A quick recap: all through the Spring and Summer, I watched my next-door neighbor care for his ailing dog, Aja (I confess I don’t know if it’s spelled like the continent or the Steely Dan album, I’ll proceed with the latter). They’d be out in their front yard, whenever I saw them. Aja would be lying on the grass of the front lawn, motionless. My friend would place an umbrella or a table tipped on its side to provide shade, and a water bowl to keep his dog hydrated. Aja was so motionless during these outdoor excursions that, more than once, as I drove or walked by, I came to the horrifying conclusion that the dog had already died and was lying there dead, on the lawn. My wife came to the exact same conclusion, more than once. We were always wrong, thank God.
Still, the dog was old, and we all knew she was going to die soon. My friend talked about the difficulty Aja was having walking. He’d have to carry Aja from her dog bed to her water bowl to her food bowl. In those between-the-driveway conversations, he’d talk abut how Aja was getting better, that she was able to walk a little more with each day, that the sunlight falling on us was God’s love, and that God’s love was healing Aja (my friend has some eccentric ideas about sunlight). To be honest, it seemed to actually be working. Aja seemed to be growing stronger. She was by then totally blind, but she would would lift her head when I called her name, and accept my hand on her shaggy head with a relaxed sigh.
Then, one day, my wife walked into the house and told me she’d had a conversation with our neighbor, and his the dog had died. It hit me harder than expected. I’m sure I my emotions mirrored worries about my own mortality, and the mortality of loved ones.
When I next saw my next-door-neighbor, I gave him my condolences. He stood at the edge of his driveway, I stood at the edge of mine. Then, at the same time, we walked away from the security of our own properties and ambled onto the landscaping and timbers between his house and mine, to stand among the rocks and drought-resistant plants in a space meant for decoration only. There, we exchanged an awkward hug and a series of handshakes, the limited gestures men are left with when trying to express strong emotion. In the fragile space between the driveways, we talked in quiet tones about the love we both felt toward his dog, Aja.
It turns out he’s moving. It’s almost like his daughter and he were waiting for the dog to die before they sold the house. Perhaps the were. In any case, they’re selling the house, and he’s unsure where he’ll live. He tells me this information with the same bright, dogged (pun unintended) optimism he tells me about everything. He might go live with an old girlfriend in Arizona, or maybe a relative. He smiles when he tells me this, and I’m pretty sure he thinks he’ll land on his feet.
I hope he’ll be okay. Optimism comes more naturally to him than to I. In today’s America, a lot of people are beginning to slip through the cracks, and I want to think he won’t be among them. Our rambling conversations about sunlight and God’s love and space lasers and weird clouds and chem trails have stuck with me. I will remember him, and his dog Aja, and our friendship.
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“It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.”
― Anne Lamott
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I almost died a couple weeks ago.
I was out in the back yard, with the chainsaw, cutting back some of the rapidly growing saplings in our back yard. Men with chainsaws tend to think of them as toys, and I am no different. So much fun to wield (cue the tape of a heavily-ketamined Elon Musk with chainsaw in hand). So much power in your hands.
So, I cut through the skinny saplings in the back yard quickly and easily, slashing left, then right. I was getting caught up in the fun and got careless. My arms had been getting kind of tired, and I let the chainsaw slice the air just above my right knee.
It caught on the fabric of my shorts, and grazed the skin of my knee ever-so-slightly. I was a half an inch away from having an ugly ragged gash in my knee, gushing bright arterial blood. I stood there, staring at my ripped shorts, and the barest hint of a scratch on my leg. The closeness of the call scared me. My wife was in the front yard and couldn’t hear me. Had I been bleeding badly, who knows how bad things could have been? Could I have made it to the front yard? I quit working for the day.
I told my wife a few days later that the pants had caught on the blade of the chainsaw while it was not running, and that I might need a new pair of shorts. Sorry, honey. I was embarrassed to admit the truth. I’m admitting it to you now, knowing you’ll read this.
(A long aside: back when my parents lived in Nacogdoches, Texas, my dad was on a ladder cutting a tree limb with a chain saw. He let the chain saw slip and the blade hit his knee. Blood everywhere. My mom was sick in bed, and so Dad climbed down the ladder and got in the truck and drove himself to the ER. Blood all over the interior of the truck. He told me the entire time he was driving he was praying he wouldn’t pass out from lack of blood. He didn’t pass out, and it didn’t even affect the function of his knee, after the wound had healed. The moral: the Wood men were both lucky, and should not be trusted with chain saws.)
I don’t often trust essays that wrap their lessons up into an easy homily at the end, so I’ll avoid conjuring up some central theme to my thoughts today. These musings are simply the ones in my mind, on the bright Sunday morning I’m writing this.
I’m sorry my friend’s dog died, and I’m sorry he’s moving. I think of the space between our driveways, and how that’s instinctively where we moved when talking of life and death and God’s love and sunlight. We meet halfway, at the boundary between our two houses, and share the hugs and the handshakes allotted to us as American men in this particular cultural moment.
I hope he’s okay. He optimistic about his future, but that doesn’t ensure safe passage. Life is fragile, particularly in today’s America, with a tattered safety net and a mean streak running down the center of the country. But my dad survived a brush with a chainsaw, back in the day. And, other than having to buy a new pair of shorts, I’m doing pretty well myself.
Peace.