a dog’s spirit is cheerful even in the dusk of life.

If you like this one, or find meaning generally in what I do, please take a few seconds to presave my new single “Meet Me at the End of the World” on Spotify. It drops in a few weeks, on March 18. I’ve released 8 albums of song over the years but I took a few years off to make Morse Code. I’m kind of starting over here and need all the help I can get :)

Really excited about this song, and all the new songs I’m releasing this year. ~korby

The dog was clearly in a mood to talk. I saw no reason to resist. Listening comes easily to me, as it does to all timid persons.

“Take Charlie,” he said, rising from the soft deposit that shivered on the sidewalk on this cold March morning, “Charlie has no sense of decorum. I mean where does he get off, throwing himself at every kindly stranger that passes his way?”

I waited until it was obvious the question wasn’t rhetorical.

“Bad parenting, probably.” I said.

Now it was his turn to wait. So I added: “To be fair it’s hard to discipline someone you love, especially where beauty is involved.”

I withdrew the plastic canister from my pocket, tore free a single and licked my fingers.

“You think that dog is beautiful?”

“I had never really considered it,” I said, stooping. “It's just, I guess it if you like terriers, Charlie’s a pretty good example.”

Aspen laughed. It sounded like short bursts of whistle from a stovetop kettle.

“I’m fucking with you. Charlie is a gorgeous dog. The platonic ideal of a Scottish Terrier. If I were Charlie I would do whatever I wanted too.

This statement was ill-timed, scraping as I was the last of Aspen’s shit from the sidewalk, my bare hand protected from the filth by a sheet of plastic microns thick.

“You pretty much already do whatever you want as it is.”

“I would do more,” said Aspen.

I knotted the bag. It had never occurred to me that there were perhaps rooms in our dog’s mind that were unavailable to me.

“What would you do that you aren’t already?”

Aspen broke into a trot, pulling the leash taught. He was large for a Goldendoodle, seventy pounds at last weighing. His voice took on a singsong quality.

“Oh my God where to start. I would sleep in your bed. Not like, at the foot, I’m talking about right between you and mom where it’s softest. I would eat the plants whenever I wanted and not just when you leave the house. I would walk around in the kitchen and not wait to be invited like some kind of conditional guest. I mean do you know how demeaning it is to stand at the threshold and watch you guys eat at the table, taking your sweet ass time?”

He turned back to see how this little diatribe was landing.

“Well that last one,” I said, “The unhappiness is mutual. No one likes it when someone watches them eat.”

“Mom doesn’t complain.”

“Mom’s nicer than me.”

The edge I put into it was intentional.

Aspen looked at me full in the face. His black eyes burned. After a long beat he turned and continued walking, only now the leash sagged.

In the silence that followed I reflected on the gulf of misunderstanding that persisted between Aspen and me, despite our long tenure. You’d think we’d hit our stride by now, or come to a truce at least. As it was we continued apace, at odds, stepfather and stepson, thrown together by our shared love for my wife. After all this time it was still the only thing we had in common.

The fault was mine: I resented the responsibilities of dog ownership into which I’d married – the sense of indignity that afflicted me every time I carried animal feces in a plastic bag (like what I was doing now), the obligatory walks twice a day, the occasional bodily indiscretions in the house. It was all a nuisance to me. While he was guilty of nothing really. Nothing except being a dog.

It further occurred to me that this was the most he’s ever offered of himself beyond the usual requests. I hadn’t known his judgment of Charlie the beautiful neighbor dog or of limitations of being he felt living in our family. As someone with a lifelong history of chaffing at whatever restraint threatens to compel me, it was astonishing I had not considered our dog wouldn’t feel the same.

I watched Aspen moving brightly before me, his blonde coat shorn of its curls from the groomer’s recent clip. His big head lifted high, he moved determinedly over the pavement, even as the clear signs of hip dysplasia hobbled his gait. He was in his thirteenth year, a kindly old man.

A dog’s spirit is cheerful even in the dusk of life.

I could tell I had hurt his feelings just now. God I’m such a hardass. I wished I had a treat. Something.

“Smell that?” he said suddenly, as if nothing had happened. “That’s her!”

He shoved his wet black nose into some unmown grass and drove it forward, snorting.

“Who?” I said.

“Dreamgirl,” he snorted, stopping at an anemone of crabgrass tumoring the neighbor’s lawn. He pulled a noisy lungful of air through his nose, and another.

“It’s like you’re gulping smell,” I said.

“I can’t get enough,” he said.

He kept at it, sniffing and snorting, pressing the earth with desire, which, at any age, is the essence of youth..

“Who is she?” I asked. “What kind of dog?”

“Don’t know,” he said, “never met her.”

He sat up and looked around. Past me. Across the street. Somewhere I couldn’t see.

“But she’s out there, and that’s enough.”

He returned to his work. I watched his hind leg break into a spasm he was oblivious to. His big ears flopped happily over his nose while he rose up for air and plunged in again.

To my surprise he started singing, his fine baritone revealed to me for the first time in this our long fraught relationship.

Oh my love, he sang.

My love, my long lost love.