Our dog gets excited to go the vet, until he remembers what happens at the vet: poking and peering. He has a perfect memory of where to barf, but that's guided by scent — you can scrub the carpet, wash, deodorize, tear it up, replace it, move to another state, and somewhere in the back of his head there will be a memory of the good ol' barf corner.
He also remembers where the treats are kept. Some days he does not remember that you just gave him one.
People, though, that's the question.
Soon we're having a special visitor, Judith, our exchange student from Barcelona. She was here in 2020. "And she still wanted to come back?" you ask. Yes. COVID kicked her out of her last year of high school; she shrugged. The city goes up in flames, she shrugged: I'm Catalonian, we riot. Wake me when some guy declares independence and secedes.
If you've ever had an exchange student, you know that the bond can be remarkably durable. It'll seem as if she never left, but we're humans with long memories and a sense of time that stretches in both directions.
What of the dog, though? I want the dog to remember her. She loved Birch — or, as her charming Catalonian accent put it, Borch.
Birch has problems with menfolk, for some reason. A guy comes to fix the boiler or drop off the mail, and Birch is Mr. Defcon 5, ready to sunder a jugular. He's all about the ladies, so he loved Judith. She was part of the pack, took him for walks, slipped him a scrap now and then.
When we'd do Zoom calls over the years, she'd want us to turn the camera to show him on the floor in his accustomed place. He had no idea what was happening, because dogs are notoriously uninterested in transcontinental video communication.
When Daughter went to Brazil for a year, her return was proof that dogs remember. He was startled, shocked, alarmed. And then the scent connected, like jumper cables bringing a January battery back to life, and he revved up with uncontrollable wriggly canine joy, twitchy hips and swishy tail, hugs and licks and a few barks of reproach: You made me forget you. Don't do that again.
When we visited Judith in Barcelona last year, I noticed a drawing of Birch on the fridge, done in Daughter's lovely style. It had been there for years, a reminder of a dog she knew in a distant city she called home for a while. There've been times I look at my dog and say, "You're on a fridge in Spain, you know," and marvel at how the world stitches itself together in the most peculiar and abiding ways.
Judith has been gone for half his life. But dogs don't see things that way. There's only today. We will all sit down around the table as we did in the fraught year of 2020 and marvel at how we all made it back to being together again.
This will be lost on Birch, who will be looking for a scrap or a scritch, happy she's back, not thinking about when she'll leave again. There's only today. Isn't that enough? Look at us all here together. What more could you want?
james.lileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 • Twitter: @Lileks • facebook.com/james.lileks
