When we moved to 45th Street many years ago, I began to hear rumors of a Garden Club. As a gardener, this interested me, and I had visions of an army of neighbors, remnants of dirt under their fingernails, swapping bulbs and bemoaning dollar weed. I looked for signs and notices about meetings, but Garden Club proved to be elusive. A few months ago — after 23 years of inquiry and casting about — I learned that one had to be invited to Garden Club, so lacking any semblance of class about matters of the earth, I asked a member to invite me. The location was not disclosed, and as she pulled in front of the house to pick me up, Chris asked if I knew the first rule of Garden Club: You do not talk about Garden Club. “And the second?,” I asked. “YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT GARDEN CLUB,” he said forcefully.

So here I am, breaking the rules, and telling you about Garden Club. The spread was lavish, and the food remarkable, and the members unfailingly polite. And after I got introduced, the discussion immediately turned to limiting membership. (While I like to believe that there was no causal connection, I am not making that up.)

Garden Club that night featured a local floral designer, who looked about 10 months pregnant. I remembered those days, and especially the time I almost asphyxiated trying to tie my shoe. But she was smarter than I was, and sat liberally and panted only occasionally and sweated profusely, and despite maneuvering about with another human being tucked underneath her shirt, she made the most lovely floral arrangement that I had ever seen. It was large and irregular and undulating. It had roses. It had grasses. It had mums. It had seed pods and vines and leaves and berries. It had any number of things that she had found over by railroad tracks and growing on her house and in a neglected portion of a neighbor’s yard.

And there she was, brimming with life, telling us to embrace the withering of plants and the loveliness of their dying in the midst of autumn. “Find the beauty in it,” she said. “Don’t fight the decline and treasure it for what it is,” she reminded us.

When you have a beloved dog dying of cancer, solace comes from unlikely places. This was one of them. A more likely place was my friend Jennifer, a veterinarian, who told me that Buddy was not sad and stressed about what was happening to him. I shouldn’t be, either. So between these two things, I have viewed his last days, however many of them that there are, as a very sweet time. There is no irritation when he greets me at the door after a long day, insisting on a walk right now. There is plenty of human food to share. There is enough time to scratch. There are patches of sun waiting for him when I open the shutters. There are any number of photos to be taken, as he awaits family dinner every night, standing guard in the same spot for the last nine years.

Or as he enjoys a super-premium bone selected for him by his grandfather.

Buddy is a fixture along a narrow swath of our neighborhood — his walking route — and I have not hesitated to tell people that he is dying. It is not as morbid as it sounds, for I ask my neighbors to shower him with affection. They oblige, bending for a hug, an extended scratch.

And through it all, the old chestnut circulates in my brain: We are all dying every day. And in this very sweet time with my old and ailing dog, I wondered: Why don’t we live like it?

I thought about this all Thanksgiving. I walked outside a lot — one of life’s little pleasures — and I loved looking at the leaves. I took botany courses in college (I had no desire to work any job science-related), and knowing the volume of Miracle-Gro that coursed in my blood, I figured it might be helpful. It was not, other than sending me on a life-long search for a green T-shirt worn daily by the lab TA, Shirley: It had white fern leaves, and in the middle, in bad 70s script, it said CIRCLE OF FRONDS. But as I looked at the leaves, I thought about their crazy efforts at photosynthesis to create chlorophyll, and their backslide in autumn, which allowed the chlorophyll to recede, the green to decline, and the other chemicals — and their very bright colors — to emerge.

The leaves became yellow.

The leaves became red.

And I loved the notion that after working so very hard to stay green, the leaves — at least chemically speaking — let it all hang out for one glorious season.

The Georgia Bulldogs have not been having a glorious season, and Chris and I were there yesterday to see the loss to Georgia Tech. I purchased the tickets a few months ago, and as the game grew closer, I held them out as a self-offered bribe not to complain. The holidays are stressful, even if they are all about giving thanks, and I figured a baby step toward genuine gratitude was to be perfectly accepting of one’s lot in life. So I kept my mouth shut, and smiled a lot, and directed my loving kindness meditation to any irksome situation. I think the trick of not complaining is simply not to complain, despite the obstacles thrown in one’s way, and I found it much easier than I anticipated. This was embarrassing.

Embarrassment and all, I could enjoy the football game with a clear conscience. So Chris and I loaded up, drove over to Athens on a perfect November morning, and found our seats. They were on the third row of the highest tier, in a small corner of the stadium with space for only 33 patrons, the Jumbotron obscured from view. It was perhaps another metaphor for modern life — the satisfaction of having to watch the game, rather than the replays, hype videos, and karaoke sing-a-longs — and the view of the field was perfect.

The man sitting next to me reminded me of Boomhauer from “King of the Hill,” and next to Boomhauer sat his friend Chuck, a Georgia Tech fan. If I cannot sit next to friends at a game, Boomhauer and Chuck the GT fan would be my next choice, for they were hilarious. They would call for flags for “unwanted forward motion.” They would try to out-sing each other. They would call each other cry babies. They watched the entire game, never leaving once. Boomhauer included me in his high fives. He told me Kentucky was beating Louisville. I told him that LSU had hired Coach O.

But everything in the game was going great for the Georgia Bulldogs until 3:30 left to play. Then all hell broke loose. Nothing went right. Receivers dropped balls. Holes in the line opened. Completions were impossible. Grown men cried. Chuck the GT fan grew gleeful. Boomhauer grew introspective.

And I thought again of the floral designer and of Jennifer the vet’s advice. You never know how things are going to turn out until the bitter end. Why be stressed? Why be sad? You can’t control it. Why not make the most of what you have left? Why not look at it as an explosion of color and beauty? Why not make jokes and reach out  and make connections and walk outside and not complain and realize just how sweet every single moment of your time is?

ALC

P.S. — To everyone who has reached out about Buddy, thank you. In his quest to eat more bacon, I have fed him small pieces in the morning, telling him that it is from you.

I was working from home this afternoon, and Chris was too, and our daughter had just walked in the door from school. The phone rang, and I did not recognize the number. But I recognized the timing. It was the vet. My iPhone tells me that the call lasted nine minutes, but when the vet used words like “carcinoma” and “inoperable” and “malignant” and “metastasizing,” a switch flipped in my brain and effectively ended the conversation. There may have been the use of the word “mitosis,” and I am fairly certain that the vet uttered “canine oncologist.” I suspect there was a discussion of “palliative care” and a hope for “remission.”

But after the switch flipped, I distanced myself from being a pet owner and went into full-on lawyer mode, almost ruthlessly performing a cost-benefit analysis. It was the only way I could make it through the call. I have little memory of walking down the stairs from the study to the kitchen and staring out the kitchen window as the vet finished talking. And I thought that I had just imagined the howl — the perfectly formed “boo” followed by the perfectly formed “hoo” — until Chris and our daughter came out of nowhere to surround me as I broke down sobbing.

After I explained what I could remember, my daughter asked this question: Have you broken the news to Buddy yet? I almost started laughing, and at the mention of his name, Buddy woke up, smiled, and wanted a walk. And so it was, like almost 3,243 days before this one, I found myself leashed to a large, lumbering dog, a beast who insisted on walking a full 30 minutes, even if he managed to cover only four or five blocks in those 30 minutes, an animal who looked longingly at lap dogs scooped up and carried home by their owners, a dog whose greatest regret was my lack of a marsupial pouch.

All of I could think of was this: As long as this dog still smiles, as long as he wags his tail and gets into any number of misunderstandings about exactly whose food it is, as long as he is slightly overweight and very hairy, as long as he still nips at my chin just like a kiss and barks at his mortal enemy the mail carrier, he is Buddy.

These things seem so simple, but after the vet’s call I had been so overwhelmed with grief and what lies ahead that I forgot what lies in front of me right now (snoring at my feet, to be exact). I had sent a text to my family promising to do every damn thing on the dog’s bucket list, but when I conjured up that list, I could think of only two things that Buddy really wanted, in this order:

1. To eat more bacon, the gravity of his current diagnosis having removed the only impediment from his recent blood tests — slightly elevated cholesterol, and
2. To spend more time with his mom, because Buddy simply cannot spend enough time with his mom.

And between now and the Big Sleep, whenever that may be, everything else — the glacially paced walks, a trip to the beach and a much loved swim, rides in the convertible, visits with friends, poorly measured kibble, the chance to wear a scarf, for Buddy loves his neckwear — will be gravy. For he lives firmly in the now, and I often live anywhere but.

I have been working on kindness and forgiveness lately, which is easier said than done. A few years ago, when things seemed especially bleak, I did a yoga practice, and all I could remember — other than the fact that I really do not like yoga — was a mantra that you directed to yourself, then someone you love, then a stranger, and then someone who caused you pain. I looked it up a few days ago, and indeed I did not imagine it. It is called metta meditation:

May I be happy.

May I be well.

May I be safe.

May I be peaceful and at ease.

I have tried this in all sorts of situations, including at a gas station the other day when a jerk started yelling at another driver in the parking lot. Aha! I thought. Here is a chance to try metta meditation on  a stranger who has caused me distress! Here is a pro tip for you: Loving-kindness meditation is not particularly soothing when you use the word “asshole” as part of it. So I tried again, substituting “you” instead. I performed it, at least initially, through gritted teeth, akin to George Costanza’s father yelling SERENITY NOW! on Seinfeld episodes. But I am trying.

So as I walked Buddy this afternoon, I uttered these words to myself. I needed to hear them. I figured that Buddy qualified as someone I loved, so I directed them to him. As I ticked them off, I realized that Buddy is happy, safe, peaceful, and at ease. As long as these things remain, he is well enough.

And clearly in need of bacon. Lots and lots of bacon.

ALC

I inherited from my parents two very different guiding principles. From my father, I got a love of industry. This is a tidy way of saying that I have enough energy to make everyone, and perhaps me in particular, absolutely crazy, what with my shifting border collie eyes and my insistence on constant motion. From my mother, I received an absolute and abiding fear of being caught without lipstick, for every time I walked past her in my formative years, she asked this question: Where’s your lipstick? Like a Pavlovian dog I was trained, and you can ask my friends: I swam wearing lipstick, I go to work wearing lipstick, I lift weights wearing lipstick. You can even ask my husband: I wear lipstick to bed, and I smear it on to garden.

Which is what I did Saturday morning. I found myself for the first time in years with a Saturday morning with absolutely no responsibilities, for I had tamped down my industry side and given up teaching a spin class. It was, in a word, delicious. There was an early breakfast at Chick-Fil-A and then a trip to Home Depot, my favorite store. I occasionally dream of the day when I will be that wrinkled, grey-haired, slightly freckled older lady in clogs and an orange apron, offering unsolicited advice in the garden department, slapping peonies and foxgloves out of people’s hands, explaining that those plants will die quickly and painfully in our near-tropical clime. And if you ever need (or even want) to purchase a gift for me, I invite you to stroll into your local Home Depot and select the strangest plant that you can find.

I did just that on Saturday, plunking down a small fortune — twenty-five dollars! — on an undeniably weird houseplant. It is enormous and slightly menacing, and it may very well kill us all. I have named it Audrey, after the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, and I keep a watchful eye on it. To be fair, Audrey keeps a watchful eye on me:

But honestly, what is beauty without a little oddity and a lot of imperfection?

I hauled Audrey into the house and installed her in bright light and hoped for the best, personal safety-wise. And then I read for a moment about how Matisse painted orange oceans and pink skies and blue grasses and yellow tufts of clouds. I looked at the painting that accompanied the text, and if I had not read the commentary, I am not certain that the oddity of an orange ocean would have struck me as strange. For the shapes were familiar and the objects well-known, and even if one does not bask in an orange ocean, it still beckoned from the painting.

With this in mind, I wandered into the garden alone. There was storm damage, which seemed insurmountable, and the garden could be described kindly as topsy-turvy. It was so overwhelming that I had no idea what to do, which is why I had put it off for so long. But I decided to start at the beginning and tend to the basics, like filling up a dozen lawn bags with downed sticks, branches, and dead plant material, and hauling large limbs out of bushes and shrubbery. It was pleasant work. The sun was shining, and the weather was lovely, and the birds paid me no mind. The dog snored in his favorite bowl of dirt. And I was all by myself.

It was a perfect time to think.

It is such a luxury to slow down and think. Hands active, mindless tasks, tired body, lipstick on. That type of thinking. I thought of so many things. Saturday was the 31st anniversary of the day I met Chris in a college cafeteria, an introduction by a mutual friend with the almost instant realization that I was going to marry him. (You’ll be pleased to know that I did not make that my lead-off remark.) I thought about how the house was ours but the garden was mine, and how the destruction and mess from the storm forced me to reimagine what I wanted it to look like. I remembered the funny dream I had of discovering a house built in 1280 in my 1920s neighborhood, of walking around its cavernous, ruined rooms in the dark. When I realized I needed to use the chain saw, I missed its biggest fan — my son — acutely and ached so much to give him a hug that my chest hurt. I thought about how much my daughter has come into her own this year. I realized how after a lifetime of trying to look pretty, of wearing lipstick at every turn, that I had never felt more beautiful than I was at that moment, in dirty khakis and an old straw hat, digging contentedly outside.

Buddy, the snoring dog, also weighed heavily on mind. He had had some health issues a few weeks ago, and although I did not know it then, I know it now: The new vet — the kinder, more compassionate vet that I sought out — has found a growth in an inopportune spot. It could be nothing. Or it could be something treatable only by palliative care. Buddy, of course, is blissfully ignorant, which is his favorite state. But I am painfully aware, living in a strange hang-time of six to eight days until I know for certain. It is a hang-time that has prompted convertible rides, with Buddy on a heated seat, his nose on my forearm, his fur ruffling in the breeze, his tongue lolling. It is a hang-time that has brought the careless and generous measuring of kibble, the occasional bite of chocolate chip cookie, the suspension of baths, the extra affection.

Between the lingering storm damage, the garden, the dog, the election, I have been a quieter, muted, more reflective version of myself this week. The introspection has been, at times, uncomfortable. I have thought about choices and perspectives, how Matisse’s orange ocean may delight me but bother another viewer to no end. I have remembered the genuinely rotten times that I have felt unheard and ignored, and I have been dismayed that large segments of our country feel that way now. When I voted this year, I did so outside of my neighborhood, where it is easy to assume that everyone feels the way I do, and I voted with people who were my neighbors only in a biblical sense. As I looked around, I felt comforted to be in the company of so many people who were calm, who cared so deeply, who showed up to lift their voices — even if their voices were different from mine. I have pondered beauty and imperfection, democracy-style: It is a beautiful system, even if it is an imperfect one, and to achieve an individual’s version of perfection would render it not a democracy at all.

I would be untruthful if I did not tell you this: I have felt very helpless this week. I have wandered around. I have visited the wisest curb I know — one that says, “DON’T FORGET TO LIVE TODAY” —  a message scrawled by God-knows-who in wet cement that I discovered on a walk with Buddy during his younger, healthier days. And I have wondered: what is there for me to do?

I think the answer is simple. Live today. Move forward. Do not be overwhelmed. Listen to the problems and concerns of the larger world. Look beyond your neighborhood to your neighbors. Step back and think. Embrace beauty and imperfection. Heed the call of the orange oceans, even if others do not. Remain kind and compassionate. Tend the garden. Take the dog in the convertible. Accept that no one person has all the answers. My mother would tell you to put on lipstick. My father would tell you to get back to work.

ALC

P.S. — In case you were wondering whether Buddy actually loved riding in the convertible, I offer photographic proof. Here we are, stopped at a stop light on the short trip back from the vet as the driver in the car next to mine is saying hello. I have discovered that nearly all dog lovers in the free world call unknown dogs “Buddy,” a fact that makes mine feel universally loved. And perhaps he is.

I voted for the first time in 1992, when I was 24. It embarrasses me that I blew six years of voting, six years of complaining, but I have made up for it with a vengeance. For the last 23 1/2 years, my precinct has been in a church six blocks away, and I have walked dogs, children, and sometimes both, with me to vote. For the last 23 1/2 years, I have voted almost every time that I could vote. It is that important to me.

For the first time ever, I voted early. Early voting took me from a 15 minute walk in my neighborhood to a 15 minute drive to a county building five miles away, where I had to hunt for a parking space. I stood in line for over an hour, with hundreds of people, all of us wilting in the 85 degree November heat. All of us waiting to vote.

I did not know what to expect in this rancorous election — an affair populated by some people rabidly endorsing one candidate, some people rabidly endorsing another, some people voting against a particular candidate, others voting against the other candidate, and a seemingly large middle wondering about how the country ended up with this particular choice. I have watched the debates. I have read the news. I have been gripped with anxiety. I have lost sleep. I have asked people not to discuss the election me, and I have left gatherings where politics have been discussed. (And by “left gatherings,” I genuinely mean that I have gotten up and I have walked out.) I have wondered if I have an election-induced ulcer.

I had a mammogram this morning, and since my appointment was near the polling station, I decided that it would be a good morning to vote. Psychologically I was prepared, for I had spent a number of uncomfortable minutes exposed, having private areas smashed by a machine, all while a technician reminded me not to breathe and I reminded myself that it was all to the good. The discomfort, the lack of air, the exposure, the waiting, the nagging fear of a terrible result: It all seemed like a perfect lead-in to voting.

And sartorially I was prepared, for I had walked out of my closet looking like a Yankee Doodle Dandy, for I wore blue shoes, red pants, a white shirt, a blue cardigan, a red, white, and blue scarf and bracelets, red lipstick, and a red purse. If that did not scream “committed electorate!,” I am not certain what would. (If I had had a pony, it would have been perfect, but I had to settle for a red car.)

So I parked, and got in line, and I looked around, and I pulled out my knitting. I tried to guess how everyone was voting, but it was impossible. I worried that there would be a lot of tension, but that was unnecessary. I found myself instead surrounded by my fellow Americans, a mixed lot of different colors and sizes and genders and ages and jobs, speaking different languages and English with different accents, only one of whom was dressed entirely in red, white, and blue, but all of whom wanted one thing: to be heard. To be counted.

The 68 year-old woman in front of me had an itchy Google finger, and she told me that of 210 million Americans of voting age, 150 million were registered to vote. So far 30 million registered voters had voted early. As we shuffled through the line, none of us complaining in the heat, all of us wanting to vote and leave, I came to the line near the door where disabled and older Americans waited. There was a woman there holding the arm of another woman. The first woman had white hair and brown eyes and a cream colored sweater and green pants and bright pink tennis shoes and impeccable posture.

I am not sure exactly how it came up, but the woman told someone that she was 100 years old. And all I could think of was this: That woman was born before women had the right to vote. The 19th Amendment was passed in her lifetime. And here I was in line, a woman about to vote and thinking very little of the right to do so, a woman who could vote for a woman for president if she so desired.

It had been an emotional day for me. This realization did not help.

And I finally got in, and the poll worker told me that I looked very nice indeed, and the dour independent poll monitor (or so his orange tag said) grunted “very patriotic,” and I snaked through another line and finally I had a voting card. I put it in the machine. I marked my choices. I checked them three times. And I cast my vote.

Perhaps that is the single beauty of this rancorous election, this unsettling time: People are engaged. Voters are turning out. My 17 year-old daughter’s friends are disappointed that they cannot cast a ballot. I had to hunt for a parking space. I had to wait over an hour to vote. With hundreds of strangers, all holding their breath, all uncomfortable, all waiting for and possibly dreading the result, some of whom had to wait for constitutional amendments allowing them to vote, I voted. It was the best I had felt in this entire miserable season. It was a bright spot: I made my choice, and I had no control over what happened next. I had done my part. I could do no more.

ALC