cocopunk

The Small Bow, A.J. Daulerio’s newsletter about dealing with one’s issues and recovery—in general, from everything—asked readers to submit their best day of 2025. Reader submissions are typically anonymous due to their somewhat confessional nature, but whatever, I wrote about the dog:

I teared up sitting on the couch with the dog as we watched a movie on a weekend afternoon. Now, I hate all the crap you read about gratitude and how you should be grateful for every stupid thing, but . . . I felt grateful.

I felt grateful to be able to buy fancy Criterion discs and to have a TV and a 4K player and grateful not to worry about how the rent would be paid next month, just the mundane luxuries that you don’t get when you’re living between freelance paychecks that are never enough. And the dog, my best friend, with his little idiot body warm by my side keeping me company.

The movie was Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams,” a beautiful and weird collection of vignettes. All his late movies are great, by the way. They’re some of my favorites. Even the one with Richard Gere that isn’t on streaming anywhere.

But I knew the dog was going to be moving away. Don’t worry, he’s fine. Just not with me. It’s sort of a co-parenting situation dog-wise. I knew he’d be leaving when we were on the couch so that dollop of preemptive grief was a bittersweet reminder to appreciate the moment. I loved the dog, I loved our little apartment, I loved what we had.

He woke up midway through the movie and got antsy and bored and started pawing at me so we went for a walk. It was one of those few precious springtime weeks in New York when everything’s green and not too warm and everyone’s beaming and the church ladies said hello and it took me an awkward second to realize they were talking to us, me and the dog. Hello, what a nice day.