As we approach a year of living under the constraints of CoVid-19, those of us still here are feeling dejected. Who imagined we’d experience a pandemic in our lifetimes? That we’d close the schools? That churches would be open for neither Easter nor Christmas nor, quite possibly, Easter again? That a trip to the store would entail such risk? That people in critical jobs would imperil their lives just by showing up for work and that so many others would have no have work at all. For a year. So far. No wonder we feel blue.
This week, though, Rascal reminded me of another option: taking it like a dog. We were out walking, headed for the stairs that connect two commercial properties along our route. I don’t much like the stairs. They were no great shakes to start with, and they’ve settled so that all the steps now slant downward. Still, they get the job done.
I could see from a distance that there was a problem with the stairs. The dog, much closer to the ground, couldn’t see the problem till we were upon it. The stairs were missing. Absolutely no sign of them. They were buried under a twelve-foot mountain of snow. Rascal grasped the situation immediately: we needed to find another way to get where we were going. We made a detour and carried on. As far as he was concerned, the sudden lack of stairs was not a problem. The situation simply was. Nothing to fret about. Hardly worth interrupting a good wag for.
Contrast this with my friend Carole’s far more human response to similar adversity. Shortly after moving to the country, Carole started down the long drive between her house and the road and found she could go no farther. She backed up and pulled forward again. Same result. Backed up and pulled forward. Still stuck. Only after she’d tried three times to go the way she expected to go, did she grasp the problem: a tree had fallen across the drive.
We humans can be slower on the uptake than dogs. We can bring disbelief to bear on circumstances that are out of the ordinary. They can stymie us. We are infinitely inventive and adapt to new variables as they arise. We also spend a lot more effort than dogs in railing against change for the worse. The pandemic is horrible. We’ve altered our lives to protect ourselves and others from it as best we can. But, a year in, we’ve yet to come to terms with it. It’s hard for people to take it like a dog.
For instance and on a completely trivial note, I’m still bothered about Trim the Spruce Day. That was Tuesday, apparently, and an occasion zealously observed by the local red squirrel population. They spent the day chewing the ends off, as far as I can tell, every branch of every Norway spruce in the neighborhood. They for sure didn’t miss any in our yard. The snow around the skirts of all the Norways is littered with branch-ends up to a foot long. The dog doesn’t care one way or the other. Do I follow his example and continue life unruffled by the squirrels’ behavior? No, I do not. Every time I look outside, I’m vexed again.
Our friend Cindy had a much more positive response to an oddity in her life this week. Driving up Nixon Road, she noticed what looked like a bar of soap on the pavement ahead. Interesting, she thought; that’s not something you see every day. As she got closer, it looked less like soap and more like a wallet. She put on her hazard lights and got out of the car to go retrieve it. At which time, the wallet put its head, tail, and feet out of its shell and started walking. The wallet turned out to be a turtle, a painted turtle. Cindy stopped traffic in the other lane as well and moved the turtle to the side of the road, placing it carefully in the same direction of travel as before. Well done, Cindy.
But maybe the lesson here isn’t that Cindy sized up a situation quickly, took immediate action, and continued on her way–that she took it like a dog. Maybe the lesson is how much we could all use happy obstacles that we can overcome. Finite problems we can solve, feel good about, and be done with. Little successes to savor and share. The pandemic stinks, but not everything does. As we wait for normal to return, in whatever form normal takes when this is over, we still need to be alert for turtles crossing the road.
26 February 2021