Reading the Dog Newspaper

This is a video of Chet Baker reading the dog newspaper. He’s sifting all the scents and sounds of a moist cool August morning in 2013. I call what he's doing Bunny Nosin’. I wish I could smell everything he smells, hear everything he hears. I have not a tiny fraction of the vomeronasal scent receptors he does, so I never will. But I can get an inkling what he perceives by watching him. I love to see him plunging through grass, following his nose, taking sharp turns as his vaporous, invisible quarry turns.

I can only watch him bunnynose for so long without moving in for a little caress. If this dog knows one thing, he knows he’s cherished. I often wonder what it would be like to be the vessel for that kind of love. Where everything you did was OK, where nothing you did could offend or hurt the person who loves you. Where it’s all just pure love, untainted by resentment or jealousy or regret. Maybe dogs get and give that kind of love because they live from moment to moment. They don’t speak. They sign up to be your one true love and they give it all they’ve got until death doth part you. People make a lot of noise about doing that, but our attention spans, I think, are considerably shorter than dogs’. Maybe we could stay on task better if we only had twelve years to get it right.

It’s bittersweet, knowing that Chet, right now, is just my age in dog years. If dog years mean anything. And that come December he’ll be 63, and December 2014 he’ll turn 70. How can that be? Then again how can I, the eternal eight-year-old, be 55? None of it makes sense to me. Life just rolls on and the years toll on and I’ve no choice but to accept it all. And to love the stuffing out of this little black dog while he’s here.

From a hotel room high over Denver...JZ