Talk About Autumn

I'm finally getting over losing my dog.

I feel like I'm supposed to call her "our" dog, because she was certainly a joint project. There was plenty of vomit I never cleaned up personally. So I acknowledge my wife and friends who helped bring her this far. But fuck it, Autumn was my dog.

Meredith always said Autumn was a Texas dog. She's lean and loved being in the sun, lying on concrete, soaking up heat from every angle. When we moved here, to finish the Texasing of our dog, I put her in her crate in the back of our minivan, and we made the 2-day trip together. She whined for three hours, all the way past Baltimore, until somewhere in Virginia she stopped and accepted her fate.

Dogs are not renowned for their foresight, so we sort of assumed that Autumn had decided her life was now all about riding in a dog crate in the back of a minivan with me, and adapted.

I slept in the car with her at rest stops. We were both caged for 48 hours during the drive. We took a break the next day in Alabama, and I let her run around off-leash on Samford's quad in the bleak late January of 2015. Here's our selfie with the Ralph Beeson statue.

Still staring down the drive at Lakeshore after all these years.

Autumn and Player 3 coexisted for a while. We were wary of ever putting them together, but when he was small and immobile, we shooed her away and she got the idea. Eventually though, Player 3 learned to walk and he learned to grab and he learned that Autumn did fun things.

He was right! Autumn did lots of fun things when she wasn't vomiting partially digested fecal matter on the carpet. She jumped and ran and chased balls and was cheerfully violent—no malice, just strong and enthusiastic. From puppyhood, we trained her to roughhouse because we liked roughhousing with her.

We are not particularly renowned for our foresight either. We never planned ahead for what to do when someone small and grabby came along who wasn't good at roughhousing.

July 2015, things came to a relatively gentle head. I was kneeling on the floor, and Player 3 tottered across our small apartment trying to get a hand on Autumn. I tried to keep them separated, but was literally in no position to stop either one of them. 

Autumn got freaked out by my discomfort and the kid's unpredictability, so she told him to back off with a growl and by grazing his cheek with her teeth. She didn't bite him. She didn't draw blood. But he cried at the shock of it. The incident was portentious. Player 3 would not learn boundaries as quickly as Autumn needed him to. And I am not sufficiently ubiquitous to police them.

I briefly considered not telling Meredith, but I'm not into keeping dirty secrets from my wife. And even if I hadn't, I knew we needed to change before next time ended less benignly. We had seen Autumn fight a dog before. She is not big, but she is strong and tenacious. We could not wait and hope that her pit-mix jaws would never clamp on the boy.

I spent some time looking for another home for her, but our network in Austin was (still is) very small and quickly tapped. So I made an appointment to take her to the shelter. There was no opening for three more weeks, so we lived in a state of arrested relations for six weeks with Autumn in her crate almost constantly, to insure against further unpredictable interactions. It sucked, but maybe the drive from Philly to Austin six months before helped her adapt.

The day I took her to the shelter in mid-September, I fed her well, and we went for an extra-long walk. On our return, she plopped next to me in an armchair, hanging over one arm. We sat together for half an hour. I read and stroked her back. She smelled things. Then it was time to go.

Surrendering a family pet to the shelter is an unnecessarily lengthy process, especially when one has an appointment. One is asked to wait long past the appointment time, on a precipice of sorrow. You cannot fall in yet, because you must keep your dog from mingling with all the other dogs and cats in a constant trickle through the doors. Vigilance overrides sentiment. A dog fight in the shelter waiting room bodes poorly for your dog's chances of getting adopted.

Then, you must stand next to a kiosk with your dog and verbally answer the questions you already answered on the surrender form. Interruptions are frequent, and you have low priority on the task list. The intake administrator ignores your sniffles and eye leaks. You admit your failure as an owner to all the kindness and sympathy that government employees are known for. I had to check the box that said we could not take her back in the event that she had to be put down. If they could not find a home for her, that was her end.

After half an hour of standing and re-answering questions, they took Autumn's leash. She hid behind my legs when they took her. She was joyously explosive when we were around, and (we heard) timid when we were away. Fortunately, the administrator's demeanor sea-changed once she was not talking to me. Her borderline dismissiveness with me turned to sweetness and babytalk for Autumn. 

But Autumn did not want to go. She wanted to stay with me. Her tail curled under; the timidity we always heard about kicked in as she pulled away, trying to stay with me. Someone I had never met took her leash and dragged her through an institutional metal door. And then it closed.

That was the last chink in my failing dam of stoicism. I fled the waiting room. Sat on a bench under a tree and cried my face ugly.

For weeks after I would lie awake at night wondering if we had done the right thing. If I took her to exercise more, she could burn off energy. If I devoted a couple of hours to her every day, I could rehabilitate her. Right? I'd never done that before, but now would be different? 

"I think maybe I should go try to get Autumn back," I would say sometimes.

"I don't know what to say when you say that," my wife said eventually. 

I stopped saying it.

When you surrender a dog to the shelter, you don't get updates. Maybe she was adopted immediately. Maybe they put her down last week. You don't really get to know. But we got lucky. Twice, Meredith inadvertently found updates.

 Once, Autumn was the pet of the week on a local TV show. There was a video of a volunteer bringing her home overnight, and Autumn was laser focused on a tennis ball throughout the entire video.

This is also how we found out that the "mix" is autumn's pit-mix is probably "black mouth cur." The Philadelphia shelter where we got Autumn as a puppy told us she was likely a German Shepherd mix, which we scoffed at immediately. We didn't know what she was, but it wasn't no german freaking shepherd.

After we looked at pictures of black mouth curs on the internet though, it was obvious. Her color and build scream BMC. It's just the skinny pit head and maniacally strong jaws that look like a pit bull.


And the second time, on December 24, 2015, Facebook coughed up pictures of our girl being taken home by someone.

You can tell it is her, because of the intensity with which she is clenching that ball.

 (And the one eye.)

I don't know who this woman is. I probably never will. But I am so happy that she gave Autumn another home. So glad Autumn got another shot.




I still miss my dog, but we made the right, hard choice. And now, going on a year after we decided to give her up, I have room to talk about it. Here's one more picture of her in lapdog mode, which was most of the time, and which no one outside our house ever really got to see, lying in the crook of my leg on the couch.

We still love you, Autumn. I hope your life is joyous and filled with tennis balls.

Cry Havok

My eyes water a lot more in my 40s.

I'm fleetingly aware that my emotions have been out of whack for most of my life. I'm still not sure what emotional health really looks like; without a model, I'm unclear that I'm doing it "right."  But the depressions are shallower and briefer, and I like to think the mood swings have improved as I age. (Although they started surfacing again a few months before Player 3 was born. Maybe they were more untriggered than resolved.)

Another sign that the terrain is shifting though, is how much more frequently I tear up at music—compared to the "never" of my youth.

I have a long-standing love of Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love music. A few years ago, I noticed that just the opening chords of his song, Nothing Like a Train, make me moisten around the eyeballs. When I hear them, I relax. It feels like everything will be OK.

"Irrational" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and feelings are almost by definition irrational. But there's no reason for me to feel "OK" about this song. It's a sad song. I just do. A couple of Dar Williams ditties do it to me too, and a tune by the Weakerthans. Something in the folk/rock makeup that turns the spigot, somehow.

Most recently, I've noticed it at church. The community we're settling into in Austin, Servant Church, does hymn standards much more often than my beloved Circle of Hope.

Circle's DIY ethos extended all the way to worship music. They wrote a lot of their own songs, and cribbed a few others. That was fine.

But hymns have been winnowed. You don't generally hear crap hymns. Since most hymns are more than 20 years old, there's a clear consensus on what the good ones are, and there's a nice catalog of them. You can sing the good ones on a rotation, and it takes a long time to repeat.

These old, tested songs, I did not know how deeply they had burrowed into the masonry of my heart. "Immortal, Invisible" is not what you'd call a tearjerker, but that thing unpacks majesty. Somewhere in the second or third verse, once it's good and warmed up, I need a tissue.

Will this phenomenon intensify? I imagine embarrassing myself as I get older, turning weepy every Sunday, more frequently dashing to hit skip on a shuffle play because I don't want to cry right now dammit.

I don't like that I've become this way. But also, I love it. I spent a bunch of years in a Cold War with emotion. Like an arm slept on, I can expect some prickle as this limb awakes.

I like to move it

According to some social science report I'm not going to bother researching for this post, moving is one of the most stressful events in an adult's life. And it is!

A lot of the stress revolves around how much petty crap you have to remember to do. Address changes and tying up loose ends at the old place and still walking the dog at the end of the day.

I imagine that if some disaster hit, a fire or earthquake or war—from which we all made it out safely—and we had to flee our old home and start up in another location... that would have been almost preferable. Just drop the mic and walk away.

Instead there are literally dozens of hanging tendrils from the change that remain unaddressed. Nothing terrible, but all need to be done.

No one's bothered to make a list of what remains undone, so one floats by occasionally (Did we get the car registered yet?) and free-floating stress just drifts in, interrupting and complicating whatever else you were doing. (No! And it's overdue! Hope no one notices!)

My wife has commented before that I only get irritable over small things. She has been surprised by my calm during large, intense events. When our beloved (and sometimes behated) dog almost died, she was, I think, almost angry at how casually I behaved.

But then, I knew what I could do and what I couldn't. I knew what my responsibility and capability was. I wanted Autumn to live, but if she didn't, it was out of my control. If she died, we would grieve and keep living. If she lived, we would play-fight with her and take her down to the river for swimming again and things would be well.

Contrast that to a bat-swarm of responsibilities that come after a move, with no clear boundaries or action plans, or even a scope of what must be done. And we're not even done! We're just in the starter apartment! Buying and occupying a permanent home is still on the horizon!

But I still like moving. I like new places. Circle of Hope in Philadelphia taught me the joy and value in staying. But that pied piper plays a mean flute, and now I'm stressed in Austin.

Lent 2015: time-wasting

This Lent I have set myself the quixotic sacrifice of time-wasting.

It's sort of hard to know what's wasting time and what's fiddling. Sometimes reading a comic book is wasting time, and sometimes it's productive stimulation and sometimes it's research.

But as a concrete expression, I have barred myself from my ipad. No dinky time waster games for 40+ days. No reddit on the tablet.

I can still waste time on my desktop, and I do. Or even on a couple of analog time wasters I've got here. But when I find myself wandering that direction, I am at least aware of it and try to veer back in the direction of doing something instead of nothing.

At the Ash Wednesday worship we went to, it was impressed on me that the vice, the thing you give up for Lent, is not the point. You walk around and you're like "I'm giving up hooch for Lent." But that's not the deal.

The deal is that when your vice is gone, you've kicked your own crutch away. The vice was covering over a hole and now you have an obvious hole in you. 

Depending on how long you've had that cover-up there, you might not even know what's living in that hole these days. Maybe it's just an emptiness. Or maybe it contains things you put in there because you didn't want to have to look at them any more. And now you're looking at them. For 40 days.

But that's not the point either! The real point is that God is there to help you fill up the hole. The point is more God. And the by-product is a wholer, holier you when you two are done with that.

For me, living in a brand new city strips even more away, because I have a lot of free time. Which means a lot of opportunity to waste time. Which means a lot of opportunity to stare into the hole and asking God what kind of spackle this thing is going to take.

Restless and deprived of my usual consciousness salves, it's been grim so far. I've been reading a book on the Holy Spirit which isn't grabbing me. Tonight I finished a book of Robert Howard's Solomon Kane stories, which has actually been more productive. (Solomon Kane—worst Puritan ever or pure psychotic?)

But I'm hopeful about what things will look like come resurrection day. The antsier I feel now, the more I hope for an epiphanic payout. A lasting change instead of the returning tide of mild hedonism.

Go Not-Very-Far Together

The African proverb says that if you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far, go together. It doesn't say anything about how exhausting going far will be when you go together.

I've been in Austin for about a month. Only now am I not falling into a comatose stupor at 10 pm every night and waking up 10 hours later, barely refreshed, having dreamed seemingly every somnolent moment.

M talks about not knowing how to make friends. I think I know how, except that there's a one-year-old in tow, who does not give a red-crayon shit about the ennobling discussion I'd like to have with a just-met would-be peer. Being responsible for a young child is like having a hobby that somehow pushes you away from sharing your interests with others.

I know how to find places where like-minded people gather, make ingratiating small talk, and slowly entwine my life with those of promising strangers. It's hard, but I understand the mechanics. I've never tried to do this under such odd restraints though. I have to flee the scene during afternoon nap time and the very second dinner ends to make it home in time to bed down the loveable demand factory.

I do not see how the African proverb makers found the ability to go anywhere together. We can barely make it to the Chipotle and back.

I would think the entire proposition untenable, except that billions of adults do it every day.