His Dogness

This column first appeared in the September 2014 issue of Forsyth Family magazine:

Sometimes, Asher wakes up in the middle of the night and has difficulty getting back to sleep. When that happened one night recently, Garnet and I were talking with him about it the next morning.
The trouble, he said, is that he starts thinking about things and it makes it hard to go back to sleep.

“I know you never have that problem,” Asher said. “You don’t think about things as much as I do.”

This from a young man who is 11. Garnet and I both started laughing.

“Yeah,” Garnet said, “when I wake up in the middle of the night, I just lie there and think, ‘Gosh, it’s dark in here.’”

I told Asher that it’s too bad you can’t just print out your thoughts. If you could, I said, I would print out a list of the things that I fret about when I wake up in the middle of the night and make him read it. As I said that, I reached high with one hand and low with the other to show an imaginary printout more than a yard long.

Garnet’s father, Tim, is a gifted machinist, carpenter, mechanic, industrial designer and poet. His work requires him to fabricate parts for giant machines, and, one day soon after I met him, he was telling me about having to make a giant screw for a machine at work. The tolerances, he said, were only one 3,000th of an inch. He was telling me this because he was excited about meeting the challenge.

It never ceases to amaze me how different people are in that respect. Something that is satisfying for one person would be nightmare for another. That’s the way it was with Tim’s challenge. I’m not gifted in that way, and I later told Garnet that, if I arrived in hell and was told that, for the rest of eternity, my job would be to fabricate parts with a tolerance of one 3,000th of an inch, I would say, “Surely I wasn’t that bad.”

I also thought that after I interviewed a man for a story about him making ships in a bottle. Having to be that painstaking would drive me bonkers. He liked making ships in a bottle, though, because having to pay such close attention cleared his mind and relaxed him.

Anyway, when Garnet saw the imaginary printout of my thoughts, she said that, if she arrived in hell and was told she would have to read it, she would say, “Surely I wasn’t that bad.”

I laughed.

“Really,” Asher said, “I wouldn’t want to read anybody’s mind.”

I agreed. You just wouldn’t want to know what all is in there. If other people could read my mind, I would be embarrassed because so much of it is so mundane. As it is, Garnet already has to listen me fret about all sorts of humdrum topics, such has how much trouble it would be to fix the soft place in the bathroom floor.

No telling what it would do to her if she also had to hear thoughts that were even more dull, such as whether I should throw away the sock with a hole in the toe or wear it a few more times.

I do sometimes wonder what Asher is thinking because I imagine that is far more elevated than much of what fills my head. Several times during the day, he will announce that he is going to play in his imagination. When he goes outside to do that, I might watch him through a window for a minute and imagine that he is dispatching galactic evil-doers as he jumps about.

I once asked him whether he cared to tell me what he thinks about when he is playing in his imagination.

“No,” he said.

“I respect that,” I said and went back to wondering what I would do if I ever won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.