Aging with Grace

I extracted myself from the driver’s seat in slow motion, using my arms to pull myself up, turning gingerly to get my feet safely onto the ground. I was trying to achieve the impossible: getting out of the car without using my back. My heating pad was still warm just a half mile down the road, waiting for my return. It was not the best idea to be taking two large, muscular dogs for a walk, but even my older Golden Retriever, Gracie, who was now limiting herself to just one walk a day, was eager to get out.

I had managed to get Gracie and her sidekick Leo out of the car with minimal wincing, and now we were nearing the last turn on our local trail, soaking in the warm spring sun. Gracie was just a few steps off the trail, enjoying her freedom.

As we rounded the curve, she glanced back at me, and then quickly shifted her gaze towards the tangled branches that lay between us and the edge of the woods, where a row of houses was just visible through the bare trees. She turned back towards me, and then to the woods again. She held her head high, nose up and quivering, testing the air.

Not so very long ago that twitching nose would have set me into a panic. If her head was up, trouble was coming– in seconds, she’d be flying off after an enticing scent. Not geese or squirrels or a favorite dog pal. Just one thing: food.

Placid and well mannered from the moment I met her as a tiny pup, her passion for food was the sole thing that could cause her to go rogue. I had lost her in a local park one day for a frantic half hour, until another dog walker found her wolfing down bone meal in a bordering garden. Another time, she sprinted from my side on a trail, and by the time I had plunged through brambles and bushes and caught up to her, she’d devoured mounds of moldering goat feed that had been left to compost at the edge of a nearby community farm. She was always so demure, so reliable. Right up until illicit food beckoned.

Today her head was up again, her white curls fluttering softly in the early spring breeze. But unlike in her youth, I didn’t panic. Because I knew something that Gracie didn't know that I knew. I knew she wanted me to think she was on a scent. She hadn’t found a treasure trove of food in several years, and I was fairly certain she hadn’t found one today.

But she's always been clever, working the angles to best effect. When she was just a few months old, around the time I was puffed with pride at her seemingly perfect recall, Gracie began lingering behind me on the trail, dragging her steps. At first I was worried she was injured, but I'd call her, and she would come flying to collect a treat–her reward for responding to my call. I was a slow learner, but it did finally dawn on me: she'd gamed me. I wasn’t training her–she was training me, intentionally hanging back, waiting for me to call, so she could get a treat.

Those days are a decade behind us. At 11, Gracie is now only a year away from the culmination of a Golden Retriever's typical 12-year life span. Using the simple formula to compute her age in human years, with 7 human years for each dog year, she's 77. With a more nuanced calculation from the American Veterinary Association, she’s 69 (at 2, she was the equivalent of 24 human years, and each subsequent year has added 5 human years). Either way we count, our lifespans have converged. When we first met, she was a baby, and I was middle aged. Now, regardless of how we run the numbers, we have become peers. We are both seniors, both of us rounding the final curve in the trail.

I look to her, head still high in the breeze. She glances back at me again, a slight feint, and then she’s off into the woods with a slight spring – a little stiff, but still with spirit. I’m on to her, though. I know she's bluffing, just as when, as an adolescent, she lingered behind me on the trail.

I am confident there’s nothing hidden in the leaves for her to consume, but I call to her nonetheless, and she immediately whirls and returns to my side, her eyes bright in anticipation. I hold out a special sausage and apple treat, reserved for best behavior, and she takes it, her tail wagging broadly with joy. I smile at her happiness – and at her still-keen calculations for how to extract treats. We stand together on the path, and I feel my shoulders relax for the first time in days, her pleasure healing me like the late afternoon sun slanting across the trail onto my back.

Gracie hasn't found a pile of precious goodies in a few years. Maybe she's lost some nose power, and maybe some capacity to plunge through the woods with impunity. But my old girl hasn't lost her mojo, or her sharpness. And nothing delights me more than playing along.

Both of us tamed—but both still in the game.

A note: Gracie is the star of the chapter on Equanimity in my forthcoming memoir, The Ten Perfections: Spiritual Lessons from a Life with Dogs. So far things are still on track for release April 30. Thanks so very much to those of you who have expressed interest!