Rocky and Gawenda and the little brown dog

In the heat of this morning, old Rocky prances and bounces along the path beside the garden bed of Bobby Dazzlers.

The Bobby Dazzlers in the three garden beds in the Gardens are lovely in reds and pinks and whites, but not as I had expected them to be, for they are smaller, more delicate, each flower neat and singular in its allotted space.

Rocky prances and bounces along and though his eyesight is fading and he is hard of hearing, on this warm windless sunshiny morning, he is as if time has been conquered, or at least made to pause, for Rocky is not the old dog he was not so very long ago.

This is not to say that he is young again. I am sceptical about miracles, not wholly a non-believer, but rather a miracle agnostic. I can however say that Rocky’s prancing and dancing—sometimes he looks like his paws are not touching the ground—is not miraculous, in the sense that time has not paused let alone been reversed.

But something has happened. What has happened is —and I know, anthropomorphising is a sign of something though I am not sure of what— that I have become a sort of human grandfather to a young dog. It is a long story about how it is that this dog—small and dark chocolate brown with floppy ears and dark deep-set eyes – spends many mornings and afternoons and even some nights with us.

I think the story could, were it to be written by a writer sensitive to the dynamics of sibling love, be of prize-winning potential. but I am not that writer. I will just say that the dog cannot be considered to belong to, singularly, either of my children. It is shared between them.

Whether Anne considers herself to be a sort of human grandmother to this small dog I am not sure, but I think perhaps she does, for I have noticed that she loves the little thing. I think love is the right word though I do not want to be seen to be speaking for her.

Rocky cannot speak for himself about whether he feels fatherly towards the little dog, so I will speak for him. I think he does. I shall come to the evidence for this shortly, but I must say, fatherly is not what he felt when the little dog first came into his world.

He was, like many fathers are initially — and yes, I have no statistics to back this up—rather put out, somewhat grumpy, and concerned about how their lives are about to change and not necessarily for the better. But like most fathers, he has grown into a fatherly love for the little dog, happy to see her when she arrives, at ease with her exuberance most of the time, willing to play, as far as he can manage it, games with her—snarls and sniffing, and even inconsequential biting.

And he has welcomed her onto the blanket on which he sleeps—if that is not fatherly, I don’t know what is. And so it is that our lives—mine and Anne’s and Rocky’s—have been reshaped by the arrival of this little dog that in truth, none of us had desired, for each of us felt that Rocky was enough and that another dog would be a dog too many.

My life has been changed by the little dog and not wholly in ways that I might have wished for, though the ways that are not to my absolute liking are far outweighed by the joys of her. Yes. I am sometimes irritated and challenged by her unrestrained and unrestrainable exuberance.

Before she came, Rocky, in old age, had inevitably taken to sleeping most of the time. Because he could not hear well and could not see well, he slept most of the day away uninterrupted by loud voices or by the sound of cars outside—once the sound of every car was greeted with pricked up ears— or even by my calling him to get ready for our morning walk.

I had thought this was inevitable, Rocky’s fading into sleep, a function of being old and though my days are not spent sleeping, not at all, there are things about old Rocky, that mirrored something about old me, a sort of slowness that could be taken —wrongly I now think—for gentleness.

Rocky no-longer sleeps his days away on the blanket he now shares with the little dog. She has, from the start, been determined that he does not do so. From the time she arrives, from the time she gallops down the hallway and flies into an embrace of Rocky who somehow, in some mysterious way given his hearing, hears her coming and bounces towards her, he is no-longer the old dog I thought he inevitably was.

How is this to be understood?

Standing here beside the garden bed of Bobby Dazzlers, Rocky is ready to prance and bounce on, perhaps anticipating the arrival once we return home, of the little dog, which will herald another day of not sleeping his days away.

And I remember how sure the young gardener was those weeks ago when he said the Bobby Dazzlers would cover the garden beds in a riotous blanket of colour. But nothing is inevitable when it comes to the future. Nothing is certain. There is no riotous blanket. The young gardener, I wonder, would he be disappointed? Should he be? Okay, too much profundity, I agree.

We leave the Bobby Dazzlers and begin our walk home. Rocky is glad, for the day is getting hot and his tongue is hanging out of his mouth, but he is still prancing and I wonder whether we might take the little dog on our walks sometime soon and I wonder whether, after all these years of our walking together, Rocky and me, we are ready to take the little dog into this part of our shared lives.