My Buddy's Blog

As i was driving down the road this morning, my eyes were kidnapped by a flash of red on the grassy strip on the outfield of the mall parking lot.

It turned out to be a 7ish little boy, walking an equally young brown and white beagle-looking puppy.  Well, running him, actually.  This kid was just tearing ass down this little strip of grass, a flag of aliveness flying between the busy road i was traveling and the huge swathe of dead concrete surrounding the equally dead shopping mall which this semi-deserted parking lot supposedly served.

(Malls are deadening, pseudo-alive places at their best, but a dying mall – desperate for tenants, even if they be some stamp-collecting 20 year old’s “Collectible Postage Stamp Emporium” – if you haven’t experienced such a place, trust me that is is even more spirit-killing than a bustling mall.)

i almost dismissed this blur of red, white and brown, flapping in the breeze.  I was, after all, busy.  I was paying way too little attention to the here-and-now of driving, because in my head i was writing copy for my new poetry web site.  (Wool-gathering, out of touch with the present moment, supposedly in service of the intensely present, death-defying world of poetry – life loves to tease us with such ironies.)

But, when i was at risk of just sliding by this miraculous banner of red light, attached to a little boy whose glow lit up that red shirt like Christmas, something in me – I don’t know, the Present Moment Police or something – yelled, “Attention – pay attention”.  And so i did.

This kid was obviously having the time of his life – could not possibly be happier than he was in that moment – charging through the now with reckless abandon.  And the little doggie was also clearly having a good time, though it looked like his little legs and play-only energy were being a bit stretched in trying to keep up with this kid.

The kid and the dog ran on opposite sides of a tree – the jolt pulled the kid back and literally lifted the pup off his feet, depositing him in a pile of flailing white legs in the grass.  The kid, going back to rectify the divergent strands of leash and dog, did not just mind the task… he found a treasure – a long slender stick, branched at its upper end like a mining-geezer’s douser.  Oh, boy, now he was over the moon: a little dog to run and a new flag to fly.

Then the traffic light changed green.  (Or maybe changed green for a second time?  There was nobody behind me to beep, so i really didn’t know.)  I felt a little wisp of regret as i returned to the task of driving – though actually a bit safer now, as my attention had been pulled back  more into the present moment, at least for a little while.

Why do we so much love walking our dogs?  And why do we feel such an undercurrent of loss when we, for an extended stretch of time, are so “busy” that walking them becomes one more “to do”, one more pressured task to sandwich in among our other commitments and pre-occupations?  (I know this state – I’ve been there.)

I believe that our dogs teach us to pay attention to the here and now – just like they do.  And walking them can be an exercise in getting here.  When we walk alone, it is easy to wool-gather.  But when we have a dog to pay attention to, we are likely to also pay attention to what he is paying attention to.  We come out of our thoughts and back into our environment as it is presenting itself to us – right here, right now.

We come back to life.