As the weather evens out from a summer of cruel heat and constant rain, I have taken to sitting at the top of the hill at Riverdale Park with Beckett every evening. We did this when he was a baby, around the same hour, but we lost the habit of it.
We watch the baseball players, or the soccer players, or the Ultimate Frisbee players. I speak softly to him and finger-comb his coat. He sits very still, or licks my hand, or just lays down and watches the games, and the the other dogs, and the people. It's a very personal communion; we sit very close together and just...connect.
I was thinking about the pandemic this afternoon, how unmooring it all was to have the dailyness of our lives pulled out from under our feet. It's an old plaint, and I'm bored with going over it. But in this case, it was part of a larger thought. That very unmooring contained a hidden blessing.
It allowed me to separate myself emotionally from people, places, and things that I wanted terribly, but which were never meant for me. It allowed me space to forgive betrayals even as I said goodbye to the people who weren't what I'd hoped and believed them to be.
At the same time, I found myself steadily and surely returned into my own actual life, my own space, my own time. I was filled with new love for the people who had never wavered in their love for me, and who had always been there—the heart-bricks of my true house as it were; the true keepers of my true memories. Most tellingly I was reconnected with my own cherished hopes and dreams, my sense of myself as...well, 𝑚𝑒.
Tonight, on the way to the park, I met a friend I hadn't seen for more than a decade. He was one of the brightest lights of a very happy, very cherished, very specific garland of memories. I was delighted by how well I fit into his embrace, and how familiar he felt, and how familiar the joy I felt in his company was. We parted company with plans to have dinner soon, and we will.
I approached the top of the hill with a very light heart.
The sun was setting, and the games were winding down. Beckett flopped down on the grass as I began to pet him (the only break from that peace was the hog-wrestling I had to do with him to get this shot of us.) As the light faded from the sky, I spoke softly to him and pressed my face into his fur, and remembered how, a nanosecond ago, he was a small, sleek, impossibly shiny puppy. He still smelled the same to me, and the rhythm of his breathing had only very slightly changed.
In that moment, there was literally nothing more important than this communion with a beloved Labrador who wasn't always going to be with me. There was nothing more important than the joy of rediscovering my friend after all that time, and finding my love unchanged. I don't know if I missed this before, or if I always knew it, but it all rang deeply and resonantly new, and true.
So, of course, fuck you, COVID, for what you did to all of us. That's a given.
But also, thank you.
Thank you for locking me in a small room with my own life for a year and half, and not letting me out until I'd made some peace with some of it. Thank you for the reminder of what, and who, is actually important, and how much of the rest of it was me playing a part in someone else's narrative for so long that I'd mistakenly begun to believe it was my own script all along.
Thank you for reunions with long-absent friends. Thank you for later-summer evening sunsets. Thank you for 11-year old Labradors who hate having their picture taken, but who still, inexplicably, smell like puppies. Thank you for clearer sight going forward, and all the lessons that go with that. Thank you for second chances. Thank you for open roads.
