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07/12/01
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From: whatever-whenever.net [mailto:whatever-whenever.net] There's one thing I know . . . I . . . a-like . . . dogs! Yesterday morning, after breakfast at the hippie vegetarian place (I saw three hippies!), we took Kevin's puppy, Lexy, for a walk. She's 14 months old, and a beautiful black Lab. Her face is beautiful, and she makes great eye contact with you. Clearly, she gets a lot of love, and she cozies up to you on impact. I'm always amazed when I leave New York and meet real dogs that grow up in quiet places and aren't totally freaked out and barking all the time. That's how my dogs were growing up, and someday, when I have a dog again, that's how my dog will be. Of course, we all know I will have to leave New York if I ever want that to happen. But that's a discussion for another day, and I don't want you to start crying on me. Heh. We took her down by the river near his folks' place, so that she could play with other dogs and go swimming and retrieving for a while. We walked down a small stretch of railroad track where I picked some wildflowers, across a park spotted with dandelions, through a nice neighborhood where I witnessed the construction of a new, well-sized home, across a street where busy traffic stopped for us so we could casually cross, down another wildflower-lined street—more of a dirt road, actually—until we reached the park and the river. Lexy knows a lot of the other dogs, but it seems like she still plays by herself a bit. Maybe her friends weren't there that day. She's still young enough not to have all her confidence yet, so, while she doesn't seem scared, she's still hesitant to engage fully with the other dogs. I sat on the beach and watched Kevin throw a big stick out into the water, so that Lexy could swim out and retrieve it, as her genetic line drives her to do. After a while, when she returned to shore, she would trot over to me, drop the stick down, and then shake her soaking body all over me. Needless to say, I soon smelled like wet puppy, a not wholly unpleasant smell, but one that I would never choose to buy bottled either. We chatted with one of the other owners down there for a bit about her dog, Charlie, a wise old character who kept rubbing up against me. I noticed that while the owner was casually dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, she still wore a diamond-encrusted crucifix, several hefty jewel rings, and sported a nice rack of fake tits. She was sweet about her dogs, though, and told me Charlie must have liked me immediately, because, "He never rubs up against someone right away unless he likes you." When we left the park, Lexy played stubborn a few times, and squatted down on the ground. She didn't want to go home, and I certainly understood that feeling. They're going to have to drag me kicking and screaming to the airport from my west coast playground. En route home, in the park with dandelions, a little Italian girl spotted Lexy from afar. She'd met her before, so Kevin let Lexy run over there. The girl was besotted with Lexy, in fact, as her mother informed us, with all dogs. "She likes dogs more than other kids," she said. She dragged Lexy around by her leash for a while, and then, Lexy eventually brought the girl to the ground with kisses to her face, and the three adults stood helplessly, grinning, as the two rolled around together. After about twenty minutes of this Hallmark Card moment, Kevin gently said Lexy had to go home, and, as if it were timed to the second, the girl's mother quickly scooped her up in her arms. The girl started kicking and whining and squirming, and her mother walked off with her in another direction, softly calming her, while we walked in another, Lexy quickly forgetting the little girl, distracted, perhaps, by a bug or a flower instead. *** I started and finished my first Haruki Murakami novel yesterday, Sputnik Sweetheart. It was really good. I really need to befriend more overeducated novelist types, so I have access to more books. Damn, it was good. Murakami writes beautifully, layering stories within stories, and doing it all in a grounded, non-preachy fashion. While some of his ideas might be highfalutin, you would never know it, because the dialogue sounds real and fresh. Also, Sputnik Sweetheart is a love story, with an unhappy and happy ending. I'm sure that's exactly what I needed to be reading right now. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings. That's the line that stuck in my head, the one that drove me to get up from Kevin's patio, dig through my purse, find my journal, and scribble it down. For some reason, it helped me to organize my thoughts, and sort through some of the feelings in my heart right now. I could trace the history of my love story with John, and assess how I got from point A to point B. Actually, I might be at point C right now, and I'm not sure how much I like being there. I guess I couldn't be at point B forever though, right? Oh, whatever, I know I'm being obtuse here, but I don't know how much anyone else cares about this shit anyway. While I was reading and thinking, Kevin was doing a different kind of reading and thinking of his own. He had just received the galleys for the American release of his book, and he was reading through them, examining the changes. How exciting! A book! To have given birth to something as spectacular as a book, and then to see it unfold throughout the world, with the possibility of tens of thousands of people reading it. I'm sure I've had lots of people read my writing, either through my freelance stuff or my work site, but Internet reading tends to be a more fleeting experience, and it's not like you have to really seek it out or anything. I enjoyed those few hours, me on the porch having deep thoughts and reading a good book, and Kevin at his desk, lit only by a small lamp, reading his book that he's only read a million times before, finding a balance of new cuts and healed wounds in the text. I'm across the country, in another country, in fact, and I am alone, but together, with words. I hope you're well, and I'll see you soon.
xxoo
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