I realized this week that my real relationship with The Beast began for both of us as middle-age crept in, males seeking social stimulation and companionship. It was concurrent with a reclamation of your and my friendship yet also wholly independent.
He wasn't neglected by any means but, for reasons I think you have spelled out over time, he was longing in the same way I have been for contact and renewed purpose, both lost in the fire when his world was somewhat upended, his loyalty never quite returned in kind if not wholly abandoned.
As I watch him like a little boy with his favorite toy, laying peacefully now at rest in a spot that is not worthy of his fulfilling and dedicated life — his incisor tooth comes to mind, the one snaggled upon a railing post, his body limp and unresponsive to our presence. I realized in that second, as I blurted out, “Dude, he’s dead,” quite incongruent with my aim to strive for empathy and compassion, more startled at the finality and indicative of my dread — nothing lasts forever. As you touched him to test his responsiveness I thought He may have departed from his body yet dignity does not exist in death. I realize that today. His corpse, as with our eventual lifeless coils, no matter how we may wish to euthanize with euphemisms, eulogize the brutality in reality, the one which brings abrupt cessation of life even when that life has slowly draw down these last several days, was dead. Death to me in that moment for the first time in my existence seemed humiliating.
The final expression of bladder and intestines’ release, all he dutifully held in until he had the chance to go, which his failing body ironically would not permit, were the reminders of an ever well-trained lad. This was his end. One final indignity, someone — in this case, You — inevitably called upon to clean up the ‘mess.’ If not You, I surely and gladly would and I know you wouldn’t disagree that it’s the least we could offer in return for all his years of unconditional loyalty, love and unqualified dignity. So, now viewing this one last look upon him, laying in his grave, I project on his countenance a sadness that is merely my own, a forever boy in an aging body, yearning for youth that I cannot have back, cannot as he did time and again, chasing his ball or stick, retrieve. Nor, in the form of women for whom I long and yearn, all equally unattainable in the present as much as the irreversible path whose steps I took to reach this plateau, am I able to — in the indelible if paraphrased words of Eddie Money — go back and do it all over again. The Great 80’s. I wish I knew now what I didn’t know then.
Where from here I go, while I do not know, I do not seek nor question at this exact juncture. A bit like Frank Nolan, Tom Hanks’ character, at the cross of two county roads, maybe I’ll find the gal to whom I need deliver the Fed Ex package, the very same which keeps saving my life, to which I cling each time I’ve been outsourced, cast away or abandoned.
It's in the sadness of one life lost now to time's unapologetic imposition of its will, an inescapable vortex, the one that draws us into the shallows and drowns us in shame and sin if we permit but also a life that, if we choose, liberates us from the fear and the discord, the ones that will go gladly, disabuse us of the notion that life is even worth the bother, from which is feasible more than suffering, sadness and effort to believe from all the challenges set before us, all the calamity and upheaval we create, the ceaseless and mindless apparitions, the appropriation and dissolution of peace and harmony and sanity that yet from this existence can still arise something good.
The boy in the canine body was goodness defined. His was a vigorous gait, cadence in its many variations, never an enigma to anyone who truly listened to his German accent, always erring on the allegro side of dissonance, a life whose time needed a Shepherd’s constant contact more than the energy his weekend guardian — whom he actually guarded — no longer possessed. That was how it began, how The Beast and I took up our walks together at that very moment and therein any chance we had, any time we spent, as much a reprieve for me from the banal mundanity of human contact as for him and his constant curiosity and need for speed. LOL. JK. He liked to patrol. That was his breed, what he was built to do. That and herd, protect. That, my beautiful Zeiss, was You, through and through. That’s why you are deemed a ’shepherd.’
“IKNOW!”
You know. I’m stating it for anyone other than you who is listening in.
Anyway, where wasn’t I?
Long story longer…I was visiting the aforementioned guardian, whom The Beast was actually guarding and most viciously, until he realized, as I approached on that June afternoon in 2018, I was not foe but a friend. That was the weekend where, perhaps also, the baton was passed from father to son in deference to the roles now reversing as does the constant ebb and flow of tides, the turn of the planets’ rounding the Sun, the flux of Earth’s Moon on Her glorious celestial carpet ride, Her storied watery silken beams that shine over the nightscape vision quest where we take our journeys as we surrender our body's mind and heart-beating breast, entrust them to lay in rest, our souls divinate the chords of time, play out our tune upon a thinly veiled and narrow-cut path along the corridors of space, walking a razor's edge, walking the line betwixt this place and Thine, only to return, repatriate and merge all we receive from the gods along the Astral Plane, the Oracle lending us small clues and pieces to fit into the puzzle if we remember, if we choose to not forget and instead forge ahead to build something grander than murky vision and ice cream castles in the air.
I was never very good for living down here except for when I played with him and his kind. I'm not sure who enjoyed our walks more, The Noble Beast at chain's length forging ahead to sniff and snap at butterflies and bugs or the person, ME, charged with keeping watch over his restrictions, the ones we sadly must impose for their own good -- to keep them out of every form of harm's way and, no doubt, the latter the very same to which they'd give their own life, the one they'd without hesitation lay, down in front of our path if the moment came to pass, if it meant to save our sorry ass, only fierce jaws and paws to fend off those who would intrude, defend the ones he deemed his guardianship, master or both.
But, seriously, folks. We're brethren, him and us.
In no uncertain terms he and I both lived, he more naturally until his last breath and I aspirationally, free from the yolk of obligations to cowardice, fear, trepidation, free from a world — despite its loveliness— and its ugliness, never one to cultivate adversaries or discord.
The Most Happy Fella.
I ought have sat with you until you passed. Perhaps you, too prideful and caring, would not let that happen and wait for even the second I stepped away to depart. I love You, Zeiss — Yours was more human a soul than most.
On those last points I only wish the same might one day be said of me.
Zeiss, named after a German optician, truly was god in the form that we cannot deign to spell out. He made me see my own humanity more clearly.
We demure, put the silly thing in reverse and call him 'Dog.'
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