update of sorts

Grades are done and turned in and I've gotten no email complaints in the first 24 hours. This is a good sign.

Becky mailed our manuscript on Monday and it's a hefty one. Full of intelligence and insight.

I've been working at the Coffeehouse on the prospectus for the collection of essays I've been working on with grad students for what seems like forever. But for all the publications acceptances in the world I couldn't've gotten out of bed this morning. It was chillers last night: only 48 this morning.

Illinois, this new home of mine, is the most average of the states. Somehow that's comforting.

S. and I are going to NC next Friday to visit his parents. God, it'll be good to get away.

Part of the reason we're both going to need to get away is that S. is having sweet, sweet 14-year-old Kylie dawg put down tonight. He made the decision last weekend, and the vet is coming to his home tonight to do it. This way Kylie's home with her people and all her sisters and isn't freaked out by the vet's office. She's been diagnosed with what is probably Cushing's disease, which causes the body to create too many steroids, which explains the heavy drinking (not that kind of heavy drinking) and the peeing all over the house. But more than the disease, I think it's just old age. She has a hard time getting around. She's increasingly confused. I've never put a dog down. In fact, I've never even seen a dead dog, so I'm not sure I'll be able to be right there when the vet does it. But I'll be close by. As will Scully and Mulder and Annabelle. And there will be many many tears. Knowing it's the right thing to do doesn't make it easier. As I think about how to comfort S. tonight and in the days to come, I can't help but keep coming back to an essay by Sam Pickering called, simply, "George." I taught it this semester in my personal essay course. I hadn't read it before I taught it, and though I knew it was about a doggie dying, I wasn't at all prepared for how much it would affect me. I keep coming back to this:

In general, people weep more over the death of pets than they do over family members. The death of an animal does not disrupt routine or impose responsibility. Consequently a person has the leisure to indulge his emotions. When a family member dies, a person suddenly has so many chores that not only does leisure vanish but the dead person himself disappears. Funerals must be arranged, taxes paid, and estates settled. Clothes must be given away, and houses and apartments sold. In the mail legal forms arrive and thank-you notes go out....

With a dog, though, there's no bureaucratic busy-ness to keep you from your emotions.

The puppy I trained has vanished from memory....No, the dog I remember best and most fondly was old, at first pestered by yeasty ears, then deaf, only able to hear a high whistle. On walks this past year George began to lose his way....

Pickering, Sam. "George." The Best American Essays 2006. Ed. Lauren Slater. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 133-152.