Terminal Effervescence

Returning Home to the Portland, Maine AirportI started skipping winter without knowing it, a few years back. Today, 1.5-inches of rain into the New Hampshire afternoon, I’m making up for what I missed. The poodle has to go outside to go to the bathroom, and I promised him I’d take him once the rain let up. That was three hours ago. I’d let him out to go by himself, but all he’d do is wait for me at the top of the stairs, his back right leg permanently kipped up in protest against the pain.

This dog is teaching me lessons. They likely all do. Three weeks ago, I held all 60-pounds of him on my lap in the vet office in North Conway. The last time we were there was ten months prior, for what turned out to be a floating bone in his neck. When Dr Alfred asked this time how we are, I tried to let the information out gently. In between talking about Osito’s sudden limp and the skiing that day, I let it slip that he was diagnosed with cancer.

Click to read more ...

Edge Dweller

Cathedral Ledge, Photo by Peter DoucetteYou might not believe what I’m going to tell you. You might—if you have read things I have written in the past months—think I have some perverse law of attraction with tragedy. But maybe the truth of it is that I am trying to turn the tragedy around. When you find a dead body on your second day of vacation, you might have no other choice.   

Peter and I were in New Hampshire when it happened. We’d spent the day climbing cracks at Cathedral Ledge that started off wet at the bottom, behind the shade of trees, and turned crisp and dry when the sun hit their full depths up higher. By four we’d ditched our packs in the car and walked along the base to survey other routes. The ground was spongy with slick roots and cavernous leaf piles.

Peter saw him first, and put out his arm the way you do when you careen to a stop in the car, and you’re the driver, stopping, and want to keep the passenger safe, even though you know your arm will never accomplish that on its own.

I walked right through his arm. I walked closer to the man’s crumpled and twisted body knowing I might never forget the image or the experience, but knowing it was part of my life already. Over the next two hours, we brought rescuers to the man and ran trips up and down the trail with supplies. Each time I returned, the man became real to me as a father or a brother, or a husband with the receipt from the hardware store still in his back jeans pocket. He was not a climber, though I automatically envisioned him one with sticky rock shoes and a harness full of unplaced gear.  In the end, he was a man who’d driven to the top of the cliff the day before and made the choice to never return home.

Click to read more ...

Left, Right in the Road

It was tourist season in Jackson—an easy excuse for poor driving, over-consumption of sweets, and regrettable decisions on wildlife art. I drove through town thankful I was leaving the mayhem while people honked up and down the street. The van was loud, but it was a van, and it was having issues, and so I didn’t question the road noise until I took a sharp right turn and felt air woosh across my neck. The view in the rearview mirror looked suspicious. I pulled over. The back door—a 8X6 foot panel, in this case-- had swung wide open, with all of my disorganized trappings of life perched in the exposed shelf. Based on quick math, and my recall of the last time I had opened the back, it had been splayed wide for five miles, at an average of 35 MPH....

Click to read more ...

The Poodle Permanent

Osito in RecoveryI’m not a dog person. I never have been. I once knew a woman who returned a dog for its propensity to drool. She is my mother.

Two weeks ago, I was talking on the phone with a potential landlord for a summer sublet when he asked if I had a dog.

“Me?” I said, “No. I have a poodle.”

Click to read more ...

Working Make Believe

...Maria Montessori never talked about getting paid for work. She just wanted for children’s time to be valued. But when those kids grow up they enter a world where value, for work, comes in the form of money. Or at least money is the clearest sign of valuation.

I’m not talking about being zen about all of this—about realizing the other things “work” gives us. That is another subject. I’m talking about what happens at the end of the day when you close your computer screen and look around, and for all practical purposes to anyone in the outside world, nothing has changed since you opened the thing ten hours before. How do you know if it counts?...

Click to read more ...