Motorcycle dogs

At our house we have a polite dog, a courteous dog. She doesn’t jump up on anyone, doesn’t push her way past you in the doorway, doesn’t bark, doesn’t even come up to you unless you call her. Ducati. Obviously someone likes fast (was going to say cars, but I looked it up, and it’s motorcycles, my favorite vehicles). And Ducati is fast. We watched her race after two Canada geese across a dead cornfield with tiny soybean leaves sneaking up between the stalks, the geese barely getting enough airlift to escape her as they skimmed the ground. She’s all confidence, Ducati is. We were passing a tree, and an enormous raccoon was lolling around under it, and Ducati took out after it, and I was sure we’d have some explaining to do to our hosts, carrying shredded dog back in our arms, but the raccoon disappeared before the show-down. Further on, there’s a broken, wooden signpost lying on the grass. Ducati loves that sign. Every time she spies it, she races to it, shuffling it with her paws, and snuffling it with her nose, and moving it around, and sticking her nose under it so that only her ears stick out, and I’m sure she’s got something this time, but there she comes when we move on, laughing and empty-snouted. She covers three times the ground we do when we walk, but she always comes back when we turn around and beats us back to the yard, all dirty-pawed and happy-tailed.

I notice energy these days. I notice that as we made a turn on our way to church on Sunday, the oncoming lane was filled with thousands (no exaggeration) of bicylists with serious bicyclist clothes; I’ve never seen so many bicycles in one place before—on the road and on the shoulders, in the fields, and coming out of the backs of cars, and moving, moving, moving. After church, waiting for the potlock meal to be set up on big round tables on a gym floor being cleared, three girls ran round and round, weaving through the disappearing chairs, the oldest leading with a big smile on her face, looking over her shoulder to see if the others were still following, and I heard a wistful voice behind me, “We should all be doing that.” And so we should. And I’d just seen the same thing the day before, in someone’s yard, a boy, older than the rest, leading a string of running children zig zag across the lawn and checking, grinning, to see if the others still followed. I remembered how the bicyclists looked so serious, almost grim, determined to get their miles in, no longer able to follow a leader like laughing children or a laughing motorcycle dog. And I though how much we change as we go through life.

In the living room where I am house-sitting, there are two pictures on right-angled walls (did you read angeled? What a cool image—right angeled walls; I’d like some of those walls and those angels) that sum it up. The one is a painting of white wicker rockers and white wicker couch on the broad, shady porch of some white southern home with shades of pink roses and geraniums and azalias blending in, with an endless lawn stretching out peacefully in front, and the caption reads: “You fill my life with good things.” On the other wall is an unframed, black and white photograph of a far-off, lone lighthouse on a wave-crashed island, dominated by the energy of the sea. There’s me having tea with some of my friends on the porch right now, but across the way are other friends, restless and zinging with get-up-and-go. I'm grateful for every one.

And so goes life: Energy. Silence. Movement. Quiet. And though we often move in and out of these like day following night and season following season, often we don’t. We move more and more into bustle or quiet. And the balance and contrast and beauty comes not just from our individual lives but from our lives together. And to the extent we live apart, the Quiet miss the energy of the Young and Young-at-Heart, and the Restless and Energetic miss the goodness of Silence. And we all lose something. In these days when I live in slow mo, when I find my head suddenly bumping the keys on my keyboard because I’ve drifted off midword, or find myself waking up from another nap I don’t remember starting, I notice energy and how it’s not in me but in children and motorcycle dogs and seas. And I’m thankful that they are “right-angeled” across from me, and I wonder what we have to give to one another in this patchwork of human seasons.