The Dog & The Bamboo

Buddy and the Bamboo

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. I am up tending to my old dog who howls from downstairs in the middle of the night when he is feeling anxious and wanting me. I keep a few books on the coffee table and I pick one up, M Train by Patti Smith, and read a few pages. A passage reminds me of the time years ago when my husband and I bought a pot of bamboo. 

A sudden gust of wind shakes the branches of trees scattering a swirl of leaves that shimmer eerily in the bright filtered light. Leaves as vowels, whispers of words like a breath of net. Leaves are vowels. I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for. The language of the lesser gods. 

We once were at a garden show where we became beguiled by an exhibition of bamboo. The grower had pots of all kinds of bamboo but the one that demanded our attention was the Giant Bamboo, the possible eventual size of which we didn’t grasp at the time. This is where my  husband’s and my memories divide. He says he knew that fact but I don’t remember it at all. It was so beautiful that we purchased a pot of it on impulse, not considering whether it would fit in our yard or if we had a place for it. 

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Buddy, our old dog, appeared one December day in 2008 in the arms of a neighbor boy, one of three sweet faces peering at us when we opened the door. 

“We found this lost dog, is it yours?”

“No,” we said. “We have a white dog but he’s here”

Then my husband impulsively said, “But we’ll take him.” (To save him from going to the pound, he said.)

We did, indeed, have another dog very similar to him, Bijan. This was one of the few times we had only one dog because our other dog, Izzy, had died in 2005 during our extended evacuation after Hurricane Katrina. Bijan missed her, we could tell. So we took Buddy in and called him Buddy because he became one. Another impulsive decision.

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We did find a place to plant the bamboo and it has thrived. It’s beautiful, green, lush, and prolific and I love to listen to the wind winding its way between the leaves, watch the tall stalks sway. 

“Leaves are vowels. I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for.”

The rustle of the wind in the bamboo sounds like whispers. I imagine dreams and wisdom imparted from between its leaves, in the rattle of the stalks. It’s easy to let my mind wander in a free fall. 

Over the years, the bamboo has pushed up new shoots while others die. During one particularly cold winter when we had sustained below freezing temperatures, a lot of it was killed. You can see the dead brown stalks in the photo above. We sawed down and stacked the dead stalks ourselves over several months, dragging a few to the curb every garbage pick up day. It was not an easy job but it sharpened our skills of perseverance and self-reliance - another gift from the bamboo.

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As the bamboo has aged, so has Buddy. He’s had a couple of illnesses in the past couple of years after many years of perfect health. He, too, is sharpening our perseverance skills because he doesn’t like having his face touched. That’s a problem when an eye infection needs tending. Of all the dogs I’ve had (13!) he has been the most independent and self-possessed. Finally now, at the advanced age of at least 16 and having some dementia, he is needier. So I get up in the night when he calls to comfort and assure him I’m here. I read a bit, listen to music a bit, and ruminate. 

I’m ruminating over these two impulsive decisions that, while challenging in some ways, have added joy to my life and taught me a little along the way. How to know when an impulse will work out? You can’t know. Just leave it with the lesser gods.

The Bamboo 2016