Point of View: The Way

“What’s your favorite organ?” I asked Mary the other day, and she looked at me strangely, as she well might since I’d been reading Chuang Tzu. 

“Favorite organ? Well, if one goes they all go, so I don’t quite know how to answer.” 

“They are many, yet they are one! That’s it. How they do what they do — what, for instance, does the gall bladder do, or the spleen? — may be beyond our ken, so best let them be.”

Yet we were still of a mind not to let O’en be. O’en, who was to be neutered on the morrow, the prospect of which — once she’d described how his operation would differ from the one I had had many years ago — elicited sympathetic pains in what is probably my favorite organ. 

Would this wonderful dog be greatly affected personality-wise? Mary worried about that, lost some sleep over that in fact. Kathy, to whom I always go with such questions, said no, that he might, as a result, become a bit mellower, but that otherwise he would, she reassured me, remain the pre-eminently democratic soul he’d always been, cheerily open and accessible to anything that walks. 

He has been greatly instructive in that regard, especially with me, who, for some reason, is prone to make invidious distinctions rather than simply to let it be.

A few hours after the operation, Mary began to worry anew. “He hasn’t peed,” she said when I came back from work. “God, what have I done? . . . Let it pee.”

Soon after, I reported that all was well, that he had on our walk around the neighborhood left his calling card six times, and seemed ready again to show us The Way.