BEYOND THE CORAL REEFER: Jimmy Buffett Finds That One Particular Harbor

BEYOND THE CORAL REEFER: Jimmy Buffett Sails Into That One Most Particular Harbor

It was always the ne’er-do-well golf pros. Everything cool, somehow contraband and just beyond the true reach of a 12-, 13-year old girl who was too thin and absolutely curious about what the grown-ups didn’t see because they weren’t paying attention.

Songs about smugglers, washed out drifters, deadbeats and writers would drift from that backroom, occasionally with a waft of steel guitar and some short blasts of harmonica. The voice felt just like one of those naughty golf pros – warm, familiar, welcoming, wry – except it had some flannel to it, some molasses and a bit of cayenne as it flowed over notes that lifted and fell like the curtains on a slow, humid night.

He sang of a Florida I knew from going to Pompano, Delray, Palm Beach to work on my golf game during the six, seven months Cleveland wasn’t hospitable to that sort of thing. When his voice drifted out the bag room on a small gust of gasoline, dope smoke and sweat, my ears pricked up for the stories, always the short stories about pirates looking at 40, men going to Paris to seek something, lives intersecting in Montana...on Monday.

It was all so romantic. Even before I knew about “Margaritaville,” because I lived in a place and time before that Key West loser’s lament became the freak flag, good-time National Anthem. Somewhere in the delta between personal responsibility and screw it, that song plumbed the awareness of a man who knew better, but just didn’t care.

Jimmy Buffett must have been changing labels. I bought all those ABC/Dunhill Records – it seemed – remaindered at Record Theater at the Golden Gate Mall. A1A after the single lane coastal road that ran along the east coast of Florida; the sunk skiff Livin’ & Dyin’ in Three Quarter Time that was too hillbilly on first listen, but “West Nashville Grand Ballroom Gown” reminded me of too many babysitters; White Sport Coat & A Pink Crustacean who’s “Grapefruit Juicy Fruit” felt like something I was living, a Gatsby world for a barely teenage Catholic driving to another golf tournament, as well as the slinky “They Don’t Dance Like Carmen No More” that saw my father wax rhapsodic about Carmen Miranda and then wince when “Why Don’t We Get Drunk & Screw” rolled up.

We didn’t think about “labels” then, just “cool” or “lame.” Cool, of course, came in degrees. Buffett was that uncle your parents wouldn’t let babysit, even if he could talk to them about sailing, literature or Gulf Coast resorts. That made his sangfroid that much more delicious to a kid sitting on a worktable in a back room, not getting all the references.

“Margaritaville” wasn’t a hit when people started singing it, just the self-confession of the guy who drank himself out of the deal – and wasn’t 100% sure he cared as the hangover throbbed. He was coping, tequila, ice, lime and blender. For a washout, it was perfect.

All the sun slaves loved it. Work hard, party hard, recover while you you’re onto the next.

I loved that he painted this Florida of black top turned grey by the sun, the old people in plastic shoes, Walgreens and crusty ne’er do wells in bar rooms watching the ceiling fans turn. He got the Key West of Hemingway, who I already adored, Tennesseee Williams, who would beguile me in college, as well as the next wave macho literary and creative brios Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Guy de le Valdene.

Key West was for pirates. Dusty, dirty, chickens roaming the streets, space between buildings that held Lord knows. It felt like electric creativity when my father and I would escape from “practice,” head South over the 7 Mile Bridge and set to walking the streets like the tourists we were: an older Dad and a scrawny little tomboy, both sponges for whatever was in the air.

He’d lie to Mom about where we were, that’s how I knew it was good. And when Buffett’s songs came pouring out of a muscle car’s rolled down window or in that badly-ventilated back room, I was right there at Sloppy Joe’s on a barstool next to my father.
“This is the stuff, pro,” he’d tell me. “THIS is... the stuff.”

Buffett was snide about the right stuff, tender with the good stuff and savoring of the naughty stuff. Even before he turned into a billionaire industrial conglomerate of frozen drink machines and retirement communities, he understood not just what mattered, but how.

If the Eagles were “The Dirty Dozen,” Buffett was Butch Cassidy’s “Sundance Kid.” He had the escape route planned; he wasn’t backing down and he wasn’t afraid to hit the tricky spot. At a time when Southern California rock included Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, J.D. Souther, America, Neil Young to some, Poco to others, Buffett was the Southern cousin, a bit more leaning to the folkie side of singer/songwriter.

He ran with Jerry Jeff Walker, Jesse Winchester, Steve Goodman. He got those traditions. He exhumed Lord Tom Buckley’s “God’s Own Drunk (& A Holy Man),” which he delivered with a hilarious ramble on You Had To Be There. It was that notion of street musicians, playing for tips and vibes; a secret handshake and a wink to a counterculture that was as romantic as it was pungent.

“People ask me, where in the hell is Margaritaville?” Buffett says on You Had To Be There, after referencing the possibility it’s a little island in your mind or the bottom of a tequila bottle. Then he proclaims, “It’s anywhere you want it to be, baby...”

Postcards from a life I didn’t have agency over. Yet. People I didn’t know. Yet.
But I leaned into the poetry, loving the notion of captains and kids, characters painted with same detail John Prine conjured. But where Prine could be profoundly sad or lonely or conscience-tugging, Buffett was more the brio of the literati he was running with.

Dreaming dreams inside the songs has a strange centrifugal force. Like so many people who drift into the world not quite sure where they’re headed, it can pull things you never intended to you. Alex Bevan, my first folk singing idol who befriended a wet behind the ears kid, knew him from their days playing National Association of Campus Activities showcases, trying to get regional college dates. He’d talk of their intersecting wages of the road: afternoons in laundromats, talking about Goodman, Jerry Jeff and whatever.

Buffett hadn’t blown up yet. Bevan made him seem real-sized in a way. Even sneaking into “FM,” a film about free-form, big business rock radio, with cameos from Buffett and Ronstadt, the notion of pirating someone’s concert for broadcast seemed delightfully on point. In “Urban Cowboy,” he took that out West cowboy nonsense and lacquered dancefloor country with his zesty “Livingston Saturday Night,” no doubt informed by his writer friends who fled Key West for Montana.

And then I fell out of the sky at St. Andrews School in Boca Raton, seeking to be recruited for college as a golfer. It was a co-ed school with very rich kids who were sophisticated in far more fast-track way than Ohio. That was where I met Valerie.

Valerie de la Valdene, heart shaped face, tilted smile and a wash of ebony hair falling across her eye, was the daughter of a count. She was also Buffett’s godchild, and like me, a young’un used to running with older kids; she couldn’t drive, but she was one of us. If Eloise had been raised by adventure hunters, she’d’ve been Valerie, who ran up and down Worth Avenue barefoot, laughing madly and plotting the next adventure.

Valerie, who got us the tickets to Buffett’s annual Christmas show at Sunrise Musical Theater in Ft Lauderdale, who said, “You should review this for the Bagpiper,” our school paper. Being such a big Florida icon – even then –it seemed to be the most perfect idea. Until they used that issue of the paper for the annual fundraising drive, missimg my smirking reference to “Why Don’t We Get Drunk (& Screw)?”
What would Jimmy Buffett do? It became my sextant and compass. Looking at the Dean, who was braced for some kind of antics, I exhaled slowly, smiled innocently, and said, “Obviously these people are not music lovers...”

Jack Bower could barely contain the laughter. His face turned red; the howl was trapped in his throat. A theatrical man, husky but not fat, his eyes danced as he looked at me, suggesting I keep talking without saying a word.

“Dean Bower, that IS the name of the song, and it was a climax to the show. It was bawdy and brazen, but also self-deprecating and self-impaling. To not say it happened would be to not tell the story properly.”

He couldn’t take the mealymouthed sweetness. I was not that kid. He knew it. Barking as a laugh and his voice escaped, he managed, “Get out of my office. And please, Holly, be smarter please. The donors are important... They’re paying the bills.”

Turning in the doorway, I tried one Hail Mary pass. “Would it help if you knew I went with Valerie?”

I smiled. He laughed harder. It was implicit: while Buffett was the dope smugglers’ personal hero, he was also a saint in South Florida. Though his manatee awareness campaign was a few years off, he quietly did much for the region that was over-run by Haitian refugees, other Spanish speakers, profiteers who’d pave the Everglades and other entities to check.

“Get out, stay out of trouble. You know what to do.”

Yes, whatever Jimmy Buffett might do.

Still, he was quicksilver. Sightings all over the state. “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.” Concerts at Blossom Music Center, Sunrise, Rolling Stone magazine, softball games against publications and radio stations. It was a different time, and place.

One day during college, while clerking at the Miami Herald, a call came through to the general features desk. “HELLohhhhh,” the voice came down the line, “How are you today?”

No one was ever friendly on that extension. The euphoria felt real, the voice familiar.

“I was wondering if you could help me... I am trying to figure out where to get some good Thai food down here in Dade County. Can you help me?”
“Well, sir, uhm, we really don’t provi...” I was trying to avoid making a Herald endorsement.

“Honey, would it help if I introduced myself? This is Jimmy Buffett, and if the restaurant sucks, I promise we won’t get you fired.”

I turned purple. Of course, he won’t. He gets the plight of the late teenager/early twenty-something. I gulped; didn’t want him to think I’m stupid.

Putting him on hold, I asked a couple of the folks on the desk that I trusted. Got back on the phone, trying to “sound” like a pro, I picked up, “Okay, not sure where you are in the county, but the place you want is called Tiger Tiger... It’s down Dixie, south of the Gables, and it’s delicious. I think you’ll like it.”

“Awesome, baby. And if you can get out of there, you’re welcome to join us.”

He laughed and was gone. Dixie Highway is an easy navigation, especially in the ‘80s. Just get to Coral Gables and start looking; that restaurant was dark wood. It’d be easy to spot.

Whether it was a pleasantry or a genuine invitation, I was too intimidated to show up. Besides, real life drive-bys are only magic when you’re not stalking.

A year later, I would get to interview Dan Fogelberg, playing the NAMM Convention in Hollywood, Florida. He had a bluegrass album, High Country Snows, coming, and I stalked my story with a vengeance. It’s hard to say no to a kid with shiny straight hair in a striped t-shirt with hope in their eyes; the tour manager agreed, saying I needed to chase their limo to Ft. Lauderdale – and I could meet him in the restaurant, talking while he had his dinner. Nina Avrimades, his manager, was there; I tried to not be too excited, but I knew her name from Buffett’s record covers.

The Fogelberg interview went impossibly well. Turned out he’d had his dinner sent to his room; he was only going to have soup with me. But he ended up staying for the entire hour. When he left to go change, I set upon the lovely blond-haired woman, asking questions about what she did, how she did it.

“You know, he normally hates these things,” she confided. “Dan genuinely enjoyed that.”

Screwing up my courage, I asked the big ask.
I opened with the obvious, “You know Jimmy’s the Grand Kahuna down here. No one is bigger.”

She laughed. She saw the set-up, and she knew he wasn’t “in record cycle” or “touring.” We left it that she’d think about it, see what she could do. A couple months later, Buffett called my dorm room – and the Herald ran the piece.

So did Country Song Round Up, the world’s oldest country fanzine. My canny editor there told me about Buffett’s connections to Nashville, the reporting for Billboard magazine, the days hanging out at the Exit/In, Closed Quarters and the general creative hauntings. Suddenly, the Jerry Jeff Walker stuff, the steel guitars and the actual country undertow made sense.

It opened my mind to how impossible things can merge and converge; made Willie Nelson not the only one who could tap authenticity in seemingly opposing realms of music. But where Nelson was truly making country safe for the alternos, Buffett was slyly interjecting country music into songs people loved and never letting them realize it was “liver.”

It always seemed to be that way with this Buffett character. He existed in our world like twinkle lights in a bar; look up and smile at the twinkle in whatever other clutter was around. He knew poetry, knew how to deliver it – and he knew how to revel like an Endymion Mardi Gras float, tossing ravers out to the fans like so many fistfuls of beads.

Signed by Tony Brown, it wasn’t that Buffett came full circle, so much as music had turned all the way around to where the kid born in Pascagoula, Mississippi and raised in Alabama started his journey. Sure, there’d been Lear jets, misadventures, crazy stories, mysterious substances, inside jokes, sports teams and “60 Minutes,” but there was more to come. Writing his own books about Joe Merchant and memoirs, launching a chain of cheeseburger restaurants that turned into hotels, Broadway shows, football stadiums, creating a space for the regular guy to get a little tropicrazy and have the license to let your freak flag fly high.

All that was ahead of him. Records were a place to give his creativity a home. He was still everybody’s favorite “oh, yeah” songwriter/singer/supernova, but the Parrothead ubiquity was just starting to quicken. “One Particular Harbor” from that era was beautiful, a lulling melody that spoke of refuge and peace/piece of mind. It wasn’t what country radio was doing, but the video – possibly shot in Polynesia – was close to four minutes of mental escape every time it rolled up on CMT or TNN.
That escape was everything. As MTV blared and pulsated, Buffett was saner, smarter rebellion against 9-to-5 and the status quo. His touring business grew more robust without radio; his legendary Coral Reefers became more formidable. At different times, Timothy B. Schmitt (the ether-high vocalist with the Eagles), Josh Leo, Tim Krekel, Will Kimbrough, especially the tenderest hearted songwriter/guitarist/ Mac MacAnally, all artists in their own right.

Suddenly, it wasn’t about chasing hits, but the longevity of classic tracks, the opportunity to convene with your Parrotheaded brethren, to sing these songs together. Buffett was the grandmaster – and he took his duties seriously.

He used that power to launch Margaritaville Records, where he signed original Nashville compatriot Marshall Chapman for her It’s About Time: Live from the Tennessee State Women’s Prison project and a neophyte trickster/writer acolyte of Jerry Jeff and Keith Sykes named Todd Snider, whose mostly talking blues “Alright Guy” caused an alternative/triple a sensation.

Snider, a free spirit, and Chapman, a lanky rock guitarist with blazing charisma and a drawl for days, embodied that notion of outside the lines is the only place to color. Original voices and perspectives, they brought it with a burning intensity as different as the other – and as contrasting to Buffett’s cool

Chapman, opening for Buffett at the Hollywood Bowl, knew how to bring a Chrissie Hynde panache to a bare bones rock’n’soul grooved attack. She and her Love Slaves left those fans panting for more, and when the main dish is Buffett, that’s saying something.

Saying not just how astute a judge of talent he was, but his willingness to share the stage with a woman known as “the female Mick Jagger” in the ‘70s and the sly Snider, a songwriter who loved to see what would happen, including wandering off from the venue on one tour and not look back. That is all part of the carnival, the glorious feast Auntie Mame promised in the original Broadway show. If it gets twisted, that’s part of it.

So Buffett became an icon, larger than life – and somehow still inviting. A Saturday morning superhero, he was the kind of cartoon who was so frisky his skin almost seemed not enough to hold him. The tales of shots fired at his plane over Jamaica; the tales of adventures that inspired William McKeen’s Mile Marker 0; the charities he anchored and advocated for in New Orleans, the Hamptons, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

But even then, it was the random Buffett, the sightings of the man in the wild. Running into him in a purple label Ralph Lauren tux, where he got up and sang some for the wedding of one of his friend’s sons in Palm Beach; laughing jocularly at a CMA Awards after-party after singing “5 O’Clock Somewhere” with Alan Jackson; on his bicycle on County Road in Palm Beach, dropping by to see friends at PB Boys Club or reports that he was out surfing with friends.

Of course, he was. For while his brand was the guy who lived his life on his terms – St. Barths, St Kitts, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Jimmy Buffett actually inhabited a devil-may-care world where he just was. Not rejecting the fanfare, but laughing it off as he went.

Which isn’t to say he ever stopped thinking about what his next creative step might be. A million years ago, reading the Sunday New York Times and Saturday Wall Street Journal at the pool at a fancy Vegas hotel, he spent a little time with an emerging country artist, sharing some wisdom, talking about football and demonstrating how little one needed to change. That lesson served Kenny Chesney well; he remains indifferent to fame, investing his heart in the buzzy byproducts of making people happy with glorious concerts that remind them the joy of being alive.

When he played the annual Everglades Benefit in Palm Beach County, usually with some splashy single name guest, the high dollar tickets flew out. When the Gulf Coast was destroyed by weather, he got a few of his famous friends – and came in to raise millions of dollars. Big shows with an undertow of fun within the wreckage, offering hope as it solved or helped with problems that were critical.

If Springsteen wrote “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive,” Buffett lived it. Top-to-bottom, front-to-back, inside-out and upside-down. It was a tilt-a-whirl, centrifugal force of ebullience – and it never flagged. Whether Las Vegas, peaking out from the wings, or West Palm Beach’s “what name is it this year?” amphitheater in the swelter, it always delivered exuberance and delight. If you came with a squad or a date, we are all one once the singers slithered onstage, the tin drums started their rolls and the churn started turning.

In 2018, fresh from induction into the SOURCE Hall of Fame, which recognizes women in the music industry behind the scenes, I boarded a plane to fly across the sea. All alone, my destination was Paris, France. To mark the triumph of the unseen, it didn’t matter that no one else could join me.

Raised on the poetry within songs, hearing Jimmy Buffett sing “He Went To Paris” at La Cigale seemed the most perfect way to hold that young girl who didn’t quite understand all the grownup emotions, but recognized the power in those songs. Deceptively engaging, Buffett – like the Texas songwriters, the wild authors and filmmakers of Key West – knew that if there wasn’t conflict or a yearning, the song didn’t lance whatever was stuck in the listener’s heart.
It wasn’t that I was numb from the music business, but it extracts a toll on women who don’t fly by their looks or native charms. I needed to remember those moments when a song sounded like something I could – and must – touch, and my heart sped up at the way the images often stacked up to create some truth about living.

Paris, as Audrey Hepburn declared, is always a good idea. The streets alive with passion for life, the different size glasses of wine you can order, the fabulous cafes, the bookstores, walking along the Seine, over the ancient bridges, the Deux Magots and Café des Flores, as well as the D’Orsay, Marmottan. Picasso Museum and yes, the teeny Hemingway Bar at the Ritz.

Stopping at Le Roc, supposedly the oldest Catholic church in Paris, I knelt in a chilly stone cathedral and wept for all that life had given me. So many blessings, adventures, wonders, people and dreams that came true; not just my own dreams, but the dreams I’d midwifed for artists who didn’t always see what I dreamt for them... artists who didn’t always see how their music changed lives.

Sitting so close to the stage later that night, taking notes to always remember, I was overwhelmed by how much joy could be delivered; also, the heroism washed out characters could have being true to their own shattered lives. “He Went To Paris” was, indeed, the miracle I believed it would be.

“Looking to answers... for questions that bothered him so...”
La Cigale, there in the 18th arronddisement, had quite the history. Built in 1894, Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier had played there, later Jean Cocteau would stage avant garde evenings. It would become a movie theater in 1940, ultimately falling into a screening house for Kung Fu, then X rated films, but always it remained. Deemed a historic building in the 1980s, the French recognized its intrinsic essence – and Philippe Stark was drafted to return it to its former glory.

The metaphor was not lost on me, or the fact this less than 1000 seat venue was where Buffett chose to play. Like Key West in the ‘70s, it was the fabulous dissolute chic without resources that deliver dignity and delight right where you are.

I had traveled alone, but I sat in that row at La Cigale with every me I’d ever been. The little girl run off with the naughty golf pros, the baby rock critic people didn’t take seriously until they saw my words, the young dreamer working in a world where a journalist’s stories weren’t vanity, but a truth for the tribes, a voice that shaped how people saw the worlds and the artists who mattered, a business reporter, a major label department head who hated the way decisions were never for the artists, a boutique artist development and media relations innovator who’d fight for her clients, a battered survivor of a callous industry, a truth-teller when it mattered – and nobody wanted to listen.

It got crowded in that row. But it also got epic, because Jimmy Buffett had also flown into headwinds over and over again. He never won a Grammy; only had quantifiable hits on country radio with people like Alan Jackson. He didn’t care.

Jimmy Buffett believed in his songs, his friends, the characters who’d inspired him. As long as he had those people, a little imagination, he’d find a way. Oh, and that way made him a billionaire; he had the last laugh on the music business know-it-alls.

Not that that was his motivation. Standing onstage, with the smile slicing his face like wide open like a ripe mango, eyes sparkling at the naughtiness of Parrotheads converging on Paris in some kind of electric mojito acid test, there was revelry to be had – and songs, poetic and ribald to be sung.

That way the joy and the mission: honor what is however it was, remember the beauty, hang onto the high jinks and never, ever doubt the songs.

For someone who tilts at windmills, gets treated more poorly than people would ever imagine, whose best friend once squealed – driving around the streets of LA as two unhinged medium-20-somethings – “You could be HER, Holly Gee!” as Dylan’s “Sweetheart Like You” poured from her tape deck, La Cigale took back that fate which stretches you across a rack until you break and gave me back the effervescent joy of serving the music. That was what it’s about...

Even when the king of the parrot pirates was out flying his planes or chasing the sun, talking about good times or creating more memories, he was always braising those songs. Living like he sang, laughing like he wrote, it was all the same beautiful ecosystem so many people drew their moments of release, of elation, of crazy wild “oh yeah” from.

It was money I probably shouldn’t have spent, but it was the best value I’d seen in a long time. On the plane back, I smiled and exhaled and mindfully let all the good that is my life flow through me. “This is what being present feels like,” I marveled.

Jimmy Buffett, more than anything else, was absolutely, truly, completely present. Like his friends from Key West, adventurers all, he understood: Immersion is everything. Dive deep. Go big. Go crazy. Have fun. Feel it all, revel in it – and let what makes you feel alive be your navigational buoy.

It was a lesson that mattered profoundly.

When the call came at 5:11 a.m. from Kenny Chesney who’d texted me the night before, he didn’t have to speak. Just “he’s gone,” and gravity fell out of the room. It was dark, too early for morning to even think about breaking, and yet...

When we hung up the phone, I pulled the new rescue spaniel to me. Petted his silky head and felt tears fall off my face onto his ears. “Oh, Corliss,” I told the little guy, “you have no idea. To find someone who lived as most artists who pretend to, who embodies all the happiness that comes from being present, who wrote about places that mattered and being ripped down and forgotten...”

So many songs, so many moments, so much life.

And not just Buffett’s, but our own. I found “He Went To Paris” rising in my throat. Not because I called it up, but something in my muscle memory sent it through the transom. Singing softly to a red cocker spaniel who was licking the tears from my face, I couldn’t believe when I got to the end...

There it was: the words the old man, who’d seen World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, great love and horrible loss, had told Buffett more than half a century ago. Suddenly, there was the elegy for us all.

“Jimmy, some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic
“But I had a good life all the way.”

www.hollygleason.com

Burying Zelda/Zelda's Last Ride

Sarah always knew the call would come. Never sure when, just that it would. She knew how much pain I was in, the shock, the amputation of the very best part of me. Zelda would get her final bye-bye… a last trip in the big big car, in Zelda's backstage lounge, white lines and fence posts blurring before her mighty spaniel presence.
     It was just a matter of time, of stremgth, of being able to face it.
     I called the night before, letting her now I'd be coming.
     “Don't worry,” said the whip smart young woman who run Brentwood Veterinary Clinic. “I'll be here.”
     I didn't even think: did that mean she was coming in special? Or she would be working?
     I didn't know. Heck, I wasn't completely sure which way north was, just that the highway signs would get me there. I'd spent my life trusting highway signs, and somehow I'd always - through grace, maps, truckers and tour managers - arrived where I was going.
     This, though, was different. This was Zelda. She was going to where she could sleep forever, dream of the perfect world and be still. Well, as still as Wonderspaniels can be when they pass on, but refuse to leave their Mommy.
     
     It had been a horribly busy summer. Kenny Chesney isn't the biggest ticket-seller - doing more than a million tickets each year - for no reason. In the madness, the churning, the dealing the stadium shows - where Zelda had spent her last weekends, one can't step off the carousel. Not really, 
     So, you have to wait. Until there's a moment. And the pain compounds. That's the part you lie to yourself about. Packing the car for that trip to Cleveland was like moving through quick drying concrete; the striped LL Bean bag from Allison, the brown canvas that expands magically from the store in Chagrin Falls where Zelda almost got me arrested, the Chan Luu British West Indies shawl for her casket…
     Her casket. I started to sob. Garage door not even open, and I'm howling. Howling: something Zelda would never do. I could see her snap her head away from me, “Pas du howling! Talk to the paw!”
     She was funny that way. “Don't embarrass me.”  And of course, “Smells like poop!”
     You would be amazed how many people smelled like poop! She had no tolerance for b.s.
     “Zelda, I can't…,” I tried to reason out loud. “I just can't.”
     I could feel her face turn back to me, all puzzlement and amazement.
     “Yes, you can,” said the ghost blond. “Yes, yes, you can… You can take me bye-bye. You can drive fast and roll down the windows, open the moon roof, play the music loud! You can take me away, take me to places, remember how good it feels to be alive!”
     Even in death, Zelda got it. More than I did most days. An angel with furry paws, soft ears and the ability to melt into you, even when she was mostly just bones and fur. Especially when she got down to just bones and that fluffy fur we'd stopped grooming.

     The car door closed with a dull thud. The ignition turned over like it did every day. The garage door rumbled up, and looking in the back seat, at the folded boiled wool Indian blankets and velvet throws, I tried to smile. It didn't work, so I just tried to hold my lips without shaking.
     I put the car in reverse, exhaled hard and took my foot off the brake. So, this is how the real end begins. Just ease out of the garage, down the drive and turn onto the road. Get on Granny White Pike, past the sprawling yards, classic old Southern homes and past Otter Creek Road where we'd turn to walk her beloved Radnor Lake.
     I wanted to go slow, Zelda wanted me to go fast.
     “It'll be an adventure,” she said, in that voice I'd been hearing for years. Once she'd come out of her shell - after her brother died, Zelda sure he was the object of her homicidal plan - she started talking, and she never stopped. Old French red wine, certain kinds of jazz and funk and girl singers and Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, looks that didn't work and “smells like poop.” 
     People thought the artist development consultant humanized the pretty yellow dog, then they'd spend time with her. Once they got past her annoyance that she was being viewed as “a dog,” the uncanny would happen. “Uhm. Holly, I know what she's thinking…” came the chorus over and over again.
     Zelda knew how to make her wishes, preferences and general commentary clear.
     Even now. “Adventure. Fun. Faster!”

     I called as I was driving. Let Sarah know I'd just passed the Granny White Market, was getting close. “Pull in the back,” she said. I figured it was to shield the staff from a jag of sobbing. Then again, who wants the owners seeing a tiny casket draped in natural fabric with cocoa henna print being carried out. Sarah, who Zelda loved, thinks of everything.
     She was waiting. Face set like granite. She met my eyes, telegraphing strength.
     I knew this needed to happen. I got it. I just… well… didn't want… to let… go.
     “You okay?” she asked. 
     What do you say? I bobbed my head. What could I say? She knew.
     “Okay, I'm gonna go get her… You ready? You putting her in the back?”
     Sarah knew about Zelda's Backstage Lounge, where the Stinkerbelle held court and was chauffeured about. She could most likely tell it was made up for the trip.
     I bobbed my head again, tried a weak smile.
     Sarah's lip quivered a little, too. She turned, disappeared through the backdoor.
     She emerged with a small beige fiberglass box. Not very big at all. I knew inside, there wa a pink velvet blanket, a St Francis of Assisi and a St Christopher medal, a baby Eeyore, her pink collar and a note I'd left with them. Hard to believe that much baby dog could be held in something so small, but with Zelda, it was always the spirit, not the frame.
     “You're really gonna put her in the backseat?” Sarah marveled.
     “Where else?” was the rhetorical answer question. 
     We both knew the looking back would be a papercut, but this was Zelda's last ride. This was her very favorite thing. There was no bye-bye too mundane, too long, too tedious to bore her. She had driven from Nashville to Martha's Vineyard in the worst of winter; driven the parking lot of Memensha - straight into the waves without ever moving; she'd driven from the Vineyard to Cleveland, Ohio one late wet fall for my mother's funeral, collar wrapped in black grosgrain, much to the priest's dismay.
     And now she was making one final trip to Cleveland. 
     I smoothed the shawl over the little box, laid a couple flowers down. Sarah nodded. 
     She and I hugged, and the vet's manager handed me a mix-tape CD. “When I get sad, this helps,” she told me. And I knew she knew, indeed, understood.
     “Thanks.”

     She watched me drive away. She might've been crying. Or maybe it was the tears in my eyes, making everything swim. But I had my Zelda, the Deanerschnitzel. So sweet, so cute, so sardonic. And we were going to drive and drive and drive!
     “You ready, poodle?” I asked. Thougb I knew I didn't need to. She was always ready.
     Nosed into the traffic, turned right on Old Hickory, found the on-ramp for 65 North.
     We were gone.
     
     463 miles doesn't look like a lot on paper. It really doesn't feel like much, either, when you're watching the farms, the little cities, the giant dinosaur statues near Glasgow, Kentucky. Not when you're born to drive, to fly really over scarred and veined concrete, black top, whatever kinda paving they're using. The bridges seem to be connectors over lakes and rivers - concrete in some places, steel going into Cincinnati.
     Zelda knows every inch of this drive. We talk about all the trips and reasons she went to Cleveland: Thanksgiving with cousins on my father's side, concerts and peace of mind. She loved the apartment on Van Aken, walking the second and third fairways of the Shaker Heights Country Club in the snow, sleeping in the backseat under a bunch of blankets while some band was playing, being fussed over by Alex Bevan, who “got” her, as she was, not as some pretty dog. 
     She'd be seeing the man who's music embroidered my growing up with sweet songs like “Rainbow” and “Rodeo Rider” soon enough. She was in the backseat of the big green car with the Allman Brothers Eat A Peach up loud. “Ain't Wastin' Time No More,” indeed.

     It took a lot to figure out where to bury her. Zelda was clear: nowhere near F. Scott - or as she called him “my damned brother” - would work. She wanted to be somewhere I'd visit, somewhere she loved. I thought about Martha's Vineyard, where Ali Berlow roasted her duck hearts; her son Eli worshipped her and followed her and made a true friend out of the reticent, reluctant Spaniel. Indeed, where she created havoc, tormenting Mr Berlow and then oldest son Max with well-placed pools of displeasure intended to express just how “pissed off” she was.
     “But, that's not our's,” she whispered as I would drift off to sleep in a bed too big without her.
“No, Mommy, find some place that's your's and nobody else's.. but some place I've been.”
     I'm not sure when it hit me, but one day, sitting on her bench at Radnor I knew. 
     The Club. The Shaker Club. Under the willow trees, down by the creek on 12. It was a spot of much peace, not in play for the golfers where I had slept on many slow, heavy heat-steeped afternoons growing up. There was no more serene spot in the world, which is why I would nap there… and where Zelda could watch the world go by in an idyllic environment - with enough golfers and wildlife to not feel alone.
     The willows on 12. Of course. Mine for the sleeping, her's for eternity.
     But the plan had not gone well. The club manager, not known for his warm sense of engagement, couldn't be bothered. Ran me around, made up excuses, never called back. I'd love to think he was thwarting me, but I know indifference when I see it… 
     I was ruing my lack of success to an old friend over soup the beginning of July. He of the sangfroid exterior and unruffled-able worldview. He regarded me closely. A dog person, he knew my pain; a former child of the '60s, rules weren't even to be broken, but more ignored if a higher morale compass was iengaged.
     “What you need is a Carl…,” he said in the low voice tempered by cigarettes and time.
     “Carl?” The lady who helped raise me's husband's name was Carl. But he was long gone to aShriner's Home or Heaven. Most likely the latter, and my friend didn't know his name.
     “Carl,” came the response. Flat. Given.
     “Carl?” I echoed.
     “I thought you were a golfer,” he returned, sitting up a little straighter, leaning in a little closer.
     “Your point?” I was anguished and now getting annoyed.
     “Didn't you see 'Caddyshack'? You need Carl,” he said evenly and not unkindly.
     “Carl,” I intoned. This time as sacred mantra. Carl, the stoner groundskeeper, obsessed with his chores, varmints, a world that has nothing to do with the regimentation of club life. Carl.
     I smiled. He smiled back, brown eyes sparklng a little, knowing he'd not just solved my problem, but had moved Zelda a little closer to her final resting place. Sometimes solutions aren't obvious.
     And I found Carl. On the 4th of July. Running yellow nylon rope. To keep the kids back form where the fireworks would fall after exploding. If my initial outburst - “Do you work here?” -- met with confusion and  its follow -- “I need you” -- inspired fear, my story hit his soft spot.
     The girl with the 17 _ year old Cocker Spaniel looking to bury her baby where she slept as a kid. The unresponsive club manager. The fact that months had passed. “Will you help me?” I asked.
     A tangle of curls, the firm physicality of youth and working outdoors made this someone Zelda would put her faith in. Not the logical candidate, but Zelda liked strength and personal conviction, not what everybody else sought 
     “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I will.”

     It was sometime in August by the time I could get away from the tours, the press releases, the tv and the what comes next. There had been an Entertainment Weekly piece that had a website coda which painted a very honest, highly vulnerable picture. It raised questions, those questions needed time to address with the people who asked, to explain so the client didn't look whiny.
     There was so much going on, and when I buried Zelda, I needed to do it completely. All me, all her, all about perhaps the greatest love of my life.
     When I finally called “Carl,” he'd about given up on me. He'd gone out to the site, which I'd also scoped. The willow trees had been cut down, a tragedy given their age and expanse, but there was this notion of galleries for golf tournaments - and so, away with the willows.
     Instead, I had found a small cluster of pines, some kind of special variety where the branches drooped and the long needles leaned down, seeming to sigh from the quiet cool of the moment when day surrendered to twilight. It was just as beautiful, off to the side of the green, also out of play, out of the way. No reason to ever cut them down, peaceful like the slumber of spaniels.
     We reconfirmed the spot. He told me not to worry. He suggested I meet him at the greenskeeper's shack, which was anything but. He'd figure out how to help me get Zelda's casket to where it was going… rather than parking behind a wall, by the tennis courts and negotiating a particularly steep incline.

     I had called a preacher's son from Macon, Georgia. What kind of scripture do you read at a time like this? What verses are right? What note to you strike? And I called Alex Bevan, who'd sung so sweet at my mother's funeral… who'd looked into Zelda's thickly cataracted eyes and smiled so she could see him.
     If there was a constant of kindness from childhood through my grown life, it was Alex Bevam. Not quite a friend, not really a brother, sort of a soul companion from somewhere else. For he was always on the shores of Lake Erie, threading the Grand River, the Emerald Necklace of the amazing park system - and I was somewhere in the wind, a postcard, an email, a call at random hours.
     “Would you come?” I'd asked. “Would you mind?”
     Alex Bevan has always had a soft spot for broken things, fallen birds, lost dogs and people out of sorts. He looked at his book, and said, “Of couirse.”
     He laughed when he heard where it was. Said “Of course,” again. Asked me what time about.
     Since this was clandestine, it could be midnight. Or twlight. It would depend on the road, and what kind of time I was making. 
     Everyone who needed to know knew. I was somewhere above Louisville, in the 90 miles where there just isn't much. Today, there would be no Reality Tuesday Coffeeshop, just before getting to Cincinnati. I had a holy trip to make, and nothing - beyond filling up the car - would stop me.
     “Hey. Zelda,” I said outloud. “We're finally getting you to Cleveland… We're finally gonna put you to sleep in your own little bed.”
     I could feel her smile form the backseat, feel the little nub of tail thumping against the cushion.
     Jackson Browne sang “Love Needs A Heart” from his song cycle about the life of the touring rock star Running On Empty. “Proud and alone, cold as a stone,” came the lyric from the speaker. Deaner liked the delicious sadness, but she wanted something… more.
     “Hey,” I could her little spaniel voice intone, “what about 'You Love The Thunder'? Now that gives you a little more traction in the pain.”
     “Pain?” I heard my voice say. “Are you kidding me?”
     I couldn't tell Zelda how bad it hurt. Beyond the fact that she already knew, I knew she'd held on so weak and frail, because she didn't wanna see me cry like that. She was the strong one, the fierce one: Zelda Warrior Spaniel, mighty, mighty broker of  munk death.
     Even when she was slipping from this realm, she would put a paw on my face, look into my eyes when we'd be sleeping and tell me, “It'll be okay.” Because it is. Life goes on. Even with a giant hole torn out of it. You don't get any choice, except to keep on.
     Still in heaven, Zelda finds her ways.
     Not long after she died, the phone rang and a thick, long, slow drawl poured out.
     “Hah-leeeee,” came the gnarled male voice. “Yeeewwww dewwwwin ohhh-kayyyyy?”
     I started to cry. It was Richard… Young… from the Headhunters. When I'd first moved to Nashville and was having a hard time adjusting after life in LA, he'd been my angel of how to adapt. I'd tried to help him understand being a “thing” because the Kentucky Headhunters were exploding. But as much as musicians crave adoration and attention, he was too genuine to have people respond to a notion and not his humanity. 
     “Honey, what's the matter?” he asked, clearly unprepared for the gale-force he was getting.
     I explained in snorts, sobs and stammers. He listened. He let me cry. He took it all in.
     Richard Young is a farm boy in a lot of ways. He keeps bird dogs. 
     But he's got a tender heart for all the biker exterior. When I finally got done, he was just quiet for a bit. I've known him long enough to know he's thinking. Looking for the appropriate thing to say, the insight that might help.
     “Well,” he finally said, “you know, it hurts so bad because you loved her so much.”
     I whimpered.
     “No, baby, that's the deal. And you should be glad it feels like that… because it tells you how much you loved that little yeller dog… and you know, too, that little dawwwg with thuh great big heart, she loved you even more than you loved her… if that's possible.”
     Richard Young. Hillbilly Buddha with a low slung Les Paul and a loose downstroke.
     He was right. I sniveled a little, but I found comfort. Never mind that Zelda called him, “That fat hillbilly…,” she knew who to have call. If he liked the beer-drinking F Scott Fitzgerald Spaniel Gleason better, whatever! She recognized plain dirt genius, and she knew what I needed to hear.

     “Deaner, you okay?” I asked. Truth be told, she was frozen. I don't really use the air conditioning if I can help it. But I didn't want her melting. Not like this. Not en route the weeping pines off the 12th green.
     “Yeah, Mommy,” she seemed to say. “I'm perfect.”

     So we drove on. In thought. In silence. At 72 miles per hour, the world can put you in a trance. Truths emerge; torment subsides. Just the road, the lines, the mile markers. Maybe not for everybody, but for us… especially for us. Always her in the back, peaking out, me in the front, foot on the gas.
     “See, better already,” Zelda said. Columbus, not quite rush hour. Pushing through, pushing past Polaris Parkway, where Zelda had reigned over a Brooks & Dunn Neon Circus backstage, trotting around, looking at the trick ropers, the fire eaters and contortionists with glee. 
     It was a tour devoted to big strong men, all musk and brawn - and she loved it. She loved the pomp and bluster of Brooks & Dunn in full rut. The big thick honky tonk beats, sheets of electric and steel guitars, the way Ronnie Dunn's voice sliced through it all and Kix Brooks whirled and churned that audience into a full boil.
     She'd sometimes sit next to me almost quivering with delight and excitement. So many things rushing at her senses, the music so full-tilt and the crowd just awash in all of it. To Zelda, that was the only way to roll. Blowed up, too loud, completely engorged and absolutely throwing oneself at the party…
     Columbus means less than two hours. The thought went through my head. 
     I called the greenskeeper, touched base with Alex. I pushed the hair out of my eyes, squinted a bit at the road glare. Mostly, I just kept driving, driving and driving and driving… and when the decision came to take the 271 offshoot, which would bring me in without going through downtown I took it.
     I would pass what once was the Richfield Coliseum, the giant basketball stadium where I'd seen Led Zeppelin, Heart, Bruce Springsteen, Hall & Oates the night before my SATs and the Allman Brothers with Muddy Waters at a Free Cliniic benefit, Neil Young on the Old Ways Tour, for an interview that would help break me as a national music critic. 
     Memories… of who I was long before I was anyone at all.
     Through Peninsula, where the Peninsula Nightclub was a stopping place for dinner before Blossom, where cool bands played and the grown-ups remembered dancing there to “real bands.” A small town on the 303 that somehow had defied modern quicker, faster prefab improvement.
     The exits on this stretch of highway got more and more familiar. Then there was Chagrin Boulevard. “Well., poodle, we're almost there,” I sighed as I nosed onto the offramp.
     Rush hour was basically done. The heat of the day was receding. There was still traffic, but it wasn't frantic in that trying-to-get-home way. I fell into the tide of Mom-mobiles and exiting businessman-sedans, moved to a major artery, made a right, then turned left on South Woodland.
     South Woodland would take us where we were going. Past Canterbury Golf Club, where every major national tournament has been played, where Duff Lawrence and Mike Kiley created a world of graciousness and sportsmanship for their golfers. My stomach became a fist, my throat strangled itself…
     I texted Alex. He texted back he was close. 
     I called the groundskeeper, who told me was ready for us.
     I got to the light at Courtland Boulevard, turned on my signal and waited for the cars to finish passing by. Then I headed for the cobblestones and the brick building with the cream portico… the cul de sac where my own grandfather had died on the 4th of July long before I was even a notion.
     Turning into the members lot, I kept going. Through the far corner where the service access is, behind the 8th green of perfect emerald bent grass and up through the trees that punctuate the far side of the hillside that sculpts the 8th fairway.
     Carl was waiting with a flatbed gator and some tools.  I turned off the car.
     “We made it, poodle,” I managed to say. “We made it.”
     “You need help?” he asked, then thought better of it. “Here, let me get her.”
     I got in the cart. He settled the little fiberglass carton with the raw cotton hippie shawl draped over it squarely on my lap. 
     “You good?” I nodded. I'd been flying over these hills on some version of this vehicle my whole life. We were walkers, people who believed in the sanctity of the game as played like the shepherds; but don't think I didn't chase around on golf carts after hours.
     He pulled out, slowly. Not quite a funereal pace, but certainly with the dignity this last ride should entail. I had my Bible with me. The few flowers I'd brought. But mostly, I could feel the weight of the best little girl in the world, Zelda Fitzgerald Spaniel Gleason.
     We made a little small talk. About the drive, about how green the golf course was, about cutting down trees and how good an agronomist his boss was. Alex called as we were coming across the 9th fairway towards the snackbar. I told him where to meet us; I explained to the young 20-something who Alex Bevan was. 
     “Huh…,” said the young man who'd signed up just from the decency of his heart.

     When we got to the site, there it was. Only more so. Carl had dug a perfect grave. Neat exact sides, deep enough, Zelda wouldn't wash out or be dug up easily. It was straight down, into the chocolate dirt and clay - fertile enough earth to make this golf course one of the most vibrant in Northeastern Ohio.
     “Wow,” I said.
     “I wanted to get it right.”
     Alex Bevan walked up. He said “Wow,” too.
     The pines in the fading light were the inky black green of a Japanese ink print. Moisture was in the air, which was - at this hour - neither hot nor cold. Everywhere the hole wasn't, there were trees roots and thick green gras, branches reaching down weightlessly, needles sweeping anything that passed under them forlornly.
     “What do you think?” I whispered to the box on my lap.
     “I love it,” came the whisper from Zelda. “It's so pretty and perfect… I'm home.”

     Home. A hole in the ground, albeit holy ground where I spent my growing up years. Maybe. I mean, we all end the same. We all find our place to decompose. Not that my composure was wholly resolved in that moment.
     Still, it was a peaceful place. After all of it, there was somewhere she could sleep and I could visit. There would be no end of people passing by, deers, ducks, geese, rabbits. Bucolic. 
     
     “You ready?” Carl asked. 
     “Yeah,” I said, gently helping him lift the package from my lap. So many things beyond the lifeless body of a frail dog were going into that hole, and we all knew it. 
     Alex smiled at me, that gentle smile he has. One that is reassurance and grace, the one that lets him weave songs of hope and solace out of topsy turvy moments. 
     The groundskeeper jumped down in the hole, took the box, gently lowered it. He turned and wiggled out, as he also settled the contents. There she was, ready to be covered. “Man you are dust, to dust you shall return,” I thought. 
     I read the scriptures in a voice stronger than I would've thought. I had spoken at both my parents' funerals, out of duty, out of wanting their lives to be remembered with meaning and the vibrance with which they lived. Those two events were scary, hard, the fear of failing their legacy; this was far more brutal.
     Csrl nudged the shovel over to me when I finished, Kinda nodded.
     “Go ahead,” my friend the folkie encouraged. It wasn't about burying the dead, so much as it was keeping the spaniel warm,. She, like her Mommy hated, to be cold. I closed my fingers around the handle, shoveled a few handfuls of freshly turned soil into the grave… wincing a little when I heard them land with soft thuds like rain.
     “Zelda, I love you,” I said. And she knew that I did. I knew she did, too.
     “If you want me to finish up,” the erstwhile gravedigger offered, “I can.”
     I wasn't sure what to do. The sky had turned the murky grey that quickly becomes midnight blue, then dark. It was getting cold. I didn't want to go.
     “It'll be okay,” he reassured, met my eyes. “I”ll take good care of her.”
     Lump in my throat, I nodded. Sometimes you have to let go. 
     I reached into my pocket, took out a folded bill. I put in Carl's hand and smiled through the tears. He deserved it, for making this not just easy, but dignified. For digging the perfect grave - in a moment too many people would think was crazy.
     I looked at him one more time. “Thank you. For so many reasons.”
     “It's okay,” he said. 
     I looked at Alex, a man whose love of dogs - Rounder and Harp and now Tilly - is legendary. He knew. Heck, Rounder had had better access and was even more famous back in the day than Zelda was now. And Zelda was a legend!
     “Wanna have a drink?” I asked. I needed to shore up. Irish to the core, it's what we do in these moments.
     “Sure,” he said stoutly.
     “Well, then, let's walk…”
     One thing about golf courses, they are built for walking. You cover that ground like a dream. It gives under your feet, pillows and supports you. It carried us straight to the veranda, to a wrap around porch where the crickets cried for a brave girl and her owner.
     Zelda. Zelda Zelda Zelda. The wonderspaniel finally laid to rest. Her mother left to wander the world remembering what love can be. I had done it. I had gotten my girl to a place she could sleep with the angels, where she could have peace and enjoy what was next.
     “What're you having?” the waiter asked.
     “Maker's Mark,” I said.
     “Me, too,” Alex Bevan, the local hero, requested. “Please.”

     Somewhere in the distance, Canadian geese took wing. Their honking was the sound of travel and euphoria, and they were almost the trumpet call Zelda's last trip required. It wasn't lost on my companion.
     “She was a helluva girl,” he said. And she was.
     We talked the way people who've known each other too long do: elliptically, the details already filled in, the sore spots known, the tears shed without worrying. Alex had been here before, had parted company with best friends and lovers gone. He knew the pain, understood the power of elegy and just being with it.
     But he, like Zelda, understood the unspoken.
     “I'm gonna be fine,” I said reassuring myself as much as him.
     “I know,” he agreed. “You already are.”
     Sipping the bourbon, watching the deeper and deeper shades of indigo descend and envelop the grounds, the conversation slowed and truly wasn't necessary. But the cold came up, and it was time for us, too, to go.
     I hugged my friend, who'd watched from the edges as I turned into an adult. Our worlds were so different, but our hearts were mostly the same. Northern Ohio kids who believed in love and kindness, dogs as true companions, ties that never die.
     He left, and I sat there. For a few more minutes.
     Zelda arrived when I was starting to truly become an adult. She had outlasted three engagements, superstars being built and falling apart, clients firing me and getting fired by me. She'd listened as Scooter Carusoe and I had written the second half of “Better As A Memory,” thrilled to be at the root of creativity and watched me struggle through sickness and the first draft of my first novel  in a place that was anywhere but her Nashville home.
     Zelda had been through it all: huge tears, major triumphs. None of it really mattered to her. Just love. She would - as she got older and deafer - sleep by whichever door I'd left from, that way she wouldn't miss me when I got home; then when she was too aching to sleep on the hall or kitchen floors, she would wait wherever I would put her to nap, lifting her sleepy head to say, “You made it.”
     Someone has said the thing in life we all deserve is someone wondering if you got home okay. For almost 18 years, Zelda did that for me, Always. 
     Now looking at an abandoned putting green being frosted with evening mist, I had finally done it for her. Worried until she got home. Now she was all set and safe. I could know that she was okay, and in that, I could truly say “Good Bye.”
     It wasn't easy leaving that spot. But I was too cold and it was too dark.     “I love you, poodle,” I told the night. I knew somehow she - now quietly sleeping under several feet of good, rich soil - heard me. She sighed and yawned, no doubt, smiling that she was so loved, then returned to her dreams of bunnies and ponies and roast munk supreme.

Portrait of a Wonderspaniel + Her Mommy
by Glen Rose

And then she is... stars (June 4, 2010)

Zelda. She had that way. She just did. Even in the end, she remained the ultimate monster of love (to borrow from Sparks). She felt the wind whipping into the car, sunk into the music, took it all in -- and dreamed.

The people at the vet's were just as unwrapped as Ali and I. There is never a moment sending doggies to heaven is easy. But some patients -- and Zelda was a baby they'd pulled through a couple big crisis. and she'd charmed them in her weakness just like she did everyone else -- are tougher than others.

But everyone tried to be brave, through their wired set jaws and their too veiled eyes. The inevitable is just that... just... time. And there's nothing you can do -- like water slipping through your fingers, it's just gone.

Zelda got quiet, too. She knew. Not quiet in a scared way, but in a "this is it" way, uncertain of the future... knowing, no doubt, they were going to stick her, because they always stuck her -- and just too tired to even know what to think about it.

Sarah, her very favorite office person, was there. She'd been dealing with a fairly upset me on the phone for the five months it had taken the spaniel's kidneys to fail. She is patience and kindness and knowing. Zelda was glad to see her...
And Dr. Stanland was there. Quiet, calm, gentle. She had done the same protocol on a Sunday 14 years prior as an emergency for Scott, Zelda's brother. She understands the way sorrow runs through your veins, permeates every fiber of your being, every breath taken.
"You ready?" she asked the poodle. Zelda looked up, so tired she could barely smile. She was. I wasn't, but the little girl was ready to fly, to romp, to be free -- of all pain, all exhaustion, all the nausea that had plagued her.
Dr Stanland explained the process. A sleeping medicine to let her drift off, then something to end her suffering -- before it was just too much. And, because Dr Ann thinks of everything, BABY FOOD! Something to nibble while the first injection was being given.
Never mind the plate of beef burgundy Zelda had just devoured. A new and delicious snack. The poodle was elated. Yummy! Yes! More... and she ate the entire jar, licking the spoon and smiling at Sarah.
"You can take her out to the car," my vet said, knowing -- as did everyone -- that was Zelda's most favorite place.
Zelda, so weak, she doesn't even think twice about walking. I scoop her up, and she melts into me. She just lets go and merges into my body as she did so many mornings when she wanted to keep me all for her.
Back in the car, there is more music. More petting that silky blond fur, kissing the top of her head. Trying not to cry, because as the orderly told me when my father was so ill with the cancer, "He don't need your tears... and your sadness... He needs to feel joy, and life... and love. You bring him THAT, and you leave your pain out there -- cause he's got enough of that."
She was wide, that orderly. Tough and big and brown. An old, honest Florida texture you don't see much anymore. She was right about Zelda, too.
Sarah came out to check on us. Took on look at Zelda, shook her head laughing. "She's not going to sleep. Of COURSE!"
Cars and Mommies and music and friends. How do you miss that? Certainly not for sleepy Zeldas, no. No!
Sarah petted Zelda, too. Talked about what a great spirit she had, what a big life... an even bigger personality. Zelda was nothing, if not a force of nature.
Eventually, her eyes started to be heavier than her will to rock. All the Allmans, the Patty Loveless, the Rodney Crowell and the Otis Redding couldn't keep Z from the land of Nod.
"She might be ready...," I half-asked.
Sarah nodded. "Yeah, she's asleep."
And so, once again, I scooped up my dream baby -- and rose out of the car. This time, people had tears in their eyes when we talked through the lobby, the satellite of fluff and silky shine tangled up in my bare arms, ready to go to heaven.
She was ready. It wouldn't hurt, but it would end the pain, the exhaustion, the nausea. This was an extraordinary little girl... and she laughed through all of it, but it had worn her down. It was time.
My friend Michael is a dog person. He'd lost his dear Sid Vicious suddenly. He had been a constant source of encouragement, of knowing when, of doing the right thing... He had all but held my head in a book called THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN, but even still he couldn't get me to read it.
On a flight after a very fraught trip to Austin, I had cracked it open, had finished it the next night in the lost hours in Woodstock, NY. A trip I'd taken because my beloved Hobbs had insisted I would be a better Mommy to Zelda if i got a break, got my head clear.
THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN is written from the perspective of a man's best friend, the night before the doggie is to be put to sleep. It sounds sad, but it is triumphant. Enzo lives, runs, flies -- and returns in the most unlikely ways, as his good owner finds his own depths, altitudes and soars.
In this moment, with tears running down my face, I understand why it was so important to my friend to get me to read that book. Why my confession that I'd started and was being held hostage prompted an actual phone call from him... and that he knew what I couldn't until this very moment: it made me feel better.
Dr Stanland put the needle in, depressed the plunger. She offered comforting words, understanding, compassion. Ali brought her quiet strength and her bottomless love for the spaniel, too.
Zelda couldn't have been surrounded by more caring, more grace, more magic. She knew that. Her breathing slowed and slowed. My fingers gently laid on her rib cage, stroking her side so whether she was awake or not, she knew her Mommy was right there with her.
And then it stopped. Another tear fell.
But I knew something -- in spite of the giant tear and hollowness opening up inside me. I knew that Zelda was already on the wind, her ears flying behind her, laughing and marveling at how she was getting her sleek, strong, sexy superspaniel body back.
She was laughing. She was exultant. She was light, bright blinding white light -- shining, shimmering. She was free.

"Is she gone?" I croaked, knowing, but needing to be told.
Dr. Stanland nodded, smiled in the sad way of people who know it's the right have.
"Okay," I said. "Okay..."

Zelda was gone. There was only one thing to do: Get in the car and drive. Drive fast. Drive hard. Drive nowhere and everywhere -- just the way Zelda always liked. Windows down, music up, hands held out to the darkness, to touch everything that the early evening might hold.
From that point on, of course, the night holds the promise of a beautiful butter colored spaniel. Just as the indigo swallows the sunset, somewhere around 72 miles an hour... if you have the Stones or Jackson Browne, John Prine or Alex Bevan, "Dream On" or Bruce Springsteen's "Drive All Night"... you can feel the softness of Zelda's fur... Zelda's heart...
All you have to do is reach out and touch it. She's always there, laughing and urging you on. Roll down your windows -- and see.