By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Age of Anxiety
My wife’s pit bull wears three collars. “WTF?” I asked her.
“You bought him the pink one with cartoon bones on it,” she said. “The black is a thunder collar to calm him down during storms. The blue one’s also for anxiety.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard since the last dumb thing!” I shouted. “All she does is eat, sleep, steal food, chew and destroy things! What is he anxious about?”
“You yelling at him,” she said.
I looked at the bed she’d bought him. He won’t set foot on it. It stands on four short metal legs with a fabric that gives, presumably under weight never put on it, between them.
“Your dog’s going to love their new bed,” the box said. “’Dog with a possessive ‘s’ is singular, ‘their’ is plural,” I noted.
“You did it again,” said my wife. “Now I have to buy him another collar.”
W.H. Auden’s poem “The Age of Anxiety” deals with men seeking substance and identity in a fast-changing world. Leonard Bernstein wrote a symphony based on it, as did Jerome Robbins a ballet.
“We would rather be ruined than changed,” I recited Auden’s lines. “We would rather die in our dread/Than climb the cross of the moment/And let our illusions die.”
The dog started whimpering.
“Why do you have a harness on him?” I asked.
“To walk her,” she said. “She’s stronger than I am.”
Better dressed too, I hastened not to add. “Why not enter him in a harness race?” I told her aloud. “Earn back some of what you spend on him. What do you think about racing horses?” I asked the pit bull.
“They’re big with sharp hooves,” my wife said.
“I didn’t ask you.”
“Now I’ll have to buy him two more collars.”
“When I was young,” I ranted, “dogs wore one collar with two rings: one for tags, one for attaching leashes. The world’s gone to hell.”
“So you and Auden think.”
“Thought,” I corrected. “He’s dead. So are Bernstein and Robbins.”
“See what negative thinking brings?”
“So is Norman Vincent Peale. I’m OK if you’re OK thinking your dog is anxious. But what makes you think she does think? How do you know you’re not reading your thoughts into her?”
She started looking up thunder shirts for cats, of which she has three. Will her birds and bunnies be next? I know my lone hope was prayer.
Self-fulfilling prophecy time. When I read last week’s ad, “Christianity is Under Attack Like Never Before, The New World Order Cadre Will Not Rest Until Christianity is Eradicated!”
Given the Old World Order, how could a New One be worse? You don’t want to know, they say. I grew so anxious I was easy prey.
The Inner-City Church Planting Mission says in its ad a 2-person home Bible study is the one thing no government can eradicate. ICMP’s website provides all the teaching tools I will need, but first one of us must agree who will act as elder.
Being 70 I am older than almost anyone. But wait, there’s more. To be such an overseer, says the ICMP, I must, per 1 Timothy 3: 1-7, be above reproach, faithful to my wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome nor a lover of money.
That sets the bar so high I can’t reach the beer on top of it. The very years that have made me elder have blest me with so many opportunities to sin it would have been wrong not to take advantage.
“Who do you know who’s sinless?” I asked my wife.
“Your pit bull.”
“She’s not my pit bull. Plus she can’t read the study guide, much less Bible.”
“If she could she’d know good from evil,” my wife said. “That’s what makes animals pure. And illiterates.”
Maybe there’s a go-around, I got thinking. Like be born again. Once my sins are forgiven I can start all over.
How many times can I work this gambit? I pondered further. If only once, I should wait till the end. Enjoy a long life of dissolution, repent as I die, then pick up my harp and halo.
So much for the 2-person home Bible study in the meantime, even if the other person were a pit bull. Plus by then I’d be so deep in the grasp of the New World Order I could only parrot conspiracy theories pumped into me by others.
Xanax is one way to deal with anxiety. Write poetry, compose music and dance are others. Auden, Bernstein and Robbins aren’t around to say where working helped, but their works live on.
My wife reading her feelings into her pit bull reminded me of Ride Sandy, the penny pony featured by Meijer mega-stores for generations.
Plunk your toddler on the mechanical horse, a cent in her slot and she moves up and down, back and forth. Sandy goes nowhere except where your child’s mind takes them. Fine with me.
