That Ol' Shuck and Dive

We have a code in our household: DIVE!

DIVE! is used in the grocery store, the theater lobby, on the street corner. It's used when one of us (okay, okay, most often me) sees someone we hadn't planned to see. DIVE! is meant not so much as a command as an explanation for my sudden bolt down the cereal aisle, the quick hunker behind the Spiderman display, the mad dash into cross traffic . . . whoops! THUNK!

I'm a bit of a shy creature. Shy, and missing the spontaneity gene that makes a surprise encounter an exercise in jolly good fun. The blood drains out of my skull; my tongue gets thick in my mouth. A simple Hi, How are you? however genuinely it might be felt, blubs out in a spittled wad of burble burble. Trust me: It's not pretty.

So there I was on Saturday, strolling across the Costco lot when . . . my name called out from one of the parked cars, the sun striking with the momentary blindness of windshield light, and me with no place to bolt, hunker, dash or dive. Fortunately for me, the universe is merely random in the doling-out of its genetic cruelties, and by some equal stroke of universal mercy, I've been embedded with a modest string of deportment code.

Which is to say, I pulled up my big-girl underpants, sucked in a deep breath and turned to greet whoever that woman was who had called out to me there.

It was Annie. Annie the tech from the veterinary office. Annie from the veterinary office 8 years ago, where we'd taken Travis, our beloved but tired and very sick dog for his last months of treatment. Annie, who had a 6th sense for knowing when we were there, always turned up with a big hug for Trav. Annie, who on Travis's last day, brought him a piece of doughnut from the clinic breakroom, so he might take with him the taste of something sweet. Annie, who asked permission to stand with us when Trav's doctor set the needle in.

It's been eight years, perhaps thousands of dogs later, and she still remembers Travis. Remembers, even, the lesser detail of my own name. What a gift, what an enormous surprise of a gift, to see Annie again after all this time.

How grateful I've been all weekend, how grateful I am that Annie doesn't possess that DIVE! gene. Maybe it's time I take mine out, give it a good, hard look in the sun's bright light.

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                                       READ A POEM I WROTE ABOUT TRAVIS