This Explains So Much

"There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen.

Bosco's Parade Route

Bosco the Wonderbeast has many strange characteristics--everybody thinks their dog is special, but Bosco is mostly just strange--but maybe the strangest is her parade route.

First, a quick background. Bosco is half whippet, half Australian shepherd. This means that her instincts are to round things up (the Aussie half) and then kill them (the whippet). Whippets are fantastically fast dogs--once, in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere in Canada, I had four TV stations; two of them showed whippet racing. It takes a greyhound about a hundred yards to get up to 35 mph or so; whippets are there in two or three steps, but by a hundred yards, they're pretty much done.

When Bosco gets a large treat--say, a new bone--she takes it on a parade, running laps around the kitchen, through the dining room door, into the hallway, into the living room, back into the kitchen. The record for this is somewhere in the high 40s, and the average is probably 25 or so laps.

Sometimes she looks like she's really enjoying it. Sometimes, she looks like it's a chore she has to perform. But it is a rule: get a big treat, take it on a parade. This is a dog that likes rules, and if you don't give her one, she'll make one for herself, and she'll stick to it.

This is all related, trust me. I was thinking about when I first moved to Japan, a dreadful place called Utsunomiya, a big industrial city, filthy air, water that gave me a sore throat, crowds, noise, the works. I lasted six months there before moving into the Japan Alps, which were clean and incredibly beautiful.

In Utsunomiya, the office where I worked was on the main street, a mile or so from the train station. About once a week, one of us would have our bicycle stolen. We'd go downstairs after a hard day's work of teaching English to people who really didn't care at all, and no bike.

The theft victim would trudge off to the train station, and there the bike would be, parked somewhere obvious. It wasn't so much stolen, as borrowed by somebody about to miss a train. Fair enough.

I rode to work along the same roads every day: past the bowling alley (bowled a 206 there once), through a residential neighborhood, past Nudo Toyo (which was always being hosed out every morning and was frightening just for that reason) and a pachinko parlor, down the underpass beneath the train station (where most days a woman was trying to navigate the slopes on her wheelchair), and then along a shopping street, before popping out onto the main street in front of our office.

My own parade route. Some days I enjoyed it, some days, not so much.

A friend of mine, living abroad for the first time now, asked if I had any advice at all.

And what I came up with was this: never, ever take the same road twice.

Leave the parade route for Bosco.

Scent

When I left the hospital last Friday, the first thing that struck me as they wheeled me outside was that the air had a scent to it. Hospitals, of course, have their own smell of fear and alcohol and soap and more fear. Outside, though, it smelled like trees. Maybe not great trees--it certainly wasn't that Southeast Alaska rainforest scent that is one of the best things that can ever happen to your nose--but it did at least smell green and alive.

Some years ago, I heard a story of a kid who had grown up in Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutians. Then the family moved to Ketchikan, in Southeast, and the kid couldn't take it. He said the whole place stank, stank, and he couldn't breathe. Finally, they figured out it was the smell of trees that had gotten to him. The kid had never smelled trees before.

But isn't that why we go anywhere? Isn't that the clearest way to experience anything? It's one of the main things we can learn from dogs, who understand how important it is to simply put your nose in the air and see what's out there.

That great Joe Jackson line, "but I can dream/until I go/of smells that I don't recognize."

Paprika in Budapest. The deep, cold smell of Japan in winter. Scotland smelled like lost love, and in Hawaii, standing next to flowing lava, the smell was burning tennis shoes and a world where anything was possible.

I made it to the back yard today, walked under the orange trees. Tonight, looking forward to finding out what the Canary Islands smell like--for hundreds of years, they were the end of the world, and one must always wonder what the smell of the edge is--I'm hoping for dreams of the particular scents that haunt me, that they'll come and clear the last few weeks out of my system.

Absolutely Knackered

Today, Lynn called from London, simply gleeful at the phrase "absolutely knackered."

The simple joys of travel.

I might make it as far as the back door today, myself.

Yeah, There's Probably a Stupid Proverb about That

Day, maybe 12, in the hospital. Here's how you measure recovery: count the number of places where there are wires, tubes, or lines leading from your body. A couple days ago, I was held down at nine separate points, but I'm down to two or three now.

I sit up. That takes a good fifteen minutes.

Put my feet on the floor.

Trailing IV tubes, enough electrical equipment to light a small city, I walk to the door of my room, lean my head on it for just a second. That's maybe ten feet from the bed, and by the time I get back, I'm completely exhausted, breathing like I just finished a marathon.

I got home yesterday, all tubes and wires gone.

In a month, I'll be in the Canary Islands.

"It's a long, long time 'till morning."

Bad Movie Dialogue

Was watching the not impressive remake of Flight of the Phoenix the other day--had no idea the original was written by Elleston Trevor, who many years ago used to come, dressed like a confused James Bond, to the bookstore where I worked--and there was a line in it that went something like--

Everybody just wants someone to love. If they can't have that, give them something to hope for. And if they can't have that, just give them something to do.

Made the whole movie worthwhile.

So I have been keeping very busy, finishing ten or so articles in the past week.

But circumstances are probably going to keep me away from this blog for the next week, maybe ten days or so. Hard to say right now.

Remember, hope was the last thing out of Pandora's box.