The Doggy Paddle Back to Land

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 26, Verse 11

"As a dog returns to its vomit, so does a fool return to its folly."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

So, by now you know about my thing about airplane disasters.  Today, a passenger jet en route to Bali, where my wife and I honeymooned lo those many several years ago landed just shy of the runway.  About a hundred feet shy.  In the Indian Ocean.  Hey, these passengers were most likely water lovers anyway, right?  It's a good thing, too, as lots of them, apparently, swam back to land.  The plane split.  Everybody lived.

I wonder, though, how many of these fuckers who lived through that harrowing and horrible experience, are going to be excited about getting on a plane anytime soon.  If it were me on that flight, faced with the prospect of essentially 24 hours flying time just to get back, I might just be calling Bali my new forever home, and there are worse places to call home.  Like, for instance, all of them.

From 1980-2003, I was not a dog person.  My family didn't have dogs since my eldest sister was a young child.  They had Basset Hounds, from when my mom was a girl until she was a young mom herself.  As one Basset died, it was replaced with one of a similar vintage, and each one was called "Gypsy".  No one ever accused my family of being imaginative.  By the time I rolled out on the assembly line (that's what my grandfather called, um, I guess, my mom's uterus), my family was dogless.  My mother had gotten fussy in her late twenties and educated about the perils of childhood allergies (which, in retrospect, was good as I turned out to be allergic to everything, from grass to dust to cornmeal and chocolate to ragweed and my own elbows) and so no dog would grace our threshold for many many years.  

When my middle sister became independent, the first thing she did was get pets.  Those turned out to be mice living in the stuffing of her first sofa.  After that, she got a dog.  Then she met an idiot who moved in with her, and this idiot had a dog.  When she and the idiot broke up, she had two dogs.  Right around this time, I finished college and moved out on my own.  My girlfriend at the time had just broken up with me, after inviting me to her parents' house near Boston for a long weekend (I got right back in the car and drove six hours home, thankful I wasn't relying on an Indonesian jet to get me there) and I was very lonely.  So, I adopted one of my sister's dogs, Finley.  I was hooked.  They really get their claws in you, those bastards.

In 2009, my wife and I miscarried.  We were devastated by the loss and we responded to that grief by adopting a second dog.  Where Finley was a saint, Molly was a succubus.  A terror.  A nightmare.  She peed and pooped everywhere.  She was skittish, manic, wild and she was not to be tamed.  In 2011, we gained two babies, and lost two dogs.  Finley's health deteriorated to an appalling level.  He could no longer hold in his previous iron-clad bowels, he couldn't stand, he cried all day from arthritis pain, he couldn't eat.  It was horrible.  It ended the way so many of these things do-- on the floor, on a blanket, with me, a doctor, and a needle.  I cried so hard I couldn't see, and I don't know how I made it home without crashing the car.  You'd think it would have been easier to get rid of Molly, but there were disgusting tears there too on the day when I re-surrendered her to the shelter we had adopted her from two years earlier.  Two absolutely terrible years.  We couldn't do it.  She was ripping our house and our sanity apart.

I couldn't have it.

Now, the crazy rides again.  Tennessee, a four-year-old Basset rescue, waddles through our house with all the absurdity and charm she can muster.  And she does it effortlessly.  I tell people that making mistakes doesn't make you bad or evil-- I tell people that for a living-- and I wonder if getting another dog is a mistake to begin with.  Maybe it's just impulsive, or foolish, or asking for it.  I guess, if it turns out okay then it wasn't a mistake.  If it blows up in my face, it was.  What can I say?  I'm a sucker for a sob story with nine teats.

Seriously-- nine.  I counted.  I don't know what you do on your Saturday nights.

I love the way the center of the top of her head smells-- right where the thin white stripe of fur traces between her obscenely long ears-- like... dog.  Like magic.  It's the perfect spot to kiss.  I bury my nose and my face in those endless wrinkles and I think that this can't possibly be a mistake.  Yeah, the nanny's terrified of her (even sent my wife a crying face emoji text today) and I don't think she's a complete win with my children yet, but I suppose they (the kids, not the nanny) will grow to love her the way I do.  The way I loved Finley.  The way I wanted and tried to love Molly.  

Tenny had a hard life, and, for these first few weeks, I know she's going to make our lives hard.  But we'll all get used to each other and it'll all get better.  It's funny.  I never wanted to be a dog person.  I didn't understand it growing up.  My friends had dogs and they were okay, but I was never dying to have one.  But after Finley died and we gave Molly back, I was completely lost, adrift out in the ocean, clutching to my seat cushion, waiting.  Waiting for my short, long, slobbering savior. 

Some people just never fucking learn; and I'm glad I'm one of them. 

Sissy

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 3, Verse 25

"Be not afraid of sudden terror, or of the darkness of the wicked when it will come."

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CHIPPED WISDOM: 

It's funny what you remember.  I remember nice things-- like my first kiss with the woman who would become my wife (precipitated by my undeniably romantic utterance: "Let's get this over with already") and I remember the surge and roar and growl my first car's engine made when I stomped hard down on the accelerator as an idiotic 16-year-old.  I remember how it felt to be ensconced within my mother's arms as a boy when I was sad and I remember the exhilaration of riding the conveyer belt at my father's factory when I would go with him to work on Saturday mornings for his customary half day.  

Wouldn't you know it, I also remember things that are not so nice?  

You don't forget being bullied.  My bullying was not so terrible, but it was rather consistent, and it lasted I think longer than is probably customary.  I was bullied pretty heavily in college.  My hallmates covered the doorknob to my room in a substance that was most likely ejaculate, which made shaking hands with my doorknob, um, unpleasant.  They downloaded porn of dubious quality and taste onto my desktop computer when I wasn't there and my roommate let them in, and probably supervised the operation-- then they made pictures of obese women masturbating the subject matter of the screen-saver.  

Cute.

One intoxicated gentleman decided to trim his pubic area while sitting on my bed.  With my office scissors.  While I was sitting in the chair next to him, daring me to do something about it.  He was a lot bigger than me, and, you know, he had office scissors.  With pubes stuck to them.  I chose the Gandhi route.  

Predictably, the bullying occurred, though not to this degree, in high school, and middle school, and elementary school-- where kids first establish a pecking order once they realize some kids are different than other kids and are, consequently, to be targeted.  My bullying, however, started even earlier than that.  My kindergarten teacher, after witnessing my perhaps excessively negative reaction to a picture of a tarantula in a storybook, yelled, "Oh-- don't be such a sissy!"

It hurt to hear it, and I crawled under a table in the corner for the better part of the day and cried, but really, it was good advice.  If only I'd listened.  

I'm not scared of tarantulas anymore-- though, to be fair, I can't say I've ever seen one in person... let's just say I'm not scared of pictures of tarantulas anymore-- though I do have a significant amount of fears.  High on the list is a fear of dying in an airplane crash.  Now, I haven't been on many airplanes, so the probability is very low but, every time I fly, I am about 90% certain that the flight is going to terminate in a twisted inferno necessitating consultation of my unfortunate dental records.  How my wife ever got me on many, many planes to get me to Indonesia for our honeymoon without the aid of copious amounts of Ativan and ether is beyond me.  I guess you do crazy things for love.  

When I was eight years old, Pan Am Flight 103 fell from the sky and its remains, and the remains of its passengers and crew descended on the town of Lockerbie, Scotland.  I had a youthful affection for news anchors because they wore three piece suits and so I watched the news all the time as a kid, and I was mesmerized by the images of the broken plane, lying inert and in tatters, as helpless and bewildered local policemen stood impotently around the scene.  Nothing to do.  No one to help.  

Nothing.

I watched endless footage of the bodies set alongside one another, in endless rows, in a makeshift morgue, covered in shrouds.  They reminded me of candies in a box, just all lined up, identical looking in their wrappers.  I watched film of hearses coming to the morgue to take this body or that to this morgue or that.  If I wasn't watching that, I was watching reruns of "Monty Python's Flying Circus"-- so I'm not really sure which one is healthier. 

One day, speaking of healthy, I assembled my family, and a friend of my 11-year-old sister who had the misfortune to visit our house that day, in the living room.  I brought in our Casio electronic keyboard.  I put a toy hearse (what?  Didn't you have one of those growing up?) on the glass table in the middle of the room.  I lined a bunch of Playmobil action figures (supine) onto the table and methodically covered each one in a white Kleenex.  I played a modified version of Chopin's Funeral March on the keyboard and then loaded a Playmobil figure into the back of the toy hearse, drove it to the opposite end of the table, unloaded the action figure, and repeated until all of the Playmobil men and women victims were successfully deposited.  I wish I could describe for you the facial expressions of my family members, and my sister's friend, but I never looked up once.  When I was done, I wordlessly picked up my gear and walked out of the room.  Maybe I knew what I was doing was wrong.

"You were trying to develop mastery over your fear," my wife said to me recently.  I'm not sure that's true, and, if it is, I don't think it worked.  Yeah, I've flown to Pittsburgh, North Carolina, Australia, Indonesia, and Ireland, but I've been an absolute wreck each time.  Not only that, recently, when we had some free time to ourselves and it was my turn to pick the evening's televisual feast for the evening, what did I choose?

"Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel.  Subject matter: a 1978 mid-air collision between a passenger jet and a Cessna over a crowded section of San Diego, killing 144 people.  I mean, what was I supposed to do?  "Bob's Burgers" was a re-run.

Fear doesn't stop me-- not from doing anything, really.  It doesn't stop me from working in a dangerous place with dangerous people, it doesn't stop me from flying or driving too fast or doing things I know I'm not qualified or capable of doing.  It doesn't stop me from loving or losing or taking risks.  It doesn't stop me from eating salty and fatty foods, or from going downtown to see a show.  It doesn't stop me saying how I feel.  But it does haunt me in a way-- I know the darkness of the wicked is always there, even when it's not.  It's fastening its seatbelt and returning its tray and its seat-back to the upright position next to me.

And it's always letting me know, never letting me forget that, deep down, where it counts the most, I'm still a sissy with a bowlcut and an aqua blue sweatsuit, hiding under the snack table, fighting back tears with everything I've got.