have it no other way. I’ve never gotten over it, though. Yes, children must lose their parents at some point — life is remorseless that way. But it doesn’t usually go like it went for me and my five younger siblings. I’m still the worse for it in a profound way: The weirdest kind of social animal who, unintentionally but inexorably, erects a wall of detachment when friendships threaten to get too close, when personal involvement threatens to become emotional investment.
It’s not that I don’t want it, it’s that I don’t want it to end. I never want to hurt that much again.
Except I let Gelly in. I can’t explain why, except perhaps that I wouldn’t have thought it possible. Maybe it’s because he was impossibly gorgeous. Maybe it was because he was simultaneously charming, impossible, and dependent. Maybe it was the infusion of happiness he gave our home during a depressing time. And maybe it was how hard he fought, and how hard we had to fight for him, through one frustrating medical problem after another — piled up until there was no addressing one without exacerbating two or three others.
This was so hard. My wife, who has awed me for nearly 30 years, was downright Homeric in struggling to give this high-strung but unfailingly sweet-tempered pup the long, happy life he deserved. It wasn’t to be. And until that was finally, unbendingly clear, I had no idea how much Gelly had lured me in — and thus no idea how much he’d made me see that the other side of that seduction is serenity and love, not abandonment and loss.
Life is so poignantly ironic. I’ve closely observed it for decades without realizing that heartache is the tonic for fear of heartache, that the heart aches because it has touched a miracle all too briefly.
I won’t lie: ‘Tis the season to be melancholy around here. We’ll be reeling for a while. It gets a little better every day, but then comes a moment, a sight, smell, or sound that reminds us Gelly is gone. It’s painful. The real downside of not being a dog guy is my lifelong failure to have learned that, even when a dog has a “long” life, it is the blink of an eye. The dreaded day always comes way before its time. Resigned apprehension of this is not built-in for me. Even now, I’m not a real dog guy, and it feels more like I’ve lost my friend than my pooch. Dog people get another dog. This is not a void that another dog could begin to fill for me. True to form, I never want to feel this pain again.
Yet, I’m not really true to form. I’ve been changed by a hard-won lesson, one I should have embraced rather than gone to war with a half-century ago. We can be better from basking in the glow of a fleeting life that gives and teaches, a life that loves, because even when the life is tragically short, the love endures.
It’s the lesson of Christmas, even a blue Christmas.