Monday, December 12, 2005
The Dog Who Flew
This weekend was a good, hard full couple of days, and there�s too much to report to take you through it very carefully. So here’s a sketchy run-through, followed by a nice story:
Zach went to a Christmas-tree lighting at the Presidio, which was a great time for all until the lights went on and scared my boy a little. He was much more sanguine at the winter wonderland fest up in Tilden Park, with the Victorian carousel and the dozens of decorated trees and the surreal illuminated yulescape they’d set up to trigger those mescaline flashbacks I so enjoy, what with the giant inflated penguin popping into and out of a chimney, and yule yaks, and a light-outlined dude in a sombrero and serape leaning against a saguro cactus. This was a display the boy enjoyed, and so did I. Yee-ha, yule-siesta-guy! Ho-ho-ho, illuminated flamingo!
Similarly, Zach is enjoying our own little tree, now necessarily tiny because it’s relegated to the truncated space above the media cabinet - but it’s laden with all our most favorite ornaments (Tut! Elephant! Cornboy! and - oh - the noble seated mastiff.). When I stowed all our cds in big books instead of on a teeter-ready tower, I finally found our copy of the Blind Boys of Alabama album where they’re doing xmas tunes with Chrissie Hynde and Tom Waites and folks, so that was fun to hear as we “decked halls.”
On saturday, I also got to attend a citizens’ advisory meeting for proposed changes to my bus line - a meeting that deteriorated into a bitchfest full of recriminations, insults, and fearmongering, and all the worst aspects of popular democracy in action. So that was a bit of a downer, though the proposed design changes they shared with us were interesting, even though people sure seemed to resent not having more choices to consider.
But those vituperative few hours were the exception, not the rule, this past weekend. I’ve had lots of sweet moving moments to enjoy over this past week that have already faded from my memory, and I am not going to share any of them with you because I don’t have time - and there’s a better story to tell, one that fits in with yesterday’s little trip to the beach in the murky gloom at 6:30 at night.
Where we went was Ocean Beach, which is a place I rarely go anymore. The last time I went there was in April, when we had just left Cosmo for the last time at the vet’s office, released from his illness and limitations and gone from us forever. That sad afternoon, we’d watched the waves roll in along that seven-mile strand of golden sands and we wept and held each other. We were there because Cos had loved to romp on the beach. We couldn’t take him there often because he was too likely to meet other dogs who’d wind up snarling at him, but it was obvious that Cosmo cherished his time at the seashore, sniffing the rich breeze and listening to each wave collapse, hissing, into sands full of tiny crabs. He didn’t need to run the length of the beach, because he was only guarding the part where we all stood together - but he guarded that bit very diligently.
The story I was reminded of as I stood on the beach Sunday night was one that happened years ago when we went with Coz down to Fort Funston, at the bottom of Ocean Beach. It’s a famous hang gliding spot, but also a place where many people bring their dogs. Since we didn’t actually want to meet too many other dogs, we’d taken Coz that day out to a secluded finger of eroded land south of the doggiest portion of the park, and we all sat down together to look out over the world from the edge of a tall steep cliff. With the surf crashing 100 feet below us and the ocean glistening in the sunlight, it felt like our beach, our cliff, our world to enjoy.
Then, without prologue, some other dude showed up. Coz was immediately suspicious of him, so we got a good grip on his leash as our new neighbor just settled right in and made himself at home on our own personal bit of the bluff. Frankly, though, I shared a bit of Cosmo’s outrage. This guy has a whole coast to choose from, and he has to horn in on our little piece of it? That’s just rude. But he’d given us a dozen or so feet of clearance, and it was a public area, and we’d chosen a really nice spot, so I just swallowed my rage and hoped he’d stop messing around with his backpack soon.
Because he’d shown up wearing a backpack, but then he took it off and began laboriously to unpack it, emptying out from it a large quantity of nylon fabric. Then he started clipping the fabric to the edges of the backpack, and then he fiddled around with the pack itself, folding it in on itself and re-configuring it into a sort of open bucket. As the dog and I were growing more and more tired of his shenanigans with that damned bag, he strapped it to his backside and spread out the nylon fabric, into the fresh pacific breeze. The fabric filled and blossomed out behind him. It was a parasail.
He stood up. Cosmo was, by now, quite upset by this man’s behavior. He had invaded our sovereign space, behaved disruptively, disgorged unnatural materials into our environment – materials that were snapping in the wind and making him nervous, and now he was standing up and walking toward us and the edge of our cliff. That, Cosmo knew, was strictly forbidden. Put aside the notion that nobody should get too close to us without express permission: people on the cliffs, or otherwise attached to the earth, were supposed to remain in place. But this guy, this whack-job, this violator of the natural order, was just walking off the edge of the cliff, into thin air and right up into the sky, his parasail gloriously billowing. Cosmo reared and roared at him as he shrank like Daedelus into the pale blue yonder, but the man was gone. His incursion into our space had lasted barely five minutes, but he’d turned the world on its head forever. He’d walked up but then he’d flown away. Cosmo was confused for hours.
That moment was on my mind last night when we stood, the five of us, out on Ocean Beach in the early-arriving darkness of night – Kel cradling Zach in her arms, and me, and Cosmo and Rufus cat too. We were in the shadow of the Cliff House, up at the north end of the beach, and the wind was gusting. Kel and I both felt that we had to bring the pets out before the end of the year – that we didn’t want to celebrate the New Year with them still waiting for us to let them go from their locked cedar boxes. Rufus had died in February, after all, ten months past, and Cosmo had been gone since April, when we’d last walked weeping on this beach. The time to give them release was now.
I pulled the small box from a colorful cotton bag and we wrestled with the lock till the lid opened and I was able to withdraw from it a plastic sack full of fine grey ash. We briefly acknowledged the sweet spirit that had brought Rufus to our lives and the love and gentleness she had shared with us, and then I walked up to the surf and emptied her ashes into an onrushing wave that wound up making me scurry, soaked, back toward dry land.
She was gone, then, leaving only black wet sand behind her, and it was time to let Cosmo go. His box was larger and heavier. I pulled out his cremains and we mouthed a few pale words about his stalwart soul and his gracious loving nature, his warmth and courage and strength, recalling those final moments with his head in my hand, eyes closing against a world that has had to go on without him. We miss him all the time, and I expect we always will.
I stood on the beach in the fresh damp breeze, emptying his ashes, standing a bit back from the ocean – Cosmo was never much for playing in the water anyway, and I didn’t want to get caught by another wave. His ashes fell to the sand and began to blow in the wind off to the south, toward Fort Funston. We gazed down at the dark sand and the pale patches that constituted what was left of our wonderful friend, and I realized that it might be hours before the ocean finally overwashed him.
But I also realized that, as he lay that one last time on the beach, that the wind would keep picking him up and carrying him off into the air, lifting him skyward above Fort Funston like that man with the parasail. Cosmo, however, would not be coming back down again. He’d joined the new world order, it seemed to me, leaving the earth for the heavens. The dog is gone now from our home, completely gone - but the sky endures above me, and I can’t help but feel that he’s up there still, watching those rambling waves wash ashore and barking at the other dogs way down below. I knew, as we packed up our bag and left the beach, moist-eyed, that he’d be protecting my family so long as there is sky above us, and a sliver of earth beneath us to defend.
Thus protected, we drove back home to start another week. I am surprised how comforting it is today to know that Cosmo’s looking out for us again. And any time I want to pet him, all I need to do is find a place where I can feel the wind on my face.
