This is a Linguist-in-Chief Anne-Michelle Tessier Dog Post. You may remember LiC AMT from such other dog posts as The Problem of Maggie’s Mind.

Howard is getting older. He’s not old, yet, but he’s acquiring the habits of middle age. He wants to wrestle less with still-bonkers Bagel. (Howard is nearly 8, and Bagel is 4). He doesn’t want to jump as high or run as far. He naps more frequently and deeply; taking cheese out of the fridge won’t always get him bounding to the fridge from the bed upstairs – though taking out salami still will. His neuroses about locations or scenarios in which he will decide it is Not Safe for Walking continue to accumulate; he has added ‘Chinese cultural center picnics” to the list of events that if spotted, cancel an entire outing. (I suspect this is because one time we came suddenly across a group of elderly Chinese women in a park practicing a kind of folk dance that involved the waving of fans AND the use of a gong and he has never forgiven the entire nation.)

The thing is, it’s not just Howard. Everywhere this summer, there have been reminders that time is passing, youth is fleeting, the march marcheth onwards. For weeks I have been making notes towards the newsletter piece I thought I was writing, on the topic of parasocial relationships with dogs on the internet who are somehow always dying. Some of them were very loved and very famous; some lived on the streets in Thailand and have never had a name, and the multitudinous rest are somewhere in between. Lately so many of them are approaching their end that I have been overwhelmed, with both a heavy sadness and a perverse guilt that I have been trying and failing to describe to my satisfaction. … I get sad for everyone; I get mildly angry I’m being forced to feel sad for animals I’ve never met; I get annoyed with myself for feeling forced (by who?); I feel guilty for wanting to look away; I hug my dogs and repeat.   

It turns out I am not writing that piece, however, not only because it is too heart-wrenching. Instead, with one month of proper summer left, I am now building a somewhat complicated outdoor planter in our backyard. It will be long and low, running along a fence, and it will hold many of next year’s plants up out of Howard and Bagel’s digging and peeing ranges. As with the previous two planters -- which me and the more advanced woodworker I live with have built the last two summers -- the project is equally rewarding and infuriating, and I swing from accomplishment to despair and back again several times each hour. (If you would like to know a hundred things I’ve forgotten and relearned each year about hand-sawing, wood-holding in a bench vice, measuring incorrectly, chiseling around knots, attaching the pocket screw jig and a million other stupid things, please do not hesitate to ask but otherwise I will spare you.)

One particularly tetchy part of this work is the leveling. The ground by the fence is sloped and uneven, its dirt shifts and throws up surprises, and the universe’s general entropy vigorously resists the structure that me, an 11-foot cedar board, and a 3-foot level seek to impose on it, along every dimension. And leveling is actually what this story is about. Because of Roy.

Roy and Nada were already my parents’ neighbours in Toronto before I was born and for all my life they lived beside us, in a house full of Serbian accents and unfamiliar cooking smells and the occasional shot of plum brandy. I spent my childhood summers swimming in their pool with Nada floating beside me, while Roy whistled and gardened and puttered. He was always complaining happily, with a fluid and idiosyncratic ESL syntax (I really wish I’d taken better notes on his relative clauses), and he still climbed implausibly tall trees (scaring all the women, at least) well into retirement. They were an exotic set of chosen semi-grandparents, and I loved them fiercely.  

So. This week I’ve been out in my west coast backyard, trying to get a level base for my planter, muttering oaths and moving dirt to no good end, and I’ve been remembering my father doing the same thing about 40 years ago. He was building one of those metal garden sheds from the hardware store, it was behaving poorly, and so he was futzing with a level and a rake and a measuring tape and I’m pretty sure he was trying hard not to yell obscenities in front of his innocent child (me) … And then came Roy, leaning over from his yard to contribute his energy and wisdom, and delivering the sage advice that has ever since been cherished and much-repeated in my family:

“Eh, Roger, what, don’t worry, you know.” (Here, he would give a performative shrug. Roy was a great user of discourse particles, and a great shrugger. He was probably also not wearing a shirt.) “… It not a bloody cathedral.”

Nada died a couple years ago, and for many months Roy has been declining. (The last two times I saw him, I think he recognized me?) … Last week his children had to make the painful but necessary decision to move him to a nursing home. I hear he’s not enjoying it; neither are they. We all know Roy was made to be outdoors, independent in his garden, giving advice, offering his help, whistling under a pergola.

Next summer I will plant some new flowers and some vegetables, in the planter which is not a cathedral but still special, and all of it will remind me of Roy and of being young. The planter will be mostly level, and Howard will probably try to pee on it. The march marcheth onwards.