Enough, and Free
Today he would have been two.
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We used to bow to each other.
Not as a trick. Nobody taught it to either of us. I would come out of my work room after an hour, sometimes four, and he would be in the living room, and we would see each other, and both of us would go down. Front legs stretched, chest to the floor, that long Labrador bow. And me, bending toward him. There were mornings I touched his feet and asked for blessings.
He was a dog. He was also the first being I ever bowed to without anyone telling me to.
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We had two words.
Enough and free.
Tug of war, fetch, chase. Two minutes in, sometimes five, I would say enough. He would drop it. Go down. Wait. And then that look, the one anyone who has lived with a dog will recognise instantly, eyes moving from me to the toy and back to me. Ready? Not whining. Not nudging. Just asking, patiently, in the only language available to him.
He would not touch it until I said free.
Same at his bowl. Food in front of him, and he would sit and wait. Not once did he take anything without permission. It is why he stayed healthy, and why he never ate what he shouldn’t have. But that is not obedience, and I want to be careful about the difference. Obedience is what you get through fear. Trust is what you get when the other one has never used the word against you.
Here is what I could not have understood any other way.
The waiting did not cost us anything. It did not make him smaller around me. He still slept on me, literally on me!, the whole weight of him, while I lay there unable to move and entirely unwilling to. He still lost his mind when I came back from being gone eleven minutes. The structure and the love never once diluted each other. Not once, in two years.
I had believed my whole adult life that they would. That commitment was a cage. That if I ever became responsible for keeping something alive, the part of me that could still play would go quiet and stay quiet.
Then a Labrador sat in front of his bowl and waited, and showed me the entire thing was backwards.
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I taught him spin.
This is going to sound absurd and I have made my peace with that. Topspin, backspin, sidespin. I showed him what my hand did before the ball left it. Where to look. How the ball would turn off the first bounce depending on the motion I made. Where to position himself, based on what he read in my wrist, before anything had even been released.
Four or five sessions. That was all it took. After that he was moving before the ball landed, and catching it clean off the first pitch, every single time.
We had been doing a smaller version of this since he was four months old. If his toy got wedged somewhere, we did not pull it out for him. We walked him through it. Look here. Now here. Try this angle. We wanted him to understand the mechanics and not just receive the outcome, so that the next problem, the one we would not be standing next to him for, would still be solvable.
And it worked. He got better at deciding for himself. Better at reading the situation, the context, the moment, and choosing well, more and more often as he grew. He used every brain cell he had. All of them, all the way to the edge.
I was so proud of teaching him.
It has taken me until this week to see the joke. He learned spin in five sessions. I had been in the other course for two years, and I only found out I was enrolled after it ended.
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Our walks were at midnight.
An hour, every day, once work was finished and everything else was finished, because I did not want to give him the version of me that was still half in a meeting. Partly it was practical. Nobody is out at midnight in this city and the roads belonged to us. But mostly I wanted to actually be there for it.
Some nights it was hard to get out of the chair. I did it anyway. I told myself I was doing it for him.
I was not. I was doing it for us. He got the hour he loved and I got the only hour in the day that asked nothing of me, and I did not work out which of the two of us needed it more until there was no longer a walk to go on.
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Alternate weekends were his as well. Swimming, without fail. Prathiksha and I are homebodies, our idea of a good Saturday is the two of us at home with nothing scheduled and nobody expected, and we never missed one of his. The routine, the new places, the water, the travel. Not once did we skip it because we were tired.
I keep going back looking for the part where that felt like sacrifice.
It isn’t there. I cannot find it anywhere.
That is the thing nobody explains properly about becoming someone’s person. You expect the cost. You brace for it, you budget for it. And then it arrives and it is not a cost at all, it has quietly become what you are, and you never noticed the exchange taking place.
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He was in whatever room I was in.
Under the table while I worked, or just behind my chair. I got into the habit of checking before I moved. Before I rolled back, before I stretched my legs out. I checked even when he wasn’t there.
On the couch, on my lap, whenever I was on the PlayStation. Every single time.
I did not go to the bathroom alone for two years. He would come and sit in front of me. No reason. No request.
Five minutes, five hours, two days. The greeting never changed. Not once did I get a smaller version of it.
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He died on a Friday afternoon. Suddenly, and fast, and a week short of today.
I am not going to write that part here. Some of it belongs in rooms with doors.
What I want to write about is what came after.
The teachings didn’t stop.
That is the part nobody warns you about, and it is also the only mercy in it. I still check behind my chair before I move it. I still hear enough in my own voice when I have been grinding at something too long, and I notice that I actually stop now, which I never used to do. He is not here and the entire apparatus he built in me is still running.
He was never holding any of it on my behalf. He put it in, over two years, one game of catch and one midnight hour at a time, and then he was gone and it stayed. There is nothing for me to preserve. Nothing to keep alive by remembering hard enough. It is simply how I work now.
That is the closest I have come to acceptance, and I want to be accurate about how small it is. I am not at peace with him being gone. I do not expect to be for a long time. But the two years were not taken back when he was taken. Whatever he did to me is finished, and it is mine, and there is no amount of grief that can undo a single hour of it.
I wrote about him last year and called him a mirror. I wasn’t wrong. I was early. A mirror shows you where you are. He was doing something harder. He was building the person who would be needed later, and he did it the whole time while pretending to be a dog who wanted the ball.
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If you are living with one of these teachers right now, and most of you are, you will not be able to tell.
It will not look like a teacher. It will look like a responsibility nobody asked whether you wanted, the exact thing you have spent years explaining your way out of. Mine walked in with my wife while I was busy explaining that I did not want a dog.
You find out you were being taught when the teaching stops. That appears to be a condition of the arrangement, and I have stopped arguing with it.
So the only thing worth saying is this. The hour you almost skipped tonight is the one you will be looking for later.
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He never took anything until I said the word. That was our arrangement, for two years, at every bowl and every toy and every doorway. He waited. He looked at me. He held the whole of himself perfectly still until I released him.
I must have said it a thousand times.
I never once meant it the way I mean it now.
Happy birthday, Danny.
Free. Peace and Eternal Bliss.
