Bonnie and Clyde Files 24

Dear Bonnie and Clyde:

I apologize for my absence of late. I have dearly missed our zany adventures, physical and metaphysical, along the river. The physical adventures barely last half an hour, but the metaphysical ones, well, they are timeless.

You two are my next book, if only I knew how to publish it. There might be one method out there, old school. It might allow me to publish the book and help raise money for your care and the care for more senior dogs in a country that seems to be producing more and more people who give away or abandon senior dogs when the dogs become inconvenient. And I’m not talking about the financial expense of caring.

Our adventures will resume soon, perhaps even today. Treats are stockpiled. I’ve got my rain uniform wrinkled and ready.

Clyde, that tongue of yours! It’s only rock and roll but I like it.

Bonnie, your ongoing and mysterious communing with river and woodland sprites! You are a Led Zeppelin/Lord of the Rings kind of dog.

I have often visited the sanctuary in deep despair, but then I hear your howling at the gate. I set you free, gimping into the pasture, we make for the river, we traverse thistle, we dodge swallows and elk scat, and then something sublime always happens to me. This is a certainty, like a law of personal gravity where my gravity disappears in such a silent way that it defies a simile, but begs for one.

You two have sustained my spirit. You have been wondrous, wide-open, smiling therapy in a world where therapy is so narrowly defined, dour and expensive.

Fall is here and the river will change with rain. Perhaps I will construct us a Huck Finn raft. I want to float a hundred feet down an Oregon Coast river with old dogs as my sidekicks—you two. Then I’ll drag us out to a gravel bar, build us a driftwood fire and roast hot dogs on a stick of willow. Not that eat hot dogs, but I know you two will. That’s all that matters.

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