Read Cherished for Free Online Page B

don’t feel him to be absent.
    There is no way to tell non-horsey people that the companionship of a horse is not like that of a dog, or a cat, or a person. Perhaps the closest two consciousnesses can ever come is the wordless simultaneity of horse and rider focusing together on a jump or a finish line or a canter pirouette, and then executing what they have intended together. What two bodies are in such continuous, prolonged closeness as those of a horse and rider completing a hundred-mile endurance ride ora three-day event? I have a friend who characterizes riding as “one nervous system taking over another.” I often wonder — which is doing the taking over, and which is being taken over?
    I never expected to be writing this essay. Rather, I intended, in twenty years, to write, “Oldest Known Equine Is Seventeen-Hand Ex-Racehorse.” But I see it is time to take my own advice, the advice I gave my daughter when she got her first real boyfriend. I told her that no matter what happened with this boyfriend, once she had experienced the joys of a happy and close relationship, she would always know how to have that again, and would always have that again. And the truth is, that works for horses, too.

5.
FLUFF

Joe Morgenstern
    Y es, yes, I admit it, I didn’t take care of him the way I promised I would.
    When I was ten years old, I had a black cocker spaniel named Fluff. (His full name was Mr. Fluff, though he wasn’t particularly fluffy: I don’t know whether the Mr. was my mother’s or my father’s idea.) Exactly what I didn’t do is lost in the mists of time, but I’m prepared to admit that I didn’t walk him enough, didn’t clean up after him, didn’t feed him regularly, didn’t wipe his bowl, didn’t check to see that he had water, didn’t do any of the things that ten-year-olds promise they will do if their parents will only let them have a dog. The one thing I did do was love him. I can see evidence of that love in the last remaining snapshot I have of him. There I am, standing in front of our suburban New Jersey house in a suit jacket, shirt and tie, and knickers — what was my mother thinking? — and gazing lovingly into Fluff ’s eyes as he sits on his hind legs (which he could do, as the stupid pet joke hasit, for hours on end). But I don’t need the photo to remember how it was between us. I may not have always been there for him, but Fluffy was always there for me, adoring me and, I choose to think, forgiving me for my endless lapses.
    My dog is the main subject of this story, but it’s also about my mother and father, who found a way to free themselves of having to walk Fluff, feed him, wipe his bowl, etc., etc. They appealed to my patriotism.
    The year was 1943, during the darkest days of World War II, when American boys were going off to fight in far-off lands and islands — not just nameless boys, but older brothers of kids I knew. One day my father came home from work in Manhattan, sat down in his big leather chair to read the afternoon paper, and tore an article out from an inside page. The subject, I learned at dinner, was a program just announced by Dogs for Defense.
    A civilian organization that provided dogs for military duty, Dogs for Defense had been training large breeds — German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, and the like — as sentry or attack dogs. Now, however, they were planning to train a limited number of small breeds for a very different purpose: going behind enemy lines to find wounded American troops, then leading rescue parties to them. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” my father said, “if they were willing to take Fluff?”
    As soon as he said that, I felt a panicky swirl of shock, anxiety, incipient grief, and, God help me, patriotism. I don’t know what I said — probably nothing — but over the course of the next few weeks I came around, or was brought