The measure of love

"There she goes,
There she goes again..."

I am standing in Home Depot, talking to a guy named Louie about shellac-based primer. It is $35.00 a gallon, but the only thing you can use if you are stupid enough to want to paint over asbestos shingles instead of residing your whole house.
Most people would just go ahead and put up vinyl siding, because painting the asbestos shingles will cost about the same. But people like me, who really hate vinyl siding but can't afford to reside with wood...those people would consider painting asbestos shingles. Louie, who is a painting contractor on the side, says it will turn out fine with the shellac-based primer.

We're still negotiating my purchase of the house I made an offer on. Nothing's been finalized. Still, I thought I'd get my ducks in a row by strolling through Home Depot, estimating the cost of work that needs doing.

I am scanning the rows and rows of color samples while Louie explains that asbestos shingles are made with tar, which will seep through color without the primer. I am rapt in thoughts of the future, the possible colors of my possible new house, the one sitting on the hill above the park.

Then that song comes on in the Home Depot background music. It kicks me in the gut.

Does Louie notice that my eyes well up with tears?

"There she goes,
There she goes again."

Yes, Reader-- I have seen the feminine hygiene product commercial using that song. But long before that advertisement, that was my song for Casey. My sweet dog Casey. I used to sing it to her in the car, or when she was running in the yard, or sitting with me in the living room, lying across the room looking up at me.

She wouldn't get on the furniture if I was in the room. Sometimes I'd catch her there when I came home, and she looked guilty but I'd say, "Of course you can sit on the sofa, Casey." I'd sit there and pat the space next to me, but she demurred. Whoever had her before I did, the fat fucks that took her to the pound without concern that a morbidly obese middle aged dog would likely be put to sleep-- they must have never let her get on the furniture. Probably they were too fat to share it.

The woman who ran the pound said the people who brought her in were very fat. They said she was a stray, but the lady was pretty sure they were lying because Casey, too, was super-sized. She was so fat that they didn't think anyone would adopt her at first. Also because she was older. Older dogs have a hard time getting adopted. She was actually taken into the room where the unadoptable dogs were taken to await their final shot.

But the woman who ran the pound said before she started giving the shots, she looked at Casey and knew she was special. So she saved her. She said that even though Casey was probably 8 years old and weighed nearly twice what she ought to have, she knew that someone would come along and want her. Because she was that smart, sweet,sassy amazing of a dog. The woman who ran the pound said she'd never been tempted to adopt one of them on her own. She had enough of them during the day. But Casey-- she almost adopted. And when I went back, to say hi, three years later, just because I was in the area, she still had a picture of Casey on her desk.

My dog Abby died and I was sitting on a sofa in Boston. And suddenly I thought, "There's an older border collie mix at the pound in Peabody. That's my dog."

It was interesting because that thought popped into my head, and I lived 90 minutes away from Peabody. I called that pound and said, "Um...do you have an older border collie mix available for adoption? They said, "Yes. And she's wonderful."

I got in my car. They kept the pound open for me. The lady who ran it brought Casey out for me to meet.

And I knew she was my dog. The dog. The one.

(And FYI-- it took about a year for her to lose all that extra weight. But she did.)

So there I am in Home Depot talking to Louie, and that song comes on. She died on August 14th, and it is November 28th. And I start crying. As soon as I walked away from Louie, heading to my car, I start crying.

I was even mad at Home Depot. Shouldn't they be playing Christmas Carols or something?

The thing is, I always miss her. And I always will. The measure of love is loss.

Sometimes it seems like losing Casey is such an enormous loss that I am pulling cargo wherever I go.

I know it's silly. I've lost things before. Men I loved, and other pets, and friends, dear friends whose voices I still hear in my head, whose names I can't erase from my cell phones even though the number has long been disconnected.

It's just that so rarely is something as perfect and uncomplicated as my sweet Casey. A dog with a sense of humor. I can't even explain.

I guess I just have to expect that it will sneak up on me sometimes. The sudden remembering that she's gone.

When I die, the first thing I'm looking for is that dog.

Sorry, Grandma.

I'm not worried about offending my grandfather with that priority. He, a man who could talk to animals, will understand. He used to look up at phone wires and invite the birds there to come sit on his shoulders. And they would. (We're from the Abruzzi, a region in Italy known for snake-charmers and witches.)

Here's what I want to say:

Sometimes we lose things that are in their own way perfect and we know we will never be able to find anything that good again. Sometimes, this perfection was genuine, simple, and innocent-- like Casey's was. It was always a gift to me. I marvelled, every day I knew her, that she was my dog.

But sometimes, when I've lost other things, remarkable and irreplacable things, I have discovered in the end that the remarkableness and irreplacablity were good things to lose. That maybe from a distance I could see that I had over-valued them. Sometimes, losing something I loved that much has been like being freed. And their real gift to me turned out to be their not being around anymore, to make other things, real things, seem pale in comparison.

Usually, it's taken me a while to get to that realization. I didn't always see that at the time. Pain will insist on its own time in the limelight. However we rationalize the process, sometimes all we can do is sit with the bad feelings.

I keep thinking of getting another Border Collie. Maybe someday I will. It won't be Casey. And Casey I know was irreplacable. I lived with her for 6 years. I was not projecting perfection upon, nor was she somehow faking it to beguile me. So many "perfect" things are shams. She was the real deal.

If only Home Depot would devote itself to the darn Christmas Carols, I wouldn't get all maudlin and stuff.

Peefer said recently (in a moving post I would link to if I knew how to) that in all the stories of the world, there's only one plot: fear of losing the thing we love.

I have sometimes found that loss to be, in its own way, a happy ending. This isn't one of those cases. But they're out there. Trust me.

And um...listen, if there's anyone out there who'd like to email me, I wish you would.