The sound of tires thumping over a pothole on the street below knocks me back to the craters I’ve known. Nine years ago, one the size of a Jersey calf knocked the left front hubcap loose from our car. In my side view mirror I watched it wobble off, a forlorn orphan. The hubcap skated on its rim for a few feet, then slumped and shuddered until it lay dead on the asphalt.
Stopped at a light I leaned out the door. My wife grabbed my arm: “You can’t go back, it’s too dangerous.” But I was determined: something in our lives needed saving. We’d returned our dog to the rescue the week before. He’d bitten three people. Love and training didn’t work. Our hearts lay bare and vulnerable like that hubcap. The light changed. As I pulled into the intersection, a trailing car crushed our departed hubcap.
When I started writing these blogs seven and a half hears ago, I imagined little more than a place where people could grieve the potholes in their lives left by a departed pet. It evolved into a resource to determine whether they were ready to take on a 10+ year interspecies commitment. Over the weeks and years, the blog’s tendrils stretched and curled to embrace the idea that pets may be our best teachers: in love, loss, letting in and letting go.
These are the lessons that the animals in my life have given me. More enduring, perhaps, because of the egoless source of instruction: Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi doing tai chi in a four-legged body. Wax on, wax off. The simple, jaw-dropping deflection of life’s blindsides. Simple may just be what my blaze of synapses — my actions and reactions — have needed all along.
It’s been the ear flicking, head cocking and tail bobbing that snapped me to attention. It’s been the lazy bellows of side-sleeping ribs that soothed my racing breath. It’s been the flipping of stuffed toys in the air by jaws unknowing of play that’s nudged me to try new things. It’s been the offering of paws knowing only chains and coarse concrete that lifted the sword of vengeance from my hand.
For too long, I’d been influenced largely by voices and printed words in my native tongue: elevator pitches, easily-digestible sound bites often frighteningly void of context. Over the past 10 years my wife, Susan, and I have been pet parents, other senses have necessarily sharpened in order to become versed in canine vocabulary: the timbre of whines favoring play over potty; the fearful tremor when human voices ring with conflict; the crouching tiger pose when an animal breaches a comfort zone.
I still rely on human language to convey the alchemy of mind, body and spirit that animal companions bring in good faith to humans; to report when we betray that faith — or shatter it to bits, then try piecing it back together through advocacy and legislation. And, still, our pets want for more of us.
Many of your responses to these blogs were shared off the slick banner of social media. One senior finally coaxed his anxiety-ridden pup into the car; now she happily rides shotgun everywhere they go. A shocked friend stopped using a water additive laced with xylitol when she learned it could cause liver failure in dogs. A brother’s agony over whether he made the right decision to euthanize his dying pet was given enough air and honor to at least partially fill the pothole in his heart.
These are our stories. I just give them words so we can see, and hear and remember our potholes. The ones only we can fill in our own time.
Thank you!