Fulcrum of life.

Yeah, the pic is a bit blurry at this size, but so is the boy. Let me explain.

I’ve had easily a dozen dogs in my life, many of them brilliant beyond the pronouncements of animal behaviorists. All of the brilliant ones showed a marked capacity for understanding and adapting to the family, with some determined exceptions regarding their own desires. An Irish setter who could ferry a pack of cigarettes to my dad in the bathtub. A fox terrier who — told to exterminate a troublesome mouse in the morning — presented the corpse of said mouse on the threshold of the bedroom doorway when the masters returned from work. A German Shepherd whose devotion first to me and then my dad made me regard her as a Catholic saint. A greyhound who feared men but immediately regarded me as a protector and never changed his mind, even when I participated in his euthanasia. A Scottish Deerhound who was loath to show his emotions but trusted me to the end.

Raebert is unlike any of them. He’s the whole span of dogdom. He’s the smartest and the dumbest, the best and the worst, the most dependent and independent, all at the same time. He’s like a visitation, an occupying force. Almost a lesson.

I’ve written and deleted a bunch of words about how different he is. They all boil down to this. He thinks he can make everything better, no matter what we think. At night he gets itchy. When my wife and I are on the couch, he mills, he roams, he poses, he demands (our) food and attention. What he really wants is to get on the couch with us. He wants to blanket us with his gigantic body, as if he could protect us from the fears and worries he detects in us, and he just knows that he can hold time hostage while he goes massively to sleep with his head on my lap and his invulnerable rear end on my wife’s lap.

That’s the only time I could ever call his sleep blissful. He goes out completely, limp and at peace. But he’s just so so heavy that you have to wake him up and push him off.

He’s not trying to adapt to us. He’s trying to adapt us to his mission, which is… What?

I’m the one prone to flights of fancy. My wife isn’t. She’s flummoxed. Early on, she thought it was a domination game. But now that he buries his head so submissively and constantly in her lap, she knows that’s not it. What she says is unnerving. “They’re the hardest, most demanding dog you can have, and I can’t imagine ever not having one again.”

Me? I keep thinking of my email user name “SigmaZrn.” It’s short for Sigma Zerone. Sigma being the mathematical symbol for summation. Zerone being a mathematical term I invented in my punk writer days, as the universe of possibility and meaning between zero and one, which is infinity, totality. Everything that happens occurs in the space between zero and one. Raebert is the living embodiment of Sigma Zerone.

This is not an abstraction. He needs to be near me. All the time. He is life itself. When I lose heart, I can put my hand on his impossibly huge chest, feel that great heart beating, and forget that there’s any time but time now.

What’s it like? It’s like having a unicorn curled up beside you. Unreal but miraculously hyper-real. He’s there but maybe he really isn’t. Nothing like this could be true, could it?

Why he looks so different in his pictures. Some days he’s this. Other days he’s that. He’s not always the same color. He’s as childish as they come. Then he’s a wise Scottish lord from aeons past. As I said, blurry.

He’s a gift from God. And being the ungrateful jerk I am, I keep thinking the gift can be withdrawn at any time. Maybe he’ll be taken away as abruptly as Psmith was. But to quell that pointless fear, all I have to do is reach over and stroke his shoulder. He’s right beside me, you see. As he will always be, one way or another.