What the Old Dog Knows

Barnaby, my golden retriever of fourteen years, lay with his silver muzzle on my slippered feet. We were watching the papaya tree I'd planted forty years ago, the one Margaret said wouldn't survive our first Wisconsin winter. She was wrong about many things—that tree most of all.

My granddaughter Lily visited yesterday. She's studying ancient history now and told me about the Sphinx of Egypt—how it has guarded its secrets for millennia, how some riddles were never meant to be solved. I smiled. At seventy-eight, I've learned that life itself is the true sphinx, and the answer isn't what you expect.

I still remember the morning Lily was born, how her hair was like black silk against the hospital blanket. Now she cuts it short, dyes it purple, and asks me about the 1960s as if I'm some artifact from a museum. Perhaps I am.

"You're taking your vitamin, Grandpa?" she'd asked, holding up the orange bottle I keep on the windowsill. I nodded. Margaret used to line up all our vitamins every Sunday morning, a ritual she swore kept us young. She passed seven years ago, but I still keep that ritual. Some habits become prayers.

Barnaby lifted his head, his milky eyes finding mine. He knows things younger dogs don't—that patience beats speed, that a quiet afternoon together is worth ten loud adventures, that the ones we love never really leave us. They live in the fruit from a tree they doubted, in a Sunday vitamin ritual, in the way we still talk to them as if they're sitting in the matching chair across from us.

The Sphinx, they say, asked travelers: "What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?" The answer: a person, crawling as an infant, walking upright in adulthood, leaning on a cane in old age. But I think there's a better answer: love. It carries us on our parents' arms, then on our own two feet, then on the strength of those we've raised.

I scratched Barnaby behind the ears. The papaya hung heavy and ripening above us, another season coming full circle. Some riddles you don't solve—you simply live your way into the answer.