Must Like Dogs

June 11th, 2006

I’ve been told that everybody has to have a dog story, so here’s mine.

Before I married my delightful wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, I dated a woman who lived on a farm and owned a mutt’s mutt, a wolfy, snouty, toothy fiend named Mr. Sport. At the time, I didn’t like dogs much; in fact, they frightened me fairly thoroughly. So picture the following scene: my girlfriend-to-be leads me into the nearby grazing field, intending to introduce me to her pet cow (I kid you not), and Mr. Sport, poised at the far corner of the field, bounds directly toward me at top speed, looking pretty much exactly like the Hound of the Baskervilles. I, of course, immediately adopted the deer-in-the-headlights defense, and froze, absolutely petrified, as Mr. Sport veered off at the very last minute. Just a little canine humor, there. I suppose he must have concluded that he’d met his match, because he decided then and there that I was one of his very favorite people. Mr. Sport’s gone now, to the Great Hydrant in the Sky, but I will never forget that moment; I’m pretty sure I thought I was going to be eaten.

And how far from my music are we, here in a cow pasture in Rhode Island? Not far at all, in fact. It was this very woman who did me the favor of reminding me what it means to be an artist in the first place. It was at the first party we went to, at a colleague’s summer place in Ogunquit (tough life, that). I have a vivid memory of this woman with a croquet mallet in her hand, hitting one of the croquet balls randomly around the yard. The expression on her face was priceless: it was the mesmerized concentration of a 10-year-old child. There was nothing in the world besides the ball and the next croquet arch, nothing, and in her I saw what I’d been missing all those years: the ability to shovel away all the crap and touch the world in its fullest, most honest form. Call it “writing down the bones”, as Natalie Goldberg calls it, or free writing; invariably, the secret of good art is casting aside the observer and just being.

Arf, says Mr. Sport, and I couldn’t put it better myself.

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