Cryin’ All the Time

Her dog is dying now. God, he’s old, completely blind, mostly deaf, but he’s a person to her and she can’t let go, so we listen to him bark, at something, at nothing, and we pray the neighbors don’t complain.

I mean I pray. She sleeps the sleep of the dead. Some things set him off, I guess, the rain he won’t come in out of, a cat or rabbit, one of those big turtles tiptoeing across the yard. Maybe he smells them and tries to scare them off. Maybe he’s the one that’s scared. I would be.

Or he barks at the moon. Sometimes the moon when it comes rises like a sleep-creased face from a pillow, lost, questioning, Is it really time? Time to get up, time to go?

And when I get up and go out to quiet him, the yard is fuzzy with moonlight, and I open the pen and walk to the back where he’s facing east. Under my hand, he’s better, quiet, not afraid anymore. The moon reflects in his milky eyes and he turns toward me sadly. I don’t know that he’s afraid. Maybe he’s just talking to himself, as the lonely sometimes do, as the blind, the deaf, as even the unimpaired sometimes do. Or maybe it’s only a greeting, maybe he’s calling out to the moon, conversing, chatting, passing a visit with the one bright face he can still see.