George Bowering

Imagine that — my last words might have been spoken to the dog, she who saved my life, it has been said, spoken with no thought of reply nor of understanding, a genial insult maybe, a philosophical conundrum posed aeons before any household pet ever turned an ear. In the ambulance I made no remark about trees nor how tired I was of them, and in the second ambulance our dog’s heart beat hard with terror.

Being in a coma can play havoc with your sense of time. It can turn your eyes from brown to blue. It can grow hair on your belly, it can get you lost between bedroom and office. If you are to live in extra innings, you’ll have to watch the corners, step around bad things, ignore insults and welcome loving hands that sculpt you in your chair. Being refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time, you have to save your humor and guard it, a precious trove to bring out as needed, white strips on the road flying beneath your vehicle, eat them up, wake to a busy underground world, where people in body bags keep passing by, tilted toward you know where. Where half the people in your life have gone, dissolving your sense of time, which was never supposed to have an end.

Fresh out of the icebox, this brain looks the wrong way from time to time, and misses the cat stepping by, Gerry on the screen laboring to tell the nuances his pink matter almost notices, he’s not my brother, not really my close friend, just my necessary neighbor on a bicycle going by like a whistle from the lips of someone I trust. He has a peculiar skeleton arranged his own way in the mind’s pasture. We were as they say “of an age” and so inter- twine somehow, though I wanted to work when he wanted to play. That long nose is in my life and in my writing and so is the Okanagan River. I sometimes get to the river when I am at work, the sun on my back not the ink in my pen. There was, when I was last in the Okanagan Valley, a cat with big paws in the neighborhood, I was told, fires I could see along the hillside, stunning heat from the sky, enough to thaw any brain.