Where does a big dog sleep? Pretty much wherever he wants. In the case of this dog, Fezzik, my 80-pound, four-year-old, purebred mutt, the spot he wants most days is the back of the couch in my studio. The back is too narrow for him so he has to brace his leg against the seat to keep from sliding off.
I can’t imagine why he likes something so uncomfortable. Perhaps the ready view of the bird feeder it offers. All he has to do is lift his head and look to see if anything interesting is happening there, “interesting” being defined as a squirrel or rabbit. Perhaps it’s his way of annoying my other dog, a 40-pound, thirteen-year-old named Mandy, who does fit nicely on the back and doesn’t like it that he’s swiped her spot. Or perhaps he doesn’t know he doesn’t fit. He’s in denial.
Denial, I’m coming to realize, is a virtue, not a fault, a survival tactic of the highest order. When reality is unpleasant, reshape it in your mind to suit your desires and survive. Whether the stress is great or small, simply assuming it is small, does wonders for coping. Myself, I’ve raised denial to an art form. For many years I kept two In baskets in my office, one labeled “Deal With,” the other “Ignore.” The Ignore basket was always piled high and once every six months or so I’d sort it. Almost everything in it would be unimportant, or more likely, would have become unimportant by the time I handled it.
Fezzik’s talent for denial, however, has me thinking that humans didn’t invent denial, as I had thought. Its survival value in the evolutionary thread may be much older than humans. Perhaps the genes for denial were passed on to us by the half-fish, half-reptile relative who first crawled on dry land. “It’s not so bad,” the creature must have thought, and we’ve been denying the truth ever since. And coping.
