Winnie

I often think my dog is waiting for Mike to come home. I can see it in her. She’ll wander around the door, or perk up at a noise from the garage around the time he used to be home, or she’ll be unsteady about a situation in a way that you can only pick up on after being around a fellow creature for over a decade. Unsteady…as in, she’ll recognize something is being amplified, or necessarily hushed, or, more likely, she senses in both my families body language, and all of the people that come to our house, that something is a bit different, a bit amiss.

Hell, she was there that night.

But I don’t think she knows that he died. Not in any sense at all. In fact, quite the opposite; she waits at the door. We’ve all left her (particularly Mike and I) for long periods of time before. When both of us were in college, we could be gone for months on end, and so maybe she got used to us being gone for irregular pieces of time. And maybe she just absorbed these things internally and filed it under the ‘They Leave But Come Back’ part of her small brain.

So that is why she sniffs around our garage door at some times, or wakes up at nothing and barks happily. She’s opened that file and assumed he’d walk through; something I think we all do but never act on out of pure human logic. We know.

She’s never gone near his room though. I’ve taken very close note of that. I don’t have else anything to occupy my day and nights other then to just observe things like this. She doesn’t sniff near it (that door is rarely open anyways), she doesn’t bark at, she just…avoids it. She’s waiting for him to come home.

We picked Seabean from a nice lady that bred Dachshunds out near Micco (I think), when I was about twelve. There were about fifteen little puppy mini-dachshunds running around that Beluschi-less animal house, bumping into walls and falling into holes. And it was myself, Mike, and my Mother on this puppy mission, and I believe we only took one trip down there. But either way in the end, the decision came between two dogs. A little seabean colored puppy called Winnie, and a strange blond mini-dachshund named Tank. My brother and mother we’re immediately, and firmly, in favor of picking Winnie. She followed you wherever you went, and she was tiny.

Tiny, on a level I can’t quite describe to you. So tiny, in fact, that when we brought her home, she looked around nervously, started towards the living room area, and my Dad said something to the effect of, “Is that really all there is?”

Anyway, I being the Pepsi of puppy choosers sided with Tank, for reasons I can’t identify to this day other then my stubborn liberalism (nah, you squares are picking the wrong dog, man). It was like arguing for Ryan Leaf over Peyton Manning, or Omeka Okafor over Dwight Howard: it was something you knew wasn’t right, but you wanted to try to prove true just for the hell of it. But sanity prevailed and we picked Winnie, who we named Seabean, because, fuck, she looked (size and color wise), like a seabean.

We drove home that night under a full-moon, and dish-sized Seabean was anxious and jumpy to be going 65 miles per hour in a Colt Vista down A1A well past her bed-time (and for damn good reason). But at some point, despite my childlike protest and stubborn pre-teen determination to do something different, she wandered over to me. And in that late night, as a full moon shone on us, she put her football card sized head on my skinny of thigh and fell asleep. And so did I.

Now nearly thirteen years later we are on the same schedule. We’re fed regularly, we flail around in a Jacuzzi (I do, she stands outside and licks up the chlorine filled pieces of liquid my 125-pounds discharge), we watch Magic games (I can’t say for sure that she isn't actually watching the games at this point), and mainly, we pace in front of a door waiting for someone to walk through. But I’m pretty sure, only one of us knows that that someone will never come through that door again.

And I think her consistent hope is probably pretty similar to all of ours. We all want to believe that someone is about to come through that door, to surprise us in some supernatural way, and rationally we're about 95% certain that no one ever will. But really, we're to dumb, or subconsciously irrational, to accept that no one ever will.

Then again, that’s a human perspective, and maybe someone will come through that door eventually. Maybe they're already have, maybe we can’t see it…plenty of maybes. Be sure of nothing, and you’ll never be disappointed. Did you know that living creatures can build their DNA off of arsenic? Neither did our race before quite recently. Like a week ago. Wonder what we’ll know tomorrow.

But here’s what I do know. After that night, with the full moon and the puppies, despite the protests of a forming counter-culture poser, there were five Oliveri’s. Now there are four. And I’d imagine that number will only go down from there. Take nothing as fact though, and believe all to be fiction, and at some point, maybe, the numbers will come out all green, and the tides will align, and something will make sense.

But really, just keep pacing.