Walking the Dog

We went home together that night.

The next morning, I resumed my early morning walks, and took Rusty to see her new neighborhood. I'd heard that if your dog is too fat, you need more exercise, and I swore neither of us would suffer that fate. Fall was already beginning, so the mornings weren't so early, dry, or clear any more, and the days were already getting noticeably shorter and wetter. There was just the hint of color in the sky to the east when we set out.

Without thinking, I followed the path that Jesse and I used to walk together. When we finally got to the Starbuck's, I noticed Lucy's little Jack Russell terrier tied to one of the benches, and while I was tying up Rusty far enough away that they wouldn't fight, I looked in the store. A tall girl was in there, ordering, and I was sure it Lucy.

I went in, but I didn't feel much like flirting any more.

After she placed her order, she kind of side-stepped to the pick-up counter, and didn't see me. She glanced over when I placed my order, and when I, too moved over to the pick-up area, she asked me, "Hi, there, Jim! I haven't seen you around for a while! Where's Jesse today?"

I hate it when that happens, but it happens a lot, so I had a canned answer, "I've been pretty busy, Lucy. My wife passed away a couple of months ago."

She looked acutely embarrassed and was fumbling for something to say, some combination of an apology and condolences. I imagined I knew how awful that made her feel; she had no idea of what had happened when she made their innocent remark, and now she felt so sorry to have hurt me even more by reminding me of my grief.

"I know," I said, "you feel terrible for mentioning her. Don't! Don't feel bad! I loved her ... I still love her, every minute. The last thing I would ever mind is someone mentioning her to me." I tried to radiate one of those sincere smiles, but I knew it probably looked pasted on.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," the girl said, "she seemed very nice!" Then she cringed and blushed feeling she had made another insensitive blunder.

Our coffees were ready. She had ordered a muffin, too, and I had a biscotti. I know, that's not on the South Beach diet, but you gotta live.

"Are you going to sit in here?" I asked. "If you are, can I sit with you for a minute and tell you about her?"

"Uh, okay!" she seemed to brighten, but was also hesitant. I understood – she hadn't really planned on hearing maudlin recollections about a dead woman this morning. I vowed to myself to go easy on it.

We sat together at one of those tiny tables inside, and I probably bored her silly bragging about my late wife, how fantastic she had been, how much I missed her, how great our life together had been, and how I was trying to cope. I was past crying or feeling reluctant to talk about Jesse; I just enjoyed reliving our times together aloud.

After a while, maybe half and hour, she said, "I'm sorry, Jim, I need to get going, or I'm going to be late for work."

I was suddenly self-conscious about how much of her time I'd monopolized, and said so.

"Oh, no! I appreciate you telling me about Jesse, and I imagine you appreciated having someone to Listen! But, really I just have to get Goliath home and scoot to work!"

Goliath apparently was her tiny terrier.

"He seems to be getting along fine with that other cute little doggie out there!" she said, glancing out the window. The two dogs were lying quietly, as close together as they could get with their leashes stretched out, their heads on their front paws, just looking slightly forlorn, waiting for their alpha companions to come back.

"That other cute little doggie is Rusty! She's my new pal."

We walked out dogs together on the way to her apartment, and she said we all should walk together in the mornings again. I told we'd look forward to seeing them the next day.

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It became our habit to take our dogs for a walk every morning, except Sundays. ("I HAVE to sleep in at least ONE day a week!" Lucy said.) I'd take Rusty downstairs to the entrance of our condo building by 6:30 every morning, and Lucy would be just about arriving there with Goliath ("I'll meet you at your place to even up the distance," Lucy said.). We'd all walk to the Starbuck's together, get our coffees and a biscotti each to share with our dogs, then head back. Lucy and Goliath would turn off at her apartments to get going with their day, and Rusty and I'd finish our loop back to the condo.

It's probably hard to believe, but I sincerely had NO thoughts about Lucy as a female. Obviously, I could see that she was a very attractive young woman, but my feelings toward her were more as if she were my daughter; she was much younger than my daughter and I was still deeply grieving over my dead wife.

Time passed. My sister had been right. I was much busier, busier actually than what Jesse and I had become used to over the last few years. By the time night fell and I got back to the condo and fixed myself some dinner each day, I was usually tired out. And all the new activities took me totally out of my inward funk. I knew I was still grieving Jesse's loss, and I imagined I probably always would. But now hours at a time passed when I didn't feel like giving up on life.

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The Christmas Season of 2008 in Portland, Oregon was way unlike the usual season there. Portland might usually get one two light snows a winter, generally just a dusting; seldom was it enough to stick on the streets for more than an hour.

But that year, starting about a week before Christmas, it started snowing and simply didn't stop. It soon was looking like I was back in Colorado. There was at least three feet of snow piled on top of the cars in the parking lot. I watched the national weather, and could see that our old home was having another dry, droughty winter, and it was sunny and in the fifties there every day. I don't know about global warming, but something weird is up with the weather, for sure.

Lucy was a trooper, though. She would be at my building every morning, little Goliath determinedly plowing a groove through the new snow, and I'd gather up Rusty and we'd make our morning trek for coffee. The dogs got along just great, and both seemed to love playing with and in the snow.

I was planning to go up to my daughter's house after our morning walk the day before Christmas Eve day, to help them get everything finished for their kids' special day. But when I got up that morning, the city was in the grip of just a phenomenal blizzard, on top of the heavy persistent snow that had been accumulating all week. The snow was as heavy as any I'd ever seen in Colorado, and the wind had come up. On top of that, drivers here weren't equipped for, or experienced with driving in these conditions. It was just miserable.

I realized I needed to call Lucy to cancel our walk, of course, and then I'd call my daughter and tell her I wouldn't be able to get up THERE today, either. I just really hoped that I could get to my daughter's house for Christmas!

As I was calling Lucy's number, I glanced out the window, and could dimly see her through the blowing snow, struggling to cross the street to my building.

"Jeez, Lucy!" I said to myself. "Are you crazy?"

I was still in my pj's, but I grabbed my slip-ons and bolted out of my place and down the hall to the stairs. Rusty came running behind me. By the time I got to the building's front door, Lucy was standing there, clutching her coat tightly to herself, peering in through the window. No Goliath in sight!

"Lucy, you insane woman! Get in here!" I said as I opened the door for her. The wind howled through the open door, blowing little snow drifts across the lobby almost immediately. "Where's Goliath, honey?"

Lucy opened her arms, and with them, her big fluffy coat, and there, tucked in next to her for warmth was Goliath, looking like a bedraggled waif. The two of them looked like some kind of refugees or something from Doctor Zhivago. They were soaking wet and shivering.

"C'mon, honey, no walks today! You can't go back out there!" I said, herding her and her little dog, too, up the stairs and down the hall to my condo, Rusty in tow. "Get in here and let's get poor little Goliath warmed up before he freezes to death!"

When we got to my place, I concentrated on getting Goliath dried off, and Rusty was all excited to see him and Lucy in her house, licking them and jumping around. When she saw how distressed her friends were, she barked a little, and Lucy quietly shushed her, saying, "We're okay, Rusty! We're fine! There's a good girl!"

Once Goliath seemed to be settled in with some food, water, and a warm blanket, Rusty lay down beside him, and they just totally mellowed out together in the blast of warm air from one of the little electric wall heaters that counted as the heating system in this tiny condo.

My attention went to Lucy, and I realized that my walking buddy was still soaking wet and shivering. She still had her coat on, not zipped up but just only pressed together from trying to keep Goliath warm next to her; the wet dog and the snow that had blown in had soaked her to the bone.

"Oh, for crying out loud, Lucy! Don't' you have any sense at all? Surely you didn't think we would take our walk today in this mess!" I barked out. Then I realized that Lucy was crying.

"Jeez," I said aloud, but to myself. "Sorry! I'm so impressed and flattered that you came to walk with us! But it's just way to nasty out there today! Let's get you warmed up, too."

I hung up Lucy's wet coat, hat and gloves, put her boots by the door, and took her soaked sweat socks, which had come off with her boots, to drape them over a chair back to dry.

"C'mon." I said, dragging her back toward my bathroom.

"Oh, no, Jim!" Lucy moaned. "I've got to get to work!"

"Lucy! The whole city's shut down! Call your office, you'll see; I'm sure they've closed for the day!"

While I called my daughter to beg off for the day, Lucy dug out her cell phone and called her office. She got a recorded message saying the office was closed until the day after Christmas, when they would re-open, weather permitting.

We watched out the window for a while; there was nothing moving on the streets, no one walking by, no birds in the air, nothing. I told her there was no way I was going to let her even try to walk home under those conditions.

I talked her into taking a hot shower at my place instead of trying to get home, and just spending the day shut in with me, all warm and comfy in my snug little condo. She called her roommate, so she wouldn't worry, only to discover that her roommate was spending the day (and the next two or three) at her boyfriend's house. Apparently her roommate only had the one boyfriend.

While Lucy was trying to warm up in the shower, I gathered up all of Lucy's wet clothes and put them in my dryer to dry them out and fluff them up. I ransacked the drawers in the bedroom, looking for something for her to wear. I had long since thrown out or given away all of Jesse's stuff; and it would have been much too small for Lucy, anyway. Lucy was as tall as me, so I finally settled on an old mismatched set of my draw-string sweats.

I handed the sweats in through a crack in the bathroom door, along with a pair of fluffy wool socks. When Lucy came out, she looked cute as hell in the over-sized sweat clothes, and honestly for the first time, I began having "certain thoughts," when I could plainly see her pert boobs bouncing around inside my old sweatshirt.

I fixed us some hot chocolate (instant ... not on the South Beach list, either) and peanut butter bread (ditto.) I showed her around my place, which took about one minute. I dragged out some photo albums of our daughter and her kids and bored her with that until I realized that she had probably had enough.

So, we sat and watched the TV, which was pretty much wall-to-wall special reports from the local stations about what it was doing outside. These mostly consisted of bedraggled-looking junior staffers standing out in the blizzard at notorious hilly streets, or the last off-ramp before the closed interstate, trying to find anything new to say that didn't basically amount to, "It's still snowing here! Stay home! Back to you, Henry!" That got pretty boring after a while, so I asked Lucy if she had seen the "Lord of the Rings" movies, and she said no. We were set for the day!

It was dark, even though it was still only 9:00 in the morning. It was well below freezing out, and the wind was literally howling over the angles in the walls of the condo building. There was never a better day to sit inside and watch videos.

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I had treated myself to a very nice 40" HDTV for my birthday, in an effort to bribe myself out my depression. It is mammoth in my little condo's living room, and movies look just fantastic on it. We settled in, Lucy on my big sofa with Goliath in her lap and Rusty at the end by her feet, and me in my recliner.

Lucy loved "The Fellowship of the Ring," which is the first movie, but she was just full of questions after it ended.

I had read the books many times before the movies came out, and I hadn't realized how much I had brought to the movies in understanding about the settings, the characters, and the language. Lucy reminded me of myself when I had first read the books, wondering why every character had to have so many different names and titles. I did my best to explain it to her, and she said she was ready to see the next one after lunch.

First, we took comfort breaks, and Lucy called two or three of her boyfriends to tell them how she was doing and where she was. Then I dug around in the fridge and we had something to eat (again!). While we were eating lunch, we continued to talk about the movie, and Lucy had what I thought was a keen insight that none of the characters seemed to have religion. She had noticed that they all believed in family, friendship, trust, honor, race, magic, goodness or power, but there wasn't ever an appeal to God (or primitive gods) in the whole movie. No priests, no churches, no appealing to the heavens for mercy or guidance. We turned that one over for quite a while.

We got sodas and while Lucy got settled in to watch "The Two Towers," I put a bag of popcorn in the microwave. All of a sudden, everything went dark and silent.

At first, I thought I had blown a fuse with the microwave. But I became aware that all the fire doors in the hallway were slamming shut, and then there was just total silence except for the continued howling of the wind outside.

I stuck my head out into the hallway, and all the lights were out, except the emergency battery-powered spotlights. We looked outside, and none of the other buildings we could see had any lights on either.

I got my battery-and-crank radio out of the store room, and we tuned it in to a local station that Lucy knew. They were reporting large power outages throughout the city as snow-laden tree branches fell onto power lines and brought them down. Yet again, they warned to stay where you were, if possible, and just wait it out, that the power company was at work and would have power restored as soon as possible. They said that the snow would continue all day and through the night, but might stop or substantially lessen by mid-morning Christmas Eve.

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Except for not being able to watch movies or eat popcorn, the power outage made little difference. We had already darkened the room for watching the TV, so we just sat in the dim afternoon light filtering through the intense snow outside, and chatted.

I consciously made the effort to make Lucy do the talking as much as possible. It wasn't that hard ... Lucy loved to talk. With appropriate prompting from me, she told me all about growing up in Portland, her high school experiences, her time at the junior college, looking for work and finding it, all about her office and her job, and all about each of her (it was now four) boyfriends.

I probed delicately as to what, exactly, having a "boyfriend" meant to her, since she had so many at once. She caught my real motive in asking the question and just said right out that a "boyfriend" was a guy you liked and dated frequently and had sex with. Other guys, like ones that you just dated but didn't sleep with, she wouldn't call "boyfriends," just friends. She used that expression "hook up" that I was aware of, but hadn't understood before. By "hooking up," she meant having sex with, although she informed me that's not always what people meant by that, so I shouldn't get the wrong idea.

I have to admit that I was pretty uncomfortable by this time, talking to this pretty, statuesque girl here alone with her in my place, stranded for at least another twenty-four hours. I had developed an erection, which is rare enough for me, but it was painfully hard, which is both a blessing and a curse, as every man will know.

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Like a lot of homes in the Portland area, my condo is all-electric. Power has historically been cheap here because of the availability of hydro-electric sources, so inexpensive homes were often build with electric heat and water heaters, as they had the lowest first cost. My little home had five or six noisy little electric wall heaters, each with its own thermostat, which blasted hot air comfortingly across the room on chilly evenings.

Except, of course, when there was no power, like now.

The temperature in the house was dropping rapidly, all the heat being sucked out by the ridiculous wind roaring by. Although we were warm enough for several hours, by mid-afternoon, it was getting noticeably chilly inside. I wasn't really worried about freezing pipes because the building's design located them all as far away from the exterior walls as possible, and my unit was sandwiched between the one above and the one below. If they got power on in the next twenty-four hours, I knew we would be fine.

Cold, maybe, uncomfortable, maybe, but fine.

I realized we were going to be getting a lot chillier as time went on, but the obvious solution was just impossible for me to suggest.

Lucy saved me the embarrassment by breaking the narrative of her life and loves and saying, "Jim, I'm beginning to get really chilly!"

"Do you think we should try to make it over to your apartment, Lucy?"

"I don't see what good THAT would do! I've got electric heat, too! And, anyway, it gets cold in there even when everything is working! They said they should have the power on pretty soon. Why don't we just go cuddle in the bed?"

I really had NO objection to that.

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I found a couple of big Christmas scented candles, put them in cereal bowls, lit them and set them on the dresser in the bedroom. Lucy found the extra blanket where I told her, and threw it on over the blanket and spread already there.

Lucy climbed in first, and just intuitively took Jesse's side of the bed. Or maybe it wasn't intuition, but was because I had my reading glasses, some Kleenex, a glass of water, and a picture of Jesse on the night stand on "my" side.

She pulled the covers up over herself (we were both still fully clothed in our sweats and wooly socks, of course ... drat!), flipped the covers on my side down, and turned away to form the "inner" spoon. The dogs both jumped up onto the foot of the bed, turned circles a few times, and lay down kind of nestled together on the bedspread next to Lucy's feet.

"C'mon, Jim! Get in here, quick, it's freezing! Spoons!"

I climbed in, but I was very conflicted about getting myself tightly against her, at least in the area of my hips. She noticed my reluctance, and felt around behind herself with her upper hand until she encountered my erection, where she paused for just a micro-second, then put her arm back up onto her hip, and started to giggle.