“Life is a progress, and not a station,” says my great-great-great grandfather Emerson. In 1837, forty-five years before he died in his house down the road in town, he also wrote this in his journal:
I said when I awoke, After some more sleepings and wakings I shall lie on this mattress sick; then, dead; and through my gay entry they will carry these bones. Where shall I be then? I lifted my head and beheld the spotless orange light of the morning beaming up from the dark hills into the wide Universe.
Orange. “Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?” asks Montaigne.
13. Kind of Blue
John is on a mission to complicate things with something that can fetch. “What about this guy?” reads his fifth email of the morning containing a link from petfinder.com. “He loves brisk walks and kids. He’s recovering from a scrotal infection and likes to dig but otherwise he’s perfect!”
I guess I’m not exactly dissuading him from his search. I’m in the market for something to hold and snuggle these days. Ellie, our old black mutt, is not a snuggler.
So we drive to Charlottesville—three hours—to adopt Blue, an Australian cattle dog.
I love Route 29 as it climbs up Virginia. The uncrowded lanes and all the roadside family restaurants and sleepy service stations and the tiny towns of Hurt and Tightsqueeze. The aboveground pool dealers and shed dealers and dump truck dealers. The sprawling ranch partially remodeled as a Monticello replica and all the crosses and the Dairy Queens.
The boys want to give Blue a new name. From the backseat, for the whole ride there: Can we call him Maverick? Can we call him Sheriff? Can we call him Alberto? Can we call him Obsidian?
The whole trip home I ride in the way back with the new dog in my lap licking my face. I don’t notice the three hours because I am very busy falling in love with his crazy black belly spots and what Freddy called his “boyish eyes” and his coy, smart face. He licks the boys’ ears from behind them and makes them laugh. He obsessively watches every single person come out of a gas station and when it is finally John he starts to whine and wiggle with excitement like he’s known him for years.
I can’t stop smiling at John when our eyes meet in the rearview mirror. “How about Pancho,” he says somewhere near Lynchburg—and that seems just right.
“Pancho. You’re Pancho,” I whisper to the dog. “And you’re in our family.”
Everyone is happy. Well, everyone except Ellie. She is having a quiet, protracted nervous breakdown on the floor behind the driver’s seat.
What started out as the dogs seeming a little standoffish to each other when they first met in Charlottesville devolves into full-on mortal enmity after about twenty-four hours at home. They can’t be in a room together. Blue/Pancho snaps and bullies. Ellie quakes and hides. We catch Ellie trying to dig out of her own backyard.
We speak to a dog behaviorist on the second morning. “I can fix this,” she says, “but it won’t be easy. And in the end it may not be the right thing for either dog. If it were me, I’d take him back. There are lots of great rescue dogs in the world. You need to find the right one for everyone in your family.”
The sadness of the boys, who have been conspiring about how to rig up a ramp so the dog can sleep in their top bunk, is big. After we break the news, they take Blue/Pancho out in the yard and the three of them play basketball together for almost an hour—Freddy shooting baskets, Benny running around kicking leaves off the court, the dog leaping into the air to rebound the ball. I video the whole thing on my phone and keep it there, just to make it even worse.
Blue and I leave for Charlottesville on our own right after John takes the boys off to school the next day. Ellie won’t even come out from her new bunker under the chair in the bedroom to pee.
We listen to NPR and Paul Simon the whole way because no one is there to tell us not to. Blue loves “Under African Skies” but is exasperated by the lack of clarity from the Dutch report on the Malaysian plane shot down last year over Ukraine.
He sniffs the Virginia morning vigorously through the window crack, then groans a little and falls asleep with his head on my thigh and his body sprawling awkwardly over the gearbox and into the passenger seat.
What is the opposite of a sleeping dog’s head in your lap while you drive?
The ride home is the slowest of the four trips. I mostly think about work and to-do lists. I cry a little. The next day I’m due at Duke to meet my radiation oncologist and talk about the next phase of treatment so I also think about tumors and cancer cells and what the hell the doctors say to you if they do all the things they know how to do and there is still cancer left.
And I think: Right now, this is grieving. My mom feels a million miles away and that distance is permanent and inexplicable and I’m so tired of feeling scared and losing things. I think about why, one day when all my hair was falling out this time around, I was compelled to rewrite the last paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” by replacing snow with hair:
It had begun to fall again. She watched listlessly the hair, silver and brown, falling obliquely against the lamplight. . . . It was falling, too, upon every part of the bed sheets and the bathroom floor. It lay thickly drifted in the sink basin and shower drain, between the wooden floorboards, on the hand soap. Her soul swooned slowly as she heard the hair falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
That was grief, I say to myself. It makes us dark and a little crazy.
By then, I am pulling back into Greensboro, and instead of going home I head straight to Target because buying poster board for Freddy’s social studies project about Panama is on my to-do list. There, I promptly lose one more thing: my purse—with an unusually flush amount of cash stuffed in my wallet due to selling my inherited dining room table on craigslist on a whim (dark and crazy, I tell you)—left in the shopping cart in the parking lot.
I realize it halfway home and drive like a maniac back up Battleground Avenue. It isn’t in the cart, still wedged in the return enclosure. I look back through my car—it definitely isn’t there. I walk into the store and must be staring wildly at the security guard because she immediately walks over to me and says sternly, “Ma’am, is there something we can help you with?”
They have it. Someone has just turned it in—an older woman who is in fact still standing there. I can tell by the look on her face she has clearly seen all the cash. “You’re very lucky it was me who found it,” she whispers. “You could have just had a very bad day.”
As I am walking back to the car, a text pings in from inside my purse. John.
“Are you back yet? You have to check out this one. He’s smart and low-key and gets along well with other dogs. Plus look at those ears!”
And there I am—because this is just what we do—sitting in the Target parking lot, door still open, clicking on the link.
14. Redemption