LESSON 4/Optional Exercise : Write about a CONFLICT

“You said you were going to get away. You were going to travel after being a beach hermit-author for twenty years. Rediscover the world, you told me. Spend time with your children and grandchildren growing old in faraway places. You couldn’t do those things, you said, until your dog Halley died. Next thing I know you’ve driven eight hours to the Idaho border and come back with another dog.”

Still no answer.

“What kind of a dog is Sara anyway?” I asked him.

“She’s a mutt,” Terégo spoke finally. “Like her old man.”

“That’s what Barack Obama called himself–a mutt,” I said, “He said it when he and Michelle were thinking of adopting a rescued dog for their daughter Malia, something like, ‘A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.'”

“I remember him saying that,” Terégo said. “I really liked him for it.”

“Well, I know you’re a mutt,” I said. “English on your father’s side, Filipino on your mother’s, you told me. What kind of mutt is Sara?”

“Border collie and Australian shepherd,” Terégo said. “Half and half like me.”

“That’s sweet,” I said. “Seems to me, though, you’re back to square one. Unable to do all those things you couldn’t do because you had a dog. What the hell happened anyway?”

“I decided the things I couldn’t do with a dog weren’t worth doing,” Terégo said. “I decided I wanted a dog–I needed a dog–much more than I wanted or needed anything I could do if I didn’t have one.”

Terégo grew silent once more.

“You can go off and leave a girlfriend. At least for a while. You’re stuck at home with a dog,” I said.

We were sitting on the deck in my backyard, hoodies zipped against the mid-March sun that offered brightness but no warmth. I looked at Terégo, his eyes fixed on the distant band of sea and sky awaiting the sun’s fiery convergence.

He still didn’t answer. And he was grinning again. I resisted the urge to make that generic circular motion with a forefinger in the vicinity of the temple to convey my contemptuous incredulity.

“It’s only a dog,” I almost said but didn’t. Talking about dog-love with non-dog-lovers is exasperating and futile, I’d long ago decided. There’s an unbridgeable gulf of incomprehension separating the two, not unlike the ever-widening chasm of failed expectations between young and old, children and their parents, immigrants and subsequent generations.

“I’m too old,” he said. “And tired,” pronouncing the word like Dolly Parton. “Too old and tarred to do any more laundry.”

“What laundry?” I said. It took me a moment to realize he was answering my question: Why hadn’t he gotten himself a girlfriend instead of another dog?

“The laundry that comes with every relationship,” Terégo said. “I’m referring to a book by Jack Kornfield titled After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.”

I felt my jaw dropping.

“There’s always the laundry humans bring to relationships of any kind,” Terégo said, “even friendships. Some bring steamer trunks full, others a carry on, but they always bring laundry.”

It was my turn to be silent.

“But not dogs,” Terégo went on quickly. “Dogs bring ecstasy, but never laundry.”

My head was starting to hurt.

“Dogs are perfect creatures,” Terégo said. “I don’t know what we are, why God make us such wack jobs–all of us, each in our own way. I think he got distracted, maybe called to dinner by Mrs. G at the critical moment he was about to instill all those shining human attributes in us and wound up putting them in dogs instead. That’s what I think.”

My head was throbbing now. I desperately wanted to change the subject.

“Let me ask you something,” Terégo said. “When was the last time someone was so overjoyed, so brimming with love and affection that they literally ran to greet you?”

He had me there.

“A dog will do that for you–ten, twenty, thirty times a day,” Terégo said.

I watched him lift the tumbler of scotch I’d given him. He took a healthy swig of the amber liquid, made a loud, guttural sound of appreciation, put the glass back down and picked up a book with the photo of a bright-eyed, grinning Border collie above the title and author’s name: A Dog for All Seasons/A Memoir by Patti Sherlock.

“I read this book exactly when I needed to,” Terégo said, lifting the cover to the front flyleaf. “It’s about this woman’s relationship with her Border collie named Duncan, who was her unwavering companion and essential partner through the trials, tribulations and challenges of sixteen years on a sheep farm in Idaho, the breakdown of her marriage, the raising of her children and, eventually, her decision to quit raising sheep.”

He looked up to make sure he had my attention. “This is what one reviewer wrote about it,” he said, flipping to the back cover. “If you’ve forgotten how to see miracles in everyday moments, this book will remind you. It’s a story about the real world, the world where human beings live in constant contact with nature, where animals are more than best friends,” Terégo read.

He paused a beat, looking hard at me.

“You know,” he said, “I did take a trip a couple of weeks after Halley died. Twenty-one days in all, eight of them spent on Amtrak trains, seven in Madison, six in Williamsburg, including dozens of hours of layover stops, coming and going, in Chicago and Washington, D.C. To tell the truth, I didn’t find a wondrous world of human beings seeing miracles in everyday moments–people living in constant contact with nature where animals were more than best friends. Fact is, I found people living busy, banal, compulsively connected, totally booked lives of rarely still, seldomly quiet desperation. And I came back grievously missing Halley.”

He paused again, turning to a page bookmarked by a folded sheet of yellow notepad and read aloud some of what Patti Sherlock had written: “Still, married or single, I’d have stars. And sunsets. I’d have winter days when snow blanketed the hayfield and frosted the trees in white. And there would be Duncan. Faithful, smart, and happy Duncan. Sticking to me like Velcro.”

Terégo was grinning again.

“That’s what dogs do, stick to you like Velcro through thick and thin,” he said, thumbing now to the last page of the book. “These are Sherlock’s closing words,” he said, then read them to me: “For those of you who have been loved by a great dog, who have, in turn, loved the dog back, we can say, and this is not too large a statement, we have known Glory in our lives.”

The sun’s lazy plummet into the crimson horizon had brought a chill to the air. Terégo took a last long swallow of scotch.

“How many of us have known glory in our lives?” he said, so softly I could barely hear him.

And we left it at that in the gathering darkness.