Luna closes her eyes

I had been sitting in the same chair reading the same book for nearly an hour when I heard a woman scream from across the street. Usually hearing a woman scream sparks a mad cognitive dash, alerting our senses, scanning for danger, digging through rational thought piles for some reason why she might be screaming. On this night, a warm winter night in Northern California, there was no mad cognitive dash in my brain. Before even thinking about it, I knew why she was screaming.

I should apologize for any confusion. Yes, I am living in Guatemala. My home base remains there, my work, and my choco-bananas, and so on. I have come back the United States for our month-long Christmas break, spending a little over a week visiting friends in California, and will now spend a few weeks here in the New York/New Jersey area with family and friends. A fairly short and fairly busy trip, meaningful to me because it is a Visit. And therefore not a Return. It was a Return that I had been planning since the Departure (although its form was always unclear). If I needed any reminder of the choices I have made over the past year, good choices and bad choices, this Visit is it. Closing the circle, I twice stood in San Francisco International Airport with my beat blue backpack on a Sunday, almost exactly seven months apart, once departing and once arriving. Little moments.

I had my two overstuffed bags packed with clothes and other items to bring back from California sitting on the wooden floor, and I was waiting for my friend to come pick me up. I fumbled around the house a little, ate some stale tortilla chips off the kitchen table, and sat down to read my old roommate's abnormal psychology textbook. I sat with my back to the window, its curtain drawn. A loud yelp of a dog in pain, screeching of tires. The dog yelped three more times, diminuendo. I hesitated for a moment, then put the textbook face-down on the table and walked out the front door. I reached the monstrous green bushes at the edge of the property and saw the dark outline of the dog lying in the middle of the road, illuminated on one side by car headlights. There were already two people standing over the dog, and a lady was walking towards the scene from her red sports car parked up the street, the apparent culprit. I thought about going back inside, but decided -- out of morbid curiosity or altruism or both -- to walk over.

The dog, a grey female pit bull with a white belly and yellow eyes, was lying on her side facing down the street. She had a large gash on the side of her chest where it appeared the car had struck her, and there was some dark, unidentifiable material lying a feet feet behind her. When I got there her neck started to spasm as if she was trying to breathe, but failing. She spasmed a few times and then stopped moving all together, yellow eyes wide open, staring blankly at the cars as we waved them around her. There was a peripheral discussion about calling 911, or the sheriff, or animal control, and people walked around on their cell phones. The lady who had hit the dog, stood far up the driveway, frozen with her hand over her mouth. I tried to ask her about what had happened, but she remembered little, and I suggested that she go and sit in her car until the sheriff or whoever arrived. And I told her that it wasn't her fault, although it certainly could have been. She could have been talking or texting on her cell phone, playing with her iPod or car stereo, driving too fast for night time on that small two-lane road.

People filtered off after it became clear that the dog had died. I grabbed a wide piece of wood and a shovel from the basement of my old house and we moved the dog over on to the side of the road and covered it with an old nasty Christmas sweater. There was one other guy who stayed to help along with the sports-car woman. There was nothing more to do, all the authorities had been notified, and so we all left. I went back inside, and both of them drove off.

I went back outside when I heard the scream, this time with no hesitation. There was a car parked in front of the dog, and three people gathered around it. One was a middle-aged Hispanic woman, screaming, kneeling next to the body. Her brother, or boyfriend, was standing next to her, rubbing her shoulder and saying some of those consoling phrases, but mostly staring at the dog. After a few minutes he started smiling and telling her that it was enough, that they would leave the dog there and come bring her to a cremation place in the morning. I told them that their dog -- Luna -- had been brave and she had died fast, no suffering. This seemed true, but more than that, it seemed like the thing to say. As the woman's crying diminished, and she stood up, her companion knelt over and touched his head to Luna's head. He got up and smiled, and then started crying silently. He hung his head and tears dripped off his nose. "She was such a good dog," he said, "Why did she have to go running out like that?" He cried and walked away, and she talked to the sheriff, who had just arrived. The sheriff wasn't much help, but he was nice, and told them how sorry he was.

As they loaded Luna's body into the back of the pickup, I saw that her eyes were now closed, as if she had just been waiting for her family to arrive. The guy told me how he had gotten when she was still a tiny puppy. He said that if he talked about her, he would just cry more, but he talked about her anyway, because that was all there was for him, there. I tried to tell him that it was okay, because she had lived a good life with a good family, and that's all anyone could ever hope for. And he thanked me, and she thanked me, I don't know for what, and they drove away, wiping tears on their sleeves, the body of their dead dog Luna in the back of the truck, covered in a dirty blanket and a Christmas sweater, sliding along the metal floor of the truck along with pine needles and a long piece of rope, her yellow eyes closed to the world.

These writings were, or are, supposed to be broadly representative of my life and my travels. Sometimes they are, and sometimes I tell stories that simply reflect individual experiences, tiny pieces of a life lived along many lines. Do not read this post as some reflection of a dark or depressing time for me, because it is not. But we have to live life knowing that the next day may be entirely different from the day before, that any day we may lose a loved one or gain a loved one, as Luna was lost to that family that night. Somewhere else, a happy, smiling family was welcoming a tiny puppy into their life. Somewhere in the world someone was leaving home, and somewhere else, some one was returning home. It's nice to believe in Heaven or reincarnation, even if they aren't real, because then dying is just going home, and if dying is going home, then everything is going home -- in one way or another. And then we are always home.