Iggy Pup

Little Iggy Pup has been living with me here in Salt Lake City since my oldest daughter, his real mom, moved to Pittsburgh nine months ago. At eighteen (in people years), he’s too old to move so far away, to wait all day in an unfamiliar place for his best person to return from work. Luckily my daughter and I are built so much alike, sound so similar, I’m not sure he fully registers that we’ve switched on him.

I’m not a dog person, which doesn’t look true because two of them live with me, in my freaking house: my son’s anxious coyote-ish Butter, also ancient, also needing daytime company (what’s retirement for?), and bug-eyed, bat-eared, short-legged Iggy. Also, two former Idaho cats flap in and out of the already-here-when-I-moved-in kitty doors. Yes, I do know they should stay inside all the time; I’ll be happy to give them to you if you think you can litter-train them. The cats are twin brothers, tabbies, one thin as a meerkat, the other fat as a badger—a “gift” from my sister who gets tired of people ditching strays in the infinite woodpile leaning against the antique barn.  

So, even though I live alone (now that my descendants are forging their own ways through a difficult and often frightening adult-scape), I often look up from writing, or reading horrifying national news (we’ll come back to this) to see the damn pets have all settled near me, chewing rubber bones or licking their crotches and underarms, farting, scratching, sleeping beneath the forever-slipcovered sofas or hogging the raggedy dog bed on the floor.

But Iggy sticks close, always: he toddles behind me wherever I go in the house or yard, which is tricky because he’s mostly blind and entirely deaf. Sniff work is key. If I’m on my writing / reading chair, he needs to snuggle between my leg and the armrest.  More gargoyle than dog, he jumps and misses, re-jumps and scrabbles, clings, and reasserts his tiny-guy attitude on top of the ottoman. Then he blinks me into whatever focus he can manage and steps paw by paw across the chasm to share my seat, wiggling himself into maximum-contact position.

I think he senses his life is closing in. At least he knows it’s not what it used to be. For such an egregiously unnatural creature, Iggy has lived a joyful life on the natural planet. He’s trekked through long stretches of red rock desert with the people he loves. He’s slept under mountain stars, ridden in a backpack over high Wasatch and Uinta summits. He’s paddled himself across ice-cold mountain pools, drunk from springs and waterholes. Now I let him go outside to smell stuff in my quarter-acre suburban yard, and he savors every scent. He ponders and assesses. Sometimes I take him and Butter out to the West Desert, toward the Nevada line, where they can play at their own geriatric paces. Both tire quickly but even so Iggy follows wherever I walk, up hills, around jutting rocks, along the slopes—low gear, undeterrable.

The world is darkening around him. He seems puzzled by the crushing silence. His lungs and throat are tightening; he coughs and quivers.

I think he senses his life is closing in. At least he knows it’s not what it used to be.

But here’s the thing: whatever troubles Iggy, it’s not the crushing news of a nation rent by irreconcilable perspectives, of post-election recriminations, harangues, competing analyses, threats, promises of vengeance and retribution, intentions of harm upon fellow travelers, sick jokes and simmering contempt, adulations and accolades for autocrats, dictators, warmongers.

Not of his world.

He’s not a dachshund, but even so there’s quite a lot of distance between his front and back legs. His spine is collapsing. He can’t keep his butt off the ground when he’s eating; he looks back at himself, annoyed, clearly recalling that he just stood up. So why is he all folded up again? I flip him on his back when I pick him up, carry him like a baby because pressure hurts his stomach. His shameless little weenie quivers and spurts. He tries not to, but sometimes he poops on the floor.

It's all very, very annoying. I have more personal time than I’ve had since thirty-five years of kids and students, I have just a little bit of extra money to think about traveling once in a while, and I’m stuck with the decrepit afterburn pets of family life. Hanging around with furry domestics doesn’t exactly feel like being in contact with nature. Mad barking and unvacuumed fur keep me from spontaneously inviting people in to chat.

But sitting here with an absurd and failing little animal, right now breathing content against my left leg as I write: attending to Iggy is antithetical to this season of political horror. The antidote to what can only be, right now, my own pointless and redundant handwringing.

I told my friend and editor Kirsten Johanna Allen a couple of days ago that I don’t write nonfiction because I feel no call to dispense personal wisdom I don’t trust—or that someone smarter than me hasn’t dispensed already. True to her nature, Kirsten responded by asking me to write a nonfiction piece reviving this beautiful communal meditation on the meanings of hope. I’m glad she did, but I confess the wisdom I’ve got here is pretty thin: right now, I think it’s our job to take care of what comes our way, what crosses into our lives, as well as we’re able. Snuggle our weird stinky dogs. Keep fresh water in the bowl. Make dinner for our frightened children, or other people’s children. Let the old men rave across the street, unanswered. Let the lawn leaves be, for the winter bugs. Leave a tip for the coffee girls.

And maybe, for now, we lay off the analyzing, the second-guessing, the self-censure and the finger-pointing.

I confess the wisdom I’ve got here is pretty thin: right now, I think it’s our job to take care of what comes our way, what crosses into our lives, as well as we’re able. Snuggle our weird stinky dogs. Keep fresh water in the bowl. Make dinner for our frightened children, or other people’s children.

Wind chasing the whirlwind.

The news today, one day after a jaw-dropping election of a man I can only interpret as the rampant and recurring id of America, was filled with commentaries on preachy liberals, about clueless “elites” so out of touch with “real America” we can’t perceive our own arrogance, about the price of eggs versus starry-eyed idealism (as if I haven’t needed to buy a dozen eggs since —when?), about real men’s interest in the economy versus women’s preoccupations with tampons. Okay. Whatever. We’ve got bigger stuff coming, like the horrifying promise to expel ten million or more (it will always become more) people from the actual soil of our nation. But now we can calm ourselves, and each other, and feed our flocks, and clear our minds and hearts for what will come.

One morning soon, I think, Iggy Pup will not awaken, won’t shake himself back into whatever dim clarity he gathers, won’t step in ridiculous joy after I give him a treat for making it out to poop on the lawn. I think it will break my heart, even as it releases me from a peculiar sense of responsibility to a needy gargoyle. I won’t want to call my daughter with that news—my daughter who has moved so far from us, who lives with such courage, works so hard to find her way. She saw the presidential campaign up close and near-violent in Pittsburgh. Overwhelming. Disillusioning. The ancient heaving of human strife, the high and brutally low stakes of political power.

She’ll be okay, I think. I have to believe this. She’ll rise to the heroic demands of living in her time, the grand and terrible motions of political history. But her loves, her interesting and absorbing work, her creativity, her intimate hours, her sweetest responsibilities: what they must not take away. What life is. What I’ll fight to preserve, for her, for her siblings, for all our children, until I go down after Iggy. Stinky, stinky Iggy.  

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KARIN ANDERSON is the author of What Falls Away and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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