Bernie and me

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Aging is an insidious thing, for people as well as pets. I remember clearly the moment I discovered I had, as they say in sports, lost a step.

I was in my late thirties. At a company softball game, the team captain assigned me to right field. I protested, insisting on my usual place in left center. He relented.

In the first inning a batter hit a short fly ball in my direction. I was sure I could get there in time to make the catch off the grass tops. My aging legs had other ideas. My diving attempt came up a few feet short. The ball dropped in for a base hit. Maybe I did belong in right.

I recalled that moment on a recent afternoon when I took Bernie, our springer spaniel, down to the pier for a swim. He loves to fetch sticks I throw out into the lake. When I show him the stick he barks loudly. When I throw it he dashes to the pier’s end and hurls himself off, front legs folded to his chest, hind legs extended, and hits the water with a huge splash.

On this day he still did that, but after he swam out to retrieve the stick, something was different. His return swim was slower, less energetic. When he reached the shallows he didn’t dash, stick in jaws, back to land. He waded, I wouldn’t sat slowly, but with less vigor than last summer. At the pier he failed in his first attempt to leap up from ankle-deep water onto the cedar planking.

Bernie had lost a step. I’m not new to seeing a treasured pet grow old. It happened to our two previous springers. Both reached a point where we had to have a veterinarian put them down. This time is different because, on the north side of seventy, I have lost more than just a step, and  I’m more empathetic about Bernie’s decline.

At age ten and a half he has at best two or three good years left. In all likelihood I have more than that, and yet I can hear, in the words of a poet, “time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Life here on this lake I love gets a little more difficult, more demanding, more fatiguing with the passage of time.

These days it’s harder walking up our 63 lakefront steps. Installing the pier on spring and removing it in fall tires me out more than it once did. Raking the yard after the oak and maple leaves fall wears me down. I go fishing less often and with less childish zeal.

I do find more pleasure these days in just relaxing on the deck or the screen porch listening to the birds call from the surrounding woods and the loons wail from the lake. And I take a few more intervals to observe, from the bench on the pier, the sun’s setting (without thinking too hard about my own).

But Bernie’s slowing down is a reminder, and not just of my mortality. It reminds me to appreciate the health I still enjoy, and this place Noelle and I worked long and hard to earn.