Love is a Many-Splendored Thing

The Jewish Museum in Melbourne had an event last night to mark Tu B’Av, the day of love in the Jewish tradition that follows Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning and fasting for the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem and other calamities that have befallen the Jewish people.

I was one of five people asked to speak about love. It was a lovely event. Here is my contribution. I cried several times during my presentation and had to stop for a moment. Let me hasten to add that I did not cry floods of tears. Just trickles. I was surprised, but talking about love can do that to you.

I wonder whether the fact that I am by far the oldest person here, led the organisers of this event to ask me to pontificate about the meaning of love between human beings and animals. Am I to take this to mean that at my age, all that is left me to ruminate on, when it comes to love, is my relationship with a dog?

My wife is out there in the audience. So too is my daughter and son-in-law. I want to say to them that I love you and that you should not take this love relationship I am about to describe as in any way a reflection of a love hierarchy in which you are ranked behind a dog.

Blame the organisers of this love-in for that.

Nevertheless, all that said, I am a writer and the fact is that I have written hundreds of thousands of words about my love affair with a dog and far fewer words about my love for you my darling wife, or for you my dearest daughter, or for my son-in-law who when it comes to love, is like a son to me.

I want to quote a couple of lines of a song, McArthur Park, by the songwriter Jimmy Webb:

After all the loves of my life

After all the loves of my life

You’ll still be the one.

It is nearly a year since Rocky died. His ashes sit on a shelf in the lounge room, inside a shiny little metal tin. I have not opened it since the young vet who had, with great tenderness, euthanised Rocky, brought us the tin with his ashes. I have not looked inside because to do so, I feel, would mean that the ashes had to be scattered and in truth, I am not ready for that.

From time to time, I look up from the book I am reading and look across the room to his ashes, and I see the shiny little tin holding upright, three copies of Rocky and Gawenda, the story of a man and his mutt. Its title should have been Rocky and Gawenda, A Love Story but I think back then, now almost 20 years ago, I was leery of having love in the title of a book of mine, because to write about love in prose rather than poetry seemed like a challenge I could not meet.

The book consists of scores of short essays about our daily morning walks, mostly in the half light of pre-dawn, walking rather briskly along the shoreline of the bay, talking, me reminiscing about the past and the present and even the future, depending on our mood, and Rocky there beside me, his majestic head swaying from side to side, his majestic tail curved and upright and pointing towards the path we were to take that morning.

Rocky and I.

He was a young dog not much beyond puppyhood and I was late-middle aged and no-longer the master of the journalism universe I had been not so long ago. I was shedding being Michael Gawenda and it was Rocky on those mornings we spent together, Rocky, who helped me, no, more than helped me, was central to my becoming, in time, a better version of myself.

It was Rocky on those early morning walks, who listened to me, looking up at me as I spoke, silently, so that only he could hear me. We spoke about many things and I came to realise that Rocky was a great listener, a rare quality among human beings who generally do not want to listen but instead want to talk about themselves.

Then, having listened to me for some time, Rocky would stop, sit down as if to say, enough talking, and I would take him off the leash and he would bound away a furry torpedo flying across the sand and into the water and all I would see after a moment or two, was his majestic head bobbing around above the waves.

And so it was every morning for a year. Rocky taught me to be alive in each moment. I came to understand that stillness is not standing still, but being quiet, aware of the light and the sun and the gentle bay waves. He taught me how to look at rocks and flowers. With him beside me, it felt as if magical moments were possible, not just possible, but likely.

Rocky and Gawenda, if I say so myself, is a lovely book. It is a love story and like all love stories, it is of a time and place, the time and place made magical by love.

I could go on about how dogs or pets in general can change lives, but that would not be a love story. That would be a piece of journalism and journalism is not very good with love.

After Rocky and Gawenda was published, we continued our morning walks for a decade, but I no-longer wrote the daily little essays that came to comprise Rocky and Gawenda. Our love matured. Rocky was happy to walk at a slower pace than before, when he was in his prime. And I grew more and more enamored of the bay waves and the little white lighthouse we passed each morning and the little wooden pier that is now gone and replaced by a squat concrete viewing platform. I grew more and more enamored of the flowers in the oval-shaped flower beds in the botanical gardens, how the flowers were uprooted and replaced with new ones with the passing of the seasons. I think I loved the poppies best. Rocky remained a handsome dog though his majestic face was greying and his eyes, it sometimes seemed to me had about them an ageing related sadness.

I do not remember when exactly it was that I decided, a decade later, to go back to writing little essays about our daily walks. By then, I was a grandfather and I had written a little book of poems about my grandson’s first year of life. And I had discovered this new writing platform called Substack on which I could write anything I wanted to. And I was about to publish My Life as a Jew, which was launched days before October 7, 2023.

I started Gawenda Unleashed, my substack, and when I re-read the first essays in preparation for tonight, essays written before October 7, they were of another time, another universe. Written by another Gawenda.

I had wondered whether I could go back to writing little essays about Rocky and me. After October 7, mad with grief and pain, and anger, the little essays came rushing out. When I wrote them, Rocky would sit beside me as I wrote—well curl up beside me mostly— and quite often, I would stop writing and look at him and he would look up as if to say `keep going, you’re not that old.’

The essays mellowed though the pain did not go away. We were old by now, Rocky and I. Rocky had few teeth left and while he still left me most mornings to run to the water’s edge—I had begun to talk silently to him again—he was no longer a torpedo. He ran as if he had all the time in the world. And when he got to the water, he did little more than wet his paws.

We still walked every morning and in some indefinable way, I felt closer to Rocky than I ever had. Rocky was the last dog I would ever have, and I was the last human being he would know the way he knew me. I did sometimes wonder about that, wonder what my life – my mornings in particular – would be like without him.

Then he got sick. He was 18 years old. Still handsome. Our walks had grown ever shorter. Quite often, we could not make it to the beach or even the St Kilda Botanical gardens. But he was still my muse, old Rock, as we sometimes called him, my muse till the day he died.

He died on a cold and rainy November day. The young vet who had come to end his life, left us alone with him for a few minutes. My son carried him outside for a minute or two in the rain and the wind and the light of the spring day.

I look at the shiny little tin on the shelf with Rocky’s ashes inside. I am writing this with a little brown dog lying asleep beside me. Most mornings we go walking together. She is my son’s dog. She is staying with us for several months while he is in Israel. Sometimes, my little essays feature the little brown dog—though I am not ready to regularly use her name. But she has made her way into my old heart. I have found myself telling her that I love her.

Love, it seems, is a many splendored thing.