photography by anna traverse fogle
Lily Bear and the dreaded laptop.
Lily Bear has curled herself in the shape of a fluffy croissant, snoot resting lightly on her two front paws, inner eyelids sliding shut. I would love to have inner eyelids, as dogs do: portable blackout curtains for naps or meditation. Breakfast arrived in her bowl several hours ago; her late afternoon walk and dinner are still several hours in the future. As good a time as any to rest. But her human (that would be me) is distracting her. In her infinite wisdom, Lily Bear has decided I work too hard.
Lily is a dog, yes, but she’s not opposed to labor; she takes her responsibilities quite seriously. She lectures (read: barks her head off at) delivery workers, strange humans, playful-looking dogs, and any large diesel-engined vehicle. She’s extremely dedicated to the work of making sure no morsel of food hits the floor in our house, and of making doubly sure that if a single crumb does fall, she reaches it before her cat-brother can. When I leave home, she monitors the door until I return, at which time she bounds in circles around my legs. So much dedication to so many causes, and yet still she thinks her human works too hard. The way I can tell this: She has launched a boycott of my laptop.
I may never get to experience a day as one of my pets, and I fear I’m stuck with the brain I’ve got. But she and her cat-brother, and the birds in the trees, and the opossum on the fence — they remind me not to stray too far from where my feet are planted.
After nearly two years of me working from home at least part of the time, Lily has concluded that the laptop generates not only suspicious noises (click-clack, bleep-bloop), but also a miasma of stress. And so, starting sometime last fall, she began leaving the room when I opened the laptop. Her indignation (you might call it dogged determination) even leads her to move from upstairs to downstairs, or vice versa, to get as far away from the infernal laptop as caninely possible.
That the four-legged creatures who live under our roofs have lessons to share is, it’s true, no great revelation. But especially after the many instabilities of the past two years, I find myself learning more and more from the animals who follow me faithfully around each day (unless I dare open the laptop).
Lucky Boots, who is a French nobleman currently occupying the form of a long-haired tuxedo cat, was diagnosed recently with a chronic ailment. The veterinarian was shocked to hear that, despite some wacky-looking bloodwork, Lucky, age 12, has been acting very much himself: chasing shoelaces, leaping up on high counters if he thinks he may find interesting food scraps, stretching out on the bedroom rug like a dog when sunbeams pierce the windows. For a few days after we learned of his condition and started him on medication, I insisted on picking him up to place him on the ledge where his bowls sit, until one morning when he darted around me in a circle and sprang up to snarf his kibble. He isn’t worried. He feels fine right now, and that’s all he needs to know.
Our animal friends teach us to stay in the present — even (especially?) when we’re scared, or sad, when we’re grieving. My little pack is down one dog; we lost 16-year-old Puck, the gentlest, saddest-eyed Carolina dog, last fall. Puck declined slowly, and then rapidly, and then one night he reached the limits of his energy and was gone. Lily and Lucky were concerned for him while he was ailing, and missed him after he left — they both seemed blue for a while — but have adjusted.
We humans grieve differently; I don’t know that we love any harder in the moment, but our big brains make the letting-go process longer, thornier. My father died in December 2020, way too young and long before any of us were ‘ready.’ We’re never really ready, are we?, to lose the people we love most. Having some understanding of time beyond the present, we yearn to bend time to fit our hearts, to hold onto the people who anchor us until … well, forever. Both my parents are gone now, and because I am not a dog — no inner eyelids; too keen an awareness of time — I struggle to reconcile myself to their absences. Which comes with the territory of being human: living with only one foot in the present, we grieve the time that’s ended, and for who’s missing from the time to come.
Meanwhile, Lily goes on snoozing on the fancy dog bed I’ve dubbed her lily pad. For now, she’s content, and now is where she lives. I may never get to experience a day as one of my pets, and I fear I’m stuck with the brain I’ve got. But she and her cat-brother, and the birds in the trees, and the opossum on the fence — they remind me not to stray too far from where my feet are planted. Good teachers.
