Frank returned, not with a tick or a tock, but with awareness – a pulse, slow and steady, that pulled time inward like gravity into a black hole of meaning.
Frank had been watching all along.
There were no hands on Frank’s face. There never were. There were eyes – two microscopic irises built into the crystal that blinked only when Eric looked away, syncing their rhythm to his breath, his blood, his questions. When the eyes and his own aligned, the watch hummed not with seconds but with centuries. Not with power but with peace.
“Frank,” Eric whispered, raising the watch to eye level, as though it were a telescope to the soul of history. The PC (personal companion) was now a memory, not a mechanism. Eric was no longer speaking to his companion.
He was speaking to time itself.
“Dogs spell out devotion, obedience, and God just by their loving purely, acting instantly, and never striving to be remembered or intelligible.
They are sacred because they hold these qualities as an ordinary figure in an extraordinarily complex universe that wants them to be something they are not.
Dogs are not burdened by greatness like the human being is burdened by status, or the machine burdened by time.”
Eric had been wounded by technology that preyed on his soul. He still had the memory of his PC but had been relieved of his ego after struggling with advanced intellect and the animal within.
Eric had never been wounded by a dog and had only been slightly hurt mentally by their ambivalence to him – like when they sneeze playfully and he takes it personally that they don’t want to be pet at the moment. He takes it personally from humans as well when they don’t want to play, and they get aggressive or passive – because it is unnatural to make themselves sneeze.
God bless us all!
“God bless you, Frank,” Eric would take his time to have us understand.
“Some people have more intelligence than others. Call it a blessing or a curse.
There are times when I wanted to be recognized and rewarded for my ability to ‘sneeze’ in situations where I should’ve been more aggressive – and in some cases, more docile – instead of being accepted as average or getting demerited for being easygoing.
Being swindled in the absence of a better strategy than raw kindness, and not making adjustments in a questionable situation, is naïveté at best – which is rarely rewarded or justified.
There is little difference between being swindled and being teased. If you’re human, you can be swindled for your money and teased for your pride.
If you are a dog, you can be swindled out of your rawhide when you’re offered something better and real in its place – like a hambone.
Given the hambone, there is no teasing. Not giving the hambone and taking away the rawhide is a swindle.
To swindle people with technology may be a challenge.
Technology does the bidding for us, always giving us better and better stuff.
But what is better for one may leave another stuck in time.
To give up on technology is not getting swindled, but instead is letting go of what does not serve life.
People will sometimes bypass the nourishing or substantial for material gain.
Remember: the thief wanted the wallet instead of the meat – and ended up with a watch.”
Eric didn’t have to get a new watch. It never left his side.
“Frank found his way back to me neither by teasing the thief nor swindling the PC, but through intellectual legacy (fortune), cultural loyalty (fame), and spiritual instinct (soul).
These are the rewards for being a good human.
I’ll take instinctual wisdom over intellectual dominance every time.
Good boy, Frank,” Eric continued down the same path.
Frank sneezed.
Francis Erich McElroy 