As some of you might know by now, our dog, Sparky (the angry dog) is blind. He wasn't born blind and had many years of wonderful, color-lacking sight with which to enjoy the comforts of vision -- seeing squirrels, chasing squirrels and getting infuriated at the Mets.
But he is blind now, bumping into things and unable to tell me if this shirt makes me look fat. It is sad, yes, but I have learned so much from and about him by watching him cope with what I would see as a setback.
He perseveres. He doesn't get discouraged and he really leans on us as a comfort, to ground him, but works up enough courage to jump off the sofa (a blind leap if ever there was one) and still explores outside, letting his other senses guide him and help him enjoy a sunbeam, or roll in his own turds. While this last specific example may not be one that I will emulate, I'm sure that there is some deeper lesson to be considered.
But beyond this, and beyond the myriad other lessons that I can and have learned by watching a small, blind dog find other ways to channel his bitter rage at the world (which long predated his lack of sight), I have learned one important lesson about Sparky and, indeed, about all dogs.
Last night of all, I prepared for bed through my nightly ritual of going to bed. Part of this process involves leaving Sparky on the sofa as he sleeps and awaits my eishes chayil to come home from work. Were I to drag him upstairs to bed, he would hear her arrival and howl mercilessly until she came up or I carried him downstairs. Both scenarios would interrupt either my playing Candy Crush, or my being asleep. Or both. So I let him snoozle on the couch so that her arrival will provide him with immediate comfort. I put the TV on to a music channel so he has a constant companion and I have gauged his preferences over these past few months.
Dogs like smooth jazz.
Now, hear me out -- you might think that your dog, after tooling down the road to some Judas Priest (or Maxi Priest, or, indeed, anyone else of the Priest family), or belting out the lyrics to Alicia Keyes with you on piano playing the Francis Scotts, or even some Toby Keith (though I really don't know anything about Toby Keith, I sense that some dogs really enjoy his lyrics), is an afficianado exclusively of some other genre of music. Now, I'm not here to take that away from you and your precious pup. Doggos, as all good boys and girls, have a wide range of musical tastes and they do like themselves the occasional death metal song on a Sunday, then followed by Rachmaninoff. True fact.
But strip all that away and you will find that all dogs like smooth jazz.
And I don't know what lesson we are to glean from this, but I understand that maybe we should let the puppers listen to their smooth jazz and unwind, and take the hint and do the same ourselves. With the strains of Dave Koz or Spyro Gyra as the background to our lives, we can settle in to an evening of scratching ourselves with our back legs and really just being dogs.
