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Going to pick up Sweet Pea this afternoon. A small plastic bag. We intend to place it her beneath Rufus inside the basket on the hearth, where he’s been at rest ever since he passed in 2012.

Lately, I’ve been googling phrases like, “average length of a novel” and “average length of a chapter.”

Not because I want to impose any stricture on my writing, but merely because I’m curious to know what the numbers are. From what I gathered, the length of your average novel is in the range of sixty to ninety thousand words. Chapters, about five to six thousand words long. If true, and I’m average, I’m nearly finished with my first chapter.

Crisp, bluesky days up here lately. A little more snow on the mountains, but nothing in town so far. Happy Wife put a small pumpkin on the windowsill, and some Indian corn on the front of the house. That time of year. Come morning there’s frost on the grass, which is still green. Leaves are still on the trees too. Mostly. Kaya — remember Kaya? — continues to prefer our front lawn to crap on. I don’t say anything about it to the neighbor. Neither does Happy Wife. Moose crap on it too. Who you going to complain to about that? Besides, picking up dog crap is a snap compared to moose skat. You might argue that’s no reason we should tolerate Kaya crapping on our lawn. I suppose that’s true, but you see Jim, Kaya’s upright, our neighbor, is still stinging from having his wife of 30+ years leave him. Well over a year ago now. To complain to him that his dog craps on our lawn would feel petty somehow. There are people half way around the world, innocent people, getting beheaded. I think I can pick up some dog pooh now and then.

My favorite of these two — Sweet Pea & The Tan Man. Sounds like the title of a children’s book. Maybe I should.

Both are now perma-linked forever on the right hand sidebar.

Not much new. Still just taking up space. Although slowly a sense of purpose trickles back into our daily lives. Inevitability we move on. The slopes turn yellow and red. The nights are once again dark, and getting colder. Come morning there’s a skin of ice on the water bowl outside. Garden hoses and lawn mower have been stowed for winter. There’s Termination Dust on the highest peaks of the Chugach mountains. I used to like that, “Termination Dust.” Now I hate it for its association.

I’ve started writing a book. No, I’m not going to say what it’s about, except to say it’s a novel. I’ve no idea how long it will take to complete. I’m a rank amateur at this. I will say I am so far pretty pleased with how the first chapter is coming along. My approach to writing something of this scope, to the extent I even have an approach, is to edit over and over again until I think it’s right, before moving on. It’s deliberate on my part, but subconsciously I may be doing it to put off the challenge of thinking about where the story will go next, i.e. the plot.

Anyway, it’s one advantage, I suppose, of being an amateur writer, you have no deadline, no agent calling you on the phone every week demanding to see evidence of progress — “Mr. Nibbe, just when is it that we can expect the next blockbuster from you,” — impatient finger tapping table — “hmm?”

For all of your kind thoughts, both here and through the outpouring in email, thank you. It means a lot to us.

Walked with Harry today at Kincaid Park, just he and I. The trail was fast becoming covered with yellow and orange leaves. Breezy, and chilly — I could feel the change coming. Like most weekdays there was hardly a soul there, maybe saw one person. Felt Lucy, though. How she loved this park. Must’ve walked hundreds of miles with her there over the years.

So many miles; they should name a trail after her.

I once made a conservative estimate of how many miles I biked/walked with Rufus in 11.5 years. Would you believe as many as from Los Angeles to Atlantic City, New Jersey. And back?

Other than that nothing felt familiar today. I once asked a friend how he was doing in the days immediately following his difficult divorce. He said it felt like he was doing nothing but taking up space. That’s what this grief feels like to me.

I wrote this about three or four weeks ago.

——————

It occurred to me this morning why wait til she’s gone, write of her now, in the present, still here, with us, nearby me now lying on the floor, on her left side, to avoid pressing against the big ball of cancer on her right shoulder.

Lately I look up more often from what I’m doing to reassure myself that her breaths still fill her lungs, to see the quiet rise and fall of her abdomen, the steady grace of her form. Her breaths are rapid but I’m not concerned it’s the cancer, she’s always breathed this way, every day since we first met over ten years ago now.

She was two years old when Happy Wife (HW) rescued her; at least that was the estimate. Dogs don’t have rings like trees do so dating them is guesswork. Some people dislike the term “rescue” but in Lucy’s case she really was rescued. The women at the shelter were overjoyed when HW agreed to adopt her. By then Lucy was into her “extended” stay period and they feared if someone didn’t come for her soon… well, rules are rules, shelters have only so much room, new animals are arriving all the time and each of them wants a chance, too, complete with a photo on the website of their little supplicant face — Won’t you please adopt me? Meanwhile the Unchosen move further down the list, until, eventually, they scroll off the bottom.

But that was not to be Lucy’s fate.

The first months in HW’s care Lucy was a challenge, especially at bedtime she was inconsolable, ceaselessly restless. On and on for weeks this went, sleepless nights, until HW finally called her mother in tears wondering out loud what she had done with adopting this crazy dog. To this day she remembers her mother’s consoling words: “Dear, Lucy is just a special needs dog.”

Why of course, maybe one of Lucy’s special needs is Xanax! This was tried. But Lucy had a paradoxical reaction, Xanax made her even more anxious and restless. One time under a normal dose she began aimlessly darting about the house, jumped onto HW’s bed and without breaking stride leapt off the other side and flew head first into a dresser. This did in fact calm her briefly, and while you might say it was proof that the drug had worked, clearly it was not the way the drug was supposed to work, and in any case the effect was short lived — Lucy quickly shook off the collision and returned to her nighttime expressions of anxiety.

Eventually her anxiety was brought under control by amitriptyline and she matured into the biggest bundle of sweetness you can imagine. Even still, in the early years there were times when I grew frustrated because a bathroom or bedroom light had to be left on overnight because Lucy was afraid of the dark and needed a safe place to sleep. It was at these times when HW would calmly remind me of what her mother had said.

Just now she got up off the floor and walked over to me, standing next to my chair, looking up at me with her soulful eyes, wondering if it wouldn’t be too much trouble if I could pull away from my writing for a few seconds to let her out the door in the backyard to pooh, and then I’ll just curl up in a little ball in the dirt right here beneath the window, me and my cancer, where you can keep an eye on me if you care to. I won’t bother you the rest of the day, Papa. Promise.

And I want poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick for Every Single Time I ever complained about a light having to be left on overnight.

I open the door for Her Grace to let her out. I give her two chicken treats, her favorite. As many as she wants, as often as she wants. One of the drugs we give her (prednisone) has made her ravenous. We don’t give her drugs to get rid of the cancer, that’s futile now and has been since we conceded months ago the disease was systemic, merciless against our many tries to get rid of it. No, she’s in hospice now, chicken is palliative. We give her the drugs to reduce the cancer’s symptoms, to keep her as comfortable as we can for as long as we can.

I think it was when the four of us — HW, I, Rufus & Lucy — went to Cleveland for four years that I started calling her Lucille. That, or The Streak, for the way she could move through a dense woods, leaping over dead fall — you’d see nothing but a flash here and there of the white and brown markings of her incomparably beautiful coat as she chased down a white-tail deer, merely for the fun of the chase. And her coat and markings really are beautiful, it’s the feature of hers most often mentioned by strangers who stop to comment on how pretty she is. We’d laugh because in the same amount of time it took Lucy to chase after a deer a mile or more and return to us, Rufus was just getting his first olfactory alert — Deer!

If it is true dogs can be good friends, those two were, without question. Never fought once and they always hung together, even when it seemed they were lost without hope. When we left the house for work in the morning, they stayed in the house together, always.

Except when…

One day a violent thunderstorm passed over East Cleveland. I’d left a kitchen window cracked open before I left for work, maybe a couple inches from the bottom, mostly owing to the futility of trying to close the damn thing — with the countless coats of paint on it, it was almost impossible to move up or down. We later guessed a series of violent thunder claps came so low over the house that they must have sounded like they went off in the attic, and if Lucy has special needs there’s also one thing she doesn’t need — sudden, loud noises. So when the storm came in low and the thunder cracked she probably panicked. When HW got home later in the afternoon and walked in the house, no Lucy, just Rufus. In her mad sweep of the house to locate Lucy she happens to look out the window in the backyard. There’s Lucy, standing in the pouring rain, drenched — and I mean drenched — fur flattened to her skin and looking skinny as a mud puppy. In her panic she’d gotten out of our house somehow, ran into the neighbors’ backyard where the grandmother spotted her out the kitchen window, alerted her daughter who thankfully recognized Lucy and kindly got her on a leash and put her in our backyard (fenced). But how had she escaped the house? I get home and HW tells me what happened, and then I see the kitchen window — you know, the one a grown man could not force up or down? — open maybe six inches with a gaping hole in the screen behind it.

To this day I’ve no explanation for how she could have forced that window open that far and have managed to squeeze through the gap and push on through the screen. Special needs. Special powers.

I’m looking out the window now but I don’t see Lucy. It’s early September, a partly sunny day, pleasantly warm for this time of year. She’s probably curled up in a little dignified ball of white and tan at the base of the currant bush, a shaded refuge from the sunlight flickering through trees. Weird, isn’t it; she’s afraid of the dark but will seek it out at the first sign of flashing light, or even at what she’s learned causes it. Pull a camera from your pocket and she’s running for cover.

The final homecoming in Anchorage was in 2009, the four of us variably satisfied for having done the Cleveland thing. It felt good to be home. The four of us did the drive together as far as Seattle and never once did either dog complain. We put HW on a plane and the three of us drove the rest of the way to Anchorage, Lucy riding shotgun. She laid on a raised platform that HW had rigged up for her on the passenger seat, composed of a scrunched up dog bed, a sleeping bag, and blankets. She laid on that with her head resting on the dash, her nose pointed toward the future you might say, and would stay that way for hundreds of miles. Many a dog’s virtues capture my envy, patience and calm not the least among them. Lucy had both in spades, except, of course, in the dark.

She’s been the steadiest of companions always, but especially since we returned to Alaska. The rivers and lakes and streams and mountains are like one big dog park up here. No fences, no areas designated for big dogs versus small, no playtime rules to abide, just boundless spaces in which to roam with our four-legged friends wherever, whenever, and however we want. Spring summer winter and fall. If there’s a finer expression of freedom I don’t know of it.

There was a time after Rufus left us but before Harry arrived when our walk in the morning at the park was just Lucy and me. You never want to admit to favorites but she really was the finest canine companion I’ve ever had. Independent, fearless, friendly without exception, always close by. It seems like a simple thing, a walk in the park with your dog, but I can assure you a great deal of therapy occurs, too. For that I am especially grateful for the steadiness of Lucy’s companionship.

I wonder what will be left when she’s gone. Like losing a right arm I suppose. The pain of absence will arrive as phantoms, memories of presence which cannot be unlearned. Like when Rufus died in ’12, for too long I heard his bark in the backyard and turned expecting to see him. It will be no different in kind when Lucy goes to the Rainbow Bridge. But believing she is there, cancer free, with Rufus and all the other dogs that have graced our lives, I hope will help to chase away the phantoms.

——————

Coda: Saturday, September 27th, 2014. Lucille passed today. She’d finally succumb to the cancer. HW and I knew it was time when her legs failed her and not a trace of spirit was left in her eyes.

The emptiness in our house is as big as the hole in our hearts.

Godspeed, our sweet girl, godspeed.

Stepped outside to fetch the mail and saw this on the neighbor’s porch. Right then he comes out his front door, sees me and says, “Hey Rod, wondering if I could speak with you a second.”

He steps off his porch and begins coming toward me. Slowly, like predator to prey. I begin to back away, one slow step at a time up my driveway, keeping my eyes trained on him. I shoot a long look at the bloody bags. He pauses briefly and turns to follow my stare. I’m still backing up when he turns back around and continues coming toward me. “Hey Lee,” I finally manage to say, my back up against the garage with nowhere left to retreat, “haven’t seen your wife or three kids the last couple days.”

He’s still coming at me, a twisted smile on his face, and he’s so close I can almost touch him when I see him reach for something in the back pocket of his coveralls. It must be big or awkward or both because he struggles to remove it. I can’t quite make out what it is before he…

And then something grabs my arm and is shaking it. “Honey, you okay… honey, wake up.“

I open my eyes grab her wrist and jerk her toward me — it’s Happy Wife. She says, “You poor thing, what was it?” I push her aside, leap out of bed and run to the window. I look across the cul-de-sac. The bags are gone. But they were there. I saw them there. I’m sure I did.

I sent her off to the distant corner of the backyard to gather pooh in a bag. She appears small in this context, no? Nearly dwarf-like set against the distant peaks of the Chugach mountains, the trees coming into their own. Similar to a lawn gnome you might imagine, sans the white beard and pointy red hat.

(Reader dismay: “Wait a minute, did he just compare Happy Wife to a lawn gnome?!).

We refer to this look as her, “Fluffage.” She could probably use new Fluffage as repeated washings have rendered this Fluffage more like “Pillage.” Plus, once you’ve worn your Fluffage outside where it’s vulnerable to being soiled it then becomes forever afterward your work Fluffage. Technically speaking. Like a favorite sweatshirt, the super comfortable one, the one you’ve had forever that has somehow become even more comfortable after hundreds of washings, your go-to sweatshirt, always, until that day you slip outside maybe just to fetch the mail, no harm in that you think, and on the way back into the house you see your bike on the work stand, where you’d left it a day earlier when you were in the garage in your work clothes meaning to put that chain back on the gears but your attention was diverted and the chore left undone. So now you set the mail down and think I’ll just quick take care of this one thing. BLAM! — chain grease on the sleeve of your favorite sweatshirt.

Damnit!

Which never comes out completely in the wash. You try degreasers and spot removers of every kind but that niggling remnant of stupidity — your own stupidity! — will never go away. “Why, it’s barely visible,” others will console. But you know it’s there. Like an old friend who’s done something unforgivable, things will never be the same again, you’ll never be able to bring yourself to unlearn the transgression.

So now your once favorite sweatshirt, your old friend who’ll never be the same is forever relegated to an anonymous hook in the cold garage. There to keep company all the other despoiled clothes, themselves also once-upon-a-time regularly washed, tenderly dried in Springtime-scented drier sheets, folded and lovingly laid in a dresser drawer.

Update on Lucy: Our girl continues to defy this damned mast cell cancer. She has tumors on her tumors now, if you can believe that. The mass between her neck and shoulder is as big as a small cantaloupe. Happy Wife provides Lucy her meds twice daily by hiding them in a smear of cream cheese tucked inside a cylinder of rolled lunch meat. Lucy prefers ham but sometimes turkey is on sale at Safeway. Here she is three months ago in a moment of self prayer. She’s still with us today so who can be sure it hasn’t helped.

Happy Wife smiles at the announcement of free money. Death and taxes? No mam. Live in Alaska for just one year, stay out of trouble, and they pay you!

PFD = Permanent Fund Dividend.

Oldest PFD recipient this year: 109; youngest: 1. What on earth does a 109 yr old even need for goodness sake?

“Ya know, Granny”s been eying that new walker on Amazon. Made of titanium. Comes in colors even!”

Parents of the 1 yr old deposit the check in the 1 yr old’s bank account, that is if the 1 yr old is lucky. There’s no requirement to do this so far as I know. A child’s guardian simply files his/her PFD application, claims the number of children in the household, and accepts fiduciary control over the check that arrives for each eligible applicant in the house ($1884 per person this year!).

Ah, but in order for the child to get a check, his/her guardian must be eligible themselves. So kids with deadbeat parents get nothing. Kinda sux if you ask me, given children are born tabula rasa, but rules are rules and when they were made nobody asked me.

But there is no rule to prevent guardians from pocketing for themselves what is nominally the kids’ money.

“To hell with it. Johnny & Cindy don’t need to go to a spiffy 4-year college. Community college will do. And why shouldn’t they pay their own way? Builds character. Besides, when I was a child we had to walk over glass shards in bare feet to get to school. No sir, kids these days have it waaay too easy. $3768? Are you kidding me — let’s party!”

For your general amusement, the classic video: “Oh-yeah, well when I was a child…” (LtoR: Tim-Brook Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman). Marty Feldman!

Had to call our Internet provider this morning. We pay for 10 Mbps but lately have received only 1 Mbps. I called to inform them they owe me 9 mega bits times all the seconds of reduced speed we’ve experienced. IOW, a lot of mega bits.

“Hello, my name is Luna. Who am I speaking with?”

“Rod.”

“Hello Rob, how may I…”

“No, Rod, like Rocket Rod.”

“Oh, I am very sorry, Rod, how may I help you today.”

“The speed of my internet connection the last few days has been one mega bit per second. It should be ten. Can somebody fix this?”

“I would be very happy to help you with this, Rod. May I have your date of birth?”

“What?”

“For security purposes, Rod.”

“Same day as Ronald Regan.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t be. Could be worse, like Hitler or something.”

“I’m sorry, Rod, I didn’t get…”

“Kidding, Luna!” I tell her my date of birth.

“Thank you very much, Rod. I can help you now. So I understand your connection speed is one mega bit per second, and you have already reset your modem, is this correct, Rod?”

“I’m sorry, Luna, before I can answer your question I need your date of birth.”

Dead silence.

“Luna, kidding! Yes, everything you said is right.”

“Okay, what I’m going to go ahead and do, Rod, is I’m going to go ahead and call our support group and have them go ahead and look into if there are any problems with your connection. Can I go ahead and put you on hold while I do that, Rod?”

“Go ahead.”

Battery on cell phone drops from 70 to 50 percent. Hold music sounds like Kenny G in a beer can. Over and over it repeats. Finally, Luna returns with the news. And it ain’t good.

“Rod, are you still there?”

“Barely. My birth date is unchanged but I feel a lot older for the wait.”

“I am terribly sorry for the long wait, Rod. I went ahead and called our service department but they must be very busy because I’m still on hold with them.”

“Must be verifying your birth date, huh?”

“I’m sorry, Rod?”

“Nevermind.”

“Rod, instead of having you wait can I go ahead and get your number and call you back after they tell me what they have found?”

“Go ahead.”

Silence.

“Hello, Rod, are you still there?”

“Yes, no where else to go.” I tell Luna my number.

“Thank you, Rod, I will call you back, hopefully shortly.”

Another joke comes to mind. I spare Luna the frivolity of my mood.

“Can’t wait, Luna. Thank you.”

The ghost of Handel visited our backyard a few morns ago.

It happened while I was out there hand snatching turd-age from the deep grass with a plastic grocery bag as a mitt. You know the feeling, like when you were a kid on Halloween, blindfolded in the neighbor’s garage and directed to touch something gross and gooey and then guess what it was. Even with a Safeway prophylactic the tactile sensation is much the same. Moreso if there’s a hole in it, and the turd-age is still steamy fresh. Oh, la joie.

And then all of sudden I look up, behold the rising mist, hear the chorus of Messiah.

Such events cannot be predicted, only enjoyed.

I was not able to enjoy myself thoroughly at the Champagne Pops gala owing to the persistent, ghoulish gaze of this one:

The theme for this year’s benefit was Country Legends. Had I not known this, which in fact I did having earlier glanced at the printed program over a glass (or 3) of Pinot Noir during the pre-concert reception, I might’ve thought the theme was Heavy Metal Legends. Why? Well, remove Dolly’s tooth whitener, the red eye correction, and add a jolt of 110, and these two look nearly identical! :

 

That’s Iron Maiden’s mascot, Eddie.

…

Ten years — 10! –training the Iraqi military and they scattered like puffballs in the wind the first time isis said “Booh!” And McCain now calls for more boots on the ground in Iraq to train the “military” to fight isis?!

The mind reels.

I like to think of myself as patriotic. I really do. I like my country, broadly speaking. Not every where and every time as perfect as I’d like it to be, but utopia is for the euphoric. What I increasingly don’t understand, however, are the misguided sentiments of patriotism I often see expressed by my fellow countrymen (and women). Yes, misguided. Apparently during a moment of solemn reflection on the anniversary of 9/11, some people have expressed what you might call an almost reminiscent fondness for the good ol’ days of unconditional surrender of a country after having been carpet bombed into oblivion. Or certain post-war treaty formalities, where the losers publicly repent for their various atrocities while the winners divvy up what’s left and make the losers pay reparations for what was lost.

Verily, the felling of the twin towers was not the same kind of casus belli as was Pearl Harbor in flames. The former did not force the kind of retribution amenable to picking up the aggregate might of our Industrial Military Complex, bringing it to bear on some neatly delimited geographic area, turning it in on Full Blast and waiting for the Mo F’ers to say, I give.

You don’t need me to tell you that bringing modern enemies “thoroughly to their knees” in this way can no longer be definitively accomplished.

I suppose this explains the pining for the good ol’ days of war, when two lines of bayonet-wielding men would simply charge each other. Distinguishing winners from losers was so much easier then.

I don’t know. I’m not a military man. Don’t look for me in the Situation Room. Probably also explains why I don’t wax nostalgic around matters of military history. I don’t read that stuff and I’m more likely to yawn rather than fawn at the prowess of past military generals and such. Don’t mean to sound unthankful for their service, just saying I’m not interested in reading about, for instance, Patton’s tactical genius in the European theater. (See, I’m not totally ignorant).

Got to thinking about all this after a reply I left to a comment at a blog:

Commenter: The brutal fact is that the timber of humanity is crooked indeed, and these things need to be demonstrated and relearned over and over.

Me: The problem is when “straightening the crooked” becomes viewed as a moral responsibility of the US because we emerged during the last half of the last century as The Only Dominant Military Power In The World (please see: Team America, World Police). Increasingly, we are now expected to restore order everywhere in the world where it has fallen apart, for one reason or another, whether or not the ensuing disorder poses a clear and present danger to our homeland.

Now, implant that misplaced prerogative of national responsibility to “fix” the world inside a POTUS du jour with a jingoistic attitude and a perfect storm of congressional approval to borrow seemingly limitless sums of money to finance nation building “fixing” campaigns — future taxpayers be damned! — and, well… the national timber becomes vulnerable to crookedness as well.

What the commenter meant by “these things” was the 1) total annihilation of an enemy followed by 2) occupation of the enemy’s land for a generation or more so 3) the lesson of defeat is never forgotten. But that will no longer work in the world we now find ourselves in. Don’t need to be steeped in the lessons of military history to understand that. A glance at what’s gone down since 9/11 is sufficient to understand why.