Leaves Change, Dogs Lie

As I write these words, Jinx is sleeping in the recliner on the back porch. I came out here to do a bit of writing and he came out with me. As is his custom, the spotted menace hopped up in my lap to snuggle, and so scribbling with my pencil in my notebook became nigh impossible. We rocked and watched the rain and the birds and the chipmunks, and we rested. I needed to go inside at one point so I could put clothes into the dryer, and when I stood up, Jinx got back into the chair and made himself comfortable. When I returned, he was asleep, but shivering slightly in the cool rain-breeze. He is the coldest-natured dog I’ve ever known. I fetched one of his blankets and draped it over him, and that was all she wrote.

So now Jinx is curled in a cushy old recliner with a clean but ratty old blanket spread over him while I crouch in this maple rocking chair, its seat and slats as hard as Jen Psaki’s eyes. The spotted menace is quite comfortable; I am not as cozy. From where you are, dear, reader, can you detect the delicate scent of burning martyr, hmm?

Jinx is cute when he’s pulling these kinds of antics, but we were not amused with him the other day when Mrs. Orr and I were getting ready to leave the farm and run some errands. Because of some local activity by a neighbor with whom we have, shall we say, strained relations, we dislike leaving Jinx outside when we are away. We had to resort to some creative strategy to get him to come back inside, and once we had him secured and were driving away, we were speculating about whether his penchant for cattle-chousing might nudge one of the neighbors to call Animal Control about him.

Just as we got to the end of our gravel road and were about to turn onto the highway, a dark-green, official-looking vehicle turned off the paved lane onto our road. A large badge was emblazoned on the vehicle’s door. Animal Control Officer, it read.

We looked at each other. After a mile or two, we shrugged and decided it was coincidence. Still…

***

Since I will soon be looking for other employment due to my refusal to submit to the Death Jab, I’ve been poking around for what sort of job(s) I might pursue. My wife is convinced that we could be rich as czars if we could find a way to make one of my peculiar talents pay. This talent is voice recognition.

For as long as I can remember, I have been blessed with the ability to recall peoples’ voices with great accuracy. Whether it be a friend, acquaintance, celebrity, or someone I’ve encountered only one time, once I hear the voice, I can recall the person’s name years later after hearing only a few words.

Many years ago, I happened to be in a nursing home where a man brought around a half-wolf dog that served as a sort of therapy dog for the residents. It was a massive, gorgeous creature, gray and white, and it would prowl the halls on its master’s leash, nuzzling the faces of elderly folks and licking their hands in friendship. The man and the wolf-dog approached me as I sat in the dining area with a friend, and I reached my hand out.

The wolf-dog’s master said, “She’s going to smell your scent, and then she’s going to howl, really loud, so don’t be nervous. It’s her way of saying ‘Nice to meet you.’ And once she meets you and knows your scent, she won’t ever howl again when she sees you. She only howls at new people.”

So the wolf-dog approached, and she sniffed my offered hand, and she sat down on her gray haunches and lifted her muzzle into the stale, urine-reeking air and howled a howl that brought the nursing home to a silent halt and brought the atavistic hair up on the back of my neck. The howl went on for about a half-minute, and then she stood up and came to me and licked my hand, and I rubbed her face and ears and she licked my face and we were friends.

I saw her again about a month later, and the wolf-dog sniffed my hand and licked it but she didn’t howl. I saw her a few more times, and she never howled at me again.

So perhaps I’m somewhat like that wolf-dog, except with voices instead of scents. How can an aging hick like me earn money with this sort of exotic talent?

***

“Many people judge a religion by its art, and why indeed shouldn’t they?”

— Elizabeth Jennings

***

An elderly man I knew through my association with him at my job died recently, and I was saddened to know that I wouldn’t see him or his wife again in this life.

The man and his wife were always gracious and pleasant, dressed in modest but well-maintained clothes that would be termed “dressy” by most people my age. The man had an open, childlike gaze and a sunny disposition. His wife was quiet and giggly-shy, with a girlish energy and an obvious devotion to her husband. The silver-haired pair were always a delight to encounter.

After I read the man’s obituary, I was impelled to look up his and his wife’s street address. Based on my observations, I assumed they lived in one of the more upscale neighborhoods of the town in which I work.

But when I found the address and plugged it into the search engine, the photo of the house and property took me aback. Their home was a shabby little single-wide trailer in a field next to an industrial warehouse. I stared at the photo, looking closely at the tiny front deck and the bare back steps and the weed-choked lot next to their small yard.

Then I looked through the lichen-spotted aluminum exterior and I could see inside the walls, and I could smell the meals the woman had cooked over the years, and I could hear the window glass clattering with the laughter of grandchildren and the good-natured political arguments with sons-in-law at Thanksgiving, and I could smell the perfume the woman dabbed on her wrists before church every Sunday, and I could hear the burble of coffee as it filled their two favorite mugs in the morningtimes, and the muted conversations about how to pay that next bill or whether or not to trust that one doctor’s diagnosis. I could see the trips to the mailbox and I could hear the skiff of broomstraw on the little deck and the uneven sidewalk made of pavers, and I could make out the tiny grave out back by the dilapidated shed where the little beloved cat had been buried a few years ago at a tearful sundown.

And their little trailer was beautiful to me, more beautiful than I can express here, because I was thinking as I looked at the webpage, thinking of the Paradise I believe the man inherited, where he waits for his sweet little wife to join him, and I believe there will be coffee in his Heaven, and his cat, and flannel shirts, and George Beverly Shea hymns, and long naps. In the meantime, I know that his ever-present pocket squares are carefully folded in a drawer, and that his aftershave sits on a high shelf in the old-fashioned medicine cabinet in the single bathroom of the trailer, and that his wife reads her Bible with a new sense of expectation, and that the grass outside will never again be cut with such deliberate care.

I will miss you, John. You were my friend. Your elegant bearing, and that of your wife, made me believe you were an affluent couple, that you were a wealthy man.

Turns out that you were.

***

While we’ve been sitting out on the back porch, the birds have been very feisty, even in the soft rain. A little while ago, a Carolina wren and two titmice landed in the Japanese magnolia at the end of the porch and set up quite a racket, enough to make me look over at them to see what was the matter.

I saw the matter.

A sturdy blacksnake, perhaps five feet in length, was stretched along one wet branch, blending in perfectly. The birds were hopping all around it, fussing and scolding and telling me to come get it, come get it now, come get it out of the tree now! And so I did. I got the hoe that I kept handy during the just-ended Summer of the Snake, and I twined the snake in it and carried it away and tossed it into a pasture.

After relocating the offending reptile, I kept thinking about the birds and their urgent entreaties. I thought back to the summer, to the day when the robin came and cried to me that a snake was threatening her nest. I wondered if the birds talk to each other in their way, and I wondered if I have a reputation among them? If a snake comes, go tell the old man who lives in that house. He’ll come and take the snake away. There is enmity between him and the snake, and the enmity stretches back many, many nest-buildings. Tell the old man.

I like to think this is the way of things.

I also like to think that a certain spotted dog dreams in English, and that he is planning the things he will do when we go for our evening walk in the milky curtain of rain and fog that sits out there in the fields. For now, though, he remains wrapped in soft cloth, his ribs rising with his dreaming breaths.

~ S.K . Orr