Since we last spoke, I:

- Wrote a little more of my book, but not enough to please my conscience.

- Met some of the Manly Fireplug’s family on the Jersey Shore, watched his mother play the penny slot machines in Atlantic City, took a quick tour of Philly, and lost my wallet in a cab on my way out of New York City. On my way to the airport. As in, no ID for security. No claim ticket for my car in the Oakland airport’s long-term parking lot. No credit cards or cash. But I managed to make it home and thanks to an intrepid girl on the Upper West Side who climbed into the cab after me, I even got my wallet back.

- Considered the trip a total success when the Fireplug’s mother said to him, in reference to me, “What’s not to like?”

- Got Louie’s ashes delivered to me in a box.

- Bought my first-ever suit, so that I can look good for my little brother’s wedding next month. How I got to the age of 36 without ever owning a suit is beyond me, and probably not worth your time.

- Threw out all of my long-held beliefs about only adopting mutts from shelters, and started looking into getting a purebred puppy. A small one so that I can take him with me to more places. I am turning into the bourgeoisie gay man I used to ridicule. But fuck it, having dogsat in the past for a Norwich terrier, I want one of my own. Here is a pic of some random person’s Norwich puppy. Perhaps you can see the appeal.

- Started looking into the possibility of getting an outside office, as the whole working-from-home thing is proving to be more of a challenge than I imagined. Found an ideal place that I can afford, that is currently under construction.

- Realized that, while waiting for both a puppy and an office, I’ve made absolutely no progress on becoming a more patient human being.

- Traveled with the Fireplug to a gay resort near Saugatuck, Michigan, for “INFERNO,” a SM retreat hosted by the Chicago Hellfire Club. Came back with a couple bruises and the sounds of whips and flogs and paddles hitting bare flesh still echoing in my ears. Not to mention a few sights burned into my retinas for all time.

-Bought my first piece of luggage-with-wheels. Between that and the suit, I am becoming a grown-up.

- Developed a taste, during our plane trips, for the New York Times crossword puzzle. Can barely make it though Monday without help.

- Made it an entire year with the Fireplug. Today’s our first anniversary. I love the guy.

On Sunday, I stood blank-eyed in front of a display of Hostess products at Safeway. The Manly Fireplug came up behind me. “Think of it as sitting shiva for Louie,” he said. “You can eat whatever the fuck you want.”

I pondered that for a moment. “When did they come out with Caramel Ho-Ho’s?” I asked. He shrugged. I bought some tapioca pudding instead.

Sharing custody of Louie with the Ex, and my two years away in New York, have accustomed me to not seeing him for certain lengths of time. So it’s not like I’m hysterical with grief. I tend to cry during stupid television shows, or when I make the mistake of replaying parts of the euthanasia in my head. It ranks up there as one of the more intense experiences of my life. I think about the Ex now the way I imagine you’d think about someone with whom you survived a plane crash.

The numbness began wearing off today. I pruned some trees around my back deck, and sat in the sun looking around at my container garden, which I had repotted last weekend. Oy vey, the symbolism!

Otherwise I’ve been trying to remain vigilant; monitoring myself and doing my best to separate self-pity from normal sadness. I don’t always know the difference, nor do I really understand why this distinction is so important to me right now, other than the fact that I’m self-conscious about how self-centered I’ve become. I suppose writing a memoir, and keeping a blog, will do that to you.

Which is why I welcomed a new freelance job offered to me, writing profiles on Bay Area artists for a small newspaper. I doubt you’ve heard of this publication. Still, for the first time in my life I was getting paid to write, and I could build up clips to show other papers or magazines, should I end up liking the work. But interviewing another artist for an hour or so, transcribing their words, and then shaping those words and a few observations into something coherent, was a way of thinking about someone else for a while.

But then my editor asked if I’d cover this local conference for high tech investors, and wanting to please him, I said yes. I should have listened to my gut. The conference ran this past Thursday through Sunday. Louie died Friday, and I had to go back the next morning and bravely blink back tears as I sat through presentations on semiconductor design and investment strategies in the renewable energy sector. (Hmm, I think that might qualify as self-pity).

I’m not cut out to be a reporter. A artist profiler, sure. They know they’re getting interviewed ahead of time. But walking up to complete strangers with a tape recorder and asking them questions about a subject that I have:

a) no real knowledge of, and
b) no real interest in

was utter torture for a well-documented introvert like myself. I realized that this new-found Interest in Others doesn’t extend to Vice Presidents of Marketing Strategies.

So I had to turn in two articles on this conference, which I worked on until the last second, all the while nursing a resentment that was nobody’s fault but my own. In fact, I turned the whole assignment into this major crisis in my head, such that when I finally finished, I’d blown more than a few synapses, which is how I ended up sleepwalking past Hostess displays and (imagine this) turning down the Manly Fireplug’s proposition of hot sex.

But today is a gorgeous day in San Francisco. The Fireplug and I have front row tickets for Kiki and Herb on Sunday. I’ve recently perfected the art of making a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and, emboldened, bought The Joy of Cooking. Tonight the Fireplug will play guinea pig for Fettuccine with Salmon and Asparagus. After which, allowing an hour or so for proper digestion, I hope to get lucky.

Thanks for all the comments and emails and well wishes. It’s hard for me to believe that only two weeks have passed since that visit to the vet and the three-month diagnosis. The vet started Louie on three separate meds for his heart condition, at which point he pretty much stopped eating. Since he’d always been crazy for food, I couldn’t help but worry. I tried everything: peanut butter, hot dogs, eggs, salami. Sometimes he’d eat broiled chicken, so I bought a couple bags of frozen chicken breasts.

Nor did the meds seem to help much. His back legs continued to weaken. I started carrying him up the two flights of stairs in my apartment. Pretty soon I had to carry him down, too. But he was able to walk down the block to the park, and he’d wag his tail when I’d come home.

But he kept getting weaker, and pretty soon he couldn’t walk more than half the block on his own. On Friday I was home all day with him. He still hadn’t eaten, and I could literally see his heart pounding in his chest, off-beat and irregular. I don’t think he slept at all that day. He had a couple of miserable moments trying to navigate his weak back legs when going to the bathroom, at which point the Ex and I took him to the vet Friday evening.

The three vets on duty, two of which had seen him before, all agreed that there was only one option left. My gut had told me the same all day. Their consensus made the decision easier; still, I was prepared to dislike the vet who would give him the injection. But since she cried, too, it was hard to hold a grudge.

We signed a form asking for him to be cremated, and his ashes returned to us. And then we held Louie while he died. The only thing harder than that was leaving him there.

When I came home, I saw that the light in the stairwell, where I had carried Louie every day for the past two weeks, had burned out. And when I turned on my bedside lamp, the bulb flashed and burned out as well.

I’d had Louie for twelve years. He’d outlived most of my friendships, and all of my boyfriends. He’d seen me sober, then not, then sober again. I’d adopted him when I was twenty-four, which seems like a different lifetime now. In some strange way, his death felt like the death of my younger self, that optimistic boy in Minneapolis. I admit I can be a little dramatic.

For the first week after his diagnosis, I felt like I was drowning in regrets, for the ways in which I had not been a good dad to him, when I was drinking, when I had left him for grad school in New York. At one point during that first week, we were out on my back deck, and he hopped off the side to pee in the bushes, and his back legs gave out on him and he fell in the grass. I tried to lift him up, but he looked as though his pride had been hurt and he wanted to just lay there for a while. The phone rang inside, and for a minute I stood at my bedroom window, looking out at him. His back was to me, and he lay in the grass, in the sun, and my heart was breaking because I felt like there was already this line between us, over which I could not follow him. I wanted to know what he was thinking or feeling, but I’d never really know, because he was a dog, and he couldn’t tell me. Nor could I tell him how sorry I was for my past mistakes, and be sure that he’d understand.

After a couple of days, though, I could see how wallowing in regret was just a form of self-indulgence. No doubt he had forgiven me a long time ago. Still, I needed those last two weeks to forgive myself. Every time I carried him up and down those stairs, my heart broke a little more. But in that moment I was nowhere else; I was carrying him, I was with him, my mind focused on the task at hand, at holding him in a way that was the least discomforting to him. And it filled me with a sense of purpose. For the last two weeks I waited on him hand and foot, and treated him the way I wished I had always treated him.

There is a part of me that can’t imagine a world without Louie. There’s a part of me that still wants to believe, against all evidence, that if I love someone enough, they will be exempt from illness or death. There’s a part of me that winces when I get this sentimental. But Louie was one of a kind. Everyone says that about their dog, but in this case it’s true.

That night I replaced the bulbs that had burned out. I threw away his meds. I put his water and food bowls in the dishwasher. But I left his bed in my room for a little while longer.

I kept thinking the veterinarian looked awfully uncomfortable, kneeling on the hard cement floor before our little bench in Exam Room B. Granted, it was beautifully treated cement, in a beautiful clinic in a renovated warehouse down on Alabama Street, the same clinic where Louie had gone for his throat surgery not so long ago. In spite of the beautiful floors, and the exposed brick, and the gorgeous wooden support beams, however, they neglected to give the vets themselves decent chairs. Or so I imagined. Maybe they were only missing from Exam Room B, on this particular night, last night, the night she told the Ex and me that Louie had about three months left to live.

“Of course we can’t be certain,” she said. “That’s just based on the medical literature regarding his specific conditions.”

We nodded soberly. I had a small notebook in hand on which I had dutifly scrawled three symptoms of heart failure, after which I had grown a bit distracted and left the page blank. Later the Ex and I, driving back to his place with Louie in the Ex’s Scion Milktruck, agreed that we had both hoped that the dog we’d raised since he was twelve weeks old might live until he was fifteen, and not just twelve years of age. Somehow we’d both had “fifteen” in our heads, separately, I suppose since fifteen years sounds like a reasonable age for a good, healthy, ridiculously sweet dog to achieve. Or maybe we’d just hoped to keep putting off this kind of conversation for another year or two.

The vet was pretty, a young intern with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, who kept adusting the rims of her glasses as she spoke, looking down at her notes, then back up at us, dividing, I noticed, her eye contact equally between the two of us, rather admirably. She reminded me of someone that I couldn’t quite place. Louie, she said, had right heart failure and left heart failure. One filled his stomach with fluids, the other filled his lungs. Those were the two contributing symptoms. But the main, underlying problem was nearly elegant in its simplicity; Louie had an enlarged heart. In the cold exam room I was struck by the metaphoric connotations: my dog was dying because his heart was too big.

Later the Ex and I split a barbeque chicken pizza at his apartment on Twin Peaks. The Ex had carried Louie, all seventy pounds of him, up the two flights of stairs, since our dog’s hind legs were growing too weak. I myself only carried a ziplock baggie filled with three prescription bottles, and a print-out of instructions. I walked behind them up the stairs. Louie’s tail wagged underneath the Ex’s arm, the whole way up.

Louie drank a lot of water, ate his dinner, and then spent the next half an hour throwing up. I grew more than a little discouraged, seeing him that way. But when the pizza arrived he gazed up at me with those big brown “I would like to help you with your barbeque chicken” eyes. Clearly he still felt all right, especially once I gave him a bit of crust.

Tonight he’s at my place, a dog in high demand, licking his lips after a frozen liver treat.

And today it hit me: the vet reminded me of Diana Prince, Wonder Woman’s alter ego, as played by Linda Carter. The way she’d slip off her glasses and let loose her hair before spinning around like a supernova. Here she’s gotten herself into a predicament:

Sort of like our vet, seated on the floor. Any gay boy in his thirties can tell you that Diana Prince needed her arms and legs free in order to spin herself into Wonder Woman. Things are not currently going her way.

Of course today, three decades later, there are a ton of super heroes running around on big and small screens all over our tiny global village. This probably has less to do with an aching need for real-life heroes, and more to do with the universal desire to Have a Secret Super Power. Whether one uses it for the greater good or not is, of course, a matter of personal choice. But wouldn’t it be nice, to live in that world, to find, through clever means or just plain luck, a way to slip your bonds, to slip off your glasses with one hand, let down your hair with the other, and to spin, and spin, and spin, transformed with an explosion of pure light, into someone else, someone with enough power to change an unfortunate course of events.

It was time for a change. I wanted greater creative autonomy and a more convenient program for maintaining my site, and chose to sacrifice looking good under someone else’s design. It may not look as pretty, but it’s a little more mine. I took a WordPress template, made a bunch of modifications, and after much tedious labor (Dogpoet, completely flummoxed by Photoshop for Dummies, throws the book across the room), designed a couple of defiantly amateurish images, too. Hope you’ll update your links and bookmarks, as I need constant validation in order to get out of bed in the morning.

The transition wasn’t exactly smooth. I bet the “Import-all-five-years-of-your-archives-from-Blogger” button is amazing, when it works.

Then again, my understanding of HTML and CSS and PHP is sort of like a roll of duct tape holding a house together. Feel free to let me know what’s not working (the sidebar wasn’t appearing last night on my Manly Fireplug’s PC) as I tinker around. I’ll do my best to care. Update: the sidebar still isn’t appearing correctly on PC’s; can someone tell me what to do?

Oh, and my dog is recovering very nicely. Thanks for the well-wishes.

And yay, party in the comments!

Of all the things to be told over the phone, “Your dog has collapsed and is on the way to the hospital,” ranks up there as one of the least appealing, if not the most memorable. Especially when those words are expressed through tears and with a tone of outright despair.

“I”ll meet you there,” I told my Ex, who’d had custody of Louie last week. I pressed “End,” laced up my shoes, threw on a baseball cap, and drove down to the SPCA, all the while gently putting the idea of my dog’s mortality “on hold,” if only for the next ten minutes.

Four hours, two vet clinics, a couple of waiting rooms, no food, and one thousand dollars later, Louie had an appointment with a surgeon first thing Monday. Over time my little rugrat had apparently developed larangeal paralysis, in which the two little flaps at his voicebox, which open and close with normal breathing, had closed up and stubbornly refused to open again. Which meant he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. My poor boy had been slowly, silently suffocating while I sat slack-jawed in front of the television, watching yet another Project Runway marathon.

We left Louie with the vets for observation. At home I crashed. Sitting in the two waiting rooms, nursing a dangerously low, breakfast-free blood sugar level, had worn me out, and reminded me uncomfortably of my waiting room experiences during my mother’s illness, as did the surgeon’s too-casual mention of a tracheostomy, in the event the surgery didn’t go as planned. The odds of having two family members with holes in their throats were preposterous, and I decided not to dwell there.

Forty-four hours and two thousand dollars later, Louie came home. Getting him there was a bit of an ordeal, as my 70-pound ball of furry love was heavily sedated. The cute vet tech with the bullet plug earrings, who’d told me Louie was anxious to go home, walked him out on a leash, with a sort of padded sling holding up Louie’s wobbly back end. The leash crossed over Louie’s chest, in order to protect his throat, which was shaved and heavily bandaged. His front right leg was wrapped in a purple bandage which covered his IV incision. His back left leg was wrapped in a white bandage which covered a patch of transdermal pain medication.

“You look like a Flashdance casualty,” I told him.

He regarded me groggily from the back seat, and tried to pull himself up into a seated position.

“Lie down, you’re not missing anything” I said, and turned my attention back to the road. I took the corners at 3 mph.

My Ex, who actually works for a living, agreed that I’d be a better candidate for home nurse, what with my rather flexible schedule. I carried Louie from the car to my bed, where he promptly passed out for the rest of the day.

“How’s he doing?” The Ex asked when he called.

I described the various medications and instructions he’d been sent home with. “He’s got one of those lampshades.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, the E-collar.”

“What’s an E-collar?”

“Elizabethan. Keeps him from licking at his wounds.”

“Oh!” the Ex said. “One of those lampshades.”

“Right,” I said. “He got the ghetto version. It’s made out of floppy blue vinyl.”

“Sounds pretty.”

“Very. I’m thinking of wearing it as a skirt. With a pair of saucy slingbacks.”

Silence.

“There’s something wrong with you,” the Ex said.

But Louie, as it turned out, needed the lampshade. The next night, after I’d left him alone for a couple of hours, I came home to find that the purple bandage around his front leg was missing. As in, nowhere to be seen.

“Where did you put it?” I asked him. He gave me a blank look. “Did you eat it?”

My dog, just as sensitive as his daddy, bowed his head in shame.

“Oh, honey,” I said. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at your illness.”

He’d also scratched at his scar; his throat bandage hung open, and I could see for the first time the dozen staples holding his skin together. “Shit.” I sighed and looked away, surveying my room. “Oh my God,” I said. “You’ve been eating my jade plant. You’re delirious,” I sat down next to him. “And I’m a horrible father.”

The white bandage on his back leg was coming unglued as well. I searched through my closet and pulled out a roll of duct tape. “Good boy,” I said, as I gently wrapped his leg. He gave me a look of vulnerability and absolute trust, and at that moment the sense of tenderness and responsibility I felt for him nearly broke my heart. I understood then the difference between my mother’s illness and my dog’s illness. With my mother I felt no sense of control; her disease decided the course of events, and the various minor surgeries (the tracheostomy, the stomach feeding tube) were merely speed bumps on the road to the inevitable end.

Louie was different. I’d had him for eleven years, since he was twelve weeks old, and he wasn’t a puppy anymore. Someday I’d have to make a decision of enormous power; and the power felt like both a burden and a gift. I couldn’t keep him alive, but I could spare him pain: a lopsided compromise with fate.

And like every other time I’d imagined that day, I quickly put the thought out of my head. The only decision to make that night was when to fasten the lampshade around his neck, which I did before lights out.

“I know,” I said. “It’s a pain in the ass.”

He sulked while I stroked his head and murmured in his ear, “I love you, Jennifer Beals.”

Haiku

for Jennie

Golden dog, blue bed
Louie, lie still. I gotta
cut your long black nails

Hi. My name is Michael and I’m an Aries and I like driving at night with the windows down. And fried chicken.

My middle name is Lowell, my grandfather’s name. I used to hate it when I was a kid. I wanted a normal name like Tom or Scott. But now I like it.

I have a dog named Louie and I work in an animal shelter. I like dogs but I often don’t like dog people. Louie likes my job more than I do. I think people like my dog more than they like me, too. But I’m okay with that.

I think a lot about flow and what fits and if something doesn’t fit it drives me crazy and I annoy all my friends and loved ones talking about it till it fits or goes away.

Sometimes at night the sky over San Francisco is so bright that it keeps me awake. But I won’t shut the blinds.

I always get the worst songs stuck in my head. This morning in the shower I was singing “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.”

In spite of this I’ve had friends threaten to take away my gay membership card because I wear flannel shirts and own a few Bruce Springsteen CD’s. What do they know about being a gay?

I resent my writing instructor because she fawns over all the women, especially the blind one.

But maybe that’s good for me.

If I love you I will soak up all your favorites; books, music, movies, artists, philosophers.

If I love you I will rearrange my days.

If I love you I will save all your letters and scraps of paper.

If I love you I will put your pictures on my desktop.

If I love you I will try and write it down.

My name is Michael and I like roller coasters, scary movies, and pudding.

climb

There is the sense of language trapped like dank water caught in an old tire, or a swamp stagnating in the harsh sun….no mystery or energy rippling beneath its surface…and it will stay there unless you dig a small trench, with a shovel or even a thin, sturdy stick, from the pool towards a descending curve of the earth, gravity drawing the water gently, incessantly through the channel you’ve dug, a trickle turning to a steady stream, leaves caught in the current, turning one direction and then another, their green and yellow edges twisting, spinning, revealing the water’s intentions that flow beneath its surface.

There’s the new job, of course; the phone calls and the registration forms and the credit card numbers scrawled at the bottom of handwritten faxes. Vaccination records and adoption certificates copied and stapled. And then the names, all the names: Luna and Lulu and Marley and Tulley and Sammy and Jake and Booyah and Kayla and Titan and Oscar. Classes and dates, scrawled, crossed-out, underlined, last-minute pleadings we’re having an obedience emergency, please please can we get into the class tonight and Excel spreadsheets with fields copied, cut, pasted as the capricious nature of people and their dogs and their schedules demand.

And I’m tired; every new job leaves me tired, my worry of the small details, the folders and the receipts and the waiting lists and the voice mails. It takes time, to adjust, to streamline the chaos left by the former coordinator, to page through stacks of unreturned calls and expired credit cards and letters of complaint. To steel myself for each call, each voice a little world of worry or privilege or frustration. Every employer I’ve ever had has been damn lucky to have me.

But I’m happy when I’m busy…the laws of physics propelling me forward a body in motion stays in motion but to write I need to sit still, to have a few moments of silence.

And the doubt. Reading the words of other online journals, just one or two, here and there, the cynicism and the posturing…I absorb it, take it too seriously, too personally…like a drug injected, humming with the blood rushing through my veins. And one or two ruin it for me, just one or two detract from the brightness and the generosity all the others pour out. Resolution #1. Stop reading the one or two. Or better, don’t take it personally. Instead, go back, read the ones I love, and see in them their singular human flawed sacred life, all their own, see them write it down, see them try, each day, to say it, say their lives, their private vocabularies spinning language, sewing one word to the next, raising the tattered cloth on flagpoles that sing as the cords strike the metal and bounce back towards the sky. “All I can say” the emerald-eyed poet wrote, snapping pictures of the lights flying past her on the bridge.

You either get it or you don’t, the atomic monkey boy said, his voice brushing my ear though several states separated us. He meant, I think, that at least the two of us get it. I hope I get it, I hope I always get it. I hope I always have in my life those that get it.

But I do. And I will.

Tonight, stepping out of the cabin and into the dark; moonlight glowing across the snowdrifts, I hear…nothing. Silence; no hum of motors or city life. My ears buzzing with the absence of sound. My footsteps on the wooden staircase, the slush squeaking under my boots. I stop, stand still for the first time in days. I listen to the silence, drinking it in, pulling it around me. Then wind rushing through the tall pines and, in the moments of calm, the sound of wet snow falling in a clearing, a hundred feet away.

///

Three years ago, when my mother was still alive, when I had moved back to Minneapolis for a few months, I was talking with her partner, Lee…someplace, in some room. The kitchen (the warm center of their warm house)? Or a waiting room at the hospital? There were two surgeries during those six months. When the muscles that controlled her swallowing failed, she had a stomach tube implanted. Yes, that was it. I was still staying in their house, a week or two before I moved into the little studio apartment on Franklin Avenue. Mom had stayed at the hospital the night before, and Lee and I were to join her in the morning, and wait through the surgery. I woke early; a dark, cold, winter morning, and I could hear the shower running in the bathroom down the hall. And I could hear Lee crying in the shower, her sobs not quite covered by the water, and the sound filled me with dread.

Later, in the waiting room; the florescent lights buzzing overhead and the orange-upholstered chairs we sat in; old copies of People and Reader’s Digest piled on the table beside me. Lee told me about the previous year, when she first knew. They were in Orlando with friends. In the hotel room on the morning of their departure, Mom had started to pack her bag for the return trip to Minneapolis. But she was packing her clothes into Lee’s bag.

“What are you doing, Susan? That’s my bag,” Lee had said.

My mother stopped for a moment and stood there, her face empty. Lee could see the machinery of my mother’s thoughts groan and shudder.

“And my heart just fell,” Lee told me.

What may have been just a small incident to anyone else was, for Lee, a dark omen of the terrible future rushing towards them. Lee, a retired nurse and my mother’s companion for twenty years, knew it meant trouble.

///

I had wanted to be alone for the weekend, to fulfill the romantic notion of a writer in a cabin, surrounded by snow and trees. But Tahoe isn’t cheap, and the cabin is shared by five of us for the winter, and at the last minute my former boss’ boyfriend asked if he could tag along. I was disappointed but said yes. After all, I’m learning, or trying, to accept what life offers, rather than say no when my expectations aren’t met.

During the four-hour car trip I realized that I hadn’t been around a straight man in a very long time. Everyone I know in San Francisco is either a gay man or a woman. But we managed just fine. We had Veronica in common, and there were movies to discuss. The traffic was slow but steady. Rain showers fell the whole way, and though I expected it to turn to snow as we neared the lake, the rain only flirted with the cold; a few fat, wet flakes struck the windshield as the light drained from the sky. I was grateful for my Subaru and I was grateful for Mike as I drove us around the curves in the dark; he knew where to turn, and where the cabin sat waiting for us. He also knew where to find the light switch as we stumbled in with our bags and groceries.

“As you can see,” Mike said, gesturing to the living room, “It’s decorated in Early Butt-Ugly.” Indeed. Brown pile carpeting, strangely-shaped orange couches, a clock fashioned from a piece of varnished wood. I took Louie back outside. He hadn’t seen snow since we left Minneapolis over five years ago and he trotted nervously along the snowbanks in the driveway, unsure of where to pee.

He was a different dog the next morning. Mike and I strapped on snowshoes and set off on a trail that led from the back of the cabin up into the woods, and Louie charged ahead, his tail wagging, alert and excited. The trees were frosted with snow, and some were covered in a pale green moss that grew despite the cold. It was a mild winter morning; I stuck my gloves into my back pocket and shuffled after Mike, who was much better equipped with appropriate hiking gear. He had one of those backpacks with a plastic tube that snaked out of the zippered enclosure and over his shoulder, offering a cool supply of water. He even had two walkie-talkies, in case of…well, just in case.

The only sound in the woods was the muffled crunching of our shoes along the trail, and the snow melting and dripping from the branches around us. I shuffled along, as Veronica had suggested. My inclination was to raise my feet high off the ground, but the raised lip of the snowshoe’s toe seemed to thwart any potential face-falls. We followed the trail up the side of the hill, pausing to snap pictures here and there. After an hour or so we reached a spot that offered views of the mountain peaks and the pale grey surface of the lake. Mike was ready to turn back, but I wanted to climb higher. We parted company, and I promised to call on the walkie-talkie should I get lost.

Louie and I continued up. The trail was thinning out; fewer hikers and skiiers had come this far recently. The snow grew lighter and my shoes plunged through the powder. Finally, after another thirty minutes, we reached the top of the ridge, and I turned to see the panorama of Lake Tahoe and the winter woods below us. It was good to be alone, just me and my dog, and to have accomplished something. I followed the ridge till all traces of the trail vanished and it was just fresh, deep powder ahead. Louie lay in the snow, ears cocked, scanning the horizon like a king surveying his land. I stopped to listen again to the silence, the air still, the trees dripping. My breath was shallow, under my clothes a layer of sweat clung to me. I looked around at the surrounding mountains and the low clouds hanging just across the way, no higher than where I stood, panting.

The sandy cliffs are carpeted with ice plants; we descend slowly, the hills crumbling beneath our feet, mist hanging in the air. Louie sniffs at the ground, lagging behind, but as we reach the crest of the final hill he charges down the steep grade onto the thin strip of beach, startling a flock of sandpipers into flight. The high winter tide plays with us; waves sweep across the full expanse of beach and up to the edge of the cliffs. We run together, try to climb the eroding cliffs as the waves rush towards us, water pooling and churning around our feet, soft clay sucking us in. Louie gets ahead of me, and my heart catches for a second as the waves wrap themselves around his body, his head turning towards me as he’s carried back towards the ocean. He struggles free and with a moment of empty beach we run together towards a wider section, the waves chasing us.

Later, after the gym, I sit in my car in the parking garage, biting into a ripe mango, the juice running down my chin and fingers. My body reacts as if I’ve never eaten; I devour the fruit, sucking it down.

The 10:25 showing of The Hours, I sit alone near the back, moving my legs as couples pass my seat. I hunch down as the lights dim, clutching a cup of coffee.

Strange, how I react sometimes. When an author I’ve loved for years, whose books I’ve read and held onto through several moves, when his work begins to reach a wider audience. I wanted Michael Cunningham to win the Pulitzer, but I also wanted to keep him all to myself. And his characters, from all three books, have lived a little in me, or maybe I’ve lived through them. And it is exhilirating to see them lit from within on a giant screen in the dark, inhabited by actors and actresses I love. But I want them to myself. Or rather, I want to protect them. Because only I can understand them; I have that conceit, sometimes, as if I alone have supernatural qualities that enable me to fully comprehend an author’s constructed world. I want to hold his characters close to me, their fragilities safe in my arms. Because I know this: she felt the dark sensation around her, the nowhere feeling, and knew it was going to be a difficult day and I know this: she can feel the nearness of the old devil (what else to call it?), and she knows she will be utterly alone if and when the devil chooses to appear again (funny, even Tennessee Williams called them “the blue devils”) and I know this: “But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another.” (and how could it be that when I first read the book, several years ago, I didn’t understand the title?) and I know this: Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Because yes, even though I’ve had my share of those hours, I still want more, of everything, it’s not something I can give up. And because these women and men, made from combinations of words across a page, because they know the doubt and the soul-numbing fear and the undependable love they feel for each other; because of this I want to protect them, from the crowds and the ignorants and the never-saddened, I want to hold them tight in the dark theater, I don’t want to hear the chatter around me as the lights come up again, I don’t want to walk back to my car in that parking garage and hear around me the debates and the frustrations why did she have to kill herself? because I am conceited that way; I alone understand these women and men, I cannot trust their lives to the people around me.