Sharing My Life With Atticus & Will On Social Media

Atticus Maxwell Finch and William Lloyd Garrison, unabashedly themselves.

As a reader and a writer I do my best to avoid clichés.  I like original thought and choose the authors I favor for the way they make their words dance across the page.  As a writer, when I’m at my best, the words flow in an original pattern. When I’m not, I write, rewrite, and then rewrite again. As a last resort, there’s the delete key. I’d rather put nothing out there, than something that is tired and uninspired.  

My life is much the same way. I believe it’s important that we embrace whatever it is that makes us shine as individuals.  That’s one of the reasons I spend time with the words of Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Einstein, and others who embraced the song of each soul. 

We all have a song, our very own, and by celebrating it we become part of the greater symphony that lends itself to the glory of life and focuses on what is possible, instead of the mundane. 

This same philosophy is at the heart of my relationship with both Atticus and Will. I choose to see each of them for who they are as individuals and avoid the cover-all, mindless clichés of breeds . . . or even of species.  To me, Atticus is simply Atticus.  Will is simply Will.  Just as my human friends are not classified by being straight or gay, married or single, Irish or African.  I don’t like blanket statements.  They ignore the tiny bits of miracles that make us all unique and potentially exceptional. 

When I see someone refer to Atticus or Will with one of these clichéd terms, it really is foreign to me. For in each of them I see a thriving individual with strengths, weaknesses, peculiarities, peccadilloes, and personalities as fragrant and special as the ones that make up all of us.

I reject most blanket statements about dogs, just as I do about people.  If ever there was a title that reflects my philosophy of what makes all of us, human and non-human animals, special it is Whitman’s “Song of Myself”.  How fitting a title.  It’s no wonder that those I’m closest with and mean the most to me, all have their own songs. 

And this to me is the most interesting challenge of sharing small portions of our lives on social media.  I protect my own individuality and the right of those I care about to be individuals.  In contrast, much of social media can be clichés.    

We have a quiet life in Jackson. It’s simple and devoid of much the kind of drama one finds in supposed reality TV.  When I see it coming, I quickly walk the other way.  I weed our lives as carefully as a garden.  In spite of this, life is not boring.

The other night I surprised a friend of mine when I told her, “Since moving to the mountains, I keep more to myself than ever, and yet I’m never lonely.” 

And it’s true.  I find the stunning beauty of life all around us: in these grand mountains, in our tiny yard, on our comfortable couch.  I believe it’s because I choose to see the extraordinary where in the past I often saw little more than the common.

Three of us live together in our home. We are as different as could be.  Just this morning Will woke up, looked at me, and defecated on the floor as if it was the most natural thing in life. He then trundled around the other side of the bed and let loose a stream of piss.  Atticus stood looking down on him from atop the bed in stunned amazement, as he often does when Will acts this way. Meanwhile, Will made his way into the kitchen looking for breakfast as if nothing happened.  I laughed aloud at the comedy of Will, and Atticus’s observations of Will.  Atti then turned his raised eyebrow towards my laughter. 

Oh, believe me, I didn’t always laugh when Will showed up and shit and pissed on the floor and then thought nothing of it. No remorse. No need for penance. For twelve years I’ve lived with Atticus and can’t remember the last time he did such a thing.  Although once during chemo, he did lose control of his bowels in the middle of the night but came to wake me up to take me to the accident and show me.  But when it comes to Will, what am I to do?  It happens at his age. 

I’ve scheduled regular visits outside for Will so that it rarely happens any more. But after a long night inside, these things sometimes happen.  The comedy lies in Will’s cavalier attitude about it, and Atticus’s equally stunned response. 

Of course when we go outside I carry Will in my arms and he collapses comfortably into them. Atticus trots down the stairs. Once outside Atticus moves easily, Will mechanically.  When we come back in to eat, Atticus dispatches his food quickly.  Will eats a bit, leaves it for a while, and comes back to it when he is ready. Breakfast can last for hours his way.  With treats it’s just the opposite. Will, if I’m not careful, will nip my fingers in his hurry to wolf down the morsel, while Atticus ever so gently takes hold of it and looks me in the eye while doing it. 

One of them sleeps most of the day. The other feels out of sorts if we don’t climb at least two mountains a week.  One sleeps with covers on, the other doesn’t.  One likes to snuggle down, the other is impatient and uncomfortable doing that. 

Atticus came to me at eight weeks of age and other than the imprint of his soul, he was a tabula rasa – a blank slate.  He has been carefully nurtured his entire life. Will arrived twenty-two months ago at fifteen wearing the results of years of neglect and abuse.  In the nearly two years he’s been with us, I feel as though I’ve been an archaeologist as we’ve uncovered his true life and let him shine for what he is – a mixture of nature and now of nurture.  Like Atticus and me, Will is a product of his what he was born with married with his experiences.

I understand that Will and Atticus are dogs and I am human.  We have different biological needs.  I pay attention to those, but the rest is not so different. The way I see it, we mostly want the same things out of life.  We want to be happy, healthy, safe, loved, and respected.  We want the right to be who we are and to make individual choices.  In a human world, although it’s not always easy, I do the best I can with it and it works for us. 

It’s a work in progress for us.  Life always is.  I’ve learned a lot from Atticus, and from Will, but each of them have learned a lot from me as well.  It’s a dance in four part harmony. There’s Will, there’s Atticus, there’s me, and there’s what the world throws at us.  This is the journey I protect and respect.

And this is why social media can be a struggle for me at times.  I have a hard time relating to those who use clichés to describe dogs or breeds or who say, “My Tilly is just like Atticus.”  Such thoughts are foreign to me.  Not only that, they wring out the best parts of life and leave behind the parched and the dry.  I would prefer to think that Tilly is just like Tilly, and no one else and that she has someone in her life that recognizes that about her. In contrast to this, I enjoy when people post about a dog in their lives but don't mention the breed.  Instead they mention the dog's name.  I automatically feel a kinship with someone who doesn't attempt to sum up a dog by his or her breed.

At the other extreme, I find myself uncomfortable with the clichés of those who deify dogs.  You know the old tired terms. I'm owned by my dog. Dog is God spelled backwards. Who rescued who?  I do believe dogs are miraculous, as are all animals, but that includes humans.  We're not so bad ourselves.  Sure we have our shortcomings, but every species does.  I prefer to see the relationship I have with Atticus and the one I have with Will as a two way street.  I'm partial to Carl Jung's philosophy, "The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."

When it comes to our lives on our little corner of the Universe, I like the way things are. Atticus is Atticus, Will is Will, and Tom is Tom. We are each unique, each special, each both strong and vulnerable, and each of us is filled with the stuff that stars are made of. 

Life is more than the same old same old.  It has to be, if it’s worth living. It should be fresh, renewing, exciting, and filled with . . . well, life! At least that’s the way I see it, and that’s one of the songs of myself. 

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the
     origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are
     millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor
     look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the
     spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things
     from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
                              ~ Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself