Perhaps two or three times a year, I manage to muster enough love for teeming humanity to visit the Mall of America. When this happens, I am usually meeting my friend Doug for a Private Sale at Bloomingdale's or quenching a craving for meatballs and affordable, well-designed household goods at IKEA. One can never have enough dishwasher-safe cutting boards.
Driving past the airport to get there, I pass the enormous road-side LED sign that warns me, THREAT LEVEL ORANGE. Now, I know that Tom Ridge intended to conjure images of urban conflagration - a towering inferno or one of those fireballs that hurtles through subway tunnels in action movies. But looking to the East, where the bucolic Mississippi ambles toward Iowa, I don't feel particularly at risk. I'm more frightened of the double-wide strollers I'll be dodging at the Mall, and the skinny clothes that masquerade as "Large" sizes at H & M.
My mind wanders as I approach the parking lot, knowing it will soon have to keep track of all kinds of new data if I ever hope to find my car again: Level P3 West Yellow Pineapple Hawaii, for instance. I start cataloging orange things in my head: cantaloupe, monarch butterflies, baby aspirin, Kathy Griffin's hair. None of them seems especially threatening. So I conduct my own personal threat level assessment. What's bringing my life to the brink of catastrophe?
The Sunday Styles section of the New York Times is one such thing. Ever since Canada and Massachusetts began to recognize gay marriages, hardly a week goes by that some gay couple isn't profiled in the wedding announcements. Doctors and lawyers, comedy writers and physicists, thoroughbred racers and conductors: handsome men with fascinating jobs seem to be finding each other up and down the eastern seaboard, their unions consecrated by Episcopal priests in Worcester, Mass.
The problem isn't really that these scintillating couples are falling in love and into marriage. It's that I am not. I am the most romantic person I know. I'm made for love the way Audrey Hepburn was made for the little black dress. I'm flowers for no reason; I'm kisses in the rain. I am the original 1950s movies that inspired every film Meg Ryan made in the 1990s.
I have spent 17 years out of 40 in relationships, so I'm not especially good at being single. Nevertheless, I am a Sagittarius, and I swim the cold and roiling waters of the dating pool with an optimism that makes early Julie Andrews films seem bleak and nihilistic in comparison. Each new man I meet holds the promise of lollipops, rainbows, and vows in Vancouver. "I don't think he's 'the one,'" I might say cautiously to my friend Sarah, who listens patiently to my pre-date reveries with patience and motherly concern. "But this guy was a dance major. He could be fun to hang out with." And yet each successive rendezvous ends in the tragic, never-to-be-fulfilled promise of getting together for a movie sometime.
I have so many pent-up romantic impulses that I pity the first man I go on a third date with. I'll arrive in an ivory dinner jacket with rose petals strewn over the passenger seat of my SUV, hand him a boutonniere and a box of condoms, and whisk him off to a bed & breakfast before he has a chance to tell me he doesn't feel the chemistry.
As it stands, the only special getaway I am planning is a Northwoods weekend to celebrate the anniversary of adopting my dog. Angus is turning 12 next week, and our six years together represent the second-longest relationship I've had.
One of the dirty little secrets of dog ownership, one of those things that single dog people acknowledge but don't discuss, is that dogs enable you to talk to yourself without feeling crazy. You verbalize your thoughts, no matter how mundane or nonsensical. Over time, you come to believe that the way your dog cocks his head or rests his chin on his paws is a commentary on what you've just said to him. He's validating your choice of split pea soup over chicken noodle, dismissing the solid tie in favor of the patterned one, agreeing that the place really does need a thorough dusting and we should take care of that on Saturday.
When Angus, my most valued confidant, went deaf three weeks ago, my world became a little more precarious. If you've seen the old film version of The Miracle Worker, where Inga Swenson from TV's Benson plays Mrs. Keller, you have an idea of what I felt. When she discovers that baby Helen can't see or hear, she screams. She clasps her hands to her anguished face over Helen's crib, and the camera cuts to the outside of the Keller home, where her shrieking remains audible in the genteel southern air. If it were a horror movie, a flock of crows would fly out of a tree.
I didn't shriek when I clapped and whistled and shouted at my slumbering dog that day, but panic surged in my breast when he did not wake up. Angus usually bolted off the bed to greet me as soon as he heard the key in the lock. But I was already in the door with bags of groceries and he just laid there. I feared the worst. I went to his side and shook him, but he promptly woke up, startled and disoriented. I immediately ran around my loft, bringing noisy objects to his ears: my phone, the alarm clock, clanging metal pots. He registered none of them. And I grieved the loss of his hearing like the passing of a friend.
The first week was rough. At first, I tried shouting my inner monologue to see if Angus heard anything. "We're almost out of eggs!" "I need to focus on cardio this week!" This, however, did little to allay my fears of imminent insanity, and neighbors began to express concern. After all, our soundproofing upgrade had just been completed. They were alarmed by their quiet neighbor whose voice suddenly went up to 11.
So I turned to the Web, which proved more helpful in regards to my dog's hearing loss than it ever had been with dating. I am now teaching Angus signs for various words: sit, come, outside, treat. He's learned many quite quickly, although he refuses to lie down. He never obeyed that command when he could hear, so I'm not particularly worried that he ignores it in sign language. His stubborn personality persists, even in deafness, and that is a comfort.
I remain sad, however, for the quotidian grace notes of my life that now are lost. I miss Angus greeting me. I miss his excitement at the word "treat." I miss coercing him to bay like a wolf when I say, "sing, Angus, sing!" These little things will never happen again. Their disappearance from my relationship with Angus reminds me daily that he is aging, and that our time together is limited.
Angus is an Australian cattle dog -- a red heeler. His fur, though streaked with white and silver and blue, is a reassuring orange. Now when I come home, I greet him, gently stroking his orange head to rouse him. I take him to the park and brush his orange haunches and scruffy neck to minimize his shedding. At the end of each day, I rub his orange tummy and hold my throat to his head, so he can feel the vibrations when I say, "Good night, little Gus. I love you."
No, orange doesn't scare me. Its absence does.
