A Path for Tiny Dogs

When I finally made it to Muir Beach, or to the parking lot, I saw dozens of cars. A popular beach. I felt calmed by that. Here was a place full of people. As if I were addicted to such places, and whatever followed would be well-trod and handleable, if that makes any sense. That what tens of thousands of random humans can do, I can do with ease. There is joy in that.

I followed a path which a sign said was two tenths of a mile to the beach and there were women in black leggings and men in shorts and everyone was wearing running shoes or sandals and there were small children everywhere and I say a tiny dog walking ahead of me and I knew then that the hike to the beach would be an easy one. Any path for tiny dogs is a path for me.

There is a psychological model of the world that calls happiness the right prediction of positive outcomes. That path, the little dog on that path, me following the little dog on that path, is happiness. I reached the beach walking across this uncomfortable bumpy net-covered path and found my friend playing a sort of tic-tac-toss with frisbees and a giant chain bucket in the center square. He is extremely fit and has short blond hair and is the oldest friend I have, besides my father. He was with another friend, a genial curly redhead with a shock of hair and an unkempt beard who works as a recess coach, his job to literally play games with kids at recess, teaching them new games, making sure they play fairly. He loves games, they are, I think, the lesser love of his life. He has a girlfriend with red-blonde hair who is I now understand the source of his geniality, of his warm effusiveness. What many would mistakenly call extroversion is instead the outward affect born of complete confidence one sees now and then in couples, each building off the other’s natural adoration. It is as if he is this rich and complete human being with her. As if he feels completely at ease, or at least appears so, when he is with her.

I think everyone who meets them envies them. Especially other couples. They see how seemingly carefree these two are together, how effortlessly confident and full of life, and they wish that for themselves, and perhaps it makes these couples better, to be around them, to see them in unified action. And how he is so clearly and observably confident, even when he is running around on the beach teaching some two-year-old girl in a pink jacket who has wandered onto the large tic-tac-toss board he has set up on the sand, long white ropes tied together into a 3x3 board, with a metal bucket, about four feet high, at the center, and nine multicolored frisbees, a few still in his and my old friend’s hands and more already on the board. One in the center square but not in the bucket, the game being harder than it looks given how far back they throw them. And the little girl is wandering with her arms out, kind of stumbling, crab-walking and her mother is walking protectively behind her and smiling and the redhead leans over and asks the little girl how old she is and what she did today and whether or not she went in the ocean and he hands her a frisbee and says, Do you want to throw it in the bucket? And she nods and says, Yes, and he mimics throwing it, makes that ancient discus motion and she doesn’t get it and walks up and reaches as high as she can and drops it in and he cheers for her and she is smiling and her mother is smiling and I look over then at his girlfriend and she has this loving look on her face as if she simultaneously can and can’t quite believe she is with this person, whom she loves, whom she loves exactly for this reason, that he does things like this.

Later a man and his wife will walk up and ask him about the game and he will explain its rules to the man while the wife stands impatiently with her two ski poles skewering the sand as he asks about the game and talks with him for five minutes and his girlfriend from where we sit on logs by the fire some twenty or so feet away will say to no one in particular how much he loves this. How at night he’ll tell her how happy he was that someone asked him about his game, that this man wanted to play it but he couldn’t because his wife was impatient to go, and how others did play the game, a group of students with Cal and Berkeley emblazoned yellow on their dark blue hoodies, shorts, sweatpants, and how happy that makes him, how much joy it brings him to create a game and see others enjoying it. You can hear his future happiness in her voice. As if his happiness were hers.

Every ten minutes or so a larger than usual wave would reach the shore and crash and I’d stop and listen to the continuous roar as the wave collapsed north to south along the beach. It is very calming, the ocean, the way it kind of sits there in the background, how the mind focuses on itself, on the people at the beach, on whatever it sees, and the ocean kind of fades then, disappears, all that blue and white and the afternoon sun glistening on the sand. And dogs running back and forth along the wet sand chasing tennis balls and behind you where the liminal sand darkens to dirt and weeds one dripping wet and muddy-legged golden retriever walks with a couple, this dog prancing along with her new favorite stick in her mouth, and then the roaring and crashing and your attention returns to the ocean and you feel calm and you notice the dark green hills to the north dotted with dozens of mansions and you feel almost as if you are drinking all that color in, as if you are buoyed by it and the smell of marijuana on the air and a group of people is playing Kubb, throwing wooden batons at wooden blocks set up at some distance, trying to knock them over, cheering when they do, and two young men throwing a frisbee back and forth and still others letting the soft waves advance and recede over their feet and sinking into that wet sand and the way their footprints disappear with each wave and the sand darkens and then lightens as the water falls back.

And what had love bestowed upon each of them? There are two songbirds in the park a block away from my apartment and they are never more than twenty feet apart and they chirp constantly, a reassuring chirp, I am still here, I am still here, they seem to say. And that is how I think these two moved when together. At a party they once hosted at their apartment with some twelve people, at one point the party split into two groups, each playing a separate board game, and she led one group and he the other, and they were the only two communicating between groups. Every few minutes or so she would make some comment and he would respond with a very bad pun. What are they playing? a girl in her group asked. Wits & Wagers she responded. Because I have all the wits, he said back at her, but he kind of raised and wiggled his head as he said this, like a taunting bird, so that the higher he raised it the more absurd his assertion became, and the more absurd the more loving his banter. And I could see it too on the beach, the way she constantly knew where he was and when he disappeared once for a few minutes and she couldn’t find him she was slightly ill-at-ease until she saw his gangly figure coming from the north side of the beach where he’d been walking in the wet sand at the edge of the ocean, hidden by the late afternoon sun. And you could see how she always or tried to always know where he was, some deep delight in the way he moved, in his actions, that brought her comfort.