Thursday, June 17, 2004

The Adventures of Cosmo, the Mostly-Good Dog, Adventure the Ninth: Road Trip

It was a confusing time for us all.  Kel was living in a dorm at work, away from home and under blindfold for 10 days straight.  She was pretty much out of the picture.  I was working long hours and the dog needed more time outside than I could give him.  But we had a support network - still do, really, though a bit more spread out now - and Jon came to our rescue.  Or so we all thought.

Coz knew Jon well: He’s like a brother to me, I’ve know him longer than any of the others.  But he’s not really a dog person, as it turns out.  I’m still not sure why he volunteered for doody duty, but despite his hale assurances to me, he approached our front door that day with some trepidation.

He also wore bike shoes, and a bike helmet that he did not remove.  Based on the way Jon described it to me later, I can see it in my mind’s eye: Jon cautiously opening the door, clattering robot-like toward the dog - who does not recognize him, feels anxious, threatened, yet badly in need of a trip outside… Jon takes up the slipchain and Cosmo backs away nervously, so Jon begins to chase Cosmo around the house, kitchen to dining to living to foyer to kitchen again; Jon is getting frustrated; Coz is getting worked up and more and more uncomfortable and anxious.  Jon takes a sword of Damocles to the Gordian knot and disastrously solves the crisis by opening the door and letting Coz run down the stairs without chain or leash.  Jon chases him down, finds him at the iron gate, desperate to get outside, terrified of the android chasing him down the hallway with a slipchain and leash in his gloved hands.  In shame and fear Coz begins to pee before Jon can wrestle the chain over the dog’s head; Jon, mortified, revolted, opens the gate to let Coz just run across the street, where he always goes, planning to get the chain on him after the dog was empty and, he hopes, a little calmer....

Coz bolted.  He ran down the street and disappeared; Jon knew not where.  He searched the neighborhood, by foot, on his bike.  For an hour.  For two.  By this point, I, at work, figured I’d check in, see how the relief break went.  Jon’s voice on the phone was deflated, depresed.  He told me the story; I told him I’d go home to take up the search.  For two more hours I trolled the central ‘mond, all Cosmo’s favorite haunts, in Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, at the Mountain Lake Park goose pen, among the piles of rotting garbage at the fish markets and the cloistered dingles of the greenbelt where the itinerant relieved themselves…. 

I came up empty.  The next step was to enlist more help - there were nearly 20 of us in the ‘hood I could tap in a crisis, even though Kel was away.  I returned home, starting to taste desperation at the back of my mouth.  With deep anxiety I surveyed the options.  Things felt very quiet.  Too quiet.  Damn. 

The phone rang.  It was Kel, just checking in.  Perfect timing - just as the crisis became a crisis, I had to conceal it.  I tried to sound breezy, nonchalant; I failed.  She knew immediately something was wrong, but she was twenty miles away with a big blindfold on - there was nothing she could do but let me play it out.  A wise woman, she knew that I’d be unable to keep up for long any charade that was making me so tense.  She’d just keep her concerns to herself till she had more information.  And then, of course, no more than ten seconds after I picked up the phone, Jon showed up outside the house again, calling up to me.  “Dude, any luck?  Is Cosmo back yet?”

“Kel, hold on a second, dear,” I patiently cooed into the phone, then I covered the receiver with my hand and called back down.  “Dude, she’s on the phone now.  She doesn’t know.  Gimme a second.” Back to Kel on the phone: “Hi, honey, I’m back.”

“So, what don’t I know yet?”

“Oh.  So, you heard that, did you?”

“Yes I heard that, what’s going on?”

I explained the situation.  She took it as well as could be expected.  We coordinated a plan and I hung up with a sense of grim fatalism. 

I put my head in my hands and tried to marshall my thoughts.  My head was spinning and I was getting really worried; anything could happen to such a big handsome boy out on the mean city streets and I just wanted a moment to regain my equinamity.  I listened to the pulse in my ears and tried not to think of the worst. 

Mere minutes later, Evi called.  She lived ten scant blocks up Geary in a stick Victorian with a porch.  “Hey, Danny,” she said, “I’ve got your dog.  Did you know he was out?” Her words were like oxygen to a K-2 climber for me.  I sighed from the soles of my feet.  Evi shared her story: she’d gotten home fifteen minutes prior with her own dog, Coz’s best friend Clyde.  They’d dropped off some bags and gone a block up Geary to the grocery for a few minutes.  When they got back, Coz was waiting for them on their porch, resting sphinx-like in the late-afternoon sun.  I picked him up immediately and got him right home.

It had been four hours he’d been wandering the streets.  I would love to know what he’d done in that time, if he’d had secret adventures he’d never be able to share with us, the path he’d traveled, the things he’d seen.  But it seems he’d chosen to go only a short distance, to a friends’ house to wait in seclusion for them.  With the whole world open to him for exploration and discovery, he chose to stay close to home and to seek only the company of his best buddies.  That’s a wise choice that I have tried from that day forth to emulate.