Sparkle, our eight-and-a-half-month old golden retriever, has been with us since just before Thanksgiving and I'd say she is already very inextricably woven within the fabric of our lives. Of course, work is still of paramount importance to me--I like money and all it can do for me, and I adore my family and my few remaining friends. But, to be clear, much of my daily routine is Sparkle adjacent.
My long morning walks alone along the Long Island Sound, are shorter walks now, to a small handkerchief-sized spit of beach that allows dogs to frolic even in the summer. When I have half an hour between meetings or seem relatively idea-fallow, Sparkle is usually at hand, biting my hands and eager for a walk. All things considered--two mortgages considered--I am all too happy to comply.
We live on a patch of loam on a cliff thirty feet above the churning Long Island Sound and thirty feet inland from it. Close enough to get hit with the spray during a Nor'easter or the hundred-year-storms that now arrive four times a year. But far enough not to have to pay for flood insurance. As a man cursed with about 47 Yiddish curses (eg “May you be like a chandelier — hung by day and burned by night,”) the location of our former clump of ramshackleization is about as propitious as life gets. Finding this house was the real-estate equivalent of throwing out an old suit and finding two twenties in an inside pocket.
Further, we live along what I call the "Golden Mile." Izzy, a two-year-old female golden lives three houses down with a small fenced in back yard and parents who care less about landscaping than even I do. And just one more house down lives Pickles, another two-year-old male golden, also with a fenced in yard and parents who also abjure topiarial concerns.
That gives the three goldens an almost literal paradise. There is nearby romping, running, rrrrr-ing and rolling in the wet grass when they're not swimming in the also nearby sea. If there were a tree that somehow grew rib-eye steaks, life would be a canine carnival.
I just got in from a mile walk along the sea--sans Sparkle. She had finished with Izzy moments earlier and had had enough exercise for a while. Besides it was dinner time for her and my wife is in the kitchen which means small objects of culinary delight fall into Sparkle's maw and all is right with the world.
The thunder and lightning had started when we were in Izzy's yard, and the rain had just begun when I dropped Sparkle off and continued on my mile. By the time I returned 24 minutes later, I looked like a grizzled GI in an old Bill Mauldin cartoon and saw Sparkle looking out the window as I made my way up our short flagstone walk.
Sparkle looked at me quizzically. It's funny how dogs can be. In just a few short months, they can mean everything to you, yet at times it seems like they barely know your name.
"Hey," Sparkle said to my wife. "The fat guy is back."
"That's not nice," my wife lied. Sparkle was hardly chastened. Despite my being soaked and looking worse for year. I was an 18-wheeler's tire that had lost its retread.
"So are you having Ben's cater his Shiva?" Sparkle said to my wife. "The fat guy, I mean. He looks soaked to, you should excuse the expression, the bone, and what with the lightning and all, I"m not sure he's going to make it."
Again, my wife tsked. But more quietly this time. It seemed to me she was thinking the Shiva over. Would she have to have Ben's deliver from the city, or is there someplace nearby she could call on? Ben's is awfully expensive and without me around, what would she do with the leftovers?
Sparkle chimed in. "I've heard from all my friends, they have the best pastrami. Cut into quarters, the sandwiches are, so you shouldn't look like a pig, you should pardon the expression, if you take three. And a sour pickle and a nice Florentine lace cookie, you know the ones I mean."
My wife tsked again.
"Sparkle, you know chocolate isn't good for puppies."
Sparkle shot her some puppy-dog eyes.
"How about a nice schtickle of spongecake, instead?"
"The fat guy would like to be remembered that way. Throw in a little cinnamon babka, and we're set."
At this point I had put on dry clothes and went to scribble this dialogue, a sort of living, breathing last will and testament before another lightning strike chased it from what remains of my grey matter.
Sparkle looked at me with her eyes. Adjectivally, descriptions of Sparkle's eyes fall into two camps. Either Cleopatra-like, or more simply "beguiling."
"A little chopped liver. That would be nice as well." She went to chew on one of my shoes, barely glancing in my direction.
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