I walked the other day in Runyon Canyon, a cleft in the Hollywood Hills with a steep short climb. It was good to get my blood flowing again. It was good to breathe hard, to feel the growing wet in the small of my back, and though people half my age ran up the slope I labored to walk, I felt fit.
And halved.
Two years ago today I walked with him, guided his aching, wobbly bones down a frost-slicked slope to his little park, and the killdeer complained in flight. I was certain of looming desolation, terrified of it, and yet I was whole, somehow, in a way I have not felt since.
Runyon Canyon is full of dogs. They walk there off-leash, running far ahead of their owners, trailing far behind their owners. A rottweiler stod at the base of one steep slope, reluctant to climb, and she leaned against me to procrastinate as her man waited patiently. The hill above her rises a few hundred feet in a quarter mile, and I’d just watched a three-month-old puppy struggling to hoist itself up one railroad-tie step after another, mighty shoulders straining against the pull of an entire world. His woman laughed at him sweetly.
A part of me has been amputated these years.
We looked at puppies a few days ago, having found an adoption center along our route from one errand to the next. There was a little one there, a two-month-old rottweiler-shepherd mix boy, and I had to look away. He has followed me since. I am lucky to have a few sensible reasons not to adopt a dog, unemployment chief among them, because if I didn’t I’d have to face the real reason I walked away: it would still feel like betrayal.
Last night I dreamed of my other half, his legs grown strong again and his eyes new sharp, and he ran ahead of me frustratingly as I followed in the truck. No sideward glances toward me, nor hesitation in his step, his business was his own and I merely sought to intrude, to take him back to a home neither of us has anymore.
I carried him up that long hill two years ago, and it was an easier climb than the one I will make again today without him.
I lost my boy, too, July 15th of last year. I am amazed I could continue writing without his almost-silent purring… which unfailingly let me know when I was writing well and when I wasn’t.
I just miss him so much.
*thinking of you*
Just the other day Roger and I were out walking when we noticed a beautiful dog, and we both said, “that looks like Zeke.” We never met him, but your portraits left us with indelible impression.
i was trying to sneak a quick peek at your blog between meetings and you had me blubbering instead!!
Remembering is good. Missing hurts, but it’s the best kind of remembering IMHO. Or at least it’s the most tangible kind. My thoughts are with you, Chris, although that’s paltry consolation.
This is hard. We lost one of ours in October. She’s still everywhere I look. In a way, though, that’s ok. I think. I still need to feel her presence, and I still do.
Zeke would have enjoyed lounging in his favorite sunny spot these last few days—it’s been reaching the mid-70’s. Pinole’s dogs are happy, but the plants look terribly confused by the warm and dry weather. The creek no longer runs north. More of a staggering trickle. Even the eucalypti look thirsty, and they’re more oil than water already.
BTW, comment preview ain’t working:
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It’ll be a year this weekend since we lost Taz. I’m still grieving but I realize there’s a part of me that needs whatever it is that a dog contributes to my life. Of all the things I debate about when I consider getting another dog, the idea that I’m somehow betraying Taz has never come up. There’s nothing I can do to betray him now, any more than you could betray Zeke.
The only betrayal possible would be for us to expect our next dogs to be like our last. We have to accept that they’re going to be different, they’re going to help make us different than how we are now, and that that’s going to be OK.
All the best,
Ron