In the wee small hours of Thanksgiving morning, as the rain steadily fell, and my faithful hound dog looked at me with the face that practically begged not to have to go outside to pee (although she really, really had to go), I poured the day's first cup of coffee and fired up the laptop intending to spend at least the morning of November's final Thursday the way the Lords of Billable Time intended.
As the coffee dripped down, I helped Sam overcome her "there is no way I am going out in this" issue. It turns out that she simply needed to know she was not alone in her endeavor. So, I took off my socks, opened the back door, and went down the back steps onto the patio - and into the rain. She almost seemed to grasp the import of my gesture. Moments later, she stepped out onto the back porch. Her first several steps down the stairs and onto the patio were tentative, to be sure. But whether it was seeing me standing outside in the dark getting rained on too or the simple fact that she had held it for as long as she could, she then ambled off the patio, onto the grass, and peed. Mission accomplished, she headed back up the stairs into the kitchen with me following. I located the towel Margaret has set aside as Sam's and used it to dry her off. Her bladder empty and her coat reasonably dry, she headed off to the living room for the first of her many Thanksgiving naps.
I turned my attention back to the laptop.
Instead of beginning the revenue-generating portion of the day, I thought for a moment or two of all the things for which I am thankful. On the All Things Considered Celestial Scale of Life I have made out much better than I ever had any right to do. I am, on my best day, a C+ human being at best. I count my blessings every day and appreciate them. For an unrepentant asshole, I have much for which to be thankful.
Among the things for which I am thankful is that while I am a man of few friends, which arrangement suits both me and the world at large exquisitely well, I have some simply extraordinary ones. One such cat is Dave Lackland. He and I became friends a lifetime ago at Wardlaw-Hartridge (apologies to the present regime but I am a hyphenate and NOT a + signer). We had lost touch long ago but perhaps a decade or so we reconnected, for which I am eternally grateful. I am even more grateful that once we did, the connection held. Ten years further on up the road, the bond remains unbroken.
Ours is an incredibly unbalanced friendship. By that I mean that Dave is (conservatively speaking) ten times the human being I could ever aspire to be, presuming I had such an aspiration. I was reminded again Thursday morning of his inestimable humanity.
He no longer writes it but, being ever hopeful I have bookmarked the link to it, Dave wrote a blog several years ago when he, the Missus, and then-baby Indy lived in the Florida Keys. Its title? (Iguana) Dave's Dock. In it, he chronicled his relationship with the iguanas whose own little piece of paradise abutted Dave's and, as you shall see when you read the essays in it, eventually became one with Dave's. If you want a case study in a human being who just gets it, then read Dave's essays. They afford an insight into an exceptionally keen, sharp, and profoundly humane human being, whose understanding of not just our place in this world but the place of those species whose own worlds occupy it too, is simply extraordinary.
Sitting alone in my kitchen before sunrise on Thursday morning, I spent twenty minutes or so reacquainting myself with the world of Dave's Dock. Spoiler alert: Not all the stories are happy ones. There are significantly more humans who remind me of me than there are who remind me of Dave and a disproportionately high number of the former live in the Keys (or did in the earlier part of this decade). Yet, reading each of them restored my faith in humanity, because of the human who wrote them.
Four decades ago, the Poet Laureate of the Jersey Shore exhorted us to, "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night." As it turns out, magic is present at all times of day.
All we need is a magician, or a really good friend, to show us.
-AK
