The news from the Bay Area is full of remembrances this past week. Twenty years has passed since the big Oakland Hills fire. A lifetime, really.
More than a lifetime.
It doesn’t seem that long ago. I was working a dead-end job answering a phone that only rang when people called to complain about my employer. My ex- wasn’t yet a teacher. She was working a dead-end job filing copies of insurance policies for commercial real estate holdings owned by an equity investment firm. She was young, and so from time to time she took her job in stride, but I was not young. I was 31. I remember walking down from our dark, mildewy apartment to the Nature Sanctuary at Lake Merritt, seeing that someone was working in the visitor center there explaining the various species of birds that could be found there, and feeling bitterly jealous, feeling as if I had wasted the best years of my life not getting jobs like hers. What had happened to me? A drudge unable to rescue my failing landscaping business — sole proprietorship and undiagnosed ADD are not always the best partners — and now chained to the recycling hotline, bringing in eight dollars an hour. Becky and I loved each other, but neither of us loved ourselves, and our relationship increasingly consisted of shouting across a widening rift. I learned some years later that she was building up her resolve to leave, seeing no future between us. I was sullen. She drew cartoons in her journal of herself jumping out office building windows, not plummeting but soaring off to somewhere better. We didn’t know how to talk back then. We never really learned.
Twenty years ago this week I came home from an excruciating weekend staff meeting and found Becky and her bicycle gone from the apartment, which was two miles downwind of the fire. In that day before ubiquitous mobile phones I had no way to find out where she was, and so I fretted, but then told myself she’d hardly have pedaled toward the fire and I felt better. I was wrong: she’d headed straight for the fire, kind of: she’d gone shopping at the Rockridge Safeway, probably a half mile from the fire. She coughed for the next week or two.
Twenty-five people died in the Oakland Firestorm of 1991, including May Blos, a close friend of a close friend. 3,354 single-family dwellings were destroyed in the fire, including one owned by my friends Tim and Rhonda — though I wouldn’t meet them for another decade. Of condominiums and apartments the total units destroyed numbered 437. One of those units, in the “Parkwoods Apartments” complex near the fire’s point of origin, was rented by Becky’s high school friend Suh.
Suh was away during the fire, but her cat Oliver wasn’t.
Twelve days later Becky and I took the bus from our apartment in downtown Oakland over to Berkeley, to the neighborhood where I worked. I no longer remember what we were doing there, whether we were there because I had to do something at work or we were shopping for something in the neighborhood. I can’t honestly think of why we might have been there. Except that we found ourselves outside the Berkeley East-Bay Humane Society, and I suggested to Becky that we see if Oliver was in there. I do remember that part. “Maybe a window broke and he got out!” I said. Becky was extremely dubious, but she didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking me out of things back then. We went in.
And so the reason that I have been altogether useless for the last week or so is that in a little bit more than a week from today, November 2 2011, is the twentieth anniversary of our meeting Zeke. On November 4, after thinking things over, I took him for a walk out of the pound and he never went back.
Twenty years.
How can that seem only a moment ago, when it seems like an eternity since I saw him last? Going to the front end of the blog to find that post I linked to the phrase “took him for a walk” just above, I scrolled through the pull-down list of monthly archives for a very long time until I reached the months in which I was writing about him with him still sleeping next to me. I had to scroll past 57 of those months, in fact, to get to the month in which he died.
And of course because I pay attention to anniversaries, I paid attention to this one in Zeke’s last few months, which means that November 4 also marks five years since the day Zeke and I last got in the car, drove a ways to a nice place outdoors, and went for a walk. Though to be honest he didn’t walk much. He stood on this beach for twenty minutes and gazed out across the Bay.
Twenty years ago was before I started writing. It was before I knew that I had a career waiting. It was before the “Chris and the desert” thing, mostly. It was before the white in my beard and before I had spent more than a hundred hours on the Internet. It was also before Becky and I owned a car, and I remember wondering, as I walked Zeke six miles home across Berkeley and Oakland past sidewalks and concrete walls still smudged with fallen ash, what the hell I was doing. I spent some of the next years in a slow panic that I would get things wrong, fail to take care of him, fail to protect him.
A couple months later Becky wrote a passage in her journal describing how having Zeke around made her decide to stay with me. She drew a little picture of Zeke next to the entry, flying through the air encaped, with the legend “Zeke to the rescue!” And of course, within a year of his death 15 years later we were done. For a long time I romanticized his keeping us together during (what I thought then was) the great crisis of our marriage, but it wasn’t heroism. It was only pack cohesion. Of course he kept us together. It’s what they do.
Twenty years. There are people who were not yet conceived when I met Zeke, since born and grown and schooled and married with kids, or killed in wars, or both. And I look back at what I’ve done in that time and I see precious little of importance. So many late nights spent working, so many stupid hours spent composing rebuttals to bad-faith internet arguers, so many weeks spent on the road without him, and for what? I shoved him out of the way when he was insistent, and for what?
Since he died I think of those moments and feel a twist in my gut. I wish they were held in a bank somewhere, those cumulative hours - days - months of his I wasted. It is probably best I didn’t keep track, because tonight I would be tallying them all, finding the sum, and making calculations with the total span of my life the dividend.
I am about as over him as I am ever going to get at this point. The memories of Zeke that float to the top of my mind are for the most part happy ones. And yet I see my future clearly — at least in this one respect — and it involves a man of advanced years seeing the calendar, remembering a walk of 35 years prior, and being immobilized for a moment by grief as fresh as ever.
This is as good as it gets.
Yes.
Thank you.
Oh, Chris. I think about Zeke from time to time, and it makes me remember my lost Zoie, Havana, Bo, Mocha. None of them were mine; I just took care of them and loved them. You know that Zeke always, always forgave you, don’t you? They are made of love and optimism, and they are so generous.
Strong bonds don’t fade away. They stay with us forever. And would you have it any other way? I know I would not. Your love for this wonderful dog is a marvel. I too love dogs as much as humans. That’s OK its just who we are. And to think that 20 years later he is still your pal, now that’s a real friendship, wouldn’t you say.
Chris, I hope I’m not overstepping my bounds, but will you ever get another dog?
Your faraway friend,
Rose
Rose, how ARE you?
I don’t know if I’ll get another dog, mainly because I don’t know if I’ll be in a position to get another dog. Annette is thinking of volunteering with the local guide dog charity, and we visited some of the trainees this past weekend, and I felt myself being very standoffish and closing off — like I didn’t want any cuddles or smooches.
Weird, huh?
Not weird at all.
You’ll have to take on any new dog as a totally different person than Zeke, and maybe that’s too hard. Or maybe s/he will grow on you and you’ll make another friend, though certainly not as close a one as Zeke. Don’t let yourself get it set in your mind that whatever dog you get—especially if you’re raising a service dog—is a “replacement” for Zeke. No person, human, canine, feline, etc., can substitute for another. I love my in-laws, but I still miss my late parents, especially my dad, terribly.
But these dogs need YOU… and maybe you can find it in your heart to make a little room for them. Remember, if you stretch them, hearts are incredibly expandible.
I’m just fine Chris, and I think of you and Zeke often. I still haven’t adopted another pup, either. (you probably remember that my dog, Bunny, went missing.. - and I will never, ever forget and still treasure the kind comments from some of your readers after revealing what happened)
I have 2 kitties, and being with my horse, Joey, a wonderful thoroughbred, is about as close to heaven on earth that I can get.
Thank you Karen, for this-
‘But these dogs need YOU… and maybe you can find it in your heart to make a little room for them. Remember, if you stretch them, hearts are incredibly expandible.’
Your comment has resonated with me. I need to open my heart so that there’s room for another pup.