It Doesn't Matter It's Christmas

December 25, 2009.  Friday.
The Situation:   Mway lies quietly on the floor, her snout buried in discarded product packaging and holiday wrapping.  Unusual day today: normally Moi has already taken Mway out for her early morning walk, long before I wake up.   But today everyone, Moi, me, Jungle Boy, and Jazz Baby, is spending all morning sitting around the living room, tearing up pieces of paper and plastic and throwing them on the floor.  Jazz’s German shepherd dog, a big white pup, has come along with her to visit.  He’s been pacing around the house, jumping up at the door windows, making a constantly shifting nuisance of himself; Moi and Jazz tie him up outside for a while, but he does nothing there but whimper and bark.  (I suspect he remembers a walk from his last visit.)  I try to keep my stuff, especially the food items, stacked in one corner of the living room, and keep clear at least a small area free of trash around me.  We reach the last few items to rip open around 11:30, and, though what I’d really like to do next is eat breakfast, I decide to take the dogs out, partly because I need some air, partly because I can’t stand Atlas pacing around any more.

State of the Path:   Mway scoots down the backyard sidewalk, her spindly legs carrying her slightly stout, but taut, body, the stub of her tail flexing.  She does her best to ignore the gangly Atlas frolicking at her side.  I’ve seen her snap at him in the past, but I suspect, although she’s not frightened of him, that she’s mindful that his mouth could just about engulf her head.  The path, which begins beyond out biggest outbuilding, is the same as it has been for the past few days.  The weeds along it are beaten down from the several snowfalls this past fall, but there are places the jaggers and briars still poke into the pathway, though you can sometimes whack them back with a stick, and where they are not too thick, you can try to trample them down to widen the path.   Where tall grass grows in summer, particularly down at bug land, the path is beginning to widen considerably.  At this time of year, the path makes a clear, unimpeded circuit down to the creek then back up.  There is also a side path along the old orchard, which however disappears as you doubleback to the main path through a thicket of blackberry briars and goldenrod – these have been knocked down by the snowfalls, but you still have to trample on them, very rough going for Mway to step on.  The side path along the failed skating pond is also clear, but this can be treacherous as you have to hop over the first feed channel, which is now filled with ice and whose foot holds on its banks are not clearly visible.   A few days ago I put a plank of wood across the channel, but it didn’t hold my weight, and my boot went plopping through the ice into freezing water.  Since my rubber boots (no more than a year old) are split open at the seams, they easily fill with water – they are about worthless, and my socks are always wet after my walk.  At the far end of the skating pond, the path is impeded by one of the sumac trees on the bank that fell over this past fall and pokes its branches into the path – since the weeds are down now, you can easily side step it.   The few inches of snow that fell here this past weekend from the big snowstorm that whammied the Big Metroplis are still on the ground.  The path itself is pitted with human foot prints, mostly iced up, and dog paw prints.  It is not bad walking, but I bring my own walking stick, because it can be slippery at places.  At the seeps down by bugland, the mud is frozen.   By the old orchard, I have noticed in the last few days a very strange animal path, like I’ve never seen before.  All over the place you see rabbit and squirrel prints, but there is an expressway of them running along the old orchard, a straight, deeply worn path of paw prints.

State of the Creek:   The water is at its typical height; it is not frozen and is still running despite the very cold weather the last couple weeks; only in a few places along the banks and the exposed tree roots are there a few small shelves of thin ice.   The last few days, you can hear the creek gurgling over the rocks.  I didn’t notice this today, as my attention was on the dogs.

The Fetch:   Atlas loves to come along for the walk and follows along fairly well.  Like Blue used to do, he wanders off frequently, but for the most part he keeps to the circuit with Mway and me, and ends up with us in the clearing behind the garden, where I always throw the stick for Mway.  The last few days I have been pitching the stick into the still standing areas of dead goldenrod, to get Mway to knock them down.   Today my hope is merely to try to throw the stick without Atlas interfering too much.  I brought two fetching sticks with me, because I know how Atlas acts.  Sure enough he behaves as I expect: doesn’t play fetch, but rather snatch-the-stick away-from-Mway-and-run-off-with-it.   I try to outsmart him for Mway’s sake: while he’s running away with the first stick, I throw the other one in the opposite direction.  Mway goes after that.  But Atlas then drops the first stick, and runs over to snatch away the second stick.   As the dogs tug, I find the first stick, throw that one.   Mway knows what I’m doing, what we’re trying to accomplish.  She runs after the first stick now.  Atlas drops the second stick, looks up for a moment, smiles; he’s not going to be outsmarted.   First one stick, then the other; on and on, back and forth.  After a while I snap a leash onto Atlas, and he pulls me back to the house.   Mway, however, doesn’t follow us to the door; instead, waits in the backyard, chewing on one of the sticks, in anticipation of my coming back to throw the stick in our usual fashion.

Walk to Mark the Silence

            Toward the end of 2009, I decided to start keeping a daily journal about taking my wife’s dog for a walk, as an exercise in defiance of a silence that had imposed itself around me (metaphysically, politically, culturally, psychologically – in short, in every way but literally, i.e. aurally).  It was not my expectation to dispel the silence: metaphysically it was necessary for a sense of self in the first place; in the other ways it was too powerful for me to do anything about.  I only hoped, by a wan gesture of protest, to mark the fact of its imposition, and to the extent that for an entire year I disciplined myself, after I took the dog for a walk (which I did almost every day), to sit down and write about it, I feel that I have been successful in fulfilling that hope.

            The journal bears all the scars of the exigencies of its production.  The walk and the writing usually occurring in the midst of a busy, noisy day, I often didn’t have time to write as much as I wanted, and seldom, if ever, the time to write as well as I would’ve liked.  Reflection and revision were practically impossible.  Such research as was needed had to be done in a hurry and was often incomplete.  Awkward phrases, clumsy transitions, redundancies, sloppy word choices, underdeveloped passages, slapdash punctuation, even misspellings – I haven’t had the chance to reread much, but these must be abundant.  The word “get,” I’m sure, must stand in frequently as le mot juste.  Such as it is then, the effort, the sheer commitment to the page and to the occasion, goes to being nearly everything; and perhaps the significance of what I’ve written – what’s interesting about it -- is solely sociological, if not medical.

            Nevertheless, there is content, a whole year’s worth, as much as anyone could want; and by happenstance, because I live near fields and woods, it turns out to be, somewhat startling to me, a nature journal -- however uninformed by any of the biological and geological sciences, and though less influenced perhaps by the roster of nature writers, from Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson, than by the de-naturalist perspective of Vivian in Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying” or the vision of nature de trop in the works of Samuel Beckett.  “The infinite variety of Nature,” Vivian says, “that is a pure myth….It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her”: hence, day after day as I took Mwayla for a walk near my house, noting a shrub first bare, then in leaf, another still bare, the first now in flower, the second finally in leaf, the first suddenly bearing fruit, the second yet in leaf, both at last bare again, I felt not only that I was witnessing the change of seasons but also that, like a weak jazz musician, I was stumbling, chorus after chorus, through the chord changes of a difficult tune.  Walks with Mway I call it; the title should bring to mind John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, though the differences are striking.  Steinbeck travels with his poodle in a truck camper from Maine to California in search of America; Mway and I stay entirely within our property, and only go as far as one of the neighbors can hit a golf ball.

            Part way through, it occurred to me I should be writing it as a blog.  But how could I do something that I’d only heard about?  My wife, more computer savvy than I am, eventually steered me in the right direction.  I’m starting late, so I’ve proposed to at least keep things even, putting December 25, 2009, up on line on December 25, 2010, December 26, 2009, up on line on December 26, 2010, and so on through the days of the year until December 24, 2010, my last entry, goes up on December 24, 2011.  The effect will be like nothing except what occurs in science fiction: a man, stuck in the past with his wife’s dog, sending messages through time to the present to anyone in the world who might hear him.

            Good reading everyone,

           

            Sisyphus Gregor