Goodnight, Sweet Pooch

Yesterday, we had to put our dog Coltrane to sleep. He was a sweet, mellow beagle-mix who slept between us in bed every night. My husband and I had a voice for him--we'd often use it to order each other around on the dog's behalf: Open the fridge. Give me a walkie.

Over the years, we had developed a projected personality for Coltrane that altered between morose, snooty, greedy, Al Capone-esque, and deeply philosophical. Sometimes my husband and I would speak to each other in his voice for hours. Coltrane had no idea what we were talking about, but he knew when we were using "his" voice and would look up from the floor and beat his tail against it, waiting for us to stop projecting the fictional Coltrane and pet the real one.

There's an oft-circulated story about "the Rainbow Bridge" that's designed to comfort people who've lost a pet. It's a lovely, sentimental piece of nondenominational religious feeling that depicts a world where bereaved pet owners are reunited with their animals. I honor it for providing a framework where animals can go to heaven, since many religions won't even grant that they have souls (my feeling is that if I have a soul, then Coltrane did). But it always seems so cartoonish and inadequate. After the vet put Coltrane to sleep, a little old lady came in and made a play-dough pawprint mold from his foot and talked to us about the Rainbow Bridge. She was very well-meaning, but after several minutes of patter about how Coltrane had "just gotten his angel wings," I was ready to push her out the door.

For years I've been amused imagining Coltrane's reaction to the Rainbow Bridge: He would not want to go anywhere near it. He would check to make sure if there were any abandoned plastic bags (terrifying!) on it. He would sniff it in hopes of finding some dirty underwear or a nice week-old chicken bone. In Coltrane's real heaven, I imagine, sausages would grow out of the earth and the trees would all have low-hanging branches good for scratching your butt on. But even that image is my own projection. I do think that if Coltrane has a heaven, the Rainbow Bridge is about as good an approximation of it as the harps and angels image is for mine.

Bonnie Raitt's song "I Don't Want Anything to Change" comes close to the mood around our house now, where snowdrifts of white fur are still piled up in every corner. He was, we liked to say, a serious dog for serious times, and we will miss him for years. (We'll probably be finding his hair for even longer.)

There are no adequate words to get at how awful it is to deliberately end the life of a dog you love so much. I'm posting the only poem I've ever read that, for me, comes close to the truth of it. It's stripped down, plain--perhaps the only way such a thing can be talked about.

May

I wanted to stay with my dog
when they did her in
I told the young veterinarian
who wasn't surprised.
Shivering on the chrome table,

she did not raise her eyes to me when I came in.

Something was resolved in her.

Some darkness exchanged for the pain.

There were a few more words

about the size of the tumor and her age,

and how we wanted to stop her suffering,

or our own, or stop all suffering

from happening before us

and then the nurse shaved May's skinny leg

with those black clippers;

she passed the needle to the doctor

and for once I knew what to do

and held her head against mine.

I cleaved to that smell

and lied into her ear

that it would be all right.

The veterinarian, whom I'd fought

about when to do this thing

said through tears

that it would only take a few minutes

as if that were not a long time

but there was no cry or growl,

only the weight of her in my arms,

and then on the world.

from What Saves Us, by Bruce Weigl

Lebensraum, Cleave, and Strout

Ah, my poor little neglected blog. It's been so long, and this will be but a short visit to make you feel briefly cared for.

Over the past few months, Work has become my little kommandant, demanding more and more lebensraum in order to stretch out and stuff its face with the schnitzel that is my life. I’m hoping that soon the allied forces will land at Normandy and starting beating Work back into the space it belongs in.

It’s best that I abandon this metaphor before it becomes even more ridiculous.

So much research, so much interviewing, so much writing. I read more than any sane human should about the congenital disorders that are hurting purebred dogs. I went on a trip to Mississippi to cover a major seizure in preparation for a story on animal hoarding. I’m starting work on a feature on shelter animals working with combat veterans with PTSD.

All of these experiences have been interesting and rewarding (the genetic disease story became an obsession; for a few months, I couldn’t see a purebred dog without wondering what was wrong with it). But between them and the rest of the pile of work on my desk, I’ve had no brain matter left for fiction and poetry.

I have managed to get a little reading done, though, and so just wanted to give a little shout out to a couple of books: Little Bee, which is very moving and very funny in spite of some credibility-straining inner monologues (it wasn’t the precise English of Little Bee that bothered me, but her insight into the ironies of English culture—some of these seemed work better as a novel device than as the real voice of a Nigerian 16-year-old). I'm curious about the decision to change the title for the American market. The Other Hand seemed to me a much more intriguing title.

I also read another of Elizabeth’s Strout’s books—Abide with Me—almost as soon as I’d finished Amy and Isabelle. I think Strout is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers; she takes small-town settings and characters and psychologically unpacks them in a way that is so true and so unsettling. Check out her great interview with Michel Martin from 2009. I’m looking forward to reading Olive Kittredge, once I can force out the Work invaders and reclaim a bigger piece of my own mental territory.

Lev Grossman's "The Magicians": You Can't Go Home Again

My three late-childhood reading obsessions can be summarized easily: The Chronicles of Narnia; its less-famous cousin, The Chronicles of Prydain; and Tom Sawyer. And then when I was 12 or 13, I read Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon, which thoroughly obsessed me for months.

Though I never got into the Middle Earth saga, all the books I really loved (OK, maybe with the exception of Tom Sawyer) suggested I was going to end up as Renaissance Faire geek, summoning the moon, experimenting with Wicca, tattooing myself with unicorns, and listening to a lot of Loreena McKennitt.

I kind of wanted to end up that way. I kept trying to get into it; in high school, several of my dear friends loved the scene. But my parents were vaguely suspicious about the air of paganism and truancy that surrounded the whole culture, and the one Renaissance Faire I ever went to--not until college--spoiled the whole deal. Beyond the jousting and the wax hand-dipping, there was one exhibit behind a little hut, marked with signs that said, "Come see the littlest Unicorn!"

I was 19 by this point, there with my boyfriend over summer break. We were doing our best to get into the spirit of things, and the sign noted that the extra charge to meet the numinous beast would be donated to the March of Dimes. So we each paid the extra $2 to go behind the hut. We followed an incredibly excited pair of 8-year-old girls who were squealing to each other about the amazingness of what we were all about to see.

Behind the hut, in a small clearing scattered with hay and droppings that looked like buckshot, was a red-eyed teenaged boy in a slouchy velvet hat and leggings. The smell of marijuana around him was so strong it was almost visible, like the clouds of dust that follow Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoons. He was holding a rope attached to the halter of ... a small white goat with no horns.

Now, I can't say exactly what I expected to see. I knew it would not be a unicorn. I kinda thought it would be a pony with some sort of horn strapped to its head. I expected that they would have made SOME sort of effort, at least, to wow us just a little bit. I watched as the two little girls ahead of us frowned and looked at each other. And then one of them said to Cheech Greensleeves, "That's not a unicorn."

I waited for Cheech to spin some excellent fairy dust about how it had lost its horn through a curse, or how it was so young its horn hadn't sprouted yet.

But Cheech (who, let's be honest, had a lousy job and did not belong in any arm of the hospitality industry) leaned down and said to the girl, "That's right. It's a goat. And do you know WHY it's not a unicorn?"

The girls shook their heads.

"It's not a unicorn because children like you don't believe in unicorns anymore."

I give the kids a lot of credit for not a) bursting into tears (which likely would have been my approach at their age), or b) punching him right in his THC-laced nuts, which is what I thought he deserved. They just looked at him and looked at each other and looked disappointed, and then left.

My boyfriend and I did the same, and immediately began discussing whether we should ask for our money back. In principle, we felt we should. I don't think we did, though. Perhaps we were hoping that the $4 we'd given the March of Dimes would prevent more tragedies like Cheech. In any case, that was my first and last Renaissance Faire. And while I actually did like the wax hand-dipping and kept the resulting Mickey Mouse-ish wax glove for several years, nothing at the Faire came anywhere close to providing the kind of pleasure I'd gotten reading the Narnia or Prydain books, or from fantasizing that I lived in a place where it was possible to ditch school and go drift down a river on a home-made raft.

Honestly, while I've loved reading as long as I can remember, post-junior high, it's been rare that I've found a book that I loved as obsessively and devotedly as I loved those. Sure, I've read great books, I've found books that made me think and laugh and cry, I've found books that blew my mind with their ideas (Swift's Waterland, Quinn's Ishmael, Fowles' Daniel Martin all leap to mind). But books I wanted to chuck it all and LIVE in? Very rare.

And of course, once you actually study them, the Narnia books--like all books subject to academic exegesis--are tainted. If you read them again, you spot the sexism and the xenophobia and the religious fundamentalism, and it makes the whole thing just a little bit harder to get lost in.

But of course, where can you live then? Reality is such a pain in the ass, so lacking in winged horses and warddrobes that give way to winter forests. I can tell you what's in my warddrobe: Clothes. A mess of clothes, some of them I need to wash soon in order to look presentable for my job--a good job, all in all, but one where I work in a cubicle a good part of the time and rarely have to escape from Tashbaan in the middle of the night riding a talking horse.

All of this is a long way to get around to asking: Have there been any books you really wanted to live in since you turned 18? And if not, why not? It can't be that the books aren't as good. Qualitatively, the books are almost certainly better. At least some of them.

And a long way to get to my plug, which is this: If you are an adult who grew up on the Narnia books, if you like the Harry Potter books now, you should read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I've been snowed in for the past few days and I read it basically overnight. It deserves the praise it's getting, and will make you remember the feeling of wanting to live in a book. (Not that you'll want to live in his. You won't.)

Read it, please, then come back and tell me a) why, once you pass puberty, so few books inspire the longing to live in them? And b) whether you think Grossman's ending is happy or sad. Because I can't make up my mind, and it's bothersome in the best kind of way.