Sometimes, you just have to face those tippy issues

There’s probably a clinical name for this, a phobia of some sort, but I just call it “tippy issues.” I get tippy issues when I am sideways on a slope, especially while seated in a moving (leaning!) vehicle. I become consumed with the thought of toppling over, rolling down and down and down, into Hell itself, and that’s basically why I hyperventilate the way I do. Tippy issues.

Would that I had discovered this disorder before I moved to a place of large lumpy hills — and before I got me a husband who so loves motorized vehicles that the sound of his all-terrain vehicle revving up turns him into He-Man, who wants nothing more than to strap his woman onto the back of that thing and haul her off into the tippy sunset.

“Maybe another time,” is how I usually answer these invitations.

But not today. It’s dusk. It is not a pretty dusk. It’s raining. There’s fog. I’m hanging on to He-Man’s chest with every cell of my fingernails as we go bounding sideways forth. I’m thinking: tippy, tippy, tippy, tippy. Followed by: Hail Mary, full of tippy, tippy, tippy.

“Can you see anything in those trees?” he asks.

“It’s too dark,” I say, which I’m pretty sure would be true even if I were able to open my eyes. “We’ll have to try again tomorrow.”

“This is a disaster,” he says.

We’re looking for a dog. A large, white, 3-month-old puppy of some 30 pounds. She arrived this afternoon. We named her Luna. We put her in a seemingly secure pen, went inside to eat lunch. I was chopping celery when I saw her outside the kitchen window, bounding with determination up and over the hill, then vanishing. “The dog! The dog!” I yelled, then ran up the hill, while my husband got the ATV. That was four hours ago. Still no dog.

This is a disaster. For him, for me. For very different reasons. My own sense of loss here is less about a dog I barely got to know than it is about the mood of my husband, which, I know, is headed into the dumps. This is his first new dog in nearly 10 years. It was a project. He actually researched the breed. He is not the dog-breed-researching type. But this dog! This would be a working dog — a special breed that would patrol our fence line. He sat in his office learning the difference between a Great Pyrenees and a Maremma and decided on the latter. He finally found a breeder in South Carolina. The breeder sent pictures when the puppies were born. She gave all sorts of preparation instructions, including a directive for my husband to wear the same undershirt for two days, then mail it to her, so the puppy could get to know him. My husband did all of these things. He was a man with a mission, just like another man who may have entered his deep-sea diving stage or his rocket ship stage or, perhaps, his NASCAR stage. There were, I figured, so many worse stages.

He printed out maps to the breeder’s house, then found a hotel midway back that would take a dog. He left for the two-day trip with a suitcase and a chew bone. He returned proud, accomplished, rejuvenated: a man with a new dog! And then, poof.

What becomes of a man whose boat sinks, whose rocket ship plummets to earth, whose race car doesn’t make it even once around the track?

More to the point: What becomes of his spouse? She may have been able to steer clear of his project up to this point, but now she is in. Or, in my case, on. Any spouse worth her equilibrium would be braving her own tippy issues on this hill. My job is to lift He-Man from his hopelessness. And to hide my own. The dog doesn’t even have a dog tag yet. She can’t possibly have a sense of our place as home. No, that puppy is probably on a futile journey back to South Carolina. I say none of these things. Instead I say, “There, there,” as we make our way back into the house, soggy and depressed.

In the morning I make Lost Dog posters, while he heads off again. There were so many things I wanted to do with my weekend that did not include making Lost Dog posters. I am wondering how far into the future I will need to suspend the forward momentum of my own life, how long it will take him to get over this.

I’m just about to head out with my posters when I see a flash of white up in the woods. The dog? The dog! The dog! I run out in my slippers, screaming as I dash up the hill. “Puppy, puppy, puppy!” I tumble into her, throw my arms around her. She is wet and stinky and covered in burs. “You came back!” (I have my life back!) Oh, I love this dog.