Ode to a Dog.

This dog will die in winter. I suspect she knows.

She must, because she is lean again, and I can’t tell what from. She may be sick, or she may be suddenly vital, just one more time, to last the season. Whatever it is, it’s in her eyes. She’s wise, now, and it’s not the illusion of it like it may have always been before. It’s not in the markings that were bred there by the people who breed these dogs. It’s the knowing look of an aging sports icon, one year left…ready to defy everyone who said she was too washed up to play. Ready to say, “I got one left in me, one last dream.” Ready to be a darling for the doubters. Ready to vindicate anyone who dared to hope. This dog is an icon: a real American hero, never complaining about the stiffness in her bones or the way she can’t make it up the stairs anymore; never professing to be tired, even when it’s written on her face and in her movements, stilted and unbecoming of a legend whose existence is enough to make us smile every day in some kind of wonder.

We will tell each other stories about her, about when she was a puppy, and the “tag-of-war” and the bottle of Coke that we accidentally dropped on her head. We’ll talk about her mid-career, in her prime, chasing down a ball and low to the floor and seeming to swallow it with her entire breast, lunging…agile. And we’ll talk about the golden years, when everything went to shit but still she wagged her tail and caught balls in the air and played until the day she died, when we fed her her last meal and all cried like idiots, crying over a dog.

Until then, we joke about her big personality, about the possibility of her speaking and saying, “You fuckers better listen…I got things to say.” We joke about how cranky she’s become. We take her out to her “favorite haunt,” the woods she so rarely visits anymore and never really did much anyway. We have regrets. This is all in the nature of a death.