MissouriLife Articles

Living A Dog's Life

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:10:13 GMT

By Ron Marr
BORIS, MY BLIND AND MASSIVE MALAMUTE, has just come
awake with a silly grin on his face. He’s a happy fellow this late night,
having just become the proud recipient of a gigantic “dog pillow,” the
canine equivalent of a feather bed. He stands, turns three times (as dogs
are prone to do), and plops his 115 pounds into a more comfortable position.
Within seconds, he drifts back toward peaceful slumber.

Such was not always the case. The rare syndrome with which Boris
was afflicted stole his sight within twenty-four hours. That would shake
up the best of us.

Two years later, Boris doesn’t care that he is blind. Animals have the
sense that adaptability is the key to survival, and Boris adapted with flying
colors. He navigates steps and jumps in the car with nary a worry. As
long as I don’t move the furniture, you wouldn’t know he was sightless.

I’m more than a little impressed with Boris. His surroundings may
be dark, but his mind (if behavior is any judge) is ablaze with light and
color. Simply, he has made the best of a bad situation.

At the foot of the bed, the venerable Henry, a red dog of indeterminate
lineage, is crashed on a slightly smaller dog pillow. I don’t want to
say Henry is old, but I suspect he remembers reading the original patent
for dirt. Strangely, Henry’s advanced years don’t concern him; in fact, he
ignores them completely. Some days it is an effort for him to get to his
feet—arthritis has rented a time-share in his hips—but once up, that
dog is a blur of movement from dawn ’til long past dusk.

I don’t know that Henry has adapted to age. It’s more a case of his
refusing to give up his fun. Hen moves with reckless abandon, tumbling
and leaping like Olga Korbut after twelve cups of coffee. He races the
fence line, barking and howling at floaters on the Gasconade.

When he decides to come in the house, he doesn’t stand patiently at
the door awaiting a pat on the head. He bounces. Literally. I look out
the window and see nothing but a head and torso doing a Yo-Yo imitation.
Open that door, and Hen explodes through my cabin, searching
for a squeaky toy that would have long ago been destroyed if he still had
upper teeth.

I’m more than a little impressed with Henry. This sort of energy
should have faded, but Hen apparently missed the memo. When the
ravages of time try to sneak up on him, he chases them out of the yard,
barking and snarling and refusing to play by the laws of nature. Henry
has his own laws, and they’re gorgeous to behold.

I’ve always said my dogs give me far more than I give them, both
in terms of love, joy, care, and laughter. However, I think I need to tack
“education” onto that list.

Most of this past fall I was wiped out with a case of the old-fashioned,
full-blown flu. I started reading up on pandemics, pondering my own
pile of years, questioning mortality. Those latter two subjects rarely come
to my mind … for I’ve spent most of my existence attempting (with
some success) to remain a juvenile delinquent. But the illness lingered,
morphing into a variety of related ailments that made the world spin
before my eyes and my sinuses scream for mercy.

Finally it ended, but I was spent for weeks. I fell behind on work. I
worried. I was unconscious for about sixteen hours at a stretch.

Yes, there was some self-pity involved, but it didn’t last long. I looked
at a blind dog. He can no longer jump fences and crash through the
woods like a four-legged bulldozer, but his spirit has not dimmed. He
smiles and sings and his unseeing eyes never lose their twinkle.

I looked at an ancient pup, one who refuses to give an inch to time,
one whose energy level is that of dogs ten years his junior. He throws
his sixty pounds from bed to couch to the great outdoors, always ready
to rock and roll.

Finally I listened to my boys. I dragged myself
from bed and went back to living. Like Boris, I
thought, I may have to adapt a bit or at least take
care of myself. Like Henry, I thought I should
remember that while age is a thief, thieves can
be locked behind bars. Hen has shared his secret,
and I would do well to take heed. I must not forget
to fight age tooth and nail, laugh in its face,
and let it know I’ll give back as good as I get.

You wonder why I buy my boys dog pillows? It
is a small price for such grand lessons.

December 2007

Groundhog Blues

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 15:37:12 GMT

*By Ron W. Marr* My neighbor shot a marauding groundhog the other day, thus consigning the entirety of America to another 365 days of winter. I’m not saying that this particular rodent didn’t deserve his fate, for last summer he’d played fast and loose with our gardens. By early fall he’d excavated more holes in our yards than a gravedigger. Still, to end his existence just prior to February 2nd, Groundhog Day, seemed a temptation of fate roughly akin to burning a flag at a Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting or claiming your seventeen dogs as dependents on next year’s 1040. Why this groundhog had awakened a couple weeks early from his slumber, I have no idea. Maybe he was hungry and maybe he was confused. Maybe he wanted to do a bit of shadow-boxing. Maybe he’d hoped to attend a Valentine’s Day protest against hydroponic gardening. Or maybe he was bored to tears, having contracted the groundhog version of the February blues. I can relate, for the spell between New Year’s Day and the Ides of March is too long, too cold, and too gray. Remaining inside one's humble abode over the long winter, be it cabin, castle, or hole in the dirt, can cause the mind wander and the nerves to fray. It's a common syndrome in those locales prone to the cold gales of the northland - the insidious onslaught of cabin fever. During my Montana days the locals knew, via hard-learned experience, that one should strive to be as polite as possible in February. This effort often failed with magnificent gusto. After six months of snow and more than a few solid weeks of thirty below, emotional fuses tended to burn hot. To no avail we hid the guns, unplugged the phones, and endeavored to stay away from smart alecks, firewater, and smart alecks with firewater. Come February, in Montana, tempers were shorter than a midget in a ditch. Come February, in Montana, even the earthworms were filing for divorce. After a decade of such in the highlands, I learned a few things about cabin fever and the perils of February malaise. Mostly, I learned to move back south to my Ozark homeland, where the mercury rarely drops below a comparatively balmy twenty degrees. To my mind winter is mild here, the people friendly all year long. Then again, I’m still so enamored with a return to the state of my birth that I don’t even mind the August chiggers, ticks, and water moccasins. However, I learned something else about cabin fever during my decade on the high peaks. During the frosty times you are well advised to keep your hands busy and your mind active. An overabundance of sedentary activity and negligent thought process leads to a bad attitude. To combat this tendency, some people read. Others sew quilts, spear fish with sharp sticks, cut wood, or join a bowling league. Me ... I got serious about guitar. Now I’ve played guitar for years, usually the same chord patterns over and over. My repertoire consisted mainly of repetitive strains of “Sweet Home Chicago” or “Margaritaville,” badly plucked tunes which gave affront to all who had functional ears. And I was just fine with that. For starters, I’ve a fickle attention span. For another, I’m easily amused. But this year, when the mercury dropped below freezing, I found myself strumming the old National blues-box a couple hours a day. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it just happened. One evening, in a literal bolt from the blue, the practice paid off. I was suddenly able to do things with those strings I’d never even imagined. I was bending notes, sliding all over the frets, hitting odd barre chords, and picking with both speed and accuracy. It was weird and noisy and great. Even Boris, my blind malamute seemed pleased. Somewhere in the midst of this process, I forgot all about winter. The fire was high and the cabin was warm and the music rang out over the Gasconade. At my age (that would be 46) I had resigned myself to the belief that I was too old to improve my heretofore nonexistent musical talents. That’s what I get for thinking. The truth of the matter is that you never really are too old to learn. All that’s required is a swig of desire and a shot of gumption. I know it’s a cliché, but sometimes the oldest clichés hold the most wisdom. I still believe that you can’t teach an old groundhog new tricks. All you can do is send the little devil to his reward and keep him out of the tomato patch. But it seems you can teach an old guitarist some new licks.

The Measure of a Man

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:49:16 GMT

*By Ron Marr* Almost twelve years ago to the day, I sat in a tattered chair, took a deep breath of crystal air, and gazed in awe at the moonlit outline of Ward’s Peak. I was living in a rented, tar-paper shack with an Irish Wolfhound puppy named Buffett, preparing to start a weekly newspaper with virtually no funds, and happy as a clam. I had never before lived in a place where the mountains hung right outside my window, never before neighbored against ragged spires of granite that seemed within arm’s reach, never before felt the invigorating, June chill of a Montana midnight at six thousand feet above sea level. The mammoth sky of Big Sky Country winked seductively with a billion twinkling eyes, and for the first time in quite a few years, I felt the tension slide away from my neck and shoulders. I should have been wound up like a cheap clock — both my bank account and experience in running a one-man newspaper being next to nonexistent. Instead, I was immersed in a warm tide of calm. Whether I would succeed or fail never even entered my mind; all I knew was that I’d measured the life I’d been living and found it more than a few feet out of plumb. In the here and now in Missouri, older and I hope a tiny bit wiser, it seems I’m still measuring things. These days though, the calibrations have taken on a different form. Mostly, I’ve been measuring the wood for that fence gate I’ve meant to build for the past two years. I’ve measured how much seed-corn the squirrels eat every week and how much bird chow disappears from the feeder. I’ve measured the length of my unruly beard, the water level on the Gasconade, and the time it takes to learn “St. James Infirmary” on the blues harp (the latter causing my dogs much auditory grief ). Of course, these measurements are more vague and anecdotal than precise. They’re all ballpark, based on informed supposition, which is why I have crooked gates. Still, I tend to believe the eyeball measurements are often more useful than the exact. At least, they seem more useful in the day to day, year to year process of living a life. We are all permitted to create and define our own form and style of estimates, guesstimates, appraisals, and reckonings, but some are better than others. Some are straight as a string, and some are formulated with a crooked yardstick. In truth though, the measurement itself is not as important as what we measure, and our interpretation of the findings. We live in a world that moves at breakneck speed. This is fine if you’re going for a record on the Utah Salt Flats, but a tad dangerous when traversing the long and winding roads far more common to normal existence. The problem with uncontrolled velocity is that one tends to miss the details. When the only measurement involves getting from point A to point B with alacrity, too many roadside delights are lost to the jet stream. True of driving. True of living. Sadly, many of our kind take measure of their life via how much they have or how much they can get. Often we measure by money, counting zeros as if they were of ultimate significance in terms of character, success, and self worth. Often we measure by status, adjudicating our accomplishments not from personal satisfaction but rather via the verdict of a collective and highly biased societal jury. We measure by fame, toys, and trinkets. We measure by how much work we can accomplish, by how many activities we can pack into a limited number of hours. The problem with these superficial assessments is not that they are inherently bad; as part and parcel of a whole they are just dandy. The problem is that far too frequently they overshadow everything else. We adopt the habit of concentrating on only one thing, with the result being a life in a tunnel allowing us to only see one of a million possible lights. Almost twelve years ago today, I traced the contours of Kidd Mountain and walked the banks of the Madison River for the first time. I started a little paper with several hopes, no money, and fewer expectations. If I’d ever stopped to measure the odds, I would have learned that the most likely outcome would have found me going bust in the first six weeks. Luckily, I only measured in retrospect. That paper just published its final issue, put to bed by the folks to whom I sold it in 1999. It was a bit sad for me, having served as its editor from birth to death, but the swan song was merely one gradient in both its and my history. When I started that publication, pretty well known in the western states as _The Trout Wrapper,_ I had taken measure of my life and found it wanting. I take the same measure today, and I smile. June 2006

The Great Maybe

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 21:45:42 GMT

*By Ron Marr* The expectations are a bit cloudy, the Magic 8 Ball offering its vague advice of “ask again later.” This is the spring that followed the winter that wasn’t, a season that left the entire populace of my little Gasconade River hideaway a tad confused. In January, when the mercury over-achieved its normal condition by forty degrees, I arose to a morning symphony of tittering songbirds. During February, a period usually reserved for the cold, gray, and silent, I watched squirrels drag out their beach towels and bask in the sun. Come March, I was eyeing the sprouting green and preparing to change the oil in the riding mower. This machine had not only spent the invisible winter in the great outdoors, it had apparently taken the Civil Service exam. With the exception of a couple of inclement days in December 2005, my big, green, lawn barber had almost wholly avoided the perils of rain, sleet, and snow. I do not attribute the balmy days and placid nights of this winter past to global warming. Frankly, I believe global warming is a bunch of hooey, tales and theories composed by agendadriven-pseudo-scientists, spooky stories designed to strike fear into the hearts of those who cannot envision life without air conditioning, central heat, cell phones, malls, and Dr. Phil. The Earth experiences periods of warming, followed by stints of cooling, interspersed with episodes of “hotter than a pistol,” and “colder than a gravedigger’s toes.” Climate is historically cyclical and utterly unpredictable; in the long term, there is little the transient tinkerings of man can do to affect planetary ecology. After all, we’re just renters on the big blue ball. The guy who runs the universal utility company is likely not terribly concerned with our weather-mania, meteorological computer constructs, doomsday predictions, and media-enhanced hysteria. Our expectations of what “should be” often supersede the reality of “what will, might, and could be.” This applies in equal measure to both the vagaries of climate and the vagaries of life. No matter how hard we want, wish, or desire, the only certain expectation is that our expectations may evolve in a surprising manner. All too often, we humans are inhabitants of the imagination rut, unable to shake off our preconceived notions and simply allow the future to unfold at its own pace. We enjoy pretending that we know it all, that our plans are iron-clad, that we control our own destiny. Perhaps we hold tightly to such addled convictions in order to avoid the frightening certitude that we are in charge of very little. Personally, my crystal ball appears to have a broken defroster, the cherished glimpse into the unknown masked by veils of sleepy fog. My expectations are but bubbles rising to the surface of a bottomless pool. I wish it wasn’t so, and on the other hand, I’m glad I’m blissfully ignorant. In regard to the former, some certainty of the future would go far toward eliminating mindless fear and worry. In contemplation of the latter, knowing without doubt what tomorrow has in store would make life terribly boring. I’m approaching major changes, and as with all large jumps, one worries about missing the mark and spiraling into the void. I’ve spent the last twelve months researching and writing a travel book, beginning with the first, terrifying, blank page and ending with a manuscript five hundred pages in length. I’ve never before attempted a tome of this sort or length, and now that I’ve reached the conclusion I find myself more perplexed than I did several hundred thousand words ago. My expectations are held at bay, for to allow them free rein could result in some nasty disappointments. I wonder if it will sell. I wonder if it will flop. I wonder what I will do next. A solid year of one’s life is a rather large investment, and looking back at my project and the literally thousands of hours of research, there are times I hope that it hasn’t been a wasted year. Which leads me back to the topic of expectations. The time and effort would only be a waste if I base the book’s success on potential profits or the lack thereof. The expectation should not be whether reviewers applaud, or readers purchase, or publishers beg me to take on more titles. The expectation should be nothing more than the satisfaction of creating something that stretched my abilities and the remembrance of the joy that came with putting the final period on the final page. Some days are hot, some are cold. Some days are new, some are old. But in the final analysis they are all just days. For best results they should not be viewed from the perspective of expectation. Rather, they should be judged by how we handle the unexpected.