A Dog, a Boy, and a Question

By Paul Roberts

I’d like to take a moment and thank all the members of our Sacred Community Garden, along with all the other readers of my blog, for all of the positive comments about my writing over the last several months (especially you, Indy). It brings out the risk taker in me, and encourages me to share even the odd thoughts that course through my mind. It’s late on a Monday night, and my deadline for publishing my blog for this week is fast approaching, so…what the heck. Here I go.

I don’t know how to categorize the writing that follows, which I currently refer to as “A Dog, A Boy, and a Question.” I only know that the seed for it grew from the question in my mind that would crop up when I had a student in my class who was severely handicapped, to the degree that what I call language was impossible for them. On occasion, I was privileged enough to have students in my classroom that made me wonder what reality was like for them. They couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk, couldn’t read, couldn’t communicate, at least as I understand communication. But they were often full of emotion, and could bring out the emotion in me, sometimes in ways that made me marvel.

My thoughts about those students led to me writing a (currently unfinished) tale about a young boy who communicates only with his best friend, his dog. It dares to lead to the question “What happens when the dog is gone?” After all, young boys live longer than dogs. It’s a story with no ending. It expresses my desire to see the world from a different perspective than the one I currently live in.

My sister said in our interview for our podcast that she is fascinated by the human condition. To that I simply reply…me too. Maybe some day I will learn enough about it to finish this tale.

                                                           A Dog, a Boy, and a Question

Once upon a time there was a dog, a boy, and a question. The question belonged to the boy, and the boy belonged to the dog, which is acceptable in a story that begins with once upon a time.

He was a mid-sized dog, coated with a thick spray of black, white, and gray fur, perfect for the boy to bury his face in, which he had done for as long as he could remember. The boy was mid-sized now too, and whenever he knelt down and wrapped his arms around the dog’s neck, burying his face into the soft fur of the sturdy shoulder, the boy would close his eyes and let the earthy aroma take him back to the days when his arms were too short to reach fully around the gently muscled neck. And the dog would close his eyes, and travel with his boy, taken back as far as he could remember; and there was no time in the memory of the dog or his boy when they had been apart. This, too, is acceptable in a story that begins with once upon a time.

But the question that belonged to the mid-sized boy was much larger than he, and strangely shaped, oddly formed, full of prickles and rough edges. The question would arrive uninvited. It would cling to the boy, pushing between him and the others, keeping them from hearing what he was saying, shoving them away when he wanted to talk; sometimes hanging on from behind, turning the words of others into sounds too loud to ignore. The only one that could answer the question was the dog. Others would sometimes try, and if the boy’s face turned white or if his cheeks turned red, the dog would answer with a low growl or light woof and he would make his shoulder ruff stand straight up. This answer seemed to satisfy the question, for the others would leave for a time, and the question would go with them. And the dog and his boy would jump across the water in the ditch and sit in the tall grass beyond the backyard, having long conversations on warm afternoons. Or they would go into the house and sit down in front of the fire, watching the flames dance while the snowflakes fell outside. And if the question returned on its own, in the darkness of the night, the dog would answer from his place at the sleeping boy’s side, if necessary over and over again until the morning, when the boy would awaken and his question would be gone. 

But the day came when the question returned, once again uninvited, bigger than before, too big to ignore, its prickles pricklier, its rough edges rougher.  It surrounded the boy. It oozed over his ears making the whole word sound muffled. He opened his mouth to try an answer, but the cloying question clapped his mouth shut, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t give an answer. Always before, in that moment when the question was at its most insistent, the dog would step between them, ears alert, eyes intense and bright, and warn the question away with the low growl or the light woof, or if necessary with a sharp, powerful bark. Even though the question was unyielding, the boy didn’t hear a bark, or a woof, or a growl. And the longer that the question insisted on being heard, the more the boy grew to know that the dog would never stand with him again...

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I’m looking for your comments, your thoughts, on how we go about understanding the “human condition” when that condition is so radically different from our own. How do we truly “love one another” as we should?

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