Through the whistle

November is my favorite month.

The weather is generally not harsh; we can cuddle together on the couch under a blanket with the heat off. I can break out the slippers and the sweatshirts. Most days are warm enough for golf. Some years, November is the only autumn month we get.

We are busy in November; there are birthdays and holidays and events. Gallery openings and dinner parties. Normal has sneaked up on us. This is the time of year when we get film screenings. Most years (not this one) we take a trip in November. We’ve been to Paris, to Dublin, to Santa Fe and Montreal in November.

Our 30th wedding anniversary was last Sunday. We celebrated on Saturday night with takeout and a bottle of Lagrein. Next week, we’ve got someone coming to design a storage system for our garage. I’m excited about that. I’ll have to get a better ladder.

If you read this column regularly, you know all is not well everywhere. There have been losses, and there are pending losses, and heartbreak arrives in most lives on the regular. Stress is a real thing—it can double you over and leave you paralyzed. Grief never goes away, it just recedes a bit, and you get used to it the same way you can get used to a trick knee. Pain is our great teacher, instructing us with the toughest love.

But I know I am lucky. I am the guy David Byrne was singing about. I find myself in rooms with beautiful objects, in conversation with beautiful minds, and wonder how I got there. Most of what I worry about is phantasmal. Most of what bothers me can be cured by an hour in the sunshine with creatures I love.

November means the year is 11/12ths done; and we are already halfway through November. I can map out the rest of my year from here—the seasonal rhythms become more rigid. Maybe next year I’ll use all my vacation; maybe next year I’ll finish up a project I’ve been putting off. But the next month and a half is spoken for, set up to be disrupted by circumstances outside my control.

God laughs at plans, they say. But I make plans anyway.

One of the horrors of modern life is that I can open up a social media app on any given morning and learn that someone I used to know— someone who used to be a friend, someone I used to eat and drink with—has either died or met with some sort of misfortune. Just this week I learned a guy I knew when we were both young reporters, a guy who figures in some of my glory days stories, died unexpectedly.

Can someone who you haven’t spoken with in 35 years or so still be a friend? I suspect so; while I forget people all the time I never forgot him and I was—thanks to the Internet—always vaguely aware of the outlines of his life. I knew where he was living, some of what he was doing, the name of his daughter.

Maybe I am kidding myself that this counts for something, maybe all these digital connections do is allow us to pretend that we are “in touch” with people with whom we once shared an office or an experience. Is the genuine sorrow that learning of his death sparked in me actually a response to losing him, or is it an intimation of my own mortality? When people I knew as young reporters—people junior to me—die, doesn’t that tap an icy finger on my own certain-to-be-stilled-one-day heart?

(Cue Gerard Manley Hopkins: “It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for.”)

Yeah, probably. But he was a friend of mine too. And any chance of reunion has now been foreclosed. It makes me think I’d better do whatever it is I mean to do. It is November, after all.

And though we have this one, we are not promised another.

Still, I am pretty confident we will have our dog Paris this Thanksgiving; in the summer of 2022, her vet told us it was unlikely she would make it to Thanksgiving that year. But after I finish this column, I am going to load my small family up and drive to Holidays in The Heights where Paris and her sister Savannah will walk and sniff and enjoy the crowds. Children will approach them and we will tell them that Savvy is a year old and likely to jump into their faces if they lean too close and Paris is 15 and a half and gentle, if nearly deaf and blind.

Part of Paris’ surprising persistence is no doubt due to the medicine she takes, that Karen faithfully conceals in a slice of hot dog or bologna every morning, which has restored strength in her legs and her appetite. But I think part of it is also due to her hyperactive companion.

Savannah, we have discovered, is younger than the people at Little Rock Animal Village estimated when we adopted her in March. She’s nearly doubled in weight since we got her—she was six pounds then, and now she’s 10 pounds.

Unlike the mannerly dogs at the dog park who seem to to instinctively respect and defer to Paris—they either leave her in peace or approach in a courtly manner—Savvy treats her like an older sister. They scrap and scramble, roll each other over, snap and paw at one another. Paris usually winds up with her jaws around Savvy’s throat, and I watch carefully to make sure that she’s not put out by her younger sister’s enthusiasm. She never is; there is a gleam in Paris’ cataract-afflicted eyes as she lords over her little companion. Paris likes the fray, the play of battle. It keeps her sharp.

I do too. Or at least I know we are not close to done.

There is no finish line.

Or perhaps there is, it’s just that most of us don’t know where it is. If we’re lucky we never see it, we just run through it like our coaches always said we should. Play to the whistle. Play

through the whistle. Play until it all goes dark and falls away and whatever new adventure—if there be a new adventure—begins.

We’re not done.