Pearl Snaps and Silence

Archie woke me this morning.

His nose lifted the top edge of the duvet.

Burrowing under the covers, his 17lb. frame grazed my shoulder blades before he curled himself up, pushing his haunches against my flannel-covered sit bones.

I’ve dealt with chronic back pain for over 30 years.

These days the body pillow that I use in bed helps form a den for Archie under the duvet while supporting my legs to aid an aching lumbar spine.

Feeling the sleeping dog’s warmth, I gazed into the cold morning light.

One of my shirt’s cuffs was wrapped around the edge of an open closet door.

The cuff’s two silver-rimmed pearl snaps peered back at me, a pair of cataract-clouded eyes at the edge of a dark cave.

My wife, Lynn, and I bought that shirt, a Rafter C Cowboy Collection black plaid print, at a Cavender’s in Amarillo, Texas before enjoying Tyler’s BBQ.

My own unease with the morning’s silence made me depict the shirt as a wounded creature more than let it remind me of some of the best brisket in the Texas Panhandle.

I felt the dead air.

It was 18 years ago, but lying in bed it felt like it was right then.

Five minutes of silence during a radio show that I was producing had my graduate program’s director glaring at me.

Her closed mouth formed a hyphen before she spoke into the void.

“I don’t know what happened there,” she sighed.

I said nothing.

I’d chosen to pursue a master’s degree in journalism after I wasn’t able to start a freelance photographer business.

A year earlier, I’d left a staff photographer job in Jasper, Indiana.

Headed for Denver, Colorado, I thought that I could make images well enough to get paying clients. Aside from some brief work for the Associated Press and a local business journal, no one was buying.

I turned over the setbacks in my head:

Not enough clients, no problem, I am a good photographer. I shoot good images. Just keep going! Someone will hire me.

I took a workshop where I learned to shoot and edit video, but again, the paid work was sparse. I was losing money.

My former newspaper job, some of my freelance photography, my video skills, I thought all of these things would help me thrive when I chose to enroll in a year-long masters in journalism program.

Standing in front of the program’s director, enduring the silence, I knew I had failed the broadcast radio segment of the curriculum.

The morning’s silence 18 years later brought the failure back, drove it like a screw into my torso, twisting my gut ever tighter.

I couldn’t stand the feeling anymore so I flung off the duvet, then stood. I asked my wife, Lynn, if she would like to walk Archie with me. She nodded.

“Coffee before we go?” I ask.

Water boiled in the kettle as Archie spun, chasing his nub of a tail in the kitchen. On his hind legs, he lunged at each of us.

“How can you be so annoying and so lovable all at once?” I asked the dog.

“Because, he’s a master of many things,” Lynn said.

We drank our coffee then headed up the street from our townhome.

About half of a mile above our home we looked under a sugar pine, hoping to find the tree had dropped one of its roughly 16-inch cones.

No luck.

On the way back home, Lynn found a small, knitted wool hat on a boulder by the roadside.

We laughed, the cap reminding us of losing our nephew’s hat 12 years ago as we pushed him in a stroller. We found it draped over a mailbox the following day.

Archie stood next to the boulder and cap. I shot a picture with my phone.

Behind the dog, I looked into the green expanse of a golf fairway.

My gut still felt tight as the memory of that radio silence was still on my mind, but I felt I could make some room for it next to the humorous caper of a lost toddler’s cap.

In my mind, a painful silence stood right next to a laughable gaff.