Being Sen(i)or Dog

    There's something about both being a senior and being a dog, at least from my perspective.  Some of this came to mind as I was clearing out part of my desk and came across a series of quotes that made the internet rounds some years ago on questions dogs might ask of God.  Here's one: Are there dogs on other planets, or are we alone?  I’ve been howling at the moon and the stars for a long time, but all I ever hear back is the dog across the street.  Sounds a bit like a tag line for a Gary Larson cartoon; but then this one got me thinking: When my family eats dinner, they always bless their food.  But they never bless mine.  So, I’ve been wagging my tail extra fast when they fill my bowl.  Have you noticed my own blessing?  Couple all of this with my wife and I getting a tad older and beginning to notice a bit more of the reality of another set of quips that made the rounds some years ago about well, being older, such as: You get two invitations to go out on the same night and you pick the one that gets you home the earliest, or People call at 9:00 p.m. and ask, "Did I wake you?"  Ouch...

My pup with her new Walking Wheels "legs"

    Changes happen as one ages, something we've noticed as our bodies don't seem to recover quite as quickly after a hike and our medical reports come back with a bit more cautionary data than we would like.  And of course, dogs suddenly slip down stairs and become paralyzed.  My dog is doing fine since that incident, her eyes telling us that just being able to go out for a walk again and to visit many of her old haunts is enough to have her accept what has happened.  For her it appears to be another journey of transition, one taken almost without question and taken without much looking back or at least not as much as I think most of us as humans would do.  The lifting of the back portion of her body with a harness contraption in order to get her out to the yard to pee is proving to be a bit hard on our backs, and we wonder how it will all work when the snows begin to arrive or our own bodies give out.  But at least for now, my wife and I are just shrugging our shoulders and trying to understand as best we can, that (as my friend is always fond of saying), "it is what it is."

    The big change of course is the ironic shift of all of this making both my wife and I recognize not how depressing all of this could be, but rather just how fortunate we are.  Suddenly we are noticing and identifying with so many others around us who have so many more problems and appear to be handling it all in silence and with calm resignation.  We suddenly can't imagine the care and work and dedication it must take to have a child or teenager (or spouse) with something as debilitating as cerebral palsy or perhaps Down's syndrome (or autism or a host of other life-long or decades-long maladies) and adjusting to all those changes, from caring for them at home to having a series of unexpected hospital visits or getting used to hurtful looks from strangers.  Looked at it that way our problems with our dog are minor and we take our hats off to all the caretakers so silently and selfishly devoting their lives to another.

    Somehow all these thoughts grew stronger as I typed away on my laptop, remembering a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek about the production of memory chips, those tiny circuits that seem to be partially stealing our memories and computational skills, saving our address books and photos with the click of finger and making us decide only whether to swipe or to use our thumbs on our phones or to digitally sign a document that sells our home or business or to send that video overseas (for free!) and instantly.  I could see the changes, all highlighted in a newsletter from my insurance company on the recommended ways to communicate with the generations; for my parents age group (now called "traditionalists") have a face-to-face conversation; for my generation pick up the phone; for Gen-Xers send an email; for millennials text or instant message on social media.  The world is getting faster and we are demanding that it do so and growing impatient when it doesn't.  Where is that next generation smart phone?  Anyway about those chips...turns out that they're rather toxic.  Said the article: In a basic sense, chemicals and light combine to photographically print circuits onto silicon wafers.  Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel and a major figure in the creation of the modern chip in 1960, is a chemist.  He worked closely on the printing process with a physicist named Jay Last.  "We were putting into industrial production a lot of really nasty chemicals," Last said in an oral history project of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.  "There was no knowledge of these things, and we were pouring stuff into the city sewer system."  Moore recalled how, years later, when workers dug up the pipes beneath Intel, they discovered the "bottom was completely eaten out the whole way along, and that was just about the time we really started recognizing how much you had to take care of this."  Authorities would end up designating more Superfund hazardous waste sites in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, than in any other county in the U.S.  Exposure rates to these chemicals, which "easily permeated rubber gloves," were 500 to 800 times what was deemed safe by OSHA (the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration), so much of that processing of chips was sent overseas and away from those U.S. darn regulations (a similar pattern happened with pesticides deemed too toxic for use).  Thirty years later, the corrosive EGEs were completely phased out (by then, European regulators "had placed them on a list of the most highly toxic chemicals known to science"), but the result for many was too late as evidenced by the mothers in the photo essay above.  Lives changed, futures altered.

    My wife and I do feel fortunate, especially when we read such articles, and none of that is said without feeling compassion for those faced with such hardships.  Our dog slipping and becoming paralyzed is causing a detour in our lives, but she is still with us and bright otherwise; we recognize that we've somehow averted a major crisis, feeling as if we've somehow awoken in the recovery room instead of in a room facing that final goodbye.  Maybe we're looking at it this way because, as a piece in the now-defunct Scientific American Mind wrote, we have the "positivity effect," a trait researchers are relegating to many people as they approach old age or as they politely write, they become seniors.  Less worries, fewer years, or basically that's how it being summed up.  Said part of the article on a study which encompassed half a million people in 72 countries: Their data set...suggested that over the course of a life, our emotional well-being follows a predictable pattern: starting high, hitting a trough in midlife, then climbing upward again in later years.  In a surprising update to this finding, Oswald (labor economist Andrew Oswald of the University of Dartmouth College in England, who co-chaired the study) and his colleagues at multiple institutions found in 2012 that zookeepers see chimpanzees and orangutans exhibit more happy behaviors --such as indulging in pleasurable socializing-- at the beginning and end of their lifetimes.  In other words, at least according to their caretakers, the well-being of apes also follows the U-shaped curve.  According to Oswald, this observation hints that something biological is at work across species in the correlation between age and happiness.

Our pup after her "walk"

    Who knows, maybe this is how our dog is seeing it, that it just is what it is and time to make do with what's there.  She seems pretty content, learning all the new signals to let us know when she has to go out and when she might be in pain.  But for 99% of the time, none of those telling looks occur.  But one thing we all seem to recognize is that issue of quality of life.  She'll know when it's simply time, and we hope that we will as well and that we'll respect that.  My neighbor is going through a more difficult decision at this time as her father's condition worsens.  I passed onto her one of the few pieces I've actually kept to read over and over through the passing years, a piece by Kathryn Schultz titled Losing Streak (I've actually mentioned this New Yorker essay in an earlier post, so if you haven't read her essay yet, consider this my blatant pitch to do so soon).  In the piece, she wrote: ...we will lose everything we love in the end.  But why should that matter so much?  By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way.  The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing.  You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her.  You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later.  You have a thought and find the words.  You face a crisis and find your courage.  All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence.  No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same.  Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend.  Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days.  As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone.  We are here to keep watch, not to keep. I think my dog knows that, making me appreciate her all the more with or without the use of her legs. 

    Maybe dogs and animals in general are here to teach us to learn to take the ups and downs of life and to appreciate what we have now, at this moment.  It may not be the learning we wanted, but maybe it is the learning we need.  One thing my wife and I have noticed is that over a dozen neighbors have stopped to ask us about our dog and the "newfangled" contraption that wheels her around.  These are the distant neighbors, the ones down the street somewhere that you always wave to and that you know live nearby, but neighbors whom you've never really gotten to know...their names or how many kids they have or what they do for a living.  But they have all been more than supporting and more than friendly.  And I told my wife that perhaps part of the reason all of this happened was that so people could see that there were other options to putting your animal down just because of an accident.  They could see the life in our dog, hear her usual warning bark, watch her sniff and pee and act as if little had actually changed.  Whatever the reason all of this happened, her bright outlook makes me want to echo the words of Will Rogers even more when he said, "If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went."  And as if to grace our decision, the end of my own day was brightened with an evening sky full of color...staring up I did recognize that there was still much for me to learn.

Evening sky...ignored by my dog