Musings: 10 December 1994 - 23 December 2006

To the greatest canine companion a neurotic intellectual would-be-writer boy could ever have asked for, who traveled everywhere I went from age 21 to age 32, who lived in two provinces and one state and two countries with me, and who kept me going through dissertation-writing and book revisions and losing Tiger seasons and so many trying times, on the day of his death from old age.

I'll miss you, buddy.

A poem by Pablo Neruda, in tribute:

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

Musings: On Mortality, Mine

Debated for a while today whether or not I'd write about this, but then talked myself into it, if only to fashion a procrastinatory measure that keeps me from addressing the five-item to-do list on my desk here at work.

This morning I went to the doctor for a follow-up visit, in part to talk about test results from an MRI I had a couple weeks ago. My doctor recommended the MRI because of my father's death--as a relatively young man, from a brain aneurysm he didn't know he had. The MRI itself was a new (and unwelcome) experience for me, a here's-what-it-feels-like-to-be-shoved-in-a-coffin-for-forty-five-minutes revelation, but with more clanky sound effects than the dead usually have to endure. But whatever. I had the test and pushed it to the back of my mind, to be left aside until today's follow-up.

On the drive though, I--of course, being an imaginative sort--let my mind wander a bit into what-if territory. "So, Whining Stranger, odds are if there was anything really irregular she'd have called you right away, but on the other hand, she may have needed a couple weeks to think of how to let you know that you're in grave danger, that there's an aneurysm in your head, waiting to send you careening toward an early exit." Now, you might think that an anxiety sufferer like me would be sent into pre-emptive convulsions over traveling down such a hypothetical path. (Remember that scene in Hannah and Her Sisters, when Woody Allen sits waiting for test results, convinced that he's about to learn he has an inoperable brain tumor...?) Oddly enough, though, I didn't feel that expected tightness in the chest or nausea in the belly. Instead, mostly calm. A settled searching through the "These are the things I'd do" if I were staring eye to eye with the Fella in the Brite Nitegown.

I'd probably want to quit teaching. (Sorry, kids, but I hope you understand.)
I'd commit myself to writing more. Maybe dash off two or three more inconsequential stories in my remaining days.
I'd make sure that the people I love know how much I love them.
I'd eat sushi every day damn day, and let the dog eat steak.

As it turns out though, everything's OK in my head. (Well, on the aneurysm front, anyway-- I'm still an anxious cat, but that's not terminal.)

And rather than spend the morning thinking about final wishes, I cruised home with the windows down, singing "Louie, Louie" loudly with the stereo. And my partner was waiting with a hug when I arrived.

Shoo, Grim Reaper. I got things to do.

The Whining Stranger on Politics and Current Events: On 9/11

Given my profession, it's no surprise that I believe art and literature have a messianic propensity for salvation--or at least for offering the understanding of experience, the shaping of chaos into form, that seems to offer salvation as we stumble through our lives. Today I try to remember my early reactions to that tragic morning, five years ago. The disbelief that clouded my early day as I watched mass murder on television. The uncertainty that seemed to hover in the air in the weeks that followed.

This, of course, was all before insidious politicians tried to shape circumstance for me. It preceded the appropriation of grief to encourage a blind faith in unjustified violence. Before garish magnetic ribbons on the backs of gas-guzzling vehicles criss-crossing the empire's highways.

Five years later, one of the best responses to 9/11 is still one of the earliest: Toni Morrison's poem, "The Dead of September 11," which I first read in Vanity Fair around November of that weighty autumn. Read it and think about Morrison's compassionate response, and how it makes so much more sense--it shapes the chaos so much more efficiently--than so much of the nonsense that's followed in the half-decade since.

The Whining Stranger on Books and Reading: So Long, Mike Hammer.

RIP to Mickey Spillane, the great profane king of hardboiled crime fiction. Here's to one of the few writers who could get away with starting a novel, "The guy was dead as hell."

Read his obituary here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2275844,00.html

Musings: In Memoriam: Professor J.D. (1938-2006)

Last night my sister called me from back home with very sad news: my favorite undergraduate professor passed away yesterday. And just like that I have lost one of the most important influences in my life. He inspired me to become a literature professor. ("What? A life of talking about books with people? I can get paid for that?") He was one of the surrogate father figures to whom I turned when I lost my father suddenly at age eighteen. Professor J.D. was a model for me in so many ways, ranging from the profound to the superficial. I admired his self-deprecating wit in the classroom. I marvelled at his productivity (he was an internationally admired scholar of American literature; he was a prolific poet; he was a music critic too). I was helplessly flattered when he assigned me an A+ in a creative writing workshop and told me that he hoped it went to my head. I loved our lunches together, when we'd meet over beer and sandwiches at one of the campus pubs, and talk throughout the afternoon about novels and music and sports... Even the way I dress is, in part, indebted to him, such a fan was I of his L.L. Bean sweaters and tweed jackets and pressed khakis.

Last year, when my first academic book was in the proofs stage, I remembered (thankfully) at the last minute to include J.D.'s name in the acknowledgments. He'd long since been a first-hand influence on my scholarly work, but I wanted to register in some public way the long shadow he cast over all that I do professionally. It will long be one of my deepest regrets that I didn't send him a copy of those acknowledgments when the book was published, so he could see while he was alive how I held him in such high regard.

I pray that on some level he knew.

And I'll say now, that if I can ever touch a student even half as much as J.D. touched me in this lifetime, then this career will have been a successful one.

I will miss you, John.