The Absurd Gem

In 2016 Lucy began tweeting. After years of silence on the social media platform she had finally given in to the peer pressure of all the other dogs on twitter and began making her voice known. Lucy was old so her tweets were wise. “Wag and the world wags with you, whine and you whine alone” she tweeted one day. A perennial truth for sure. Lucy was full of insight lifted from the great poets and polished up as doggy wisdom. She was after all sinless and “without guile” so her tweets could be trusted.

When Lucy had been a younger dog she was savagely keen. She seemed to know exactly when the right moment would arrive when all was clear for her to take full advantage of the craziness of a house with four boys and slip out for a leisurely stroll through the neighborhood. Completely unaware of all the narrow brushes with death that a stroll like that would entail. Traversing from street to yard to backyard to back to the middle of the road where cars would stop and wait. Eventually there would be a frantic search at the house and then a search party and then a very worried child would pick her up and walk her scoldingly back home. It seemed that she was becoming a sage. Somehow she knew that things were changing and that at some point she would have to be more than just the family dog. She trained herself. Mainly by occupying her time with tricking her child owners into giving her endless treats. She would do this by going to the back door and intently staring until an unsuspecting child would let her out. She would then exit the house for a one minute pass around the back yard and then return to the door so that another child could let her back into the house and proceed to reward her with a tiny milk bone or dog treat. This process of gaming the system would normally result in a net treat intake of at least 5 to 7 treats per day. Another part of her training entailed a very rigorous napping schedule. There were three couches to choose from in the house where she lived so she would make daily rounds napping on each couch as the sunlight in the room was adjusted by time.

As the days turned to weeks and then years Lucy went from being the family dog to what all pets become if given enough time, the keeper of all family secrets. She heard all the fights, was there for all the meals (especially the holiday meals) and even seemed to develop very personal/different relationships with each person in the family. She was there when Grandma died. She was there for poker night on Sunday and for when it stopped. The birthdays, the girlfriends, the jobs, the late nights, the hidden cigarettes, the jealousy, the mending fences, the crisis, the celebrations. She was there for all of it. A true member of the family. The kind that only gets noticed when they are gone. Of the many family events that Lucy observed there were a few that became permanent imprints and that she alone would be the silent witness to. There was the year that the oldest member of the family made a very grand effort of becoming the worlds most pathetic mid life crisis actor by drinking whole bottles of brown poison and then pronouncing to everyone that he was “fine”. The truth about people who say that they are fine is that they are not fine. Lucy knew this and would communicate to him that she knew by simply staring at him. All during any speech about fineness she would just stare directly at him until he would finally notice and look down at her and say “what”? Once he had said this she knew that he knew, and that he would be going to sleep soon. There was another time when one of the children decided to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to procure drugs for him and his friends from a neighborhood college student who was in his own words a “moral drug dealer'“. “Only LSD, mushrooms and weed” he would tell his 14 yr old client, “no cigarettes or alcohol”. Those substances were off limits as they did “real harm to the body”. Lucy knew all this but she kept it to herself. She remained what she was. A dog who loved her family. She was always around when anyone wanted to sit in the back yard and cry. Or fall asleep on a couch downstairs. Or not even make it to a couch. Her breath was so rancid in her old age that it was almost like smelling salts, rousing even the most passed out owner so as to make it to higher ground.

The twilight of any life seems quieter, slower. The truth about a dog’s life from a human perspective is that it is short and contained in that life is an image. A whole. An energetic beginning filled with confusion and want. A middle section that can contain comfort and pain, connection and loneliness, and an ending that is the summation of all things, which is of course suffering, and then peace.

One day when it was raining Lucy started to feel different. Bad actually. She hadn’t been able to eat her food that day and the thought of trying to get treats was very unappealing. Most of her owners didn’t notice. They had work and school and other human occupations to divert attention away from her. It wasn’t until night time that her favorite owner noticed. He was her favorite because she knew she was his. The long trip from Alabama to bring her to a new place had been for him when he was 5 yrs old. He never forgot and always treated her with great affection. Allowing her to sleep in his perfectly kept room that even his own brothers were not allowed in. He noticed late in the evening as the first of many seizures started. He pet her head and stayed up with her all night long. Then in the morning there were low voices from everyone talking about her as she lay taking shallow breaths. Lucy felt fear. A new thing was happening to her and she did not know what that thing was. After an hour or so of having a very hard time breathing the oldest owner picked Lucy up and put her in the car. Yay a car ride! Plus all the boys decided to come along. The warm energy of her owners in a moving car made her feel better. After the car ride Lucy found herself in a small room with the oldest owner and all of her child owners. They were all crying and telling her what a great dog she was. Lucy felt very loved by them because she was.

Then I guess it was time. A very thin man with deep lines in his face and a bushy goatee entered the room. He asked the oldest if they wanted more time. The oldest said no. Then the man carefully picked Lucy up and left. The next moments were very confusing for Lucy as she went with the man who smelled like the outside to another room where she was placed on a table and given an injection. And then just like one of her beloved poet inspirations had once said about endings “she could not see to see”.