I once had a dog that knew he would die. He was an old dog when he knew, and while I was just a boy at the time I can still recall his face. I can still recall him not looking me in the eye and the way his body would tighten when I stroked the top of his head. He was not seeking affection and he did not expect a stroke or a pat or a tickle of the ears like when he dropped ball or piece of rope at my feet. He had once been a young dog but he was young no longer and was awaiting death, and all he wanted from me was to know he was dying, to really and solemnly know, to know it like I knew he had once been born and to leave him be and to die.
I have heard it said that a dog will go off on its own to await death. I am sure it is not just dogs that do it, that find a soft place among the trees near the river, but I can only speak for my own dog whom I found in some brush along the bank, beneath the branch of a tree that stirred the water in the moonlight, its body bent over that of a dog who did not startle as I approached.
He knew I would come, my dog, that I would look for him and find him and know, and really and solemnly know, that he was a dying dog and not mine anymore. He had once been mine and I had called him mine, but in dying he was only his own and his life and everything he had done was his own and only his own, and I was a part of it. I could not keep him anymore and all I could keep was the sight of him bounding over the hill and the sound of him paddling through the creek. As I grew up the sights became film grain and the sounds a tune, and now when I think of him I do so as if his life was a movie.
He is not the only thing I keep that way. There are places I have been that appear like photographs, unmoving and committed to time and proof that I was there because I was the lens and the focal length and shutter speed and I captured the place where I was in an image, an image I can recall but that possesses no sentiment unless I add it, and why would I add it when my sentiments change over time while the picture remains in its own time and its own sentiments and apart from what I added to it yesterday, today, and tomorrow?
I know this and yet I add the tune, and it is the tune that adds sentiment. Perhaps it is a song from the radio or a television program but when I hear it and recall the photograph the honest, emotionless image becomes dishonest and sentimental and attached to my own dishonest emotions. It is memory made episodic to accommodate my fears, ambitions, and attention span, and when I am done with it I have only to file away the photograph and pause the tune. They are mine to keep, what little they are.
My dog is not mine anymore. He stopped being mine when he went off to die. And unless I reclaim his bones from the spot where they lie and call on the worms and bacteria to give up the rest of him he will never be mine again, if he ever really was, because he started to die when he was born, even if he only knew it for sure when he lay down in the brush near the river. All that is left of him is what I keep, which isn’t much, and not even mine, not truly, but only exclusive to me. I can play the movie and replay it and play it again when it’s over but it always ends and then the memory is gone.
I sometimes think I am chasing something, maybe my dog but maybe more than just him and I can never quite catch either him or the rest of what I’m chasing. I am running in the dark, awkward and stumbling and sometimes I think I have gained some ground but then fall to the soft, wet earth that reminds me I haven’t caught anything and should get up, brush off the dirt and resume the chase. What is it Carol Kennicott says in Main Street? ‘I think perhaps we want a more conscious life.’ Without a doubt we do, but that’s obvious. I think we want a more conscious memory, although I’m not sure we want all that it entails.
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