I have been truanting the studio! I have an excuse. My dog has giardia, a condition tiresome, gross, expensive, and pitiful. In addition to taking her on the many necessary walks and buying her the necessary powder (really a powder, like from an apothecary), I seem to think she’ll be less uncomfortable if I stare at her. I tore myself away for a few hours today to write in the lake room. The sky through the skylight is getting dark. I’m listening to Wu tang on my headphones off someone’s shared iTunes library. I’m sitting in the red and purple pleather recliner I bought off craigslist for twenty dollars. One of a kind! You bet!
Anyway, here’s a story. On the way to the grocery store from the dog beach this afternoon I spotted a dog running next to the highway. This isn’t the most terrifying vision of a highway, but it’s not great. Two fast lanes run each direction, flanking an appealingly garbage-strew median of ice plants. My own dog, back when I still thought she was going to be like her predecessor, Angel-dog, wound up on this median strip, under circumstances too humiliating to relate. Anyway, my dog was fine then, and this dog ended up fine, too, though the rescue involved me swerving onto the shoulder and crawling toward it with a horse biscuit in my hand. I think I looked like Golom.
The dog wasn’t interested in the horse biscuit, but I liked it that the guy who works at the stables off the highway brought it over to help. The guy called the dog while I kept running into the middle of the road and waving my arms like a deranged conductor to make people slow down. My move: raise hands overhead, lower hands slowly to the ground, like I’m pressing the air from a giant air mattress. Repeat. Much honking. But also thumbs up from a big rig driver.
Eventually more help arrived in the form of a professional dog walker who coaxed the dog to safety by laying a trail of Goldfish crackers to the cab of his truck. It was like Hansel and Gretel. The owner even appeared at the very end, all contrite for having married that wicked step-mother.
I felt sorry for the dog, not just for getting lost, but for getting found. Maybe he had a good reason for running away. I would undertake the same Conductor Golom rescue again, don’t get me wrong, but it must be frustrating to be a dog in San Francisco sometimes. No one has any faith in you. No one thinks you have a legitimate doggy life. You’re taken out and walked about and taken home again and fed something free-range, but what about your professional goals? What about your dream of following that old hot dog smell all the way down the road? Maybe that dog would have done a fine job avoiding traffic if I hadn’t interfered. Maybe he wanted to be like the dogs in Russia who ride the subway to the best begging spots.
I’m being silly, but I do wonder why I think everything needs to be rescued all the time. Sometimes I think it’s my own rescue I’m enacting over and over, as though I think wandering is always the same thing as being lost, as though I think it’s always a disaster if you don’t know precisely where you are going.
Maybe that’s why I love the Faerie Queene and Inferno and Robinson Crusoe and all the wandering in Grimm’s woods The narrative is going somewhere, the story has limits, the book is only so many pages long, so I know the wandering won’t take me off the map, but at the same time I get to travel along and see what happens without my intervention. I’d like to see my own story unfold without Lady Rescue Ready leaping from the car at every turn. But even that, that fantasy of watching, is a fantasy of control. We can never know the minor from the major themes, the red-herrings from the true signs, the middle from the end.
