It Is A Mass Of Ice Melting

On dividing work and multiplying love.

A year ago Saturday, my wife drove forty-five minutes out to Gig Harbor and returned home with a dog in the backseat. We had planned to go together, but I had to work that day and the rescue had a “no reservations” policy — but they were kind enough to tell us another family had made inquiries about our top choice. So she sped out there, took the dog for a trial walk, and brought her back to Seattle.

I think I got a Snapchat from every red light between the two cities. They were all basically identical: a golden donut of fur with two deep brown eyes peeking warily up from within.

To say our lives have changed since we brought Orla home would be the understatement of the century. Trying to recount all those ways here would be impossible. (One that has stood out is that roughly 40% of my marriage now consists of us whispering to each other to come look at what the dog is doing. Or what “your dog” is doing, when she’s being bad.)

I just love my dog, man. She’s still puppy soft at almost two years old and despite not being a human being tries so, so hard to understand what it is that we want from her. If she’s not sure she’ll work her way through her entire learned repertoire of movements hoping that one of them will be what she’s supposed to be doing. She gets so excited for food that she runs backwards, jumping in circles, every single time she hears us measuring kibble. She’s an unrepentant forager like me and a (frighteningly) talented climber like my wife, so we joke that she inherited these things from us.

I know that what I see as her smile and her cartoonishly sweet eyebrows are products of an evolutionary process that earned early dogs preferential treatment from humans. But damn, if she isn’t still a happy and smiley dog.

ringworm @prawn_meat

(a bell rings, reminding me of previous times i have eaten) these memories are so good... might as well salivate. it's my choice.

Anyway, concepts like evolution become pointless and abstracted when I look her in the face as she cranes her neck for more kisses or treats or head scratches. It doesn’t matter, when I spread my legs on the couch and she dashes over to curl up between them and fall asleep. In these moments my heart could just about burst from the tenderness she generates in me. I imagine this comes from a similar ineffable place as the feeling I get when I wake up first on the weekends and see my wife, who works so hard during the weeks, fast asleep under the piled comforter. You want to just freeze those moments in time, with your heart as full as its ever been and telling you it could be fuller still.

It’s obviously not all sunshine and rainbows, this domestic life. Orla has a very sensitive stomach, especially for a former street dog. Way too often we lose a whole night of sleep because she needs to go out every ninety minutes when she’s sick, and when her stomach is upset she can’t settle down, which makes our lives pure chaos until she feels better. My wife and I have nigh-opposite communication styles and ways of processing information, which frequently leads to frustrations that we have to work through together. (We’ve been together in some capacity for almost fifteen years, and we have gotten better at these things over time, but mostly what we’ve learned is that it’s impossible to be anyone other than who you really are.)

Annie Dillard, The Living

These things—having a dog, being married—are certainly work. But if you do them right, most days the work is divided, and if you can build from that foundation of tenderness it is rare that the work becomes so much as to drown the joys. Unlike the work, my love and attention are not divided by having a wife and a dog, they are multiplied. And that vast and incomprehensible love doesn’t cloud my perception, it clarifies it. It might sound morbid, but what often helps center me in my most frustrated moments is thinking “what if this was the last interaction we ever had?” Through that lens the idea of getting the last word in or imposing my will becomes laughable. The old marital advice that you shouldn’t go to bed angry is sound, but I don’t even like to enter a new hour angry.

This love I have for my wife or my dog or my family or my friends is conditioned and magnified by its finitude. The price of love is that it has an end, and truly preparing for that end is impossible. I think of all the grief that is experienced all over the world, all the time, and the only light I find in it is that it must mean that love is also experienced all over the world, all the time, or else there would be no grief. The terms and conditions are inescapable, but it’s the only contract that makes anything mean anything.

There are too many terrible things in this world to name and mostly they seem to be getting worse all the time. So sign the papers, literally or figuratively, and bring more love into your life. When it comes down to it that’s the only advice that feels worth giving.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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