So I was trying to leave St. Mark's twenty minutes into the liturgy, having once again accidentally gone to the Spanish Mass. Halfway up the driveway, I fell down and couldn't get up, or rather, fell again every time I tried. A couple of hispanic-looking guys were heading down the driveway the other way. I told them that the Mass was in Spanish and they shouldn't go. In totally unaccented Midwestern English, one of them said, "Man, they should really put that on the sign." They both turned and left.
I looked down at my watch. 5:20. I had only ten minutes to get to the Newman Center for the 5:30 Mass (always in English), and as it's over a mile away, I realized I had better hurry. But I was just walking
so slow and I couldn't make myself go faster, so I realized I'd need to cut across Lydian Avenue to save some time. As I was heading down Lydian, I saw a tall, guant black dog, perhaps a doberman-shepherd mix, walking toward me. Knowing she meant harm, I looked around at the gnarled oaks, scanning nervously for a branch in climbing reach. None. I was doomed. But she just kept walking on by, with her furry, bouncy black puppy that I had suddenly noticed in tow. She strode off, but the puppy (which, oddly, looked like a cocker spaniel, and nothing like its mother), after sniffing around for a minute, locked its jaws onto the heel of my sandal and wouldn't let go. I took off the sandal but there the puppy hung, eyes roving and alert, happy-looking enough, but locked inseperably to my sandal. So I carried sandal dog up to Nelson road, where I saw a posh, well-dressed, fiftyish white woman with two hispanic children.
"I see you've found my dog," she said. "He seems to like you." Pulling out her purse she withdrew some bills and handed them to me, who, being broke until my tax return arrives, gratefully accepted them. "We're going to church. Meet us over on Eastwood later." And they walked off. I guess everyone was late that day. So, puppy-sandal still in hand, I started walking toward the intersection of Nelson and Fifth, not at all bothered that I had just taken a side street in Cleveland to cut through from Wilmington, North Carolina to Columbus, Ohio. I checked my wallet to see how much money she had given me, and found, miraculously, it had morphed from what looked like ten into about $140. Wow. Drinks for me tonight, I thought.
So I kept walking with the dog toward Fifth, and crossed when the light changed, being eyed suspiciously by the dense throng of traffic for holding a sandal with a black puppy attached. From his darting eyes, I could tell the puppy was getting skittish, and the last thing I needed was for him to take off running in traffic. I made it to the other side, where Amanda was walking
her dog. I didn't know that Amanda had a dog, but asked if I could borrow her leash so I could keep track of the puppy until I took him back to Eastwood. She was about to hand me the leash when, sure enough, the puppy dropped to the ground and ran out in front of some cars. I bolted out after him, getting in between a black minivan and an early-eighties, gleaming white Toyota Supra, like the one my friend Jason used to have but much nicer. They both had tinted windows and headlights on, and I was sure they were going to kill me but they didn't. They stopped. The puppy then darted after a squirrel into the trees, and I realized now I had to catch the puppy
and the sqirrel, although I wasn't sure why, even though they kept splitting off and going different directions. All I could think was that I'd have to give that money back to the nice rich lady, and I'd lost her dog and would have to move away in shame. Amanda caught the squirrel for me and put it in a shoebox, but I knew it would never substitute for the puppy, which was gone.
And then I saw Jamie standing there at the edge of the woods, watching, not saying a word. Honestly, I thought the intrusion was a little sneaky and rude, and so, a bit bothered, I marched up to him, pointed my finger, and said, "You're dead," in a very accusatory tone.
Quietly, like the dead, he replied: "Only sometimes."
This afternoon, I was trying to make heads or tails out of all of this, when I noticed the date: April 15. In three days my friend will have been dead eleven years. I don't think about him or how he died very often. It was a long time ago in a different city with a different group of friends, most of whom I no longer have contact with. But what I did realize is, be they young or old, we never really forget the dead. The loss they represent to those who considered them friends, parents, chidren, neighbors, is like a pinprick in the soul, that grows easy to ignore with time but never truly closes. It just lingers, and is joined in time by more and more pinpricks, until with age we are so riddled, the balance so skewed between the number of dead we know and the number of living, that it seems a matter of proper economy to join the bigger group. I think perhaps that is often why the elderly face death with such stoicism.
And so I thought of Jamie Best and Jim Metzgo, Pat Joyce and Lynn Dura and Chris Burrant, Jerry Wick and Chris Carlson, my brother's friend Hans, Amanda from the dream's brother, Kohler, Dusty--friends of mine, friends of my siblings, some close and some nearly strangers, and wondered "where did you all go? You were all so
young."
I don't know if its easier to lose the elderly for their friends and children, but loss of the young just seems so painfully
unjust. This is an illusion of the mind, of course--we don't sign 80 year leases at birth--but a potent illusion. It seems unfair to know, at 31 years of age, directly and peripherally so many people that didn't make it this far.
But I realized somewhere in pondering the question, that I already had my answer. Each of us may say to the departed, in moments of sorrow, "you're dead," and mean it as a sort of reproach. To which the dead, perhaps flattered at being long remembered, reply without injury:
"Only sometimes."
