When I see my friends and acquaintances, I fear that the question they really want to ask is “Did you get dressed in the dark?,” but because they are a polite bunch, they ask instead, “How is Buddy?” To answer you all, he is very well indeed, thank you. The cancer has not reappeared, and after a few grueling months of physiological and behavioral issues, a flip switched a few weeks ago, returning Buddy to himself. (Apparently dogs have no understanding of the concepts of “surgery,” “recuperation,” and “for your own good.”) To the delight of neighbors lining an increasingly short swath of my neighborhood, Buddy is again on his morning and evening strolls, and as they reach down to pet him and look at me to comment on his suddenly apparent age, Buddy leans into me, just like a little child.

If Buddy had understood what the veterinary oncologist was telling us a few months ago, he would have understood why he is now on a diet. His arthritis was terrible, getting off the floor had been a struggle, and losing weight was the continued key to his mobility. With all of his health problems, we switched him to a softer, highly enriched, super premium senior blend kibble whose price suggests that each individual nugget was lovingly hand-shaped by elves in Bavaria and whose recommended serving can best be described as stingy.

There have been times that I wished that Buddy could talk. This is not one of them, for I am certain that within 30 seconds of eating his kibble, it would begin. “I am hungry. I am really hungry. FOR THE LOVE OF DOG, DO NOT LET ME STARVE TO DEATH!” I have a feeling that this sentiment would be on an almost endless loop, likely but not necessarily pausing only when Buddy had food in his mouth. (The other day, I witnessed the human equivalent of this in a Chick-Fil-A, when a five year-old walked in, held a fist aloft, turned his eyes down, and hollered, “CHICKEN NUGGETS! CHICKEN NUGGETS! I LOVE CHICKEN NUGGETS!” in a slow and steady crescendo.)

But Buddy makes his commitment to food known in other ways. Last week, I ran in the house and ran out to art lessons, not thinking to remind Chris or our daughter to give Buddy his evening meal. When I came home, a 10 pound bag of bird seed inside next to the back door had been positively ravished, plastic bits of the bag thrown everywhere, and several pounds missing. I feared a sudden, apocalyptic rodent infestation, but I had my answer soon enough. On the next morning’s walk, I bent down to clean up after the dog, only to be confronted with a seeded concoction that looked and smelled like the worst bakery treat ever. This continued for two more days and three more pounds of bird seed.

Perhaps he is a bird dog.

Whatever he is, it is nice to have him back.

Buddy and I took a morning walk the other day, and I snapped this picture of him. As you will note, and contrary to how he would portray himself, he is not alarmingly skeletal. Some may wonder if he has lost any weight at all.

I took this picture not to commemorate the size of Buddy’s posterior, but because it reminded me of something that we had discussed in art class. After a dozen oil painting classes spent rendering several still lifes and one self-portrait, I switched to an abstract art course. In Friday’s class, the teacher took us on a walk and told us to look — really look. So I saw shadows and trees, reflections and ripples, pools of water and blue skies and clouds. I came back to the studio and using acrylic paint and paper for the first time, I painted this, which was something entirely different indeed:

I love to walk, and I try hard to notice things when I do. But one of the the things that the art teacher pointed out on our walk was something that I had never noticed before. Savannah is so flat, and so shaded by canopies of trees and streetlights, that walking down a typical street feels like looking into a tunnel.

You can see it in the picture with Buddy. Put the photograph at eye level and look not at the dog, but at the increasing smaller opening made by the trees as you look down the sidewalk. You can tell yourself, as I do, that you are walking into a cloistered space that barely contains the unknown and that offers a world of possibilities.

On the evening of that walk, I came home and rummaged through the refrigerator, looking for the slightly shriveled beet that I had just begun to paint. It was not on the shelf, and I looked to my left, only to find Chris putting it through a spiralizer. This would not happen to Van Gogh, I thought, and I wondered aloud whether the beet’s demise was a harbinger of a hipster easel-to-fork movement. But no, Chris explained, if the beet was to be consumed, it needed to be consumed that evening.

But what to do with the still life? I had a photograph of how it began, with my standing behind an easel, separated from my family, with the beet surgically under a spotlight on a drape:

Instead of setting up an easel, fooling with the lighting, trying to get the beet positioned just right, and mixing accurate colors to record just what I saw, I sat next to Chris on a pillow on the floor, occasionally consulted the photograph as a reference, and thought about how I would want to look if I were a beet. I would want to be pink, like a jewel, deeply faceted, and brightly colored, the most intriguing beet ever to burst from the earth and shake off the dust. I am halfway through the painting, and here is how I imagine that beet:

I have to say, it has been a rare and wonderful week, not to be so set in my ways about how I think about things. It never occurred to me that a dog would eat bird seed, but he will if he is hungry enough. I had never before envisioned a walk as a path, or a series of concrete visual images as a progression of swirls, or a root as a ruby. But they are. They can be. And if I had the utter lack of self-consciousness of that five year-old boy, no doubt I would walk into a crowded room, raise my own fist to the air, and yell in my own loud and lifting crescendo, “LIFE! LIFE! I LOVE LIFE!”

But I would scare the crap out of everyone. And they already think I’m a little crazy.

ALC

Until a few years ago, I had a sturdy old scale. It had a big red needle and a large red face, on which I had affixed a red heart sticker with HOTTIE in white letters, dead on the center. In retrospect, that scale was a dream: I could wiggle my toes or shift my weight or exhale loudly and watch the needle move to the left. This was all well and good until I met a terribly accurate scale at a doctor’s office, thus accounting for a seven pound weight gain over the 30 minutes I had spent traveling from my home and waiting for the doctor.

That evening, I ordered a digital scale — like the kind used in doctor’s offices! exclaimed the Amazon listing — and I knew that trouble was afoot when I saw the cardboard box, which said “Welcome to Your New Life Style.” What “New Life Style” could be occasioned by a simple digital bathroom scale?, I wondered. Beyond the obvious (the fact that I was suddenly and irrevocably seven pounds heavier), I pondered whether my New Life Style would encompass excessive weighing, a newfound love of precision, and life of standing flat-footed on a platform with no room for fudging.

I am still pondering.

Last week I ate dinner with a college friend who was visiting Savannah, and I took her to my favorite place, the French restaurant across the street from the bus station. I had never before been to that restaurant on a Tuesday night, and I was delighted to find that there was a special: all you can eat mussels and fries. As I ordered, two thoughts collided — SUCKERS! and GAME ON! — because mussels and fries (or moules frites, if you’re being all fancy and French), is perhaps my favorite meal. Here is photographic proof:

As I tucked in to Tuesday evening’s offering, I had an alarming thought: I am going to get food poisoning if I continue eating these mussels. This would have prompted a reasonable person to summon the server, politely state that the mussels seemed a little off, and order plan B.

I am apparently not a reasonable person, for in the face of this realization, I limited myself to a single, smallish bowl of mussels.

And I got food poisoning.

Which allowed me to discover the beauty of my high-falutin’ digital scale: Over the course of four hours on Wednesday morning, I lost  precisely 3.2 pounds.

Welcome to My New Life Style.

It was brutal, and I slept a lot, and I was very weak, and perhaps as telling as anything, I said and ate very little for 96 solid hours. On Friday, I drug myself into a meeting — nausea, abdominal cramps, and all — and returned home with a large file that I asked Chris to carry from the car into the house.

He did, and as near as I can tell, he sat the file onto a blue chair right by the front door, opened the door with his keys, sat the keys on the chair, picked up the file, and escorted his sick wife inside as he sort of held his left leg out to keep Buddy inside the house.

When you were reading all of this, did you notice that I omitted the part where Chris put the keys back into his pocket?

If you did not, don’t worry: Neither of us noticed that he omitted that part, either.

But somebody else noticed the keys.

Before I go any further, let me explain about those keys.

About a year ago, we got a terrific deal on a red car. Seriously. Neither of us could believe the price! The car looked incredible, ran great, and got fantastic mileage. It came with a single key (the one that seems to have been left on the blue chair right by the front door). Since I give my cars names, our family fleet currently includes “Blanche,” the white station wagon; “Toasty,” the black car with black seats; and “Susie,” the little blue convertible. The red car began as “Rojo.” And then things started happening.

On July 4, after the city installed new operating-room-caliber safety outdoor lighting, someone used the increased visibility to key a giant dollar sign on the red car’s hood.

During Hurricane Matthew in October, the only damage that we sustained was when a shingle scratched the middle of the red car’s windshield.

In January, I almost got flattened by a truck that decided to make an inopportune lane change, so I laid into the horn. Silence. The horn was broken.

And now in April, thanks to the dreadful combination of sick wife, enormous file, and escape artist dog, the single key to the car (along with a house key) got left on the front porch on Friday.

At about 8:30 p.m. on Friday, a stranger knocked on our door and asked Chris for money. Chris came inside, and I emptied out a change jar to give him enough money to eat, and I have some suspicion that he helped himself to the keys.

We did not know that the keys were missing until Saturday afternoon, when we could not find them. The tracking device on the key ring pinged as being last seen at 10:30 p.m. Friday night in a very rough area of town. The tracking device is still there. Neither of us has ever been there.

The red car’s new name is “Lucky.”

And we are, too. There was a car behind Lucky in the driveway Friday night, and Lucky now has that 90s holdover, The Club, on the steering wheel. (Yes, they still sell The Club, and it’s still about the same price.) The car sits in the drive, taunting me. Fortunately, our children pointed out that the house key was on that ring, and Chris changed all the locks on Saturday. Buddy and the burglar alarm deterred any home entry on Friday night, when we were blissfully unaware. Richard at the parts desk at the dealer gave me a sweet deal on two replacement keys, these expensive radio-transmitting gizmos, which should be here by Friday. In between all of this mess, our son came into town, our daughter went to the prom, Buddy had a bath, and I started to get better. Everyone was safe and relatively happy.

After all the excitement, Chris and I found ourselves alone for dinner last night, and we sat on the floor, eating pizza and watching a movie, just like we have done about once a week for the last 25 years. I snuck a drink of his wine and looked at his profile and remembered a line from a song I have heard exactly once on Spotify: I know there will be troubles, but I want all of my troubles to be with you. He caught me looking, and he smiled, and I said, “It’s been a very long week.”

And he agreed.

ALC

There is a weekend every spring where I look at the yard, realize that the gardening look that I have achieved can politely be called “The gardener must have died over the winter,” and launch into a hyper-drive of cleaning and planting. This was that weekend, at least for the front yard. It involved an old growth forest’s worth of yard bags, the liberal use of a shovel, a gallon of sunscreen, three different sizes of clippers, and the watchful eye of Buddy, who supervised it all.

Chris joined me after a few hours, and I have begun to suspect that gardening is a little like loading a dishwasher: No one does it exactly like you do, which is to say that no one does it exactly right. I am an excellent know-it-all, a honorific that I humbly bestow on myself after only 48 short years of practice. But this weekend, as I watched him water with Miracle-Gro even before I sowed various seeds, I thought — and meant —  “Good for you, Chris. Out here in the garden with me.” Even I have to admit that this felt a lot better than pointing out how I would have done it differently, my long-time pesky knee-jerk Plan A.

It was a comfort to have him around, if for no other reason than gardening alone is an excellent time to confront a lifetime of slights and sins. Without too much effort, I personally can dig up unpleasant memories from, oh, elementary school to yesterday, and as I tilled this fertile soil, I thought about how this should be the year to forgive myself and simply bury it all, perhaps under an earthy smelling bag of Black Kow.

Goals.

But Chris was there, and his presence calmed me, and working together, the garden took shape quickly. This welcome development was unlike other years, a fact that I attribute to the age of the garden and the age of the gardeners.  After 18 springs of tackling the garden, the foundation planting is in place, the plants that are going to make it through the winter have made it, and the weeds have been suppressed — sort of — through a thick layer of mulch. The soil is dark and beautiful. Mistakes — notably, a thicket of vicious wild white roses that looked snowy and fantastic for three weeks and menacing for 49 — have been corrected.

It is good to be at that point, for the gardeners are not getting any younger, either. Using a shovel hurts. Clippers exacerbate the arthritis in my hands. The ground seems farther away. The sun beats not on my bare shoulders, but reflects off an enormous hat.

This is where I am now, keenly aware of the passing of time. It is not bad. Not at all. But it is bewildering. As I look through my warm weather clothes, I wonder exactly who picked out all of the short skirts, the sleeveless tops, the great-looking but uncomfortable shoes. I ponder the insoluble mystery of being hungrier than I have ever been before, yet eating less and weighing more. I see my face in a mirror and my eyes (God love them) automatically blur the lines. And then eight painting lessons in, I foolishly decided to work on a self-portrait, and between the bright light and my own critical look, I find that shapes and shadows of my face now form an abstract road map:

At least I still have that second eye. Which will be painted in during tomorrow’s class.

I still have Buddy, too, who radiates calm. I can see the puppy in him if I squint and stand very far away, for that sweet puppy breath is long gone. But he is no longer a puppy, and neither am I, as encounters with two puppies reminded me.

The first, Ernie, is an actual puppy. Before I tell you his story, let me tell you something you already know: There are few sights sadder than seeing people who always walked a dog suddenly walking alone. It can mean only one thing. And that’s what it meant for Mr. and Mrs. G. That Louie was gone. Mrs. G once told me, in her sweet and lilting voice, that she thought Louie had some basset hound in him, and while I did not say it, she was right only if “some” meant “98%.”  Mr. G swore there would be no other dog after Louie, which is why I saw Mrs. G walking Ernie a few weeks ago. I was delighted.

Ernie exceeded the “some” basset hound bar, for he clearly was one, and Mrs. G explained to me that he had been the dog of a service member and his wife, both of whom worked all day, and three children under the age of five. The service member was deploying, and Ernie needed a new home. And there he was, on the end of leash held in Mrs. G’s hand. “He’s learning a few manners,” she said. I thought about the change in Ernie’s circumstances, from a house with working parents and small children to a home with a retired couple who loved to walk and who also had a cozy place at the beach. “Ernie, my friend,” I said aloud. “You clearly have fallen into a pot of jam.”

“Basset” is a play on a French word meaning “low to the ground,” and that was Ernie: a real low to the ground hound. After I made the jam comment, Ernie raised his face to me from far below — his red, rheumy eyes and his freckled snout — and smiled, horrific underbite and all. It was the most beatific smile I had ever seen. I was again delighted, for even at his young age, Ernie just knew.

The second puppy sat next to me at the Jason Isbell concert Saturday night during the Savannah Music Festival. You may recall that last year’s music festival saw my son and me almost beaten up, and as if to make up for it this year, the music gods have been kind. Chris and I went to an Avett Brothers concert last week with my college and law school friend Sharon and her husband, and between the music and the laughing and the effortless slide back to 1991, it was almost perfect. This week saw me just with Chris, until my new best friend — a puppy himself — sat down to my right.

This dude was no low to the ground hound; he was at least 6’5,” boasting a considerable wing span. He talked loudly the entire time, and at one point, he asked the people behind him to take a flash photograph of him and his wife. His real specialty was a series of unexpected and exultant movements, mostly a left fist thrust suddenly into the air, almost but not quite grazing the right side of my face. I thought that a black eye would give me a story to tell, and probably could be incorporated into that self-portrait, for it would still be there for Wednesday night’s painting class.

But no. He managed not to make contact as he sang along cheerily with Jason Isbell, whose music sometimes sounds a little cheery but whose words can be devastating. (Have you ever heard “ICU” mentioned in a song?)

After an enthusiastic arm thrust and a bout of singing, Puppy turned to me, phone extended. “I know I don’t know you,” he began, “but check this out.” So I looked at his phone, and there was a picture of Puppy, Mrs. Puppy, and Jason Isbell standing in downtown Savannah. Before I could respond, Puppy told me the story of that picture and of Jason Isbell himself, playing in dive bars.

I do not think that Jason Isbell himself overheard that conversation — On one hand: Puppy was very loud. On the other: we were seated in the balcony among thousands of people while Jason Isbell sang. — but Jason Isbell started talking about paying his dues in dive bars. There had been times, he said, where he would play in sports bars in front of the television screens, and people would get mad. Really mad. There were things he could not remember, and things he would rather forget, and one thing that he knew for sure: He always loved coming to Savannah. And as the crowd roared, Puppy and his wife stood up to walk past us and step out into the lobby.

“I am sorry about him,” Mrs. Puppy said, leaning closer to me. And I loved that they were so young, and their marriage was so new, that she still felt the need to apologize for him. Oh honey, I wanted to say. He will get louder and quirkier and more outgoing. He will go to more concerts and talk to more people and embarrass you even more than he is right now. He will become less inhibited about what is proper, and he will care even less. But he is yours, my dear. Embrace that.

They left, and they came back, and he spent some time proving my point as he updated me on the USC basketball score. When the concert was over, Puppy told me “good-bye” and “nice to meet you” and air-chucked my shoulder.

Chris and I went out into the balmy night. He grabbed my hand, and we walked along in companionable silence, looking at the lights, the people, the cars, the Pedi-cabs. At the parking garage, we took the elevator — a rare luxury — to the fifth floor, retrieved our car, and drove off through the night. “That was a lot of fun,” I said. And as it came off my lips, I realized I would have had just as much fun at home, in my pajamas, sharing ice cream from a carton as Chris and I sat side-by-side in our very comfortable chairs. We drove home to our well-tended yard, and we made that dream a reality.

For I am always hungry these days.

ALC