There’s not a morbid bone in my body, you know. Creaky bones, but nothing dark. I don’t dwell, at least not these days.
But it has crossed my mind that this may be the last summer for Strider, our Sheltie. Hard to say; he’s a mid-size dog, with statistically a longer lifespan than a Great Dane but less than a dinky dog, and now he’s 14 or maybe 13 (really, I can’t remember). That’s a senior citizen dog any way you look at it, and he’s pretty creaky himself. He has trouble getting up when he lies down, and he lies down a lot. He rarely barks when anyone leaves the house, which used to be his main job; now, he just observes. Go on, you kids have fun, I’ll just stay and examine the carpet and watch for…zzz.
There’s nothing I can do about Strider’s last summer, and as I say I don’t dwell. But maybe it’s bled over a little into my life, or maybe it was just our cloudier-than-usual winter and spring. I am hoarding my hours in the sun, at any rate, barely resisting the urge to roll in the grass.
And then there was this: Last week I got one of those emails.
It happens every once in a while, a happy byproduct of our time, a spontaneous connection. Often this is late at night (or late at night somewhere), and I understand the impulse. Someone is bored, or maybe just nostalgic, gets a notion and starts looking. I’m an easy guy to find, so I’ve gotten used to messages that start, “You might not remember me…” And now we have Facebook, etc.
I did remember her. A pretty girl with red hair, she lived two houses down from my best friend, Kurt. We even dated a few times, but mostly I remember her as part of my teenage landscape, social networking done the old-fashioned way, hanging out in cars or in front yards, walking into your best friend’s house without knocking and looking through their refrigerator because you were allowed, you were family.
She had married young, moved out of the country and disappeared, so it was nice to hear from her. I told her that, wrote her back and said that I was glad to hear she was alive and well, and then she asked me if I was still in touch with Kurt. She’d been looking for him online without success.
I wanted to tell her of what sweet memories I have of those young summers, lazy nights and life ahead. I wanted to tell her stories of me and Kurt, how we roomed together in college and about all our adventures, about how we drifted apart but hooked up for special events, weddings and reunions. I wanted to tell her about places we’d been, moments we’d shared, jobs and passions, marriages and kids. I wanted to tell her about how we grew up.
Instead, I had to tell her of another summer, 11 years ago, when I heard from another old friend. Kurt was a good man, but having a big heart is no guarantee it won’t be a diseased one. And now 41 seems impossibly young to die, and sorrow has mellowed, and summer awaits. I told her the sad news and went out to the yard.
I weeded, mowed, did my little quixotic dance with the blackberry vines, stacked the residual lumber from my former deck that gravity and I, always partners, took down a while back. I strung out 200 feet of extension cord and used it all, greeting each corner of my yard again after a long winter. I made a mental list of other chores, dreamed about a new deck a little, got my shoes dirty and didn’t finish anything, not really.
I dug up ghosts, always here in a yard that’s seen my family through 22 years now. There’s the tree my father-in-law planted in 1989. There’s the swing set debris, stuck in a corner of the yard to be hauled off and then ignored. There’s the sandbox, now completely covered by brush, a job for Indiana Jones, not me.
I found a yellow Tonka truck, left one day under our old deck by a little boy who lost interest. Which day? I wondered. The day he played with it in the dirt, came inside for dinner and never looked for it again, I guess.
We never know about those days, or which summer is our last, or the best ever, or the worst, which is why I ignore morbidity but appreciate mortality. There are secrets only the summer knows, and quixotic is not a bad way to be, I think. I know that the blackberries will keep growing and that I will keep fighting, and that I should.