By Buster Graziano
[Note: On occasion, I get too busy with other writing assignments to sit down and write a column, so I let my pug Buster take over “Not That Profound.” Enjoy. -Nate]
She’s gone.
That’s it. The Blonde Woman left last Friday, and she is never coming back. I’ve been staring out the living room window looking for her as those damn Golden Retrievers walk past my domicile, back and forth and back and forth, with total insouciance—as if my barking doesn’t register any sound with them, as if I don’t even exist.
No matter how long I stare, the Blonde Woman still hasn’t returned.
It is certainly strange how humans just…poof. Disappear. Has The Blonde Woman died? Did she “go gently into that good night,” vanishing and leaving only her leather boots—which I was obligated to pee on—in her closet ?
Did she ever really exist? Or had I only imagined her?
I reject this notion! She and I have shared cheese together on many occasions, and I know cheese is real. I definitively remember her telling me, again and again and again, that I was “a good boy” and rubbing my belly and professing her undying love for me.
But as magically as love manifests itself, it dissipates into the ether, a mist of molecules and emotion, but at least she left the Gray-Haired Man to monitor me and my food, to take me outside for walks.
Then—get this—the Gray-Haired Man disappeared on Sunday, leaving home with a travel bag, wearing his Red Sox hat, and speaking on his phone to whatever simpleton he communicates with about “the game at Fenway tomorrow night.”
Sure, the Gray Haired Man tossed a filet mignon and bacon-flavored Pup-Peroni onto the kitchen floor to placate me before he deserted me, a paltry offering in place of his love. Now he is gone as well.
The Blonde Haired Woman and Gray Haired Man have entirely abandoned me for no discernible reason.
A kind woman showed up on Sunday night and stayed with me on Monday. I’m guessing she was some kind of a grief counselor. Still, the Golden Retrievers passed, back and forth and back and forth, in front of my house like some kind of sick metronome. Do they understand grief? Do they understand loss or abandonment?
The poet Mary Oliver once wrote a poem called “Uses of Sorrow.” Oliver writes, “Someone I loved once/gave me a box full of darkness//It took me years to understand/that this, too, was a gift.” That is exactly what The Blonde Woman and The Gray Haired Man gave to me, and it certainly doesn’t feel like “a gift.” I suppose, henceforth, I will only stare out the window, watching the Golden Retrievers walk, back and forth and back and forth, barking half-heartedly into the street, into the void, into the eternal abyss.
Lord Tennyson once wrote that “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Can a dead man feed me cheese or filet mignon and bacon-flavored Pup-Peroni? If not, eat a fat one, Al.
I’ve been abandoned by the very people who promised to love me, and there is an emptiness in me now that will never, ever…
Wait.
The Gray Haired Man is back! It’s him! Hurrah!
Buster Graziano lives in Manchester and eats cheese.