Changes

Late this afternoon, I took Ms. Dog over to the park and threw the frisbee for her. She has been so absolutely forlorn since I started working seventy hours a week. It’s funny…all those first five years of her life when I was home almost all the time, she didn’t seem overly interested in me. Most days, she’d spend the hours dozing in her bed at the top of the stairs, and I wouldn’t see hide nor hair of her unless she had to go out. I had no reason to believe she made any particular note of my presence or absence. Now, when I do make my rare conscious appearances about the household, she sticks to me like glue. Ball or other toy in her mouth, big sad eyes beseeching.

Truth be told, her issue probably isn’t me; I imagine it has more to do with the fact that the normal fabric of her existence has been…wrinkled. Animals are creatures of habit. They have a hard time dealing with change. I can relate…

Change. In the space of four months—less than one percent of my life (and this late in my life)—everything has changed. The way I live…the clothes I wear, the food I eat, the people I know, the motivations behind my every move. Standing in the park this evening, with the light of the sinking autumn sun painting the orange and red leaves oranger and redder… it seemed like only a short time since I took my camera out about the neighborhood to celebrate the bonfire of fall, 2005. Yesterday. But an entirely different reality.

A cognitive dissonance bordering on vertigo buzzed in my head. This person who throws the frisbee for the dog in the late evening sun, smiles and sighs at the woodsmoke and the colors and the mist and the crisp air, this is me. No…this was me. Now I’m…someone else. Something else. I don’t know who I am anymore. I feel like my poor dog…like I want to glue myself to some piece of my past, with my ball in my mouth and my big sad eyes beseeching.