Days Like Today

I have exercised, eaten breakfast, and dropped Dobby at the groomer (he hates that). I am in the middle of an annual online training that is required at work. My pulse is ninety beats per minute—almost exactly that of my walking heart rate. (My resting heart rate is typically in the fifties.) My mind is racing from thoughts about Grant’s upcoming final game as a junior to Thanksgiving to my next meeting to my sister going to the doctor to Lucia finishing her semester in three weeks to Lindsay coming home for Thanksgiving in the middle of the wrestling season to the death of M. Russell Ballard to why the television just turned itself on to analysis of labor costs in my unit to uncertainty over what to write next to my sister-in-law doing a shadow day at her possible new job to my brother’s birthday to why I can’t always remember my dreams for my dream journal to school committee on Thursday, and so on . . .

I have adrenaline coursing through me, and you would think I was about to go into a huge meeting or start a big athletic competition. None of that is true. In fact, there’s literally no reason at all to feel like this. I don’t know why this happens. It does so periodically, and I’m used to it after a fashion. That is, while it is not comfortable, I’m still able to function. I can keep on with the training, correspond over Teams, work on spreadsheets, and so forth. A doctor gave me lorazepam for these moments—I never take it and don’t even know where the bottle is. That’s not a badge of honor. It just is whatever it is.

My mom used to reference the Henry David Thoreau quote when I was young: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I think of that a lot, especially when this sort of feeling overtakes me. Of course, I don’t even know what I’m anxious or desperate about. There’s more to that quote. Thoreau also added, “and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

And as I ponder all this, a song comes to mind: When you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.

And now, I suppose I should add, I hate that song. And I think Thoreau was mostly a fraud who did not actually live in his cabin at Walden but went home to his mother on weekends and whose philosophy is mostly unlivable and unsustainable. The hermit of the north Maine woods, Christopher Knight, called Thoreau a “dilettante.” I find woods instructive but not transcendent—they do not sing for me but are full of the evidence of the struggle between life and death. In my last three hikes with Dobby, he has found dead frogs in different locations to roll in along with a dead possum and dead mice. Dead leaves and pine needles are the carpet of the woods. Moss breaks down the stumps of fallen trees. The hawk circles overhead seeing what varmint will not realize he is there. The crow constantly cries a warning to her friends. While using the weed eater this summer, I twice accidentally cornered two baby bunnies and had to step back and gently urge them to return to the woods and wherever their den is. I have a friend with a game camera whose images have never been more full of coyotes. I wonder if the bunnies made it to fall.

When I arrived at the groomer with Dobby, he did what he always does—he trembled uncontrollably and sought to escape. It’s hard for me to understand—he doesn’t actually mind baths, he loves being brushed, and the groomer is kind and gentle. But there’s no talking him out of his reaction. I suppose I look roughly the same to God on days like today. I always walk away from the groomer knowing that Dobby will be fine, that the suffering is minimal, and that the result is worth it, and I puzzle about why he never learns the same lesson. Then again, have I?