The Raging Elitist

After years of imagining how sad losing the family dog will be, I was surprised by the huge relief I felt when I learned she might have bone cancer. I was on the pool deck coaching and happened to have my phone out, because I was showing a swimmer a video I’d taken of his messy stroke. When the notifications started appearing at the top of my screen, I had enough time to see they were from Danyelle and to read the words “cancer” and “crying” before quickly swiping them away. My mind went immediately to our seven-year-old son Scotty, who wasn’t at the pool because he had an ENT appointment. In the moment before sending the swimmer diving back into the pool and quickly glancing at my phone again, I felt the panicked denial one feels after emerging from an especially vivid nightmare. I’d forgotten completely that after Scotty’s trip to the ENT, Sammy had a vet appointment too. Oh God, I thought, it’s just the dog.

Turns out, Sammy doesn’t have bone cancer (yet); her elbow is just severely inflamed and full of osteophytes, bone spurs that have broken loose due to her worsening arthritis. In other words, more of the same. Pills and injectables haven’t made any noticeable difference, and arthroscopic surgery didn’t help; Sammy just limps happily and stubbornly along, tugging at the end of her leash, and racking up vet bills while Danyelle and I are alternately frustrated and filled with sympathy for her worsening pain. At some point, an aggressive bone cancer with a quick ending isn’t the worst possible prognosis. She’s within a year of the average life expectancy for a lab, and I don’t necessarily want to watch her slowly consumed by arthritic pain while pondering the ultimate decision. Still, I thought I’d be nervous when I picked up the phone to hear the news from the vet, but in the wake of my relief about Scotty, I wasn’t.

Maybe I’m becoming like my father, who on the day he had the golden retriever of my childhood put down said, “I don’t want to cry over the dog,” thereby ending any chance I had at commiserating with him. I thought it more than a little heartless at the time. Now, I wonder if it was just a matter of perspective. Sammy’s “part” of the family, and I’ve cried plenty over the thought of her death, but she isn’t really family. She’s the dog, and when she’s gone, there will be another.

I’m sure our nine-year-old son would find this attitude about Sammy’s eventual death as heartless as I found my father’s refusal to grieve with me. Cartter is ready to weep unrestrainedly over his doggy, whose presence in our home he has never lived without. I read a story from a collection of “Good Dog” essays to him and his brother, and when there was no canine fatality at the end, he wanted another. “You want to cry, don’t you?” I said, a little incredulous, thinking his desire was something like a scared kid wanting to watch a horror movie, even though he knows it will give him nightmares. According to Sammy’s vet, people these days let their kids be a part of their dogs’ euthanasia. When I imagine Cartter laid over her corpse bawling, the picture of her death haunting his dreams and waking him night after night, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea, even if Sammy might prefer to have him around when the time comes.

The other night as I walked through the kitchen, Sammy suddenly rammed me in the back of the leg with her nose. When I turned around, she looked up at me like she was surprised at herself, kind of like one of the kids testing me out, measuring my response and wondering if she’d get away with her boldness. For a second, I thought maybe she was going blind or deaf, that she’d bumped me by mistake, but when she went over to the door to sit down and stare at me, I knew there was some intent. Sitting by the door and staring is her signal that she wants to do doggy telepathy. Danyelle is her preferred receiver. Once I get past food and going outside, I’m generally at a loss, but on this occasion, I was clued in by the sound of giggling emanating from the guest bedroom.

Danyelle was curled up with the boys reading a silly comic, and I was the only missing member of the pack. Sammy limped along beside me to join them, pausing just a moment before making a mighty leap into the bed. She lay there panting happily, eyes half shut as she teetered on the edge of sleep, getting showered with pets.

 I half-joked with Danyelle the other day that it will be strange when we’ve had some other dog for a while, and we start to forget about Sammy. Sammy has pretty much erased my memory of the golden retriever whose death I wept over as a college kid, and she’ll be gone from our kids’ lives at a much younger age. Cartter and Scotty might even end up thinking of the next dog as their childhood dog. I wonder what else they’ll forget.

One day, all the markers of Sammy’s existence that currently populate our daily lives will have faded away. For instance, the cheap living room furniture, which Sammy has had a hand in destroying, is not long for this world. Of all the pieces, the bulky coffee table has held up the best, but I worry it won’t fit anymore once all the dog-worn leather seating is replaced.

The table has endured a decade of rough treatment. Sitting at the proper angle when the lamplight slants toward it from across the room, one notices a concentration of scratches running across its width. The lines mark Sammy’s preferred taking off point, the spot where she stands shuffling and nervous, unsure of her footing and afraid of the awkward, two-and-a-half-foot gap between the table and the couch, a baby chasm which she invariably conquers with a last-ditch, reckless leap of faith. The myriad little resulting scratches curving and intersecting with one another where her nails have raked across the grain of the finish resemble a spray chart, the likes of which one might see in a graphic depicting the different trajectories of a hitter’s homeruns. Sammy’s chart looks like that of a lefty who favors the power alley in right center. Her claw marks curve toward the foot of the couch where Danyelle makes room for her during those moments of peril when she skids around atop the coffee table desperate for a cuddle. Everything stops when Sammy bobs and weaves on the tabletop planning her launch. We all watch and give encouragement, and the kids laugh. Staring at the scratched surface, I hate to think it will be gone, that the memories of all these times we’ve spent as a young family will fade, so I lie to myself and think, it’s just the dog.

Snowmagedon

The kids enjoyed their second consecutive long weekend thanks to their second consecutive winter with snow in the lowcountry. This time there was just a thin layer that clung to the ground for about twenty-four hours, but it was enough to shut down the whole world for three days, schools included. Cartter and Scotty ran around with a pack of neighborhood boys, scraping snow off palm fronds, rolling it into balls, and depositing it into a big grocery bag.

Danyelle and I took advantage of the time off from school and swim to cook dinner together – roast chicken and broccoli risotto, spaghetti Bolognese. The kids were frustrated on Saturday night when we made the risotto. They came home from their snow exploits after dark at 6:30, hungry, and not inclined to wait another thirty minutes.

Scotty’s moods intensified during the early portions of the weekend. The ENT put him on a steroid to reduce the inflammation that’s been causing fluid buildup behind his ears. One night, Cartter and I laughed after watching him fly past Cartter’s bedroom door, a blur of wet hair, pale skin, and red boxer briefs streaking from the bathroom to his bed, grunting demonically as he went. I met Scotty’s moodiness with the usual teasing, which was received with the usual flashes of anger and barely concealed laughter. I was surprised when on the last night of the snowmagedon holiday, Scotty apologized to me out of the blue. He was scooting on his butt toward his room and told me he was sorry for the mean things he says to me. I had him stand up  so I could hug him and reciprocate the apology. It’s amazing how quickly his attitude shifts when I’m fully committed to hanging out, putting whatever essay or swim workout I’m writing out of my mind.

Two Swigs

I picked Cartter up from school on Thursday and drove him to practice. It’s rare these days that the two of us are alone together in the car. A couple years ago, I drove him to school solo every morning, and we both agreed that we miss that time we used to spend.

I told Cartter I wished we could just skip practice and hang out downtown and go to dinner together, and I asked him where he’d want to go.

“What was that place?” he said. “Amen?” He was talking about Amen Street Fish and Raw Bar, a touristy spot on East Bay where Matt and I glut ourselves on happy hour oysters when he’s in town and where Cartter and Scotty once sampled fried oysters. I told Cartter I wanted to take him there and get a big platter of raw oysters. I told him we could get beers with them.

“But I can’t drink beers,” he said.

 “Well just a couple swigs will be fine,” I said.

“How old were you?” he said from the backseat. We were on the interstate now, and the talk of skipping practice and frolicking downtown was even more of an abstraction than it had started as.

“When?” I said.

“When you had a couple of swigs?”

Mommy!

On the final night of the snowmagedon holiday, we took the kids out to Kickin Chicken for dinner. Danyelle and I hatched the plan while we lay with Sammy in a patch of sunlight near the neighborhood playground where the kids were playing. When I told Cartter the plan, he gasped with excitement, and said, “Really!” The reason he loves Kickin Chicken is, ironically, the double cheeseburger.

Later, as I pulled the van into the parking lot, the conversation turned toward the kids needing to get to bed on time, and I mocked the way Cartter invariably calls for his mommy five minutes after we say goodnight each night. “Mommmmy!” I called over and over imitating his voice, and he came back at me with “Lisssa!” because apparently, when I can’t go to sleep at night, I call for my mother using her first name. We all had a laugh, and later, Cartter didn’t call us back into his room after bedtime. It turned out to be just a one-night reprieve.

Geopolitics

The boys’ first day back at school post-snowmagedon, I picked Cartter up and drove him to the pool solo again. If he’d gone to band with his brother, he’d have been out of the water for six days and with the state meet coming up in less than two weeks, I encouraged him to miss band this one time.

When we got on the interstate, he filled me in on a conversation that happened in his art class in which his friend insisted that the Chinese government wants us to use TikTok so they can spy on us and “use our information.” Apparently, the teacher didn’t deny this was true.

Naturally, Cartter called me back into his room after bedtime to further discuss the matter. He was concerned that since he has an iPad at school, the Chinese were probably spying on him. My reassurance that they didn’t care about him was unconvincing.

Cartter wanted to know if other governments spied. He wanted to know which governments were the worst and why we needed governments. I told him I didn’t really want to talk politics and that he needed to go to bed, so he said, “Why does Donald Trump have this thing called ice?”

All I wanted to do was leave the room, lie on the couch and read my book. Leaning over his bed, I held Cartter in my arms and sighed in exasperation. “I don’t know, Cartter,” I said. “Donald Trump is a fucking asshole. He’s the worst president ever.” Then, I started my move to the exit.

All Cartter really wants is to keep Danyelle or me in the room talking. When I told him that he should try to talk to me about this stuff in the daytime, he said all his questions come to him at night and that he forgets them in the daytime. As I paused in his doorway to say goodnight to him again, I could see his smile gleaming through the darkness. “I learned Donald Trump is bad,” he said delightedly.

The conversation continued the next night. “Is North Korea gonna throw bombs at us?” Cartter asked when I came to him in his room. I tried to explain our military advantage and North Korea’s weak position. He wanted to know why they’re so bad, who is their president, and why people put up with him. I explained that the country is a tightly controlled dictatorship.

“So he’s like a king?” Cartter asked.

“He’s a dictator.”

“Oh, I know what that is,” he said.

Cartter wanted to know if people could escape the country by crawling through the sewer. He asked how bad Kim Jong Un was, and I said “Really bad.”

“Worse than Donald Trump?”

“Yes.”

Favorite Subject

Only in the last six months or so has Scotty adopted his older brother’s habit of asking an endless stream of questions when I try to say goodnight to him. The other night he asked me, “What do you like better, music or history?”

I brushed my mustache against his ear so that he curled up into himself like a rollie pollie. “Music,” I whispered.

“I think for me it’s a tie,” he said.

“Lucky for you having so many interests,” I said.

Earlier that evening he sat beside me at the kitchen table while I ate dinner. He had his sketchpad out and drew a series of portraits of Teddy Roosevelt, pausing now and again to look critically through the glasses resting on the tip of his nose at a completed piece, describing its shortcomings and expressing his dissatisfaction.

I was very surprised to learn that night that he knows all the words to the song “Blinded by the Light.” He corrected me when I said it was by the Doobie Brothers and again when I sang, “wrapped up like a deuce.” The lyric is actually “revved up like a deuce.” I’ve been told what it means more than once, but I’ve never cared enough to remember. I don’t think Scotty knows what that particular line means either, but he can sing the entire song.

Scotty also knows all the words to “Shine.” Sitting on the edge of Cartter’s bed swinging his legs, he sang the tune while Cartter kneeled on the rug in the middle of the room and accompanied him on guitar (Cartter has been playing both “Shine” and “Blinded by the Light” obsessively recently). We all had a nice giggle at Scotty’s emphatic, nonchalant delivery of the lyric, “Yeah!”

It’s not all music and history with Scotty, though. Two nights ago, when I tried to tell him goodnight and take my leave, he broached the topic of astrophysics. “Daddy?” he asked, “Does space end?” I said I didn’t know, but Scotty continued, unphased as always in his line of questioning. “What’s on the other side?” he said. In these situations, a final outburst of silliness is my only recourse, the one chance I have of being set free. I told Scotty to close his eyes and leaned into his bed, rubbing my beard against his face and rocking him back and forth, pretending to be in a spaceship nearing and then passing the boundary of space. This satisfied him.

We enjoyed an inside joke the next night at the dinner table. I asked what’s on the other side of space, and Scotty said, “Something furry.” Then at bedtime, when Cartter was panicked and crying over a Superbowl commercial about AI, we invited him into our spaceship.

AI

Cartter is tortured by the prospect of AI’s proliferation. I haven’t seen him so panicked at bedtime since he was a toddler. Last night I told him I loved him and that I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him. Citing the cheeseburger I made him for dinner as proof, I said, “Did you taste that cheeseburger?” He laughed, and I told him how lucky I am to have a son who gets me as much as he does. I couldn’t calm him all the way down, though.

We tried breathing together, in through the nose and out through the mouth. We used to do it years ago, and I asked Cartter if he remembered. He said he did, that he thinks about it sometimes and that it reminds him of a honeybee. He didn’t know why. In the end, his mommy paid him a visit, and he calmed down enough to fall asleep.

Earlier that evening, Danyelle nearly whipped him into a panic over a loose tooth (Cartter has suddenly started losing teeth in rapid succession). Busy cooking on the patio, I came into the kitchen to get a grilling utensil, and Scotty said to me, “We have a problem.” My little family was clustered around the kitchen sink, and Danyelle was making noise about Cartter potentially pulling out a permanent tooth. Cartter said it was loose and hurting and that he’d just “ripped it.” It turned out to be his lower left cuspid; the tooth next to it had just come out over the holidays; and when I glanced at Cartter’s mouth, there was enough blood flowing to give me a little jolt. My advice was to go ahead and pull it out, which he did directly, marking the first time in his nine and a half years that he’s pulled one of his baby teeth unassisted. What bravery. AI doesn’t stand a chance against this kid.