Recent writing

Jerry is their 10-year-old pug. The dog is, put simply, a clown. Like all the best clowns, his clown-ness is not deliberate. He’s a sunny one, Jerry, generous of spirit and of licks to the hand, face and beyond. They got him as a puppy and Leigh swore she’d never get through it. The energy, the propensity to levitate around the backyard and then settle down to a good session of shoe- and sock-chewing. Somehow she made it through, as most of us do. Now a decade later he’s finally showing some signs of slowing down, and she misses that puppy, of course. She misses him in a way that makes her chest ache, makes her remember the nature of impermanence, as if she could forget.

“I’m just concerned,” she says. “That’s all.”

“What are you concerned about?”

“What aren’t I concerned about? What if he gets out? What if he eats something he shouldn’t? What if –”

“We keep the doors closed. We keep the food in the pantry. No pug is getting up to the pantry. Not even Jerry.”

“But that’s just it. We keep the doors closed and the food out of reach. But who knows what Shasta does?”

They’re barreling through Marin now. Leigh doesn’t know much about Marin except for a great-aunt who lived in Sausalito. Visits to her smelled like Vicks Vap-O-Rub and felt like a peach-fuzz cheek pressed to Leigh’s own. But she knows the stereotype: a place of guilty liberal cash and redwoods, a place that is so utterly consumed by itself as to be its own joke, self-referential like that.  When you grow up in San Francisco, Marin is not just the suburbs. It’s way the hell across the Golden Gate Bridge, and with everything to do in the city, why would you bother to cross it?

She did, though. She and Sid. They rattled across in his old Sentra and there she made the memory that departed from childhood. They went to Muir Woods, got high, wandered amongst the trees. Then they went back to the car, tucked away in a shady corner of the parking lot, and had sex. Was it making love? Sure, if you want to call it that. Thirty-eight-year-old Leigh isn’t sure that she knew the meaning of making love at eighteen, or perhaps love was different then, It tastes different at different ages. At eighteen love tasted like soda, fizzy and sweet. Now it tastes like something to which she can’t put an easy metaphor, so slippery is it even in its structured security. It’s a taste often interrupted, confused by its sheer stature. It throws the tongue and baffles the brain.

Evan chews on his lower lip. He’s annoyed. This is always the sure signal. It’s a warning to proceed with caution, something that’s not exactly Leigh’s specialty. “I interviewed her,” he says. “You were there. Remember?”

“Yeah,” Leigh says, picturing Shasta the dog-sitter sitting cross-legged on her couch, exposing the holes in the soles of her shoes without shame.