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Chapter 1.
Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand
in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of
the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and
effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no
words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and
flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food
around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making
clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form
sentences. And that's why I'm here now waiting for Denny to come home—he should
be here soon—lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own
urine.
I'm old. And while I'm very
capable of getting older, that's not the way I want to go out. Shot full of
pain medication and steroids to reduce the swelling of my joints. Vision fogged
with cataracts. Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggie Depends stocked in the
pantry. I'm sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I've seen on the
streets, the ones that cradle the hindquarters so a dog can drag his ass behind
him when things start to fail. That's humiliating and degrading. I'm not sure
if it's worse than dressing up a dog for Halloween, but it's close. He would do
it out of love, of course. I'm sure he would keep me alive as long as he
possibly could, my body deteriorating, disintegrating around me, dissolving
until there's nothing left but my brain floating in a glass jar filled with
clear liquid, my eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cables and
tubes feeding what remains. But I don't want to be kept alive. Because I know
what's next. I've seen it on TV. A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all
places. It was the best thing I've ever seen on television, other than the 1993
Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in
which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain. After the 1993
Grand Prix, the best thing I've ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained
everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth: when a dog is
finished living his lifetimes as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man.
I've always felt almost human.
I've always known that there's something about me that's different than other
dogs. Sure, I'm stuffed into a dog's body, but that's just the shell. It's
what's inside that's important. The soul. And my soul is very human.
I am ready to become a man now,
though I realize I will lose all that I have been. All of my memories, all of
my experiences. I would like to take them with me into my next life—there is so
much I have gone through with the Swift family—but I have little say in the
matter. What can I do but force myself to remember? Try to imprint what I know
on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any
kind. Carry it so deeply in the pockets of my existence that when I open my
eyes and look down at my new hands with their thumbs that are able to close
tightly around their fingers, I will already know. I will already see.
To continue reading The
Art of Racing in the Rain please click HERE.
The
foregoing is excerpted from The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. All
rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written
permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
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