On making it personal

humans have a hard time with scale, but not dogs

I imagine him waiting for a small spot of sun to hit his face just right, reveling in the exquisite comfort of his normal routine. But today is not normal.

“Laugh it up!” says my spouse Janyce, as she walks from the bathroom over to me to grab my empty coffee cup. It’s 6am Saturday morning and still dark in the bedroom. The dog is clicking his too-long nails on the hardwood floor and walking stiffly behind her like a wind-up toy.

“I’m laughing because it was funny,” I say, still picturing him using his snout to push open the bathroom door and poke his head in. I watched him do it three times from my spot sitting up in bed. On his last try, he decided he would fully enter the room despite her calls of protest, “Do not come all the way in here.”

“Come here baby, come see Kris,” I say, and tap my fingers on the side of the bed. He is standing at the end wondering where his stairs are, his little black head just clearing the edge and looking straight at me. He can’t really see me, and he can’t hear me too well anymore, either. He wants to be on the bed with me, wants to walk up to me and lick me once on my lips and then fall to his side all in one motion, rubbing his head against my legs, stretching his body out in the large expanse of space, while the light gradually brightens outside. I imagine him waiting for a small spot of sun to hit his face just right, reveling in the exquisite comfort of his normal routine. But today is not normal.

I’m listening to a morning radio program on NPR about Thanksgiving, hungry for these first-person, personal stories and I call to Janyce in the other room. “Come listen with me,” I say.

“No,” she says, “I’m up. I’m going to get moving.”

The other day, I read a FB post from Dan Rather lamenting how so many of us are not taking the pandemic seriously enough, and not doing the right things to care for each other, even as the numbers of people dying keep rising every day. He said, “Human beings have a hard time comprehending scale. Our emotions are more resonant with the personal, the small tragedy. We need to do a better job of describing the horror.”

His comments made me think about Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones” that went viral in 2016 and is seeing a resurgence again in 2020. I read it recently in one of my social media feeds. In the poem, she juxtaposes the sentiments of a mom trying to shield her children from all that is bad in the world with a few stark visual lines of the truly horrible. That’s why the poem works. You don’t expect such a cruel image to be so matter-of-factly stated and when you read it, it shocks you to your core. I think that’s what Dan Rather is asking of his fellow journalists. Get at the personal and the small and shock us into understanding our own humanity.

“Well, that’s one way to do it,” I think. Another way is to amp up the marvelous in the world. My friend Roger sends me little wonders he finds while perusing the internet. Recently, I opened a video interview he sent me of a fashion designer in the Netherlands who makes latex clothing bubbles for runway models. Janyce was sitting beside me while I was watching it, not at all impressed. “What is this nonsense?” she said. “Who would wear that?”

“Well, no one would,” I said. “It’s conceptual art. You’re not really looking at fashion.”

The eerie, shadowy bubbles are a metaphor for consciousness. The artist is asking you to consider scale and proximity. As he puts it, “there is a symbiotic relationship between the body and the bubble around it. You have to be careful, it follows you wherever you go, it will burst if you don’t nurture it and take care of it.”

For us, it’s easy to pay attention to the fragility of our own humanity simply by tending to the daily decline of the creature we live with. We have been waking up several times in the night lately with our old dog, groggily comprehending him standing on the bed with his nose inches away from Janyce’s face, urging her to get up and take him outside. He is wearing a diaper these days that we need to constantly change and wash as if we were living with an infant. We’ve purchased a waterproof blanket for the bed, and his full-body dog pajamas are right now en route from Amazon.

But last night it became painfully obvious to the three of us that these sweet occasions of nighttime sleeping together are coming to an end. We moved his blanket to his own dog bed on the floor—still in the room—but now safely away from the big accident we know is imminent. He didn’t protest. He’s a good boy. He rolls with the daily changes that are happening to his routines now, the diminishing scale of his life, happy enough to have a comfortable place to settle in, with his humans close by, snoring gently in the dark and quiet of the night.