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Dead Dog Philosophy

This is much too easy to make boring.

*The facts:

-My family had to put my dog, Barney, to sleep in January. He was suffering from all sorts of decrepitude. Born almost exactly ten years after me, he'd be 14 this month.

-He was a poodle, about a foot high (not the manliest kind of dog, eh?)... Still, my father nicknamed him King of the House, and proclaimed his bear-hunting abilities often.

-I have just finished reading Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, his account of traveling America in a camper with only his pet poodle to keep him company.

*Exploration:

I was struck by the personality (the nobility and emergent ferocity) Steinbeck endowed Charley with, and how closely it mirrored Dad's interactions with Barney. Dad had recommended the book to me a couple of years back, but reading it this past month had been an appropriate kind of mourning, I thought. I've lived away from home for the past five-and-a-half years, and it didn't shake me deeply to hear of his passing. I'm sure in some ways Dad may have modeled his interaction with Barney on Steinbeck's prose (One of Dad's favorite interpretations: "He's saying, 'Where's my share? I work hard to protect you! I'm the king!'"), but my perspective showed Steinbeck to be echoing my personal experience. It's not a masterpiece, but it's a good epitaph.

It's as if my friend is unbound by time, safely in print. Will my memories cross with what I read? Perhaps not; we never really took Barney out of town except to go up to the mountains. I doubt the account of Charley snarling at bears (!) in Yellowstone or blocking Steinbeck's entrance into Canada will confuse me too much, but I do see him beatified in my mind now.

Last week in my improv comedy class, the instructor asked for a couple of personal stories we were willing to share and let the rest of the class act out. "It can be very emotional," she cautioned. Nevertheless, in between Buddy's attempt to cut a friend's hair in grade school ("Just like my dad, who was a barber") and Rick's episode being locked out of a hotel room naked ("And then a busload of Rastafarians came in and I was trying to hide behind a palm and one of them shouted, 'Hey, mon! Thees guy here got no clothes on!'..."), I told a story about Barney.

I was maybe twelve. I wanted to take him for a walk but couldn't find his leash, so I tied him up with dental floss. Kids do these things. No big surprise that he got away...but he dashed into the street, directly in the path of a pickup truck or van or something...I'm hazy on it. I saw him go down underneath, and his body rolled on the ground below. Miraculously, he got up and tore off screeching toward our house, about a mile away. You bet I ran my ass off trying to get there after him.

I got home, yelling "IS HE OK? WHERE IS HE?" at my family.
"Michael, you're white as a sheet!"
"WHERE'S BARNEY?"
"What? What's wrong?"
He was in the backyard somehow, nursing his wounds.

I tried to explain that he'd lived another ten or so years, it was OK. Still, it took a few minutes before anyone would volunteer to act it out. They were horrified. But so it went. Their staging was all right, but didn't really bring any new dimension to the memory.

*Questions:

-Does print engage the imagination more than the stage? Or was it that the staging is based on my (apparently riveting) telling of the event? Or that I had no preconceived impression of the print stories?

-In telling that anecdote to my class, did I bring Barney back to life in a way (for my classmates, who never knew him)? Is that any different from how the book I read brought Charley and Steinbeck to life for me, although they are both long dead? Does it matter that Steinbeck was both narrator and character?

-Did seeing my dog "die" early in his life make it easier to deal with his actual passing? Or was it just the distance inherent in living away for so long?

-Has watching Six Feet Under gotten to my head?
peachy as always, Mike at 5:27 PM