CHAPTER THREE

Mocha and Moose

Big; small. Loud; quiet. Forceful; timid. Busy; tame. Obnoxious; reflective. Push; pull. Right; left.

Semicolons; my achilles heel. 

Them and chocolate. No matter how hard I try to resist, I just can’t stay away from either. Chocolate for obvious reasons. Chocolate is sweet and delicious and is packed with dopamine. I always make room for chocolate in any shape or kind (except white) and in any form. Especially liquid. Overindulge in chocolate and you feel crappy or put on a few pounds. Overuse a semicolon and you’re just a wanna-be beatnik poet.

I break a lot of rules when writing. Most of them on accident. Most of them on purpose. Thing is, I don’t care much for rules that inhibit my flow. Writing is creative. Like drumming. Syncopation of syllables and similes pausing reflexively. I write to be read aloud. And semicolons are Regal Tips 7As - my drumstick of choice. Looking for discomfort? Drop in a semicolon. Trying to force a reflective pause? Push in a semicolon. Want to express the inexpressible? Semicolon again! Periods. Stop. The. Train of thought. Commas, well they do their thing. Quotations “give voice.” And who doesn’t love a loud double-punch question mark exclamation to prove a point?! But semicolons top them all.

It’s the tension of competing ideas I love most. Pulling polarities teetering on a tiny dot and hook. It’s a collision of worlds. A mashup of feelings, information, and meaning. Semicolons insight mystery and ambiguity. Ever-so-cocky, they’re the “smile and wink” at the grammatical party. I use semicolons sparingly. Only when nothing else will do. You can overdo it; I don’t want to look a fool. But there aren’t enough semicolons in the universe to describe my relationship with my older sister Priscilla. 

We’re like a pair of binary stars. Two gaseous masses orbiting around a shared point of gravity, locked in perpetual spin with each other. Pulling on and cleaving away from - but stuck in an eternal gravitational dance of will. Separate but balanced. Akin to Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman (or Alpha Centauri A and B) our closest celestial neighbours. Look up in the night sky and you’ll see them. To the naked eye the two stars look as one. But don’t be fooled. A and B are two distinct entities separated by millions and millions of miles. They’re stuck together, sharing space in space, spinning forever until one of them balloons into a red giant and eats the other whole. Space death. 

There’s nothing unique about Priscilla and I, or Rigil and Toliman for that matter. Most people have siblings. And something like 85% of stars in the Milky Way (or 85000000000!) are binary. Separate but balanced masses caught in gravitational tension with another. 

A galaxy of siblings; a universe of semicolons! 

Tension begets creativity. Polarities invite innovation. Priscilla; Amos. Siblings born of the same mother and father in the same home with the same family sharing the same experiences. Yet the same we are not. In fact, I would argue that Priscilla and I couldn’t be more different. Our personalities are opposite. So our are interests, talents, and choices. If Priscilla did something one way, I did it the opposite. Naturally. Our differences weren’t forced or purposeful. Priscilla was confident. I was insecure. She was (is) loud. I was (am) quiet. She was a buzzing socialite humming from places to people to parties. I was a hermit content to play with his younger brothers with his homemade cardboard Stanley Cup at home. The distance between us was incomprehensibly vast. And yet, somewhere in between was a shared gravity. A semicolon of love. 

On the whole binary stars aren’t complicated. Just two masses caught in a shared gravity. Separate but balanced. Only on the rarest occasions, and under the right circumstances, can a binary star leave its shared orbit. Usually by change in mass or a pull from a separate star or planet. Heaven forbid a supernova! When this happens the binary system becomes unstable and one or both stars are flung into the deep black. Catapulted into a new reality. A different space in space. And that star experiences something brand new. 

More rare still, and only under near-divine circumstances, could Priscilla or I ever influence each other. We’re just so different. Equally stubborn, and in our way, insecurely stable. As a teenager Priscilla would push me to date, go out, make friends, and “have adventures!” In turn I would push her to be single, take pause, go to church, and “calm down.” It hardly worked. Our pull-away from the other was too powerful. There were years of misunderstanding and fighting and arguing and convincing. Only a super mammoth blackhole could have knocked us off course.

Turns out, all it took was 40 pounds.

Unlike myself, Priscilla has always baulked family norms. Beat to her own drum. And then beat-up the other drummer (me). Priscilla grew up in the same dog-less house that I did. Beholden to the same rationale and reason against dog ownership. Priscilla didn’t care. She’s the kind of person to go after it. Break in the door and take names. As soon as she was able Priscilla got a dog: a female German Shepherd Lab mix. 

Mocha looked like a walking latte. Covered in a swirl of blacks and browns and whites. She was a rescue. Underfed. Traumatized. Standoffish. She was also highly intelligent, obedient, and loyal. The kind of dog you loved and feared. An ideal match for Priscilla. A kindred spirit. And their bond was immediate. Dog resembled owner and/or owner resembled dog. Neither tolerated stupidity. Both were scrappy, active, and affectionate. If provoked they’d bare teeth. Even bite. If nurtured they’d cuddle in kind. Mocha and Priscilla loved playing, the smell of the ocean, and hunting for beach glass. Most of all they loved each other. Nothing could get between them. 

Except Moose.

Moose came to Priscilla a little after Mocha. He was also a rescue born to trauma and neglect. And like Mocha - Moose was a Shepherd-Lab mix, chestnut brown - only half the size. Moose was wiry, spry, and anxious and his whole body wobbled when he shook his tail. Big enough to wrestle but small enough to carry. Moose was also the only dog Mocha could tolerate. A perfect pair. Inseparable friends. Mocha and Moose. Moose and Mocha. My sister’s whole life. 

In the summer of 2010 Faith and I moved back to Ontario from BC. We were crashing with my parents for time of “temporary transition”. To our surprise, Mocha and Moose had moved in at the same time. Priscilla needed a place for them to live for a couple months as she found a new dog-friendly apartment. And for some reason my folks agreed to take us all in at the same time. One big happy shedding family. 

Mocha scared me. But Moose and I became fast friends. He came when I called. Slept at my feet. Cuddled with me by the fire. We’d go on walks. Play fetch in the park. He loved me. I loved him. The whole sharing-life-with-a-dog was an entirely new experience. I had never lived with dogs before. Never known the responsibilities of feeding, walking, training, and poops. It was an education. Exposure to a new-way-of-being in the world. A different way to see creation, animals, and pets. I had loved other dogs before but Moose was my first “man’s best friend”. Moose was family. That little dog wiggled into the crack of my heart and broke it wide open.

A star flung into the deep. 

A few months later Priscilla came back to retrieve her pups and their reunion is one I will never forget. The moment she walked in the door her Mocha and Moose broke into a frenzy of unbridled love. There were yelps and whines and whole-body-shaking-tail-wags. Pure joy. Moose could hardly contain himself - or his bladder. And I didn’t know it was possible but I watched her dogs cry. Tears. Actual tears. It was unforgettably heartwarming. Bittersweet. Moose was gone and my days of pretending were over. My feet were cold once more. That was the least of my concern. I had an entirely new problem. Priscilla had done it. 

After years of pushing and pulling Priscilla had finally knocked me out of orbit. Her gravity had finally thrown me off centre. Her dogs had shown me a new way to live. Moose had opened a new way to feel. Given a redefinition of pet ownership. Of what it means when someone says “my dogs are my family.” I found myself in a new space in space. A part of the universe I didn’t understand - but wanted to. And all my feelings and thoughts and questions narrowed to a simple desire.

I wanted a dog.