Ruthie

Sarah Miller previously wrote about putting people in songs. Today, she writes about her dog Ruthie.

The current of love that runs between me and my red heeler Ruthie is thick and strong, like mooring rope. Unlike mooring rope, it is golden, shining, and never frays because it’s not made of cotton or hemp or polyethylene. Instead, it’s made of the repeating synth line in the song “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” by A Flock of Seagulls.

This is the synth line that comes in after the percussion at :08. If you don’t know it I can’t tell you what it sounds like, other than to say the cadence of it is da-da dada da-da dadada, da-da dada da-da dadada. 

I googled “synth line in Wishing” and up came a video that shows you how to play it on the piano by displaying a keyboard and then sending blue (for the bass) and green (for the melody) bars in a straight line down the screen, which hit the keys when a note is played. (It is impossible to explain, and I am sorry to say that I wasted all that time trying to do it when I could just have just been listening to the song.) The left hand keeps tempo by going steadily back and forth between D flat and D sharp, and the right hand handles the melody two octaves higher, also all in sharps and flats.

When I listen to the synth line of this song, I find myself swaying back and forth with my eyes closed and a dreamy smile on my face. The synth line lives inside me as an exact sonic expression of my love for Ruthie. To love Ruthie is to fall and to be lifted at the same time, it is to rejoice that she is alive but to be aware that she will not always be. Every rapturous moment watching her run, or stroking her fur, or listening to the wheezing grunts she makes when she sleeps is embedded with a sense of loss, and the synth line brings this pleasure and pain into one thing. The first half of the synth line is loving her, the first two-fifths of the second half is trying to hold her for eternity and the last three-fifths of it is knowing she can’t be here forever.

The synth line also evokes visuals expressing and embodying my love for Ruthie. It makes me see simple things like a green field at sunset and cream being poured from a cream-colored pitcher. It makes me remember simple but also sad things like standing on a soccer field looking up at Canadian Geese flying overhead when winter was an extreme thing and not just a noncommittal shrug from the general weather. The synth line is wonder and worship and loss all at once.

A friend told me that he had been having some confusion or some mild anxiety about how much he loved his cat until he saw how much I loved Ruthie and realized maybe it was normal to love an animal that much. Or maybe he said he wondered if he didn’t actually love his cat as much as he thought he did, because that would just be impossible, to love a cat that much, but after seeing how much I loved Ruthie, he realized that he did love his cat as much as he thought he did. 

I remember the first moment I saw Ruthie. It was just a photograph, but there was nothing that would have kept me from her. After I saw her, and walked her, but before I even set my hand on the back of her warm neck, someone could have offered me a billion dollars to pick another dog, and I would have refused it.

I said a lot about the synth line of this song already but I want to say one more thing, which is that it makes me wonder if reincarnation is real.

DO YOU YEARN?

FROM THE HEART