Edit: Dear friends, I have received a few e-mails from some of you who were puzzled by the difference in content and tone between this post and the one that followed eight minutes later ("Another Grand Day In"
, so a bit of clarification is in order. This was written by orionoir, who is both a close friend and an occasional guest blogger when I go out of town -- as well as an occasional prankster, hijacking my blog, pretending that he's me and writing scurrilous things that horrify my parents and amuse my husband. The post that follows, though, is not a prank, and though I still believe there is a better home for this post than PTMYB, orionoir has reasons for not posting it on his own blog. I don't want to move it until I know that there is a place for it, so for now, here it stays. This might be the point where I would make vaguely threatening statements about how it's all well and good to hijack a blog until somebody puts an eye out, but considering that I did much the same to him in a futile attempt to curtail what became a two-month blogging hiatus on his part, I will not. I will merely say, not only to orionoir but to the dozen or so other folks who still have their guestblogging privileges, that if you're going to break my heart, even with beauty, it is considered good and seemly to give me a warning first. Thank you for your time and patience. Here endeth the lesson. -- Bakerina
on the second night of the puppies i dreamed i was flirting with a too-young woman, we were in an art room of some sort, it might have been a school or mental hospital. even though i had my nice robin's egg blue shirt on, i started flinging black paint at her, and she at me, then we were raining through the high halls of an elegant prep school, shrieks echoing off the stone ceilings. we found her room, an open triple, unmade beds, we were covering everything in paint.
an adult asked me if my daughter had gone on the walk to the lake; i realized i hadn't known of any walk; moreover, i'd given no thought at all to the whereabouts of my children. he said a little girl had been crying, but then he said that all the girls were crying. i found my way to the walkers, but i couldn't tell if they were departing or returning. daughter was nowhere to be found.
in a reception room full of people wearing name tags, holding paper plates of vague food. under a table was my dog grace, curled up in a fetal ball. i'd forgotten about her too.
i held her in my arms. she was wondrously light, as light as a baby. i realized she was starving. i looked into her eyes: what about the litter? how are we going to keep them alive? she could not go back. she was all done. i had let this happen.
my wife woke me up. it's getting light so much earlier now, but still, the world was dark. the day before i'd been up at two, clearly she was in labor then; at three i heard the first puppies yelping. i got up lest there were any dead ones... my wife didn't want to find any, nor should the kids, i had to make sure. that was the first morning. this morning i was again making sure.
if not for the dream i would have done as i had the day before, retrieve the scrawny females from the cold wilderness, nudge a few fat males off the teats to give the frail at least a temporary chance. even just a day into their lives, it seemed to me that it was always these same little girls who somehow ended up straying from the seething warmth of their sibs.
i could hear my son stirring upstairs: at ten, he's the earliest riser in the family, if you don't count my four-year old, who stealthily finds her way into our bed around two, often waking neither of us. i moved quickly, efficiently, like a killer: a sturdy paper bag, what i hoped were the three smallest pups, a word to my deep-sleeping wife: three dead, i'm going to take them some distance. bury them by the apple tree, she says. i say, grace or the kids will find them if they're within a mile. i'm taking the toyota. she says, bring a shovel.
i do bring a shovel; i'll leave it in the car, my son especially is acute in his ability to know when a story doesn't add up. the pups are in the trunk but their peeping kitten baby yelping barks penetrate everything: they've surely a lot of life in them. i had planned to drop them off the first mount hope bridge, a deep, slow bend at wh the river flows into marshland, full of deer, beaver, large predatory birds. the state has just started stocking trout, i'm sure small puppies will disappear quickly. but i slept through that bridge and ended up a couple miles further downstream at the actual mount hope bridge, a new tressel over a long break of rapids. i had kayaked this stretch once, had no idea what i was doing, this was during chemo, perhaps i was thinking nothing mattered.
criminals are always discovered by the unlikeliest passers-by, the world is rife with these wanderers. remember the preppie rough-sex murder in central park, some cretin strangling a girl in the middle of the night in a very remote spot, a jogger just happens to come jogging by? like, okay, it's a lurid crime, that i understand, it's a story, but i want to know about this jogger. what's his story?
i left the car running with its hazards blinking grotesquely in the pre-dawn light. the early spring birds were coming to life; nearby i heard the manic pulse dial of a woodpecker on a hollow tree.
the pups came cleanly out of the bag, falling in a tight group. i heard no yelping. the water took them slowly but definitely downstream, turning them in a tight triangle again and again, nose to tail, i wouldn't have thought the current would do that.
i watched until they were out of sight, it might have been a minute. they were so much more beautiful than they'd been in the box. little dog ears. peaceful, too, alive but not struggling, perhaps doing the slightest amniotic dog paddle. i wanted to be dispassionate, without compassion at all if that were possible, i tried to see what was and not what i would want: it could have been the motion of the water which moved their prenatal paws in that universal rhythm, left front, right rear, right front, left rear, all three of them, rotating together, impossibly together, as if it wasn't just the river which moved them along.