Meeting and Conquering Some Challenges – and Giving Up on Others

Spring has come to the "land of little rain."

 

It is the second week of April, the last month of my winter “retirement” season here in Cochise County, Arizona. I think back to New Year’s Eve and how glad the Artist and I were to see the end of 2021, a year of so many losses, and what high hopes we had for the new year. A fresh, clean page! But then 2022 got off to a rough start for us (as well as for the rest of the world), and despite several hopeful restarts, personal tragedy finally arrived as March came in like a – what on earth to call it? A horseman of the Apocalypse? Of all the previous year’s losses, none comes close to the hole in my heart that this year’s Ash Wednesday brought.

Time for another morning dog walk --

But for those left behind, life goes on. The sun continues to rise and set, one foot must be put in front of the other, there are jobs to be tackled and questions to be answered and forms to fill out, errands to be run, all the regular maintenance of daily life plus the new and unfamiliar. And while there are challenges in life we would all rather not face if we could avoid them, others are no doubt helpful. You already know the challenge that keeps me on my toes and makes me laugh these days when she isn’t driving me crazy! Little Sunshine, I call her. Tiny Girl. Sunny Juliet, the puppy the Artist was so eager to bring into our life so that we could be a pack again. Now for his sake, as well as my own, taking care of her is my #1 responsibility in these last Arizona weeks. 

Big responsibility!

Other changes in my life are more subtle but definitely there. The hours I spend reading have diminished, partially in light of the demands Tiny Girl makes on my time, but even what I choose to read has changed at present -- probably not permanently, but right now. For example, I learned of an important writer whose work I did not know and acquired three of her books, a memoir and two novels. I read the late Maureen Howard’s Expensive Habits (novel) and Facts of Life (memoir) right away and passed the latter along to a friend who was a fan of the author’s work but hadn’t read the memoir. Next up was a long novel, Natural History….

 

It isn’t often that I read 199 pages of a book and decide not to finish it. Why wouldn’t I have stopped sooner? And why did I stop at all? The book is not an easy one to read, but it is not beyond my capacities, and it is beautifully written. It’s just that – I found it depressing. Everyone in the book was unhappy. And their lives were not marked by unspeakable tragedy, either, just the ordinary difficulties and disappointments of life on earth in the 20^thcentury, but it isn’t that I was impatient with them or blamed them for their discontent. Life doesn’t have to be tragic to be hard, and none of us lives comparatively: we all live absolutely in our own skins and our own personal histories. 

 

When reading fiction, however, we inhabit for a while the skins and personal histories of the characters encountered on a book’s pages, and finally I decided I didn’t want to live those imaginary lives any longer. Not at this time in my own life. They would have to go on without me. 

 

An acquaintance had suggested that since I “like dogs” (which seems a pale description), I might enjoy a police procedural by Robert Crais, Suspect. I checked the book out of the library in Willcox and sped through half of it in one night, my motivation increased when I learned that Robert Crais wrote several scripts for “Hill Street Blues,” one of my all-time favorite series on television. 

 

Suspect isn’t exactly escape reading for me, though. Having lost first a beloved dog and then, only about two months later, the love of my life, I am hardly escaping when I pick up a book about a cop and a dog who have also experienced traumatic loss, the cop when he saw his partner killed on the street – a female partner for whom he had developed feelings he was on the verge of sharing with her -- and the dog when he couldn’t save his human Marine partner’s life in Afghanistan. You might say Scott and Maggie are a pair of damaged misfits brought together by fate, to be healed by love – which seems a pretty heavy burden to lay on a dog. But this is fiction, so I am hoping for a happy ending.

 

Whatever happens to Scott and Maggie in Suspect, I have a backup comfort book waiting in the wings. It’s one of the novels set in Botswana and featuring Mma Ramotswe, by Alexander McCall Smith. I may have read The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café before, but if so it doesn’t matter. Comfort is no less comfort when it comes around a second time.

"Am I a comfort, Mama?" Sometimes you are, Sunny!