Audi doesn't want to go outside.
I don't blame her, what was rain a few minutes ago has turned to hissing nibs of ice, the size of cupcake sprinkles. The deck, and the lawn beyond it, is whitening.
She tentatively sticks her snout through the dog door, then snaps it back. Once. Twice. She looks at us, her glassy black eyes impenetrable but probably pleading.
Go on, I say, as though she can understand my instructions. (She can.)
She walks away, for a moment, picks up her stuffed purple dragon. She shakes it twice. She sets it down. She looks at me. I nod.
Dublin zips purposefully through the dog door, out onto the back deck, down the pier-like straightaway and into the yard. Because I am a gentleman, I don't watch, but it doesn't take long. She skims back toward the house, a flash of black and champagne, her mouth set joyful, a Jordanesque tongue waving like a rhythmic gymnast's ribbon.
Without breaking stride Dublin makes the 90-degree cut through the dog door and into the sunroom, the rubber flap swinging like the half-doors in a cowboy movie saloon. She dances over to me, rears a little and strikes me with a demanding paw.
Good girl, I say, and scratch her ear.
She prances away and hops onto the ottoman, then into the lap of its matching chair. Audi follows her with her head, then searches my face.
Dub did it, I say, you can do it too.
Audi picks up her dragon and trit-trots into the other room. She hops up on the chaise lounge and looks out at the front yard through the picture window. It's winter out there too.
I open up the back door and step outside for a moment. It's cold, but not that cold. Yet there's a mean quality to the air, a knifing iciness. I have a class in the morning I won't be teaching. Karen has a class this evening she won't be going to. Far off there's the bass rustle of thunder. I'm searching the tree limbs--so far nothing is sticking to them.
I step back inside.
Karen is reading her page proofs, her laptop open, a red pen poised above an ink-tracked field. Looking across the table we use as a desk (wi-fi has liberated me from the office on the other side of the house) I can see her concentrating. She can feel me watching her I think, she reads me a snatch of a letter to the editor. All the columnists are in, except me, she says, but there's no pressure implied. Deadline is still a ways off. She might be more concerned if she knew I had just started over, dumped everything I had written (in a mild frenzy, to tell the truth, we knew the weather was coming and wanted to get the car home before the roads froze) earlier today to write what I'm writing now.
Which is maybe a column about how to be happy, even when you might be able to make a case for misery.
I do not handle this stuff as well as I should. I have things to do, errands to run. I have Karen's birthday gift to secure, something at the FedEx office for which I must sign, a couple of deadlines yet to meet. My head spins and sometimes I have trouble sleeping for all the insignificant details I keep rolling around. I need a week of sunshine, a chance to hit the new irons, to work out to exhaustion. I want to peel a sweaty T-shirt off my back. But I have to understand there are things I cannot control.
I have to understand that I am not responsible for the way the world wobbles and halts. The sun will come out, tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar, and if it doesn't, we will have to deal with all those bleak disruptions then.
Paris has settled onto the leather sofa behind me. I hear her nestling, her paws pushing and tugging on the blanket we leave there, fitting herself into a compact curl. She is the color of cafe au lait, with soft ears edged in brown and golden eyes that make her look wise and beatific, a little Shvan who regards us mostly with kind pity.
Have you been outside, Paris? I ask.
She doesn't answer.
I think it has stopped, Karen says.
I crack the door. It hasn't.
We can hear the train running down by the river, a long sigh that eventually is subsumed by the steady lowing of the wind. A few notes from a wind chime break in now and then, and occasionally there's a metallic flutter from the metal basket that serves as our mailbox.
What I think is that we decide to be happy. That is hardly an original thought, it's true, but I think that is the way it works. There is plenty to be disturbed about--one doesn't have to venture far to encounter the jeremiads of the displeased. I could open a new browser window and within seconds be confronted by people who legitimately hate the president, and people who hate the people who hate the president.
There is much about which we could complain. Our country is creeping dangerously close to that fusion of statism and corporatism that Mussolini himself identified as fascism, the efficacy of an individual vote has become so diluted as to be meaningless when considered against a well-leveraged campaign contribution, our booming economy has not made a significant difference in the lives of middle-class, much less poor, citizens who find themselves working harder for lower real wages while worrying about their job security, we live unhealthy lifestyles and consume food products that make us sad, and we're constantly presented with images of the impossibly beautiful and impossibly rich doing impossibly stupid things.
But I'm not sure it does any more good to address these issues than it does to carp about the weather. Things really aren't so bad in Arkansas if you're a cultural Christian of European descent and conventional desires with a job and a warm place to sleep. And if you don't fit that description, I am sorry to admit there is limited utility in the words of someone like me. There is ice in the wind, and dull majoritarianism is afoot in the statehouse.
While I could--and no doubt will in future--use this space to point out the cognitive dissonance inherent in the way we live now and underline (once again) the obvious ways in which choosing a political position has become akin to choosing a favorite sports team, I'd frankly rather toss Audi's purple dragon (or better yet, the stuffed moose I'm afraid she may have taken out into the yard earlier today; in the thaw, we may find him stiff and filthy).
Karen has moved on until I finish this, there's no more work for her to do. She's taken up a spot in the kitchen now, and Paris has maneuvered to position herself as sous chef. Dublin is back--her ears chilled from another quick excursion into the now-frosted yard--seeking my attention.
And Audi, bless her rescued terrier heart, has found her courage and ventured out, to test the dark and wild and cold to do what's necessary. It will not be so bad as she imagined.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 03/08/2015