Maybe we should have named Cedar “Mink.” Or “Mahogany.” Or “Sea Otter”.  It seems her puppy fur is giving way to her adult coat. If I’m not mistaken, we have evidence that our puppy is becoming a DOG. 

Her new coat is coming in dark.

Tim is still in protest mode; she remains Paula to him. 

Regardless of her color change, I’ll stick with Cedar, mainly because she happens to respond to it about 75% of the time. I’ve mulled the name out loud already in this pile of half-thoughts. What I haven’t done is mention one more check in the Cedar column: a cool character in Brian Doyle’s fabulous book, Mink River. (Thanks, bro Dave, for a great gift.) 

Doyle’s Cedar is one of a two-man team comprising the public works department in Neawanka, a dreamy little messed up village where the Mink River meets the Oregon Coast. He and “Worried Man,” Billy, meet daily at noon to split one beer while they eat salmonberries and process their generative definition of “public works.” 

A bit of dialogue from the book, between two old friends who think they might be in their late 60s:

Worried Man: Listen my friend, did you ever consider that maybe the scope of public works as we have conceived it is too big altogether? I mean other towns use their departments just to fix roads and sewer lines and stream beds and such.

Cedar: We do those things. 

Worried Man: But we are also prey to what I might call a vast and overweening ambition. I mean, really, to preserve history, collect stories, repair marriages, prevent crime, augment economic status, promote chess, manage insect populations, run sports leagues, isn’t that a bit much? We even give haircuts. 

—

Worried man: I think maybe [we do] too much. 

Cedar: I think not enough… We heal things. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re here. We’ve always agreed on that. Right from the start. We do as well as we can. We fail a lot but we keep after it…. We have brains that will work. So we have to apply them to pain. Brains against pain. That’s the work. That’s the motto. That’s what we do. Soon enough, we will not have brains that work, so therefore.

Mink River, Brian Doyle

Later, Worried Man recollects how he discovered Cedar. He and his now wife were “pretending to fish, but really learning how to make love.”“Maybe,” he concedes, “thinking about it now, we were trying to figure out how to make love in such a way as to make time not matter at all, or defeat it for a while.” 

Anyway, down the river like a tree comes a naked body that is Cedar.

“We didn’t know he was Cedar right at the moment of course, and of course neither did he know he was Cedar right then, because he had been in the river a long time and was nearly completely drowned. I’d say he was about ninety percent drowned. He was awfully full of river. Which is probably why Cedar has such a thing for rivers and rain. Heck, he lived inside the river for a while, which you can’t say about many people, especially living ones.”

Cedar comes unclothed and unexpectedly, maybe part magic, part real, and sets out to heal. And if Cedar is Cedar, I’m game to settle in to Worried Man for a bit—a role I can come by quite naturally— while the pup herself keeps me walking more and farther than I could a year ago. (Still hoping for the time-stopping bit.) Her name should remind me that there’s good work to be done—brains against pain—and that there may well be some magic out there, too. Why not?

So you shall stay Cedar, doggy dog, much as you may shape shift into Paula, Mink, Mahogany, Sea Otter, Bella, Dillybar, and whatever other monikers emerge from our streams of consciousness and unconsciousness. I recommend the book. Maybe Cedar will stay with you, too.

Good time for a new, warmer coat!