I wake to feeling glad I’m alive.

It is early light, before the sharp sun slices between trees. Jane is asleep. Henry licks my ears, impatient for exertion. Warm beneath covers, I have slept deep. The warmth tingles, I wonder why. I return Henry’s cuddle. (I like the idea of being licked more than the fact of it.) I’ve lots to do but no duties grousing like a drill sergeant. Lingering is among retirement’s gifts, not just on Sunday.

Gladness suffuses me, almost to overflowing. Here is the reason to live, I think, the best reason. Henry is my professor in gladness. He has his gripes – which creature doesn’t? He gets hungry, antsy, needs to pee; predators spook (a deer! a frog! a leaf! – sound the alarm!). Crumbs from Carll’s and Jane’s cookies seem stingy, inequitable. There’s stuff he has to do he doesn’t like (ear-rinsing, fur-brushing, leash-walking – yuk!). He isn’t always glad, especially when Carll and Jane vanish somewhere, stranding him bored in his cage. A dog’s life isn’t all a bed of roses, believe you me. But that rose bed is an ample reason for being: more than ample – munificent, sufficient. Gladness is Henry’s career, job one, no other makes sense. “Beauty is its own excuse for being,” wrote Emerson. By beauty, he meant joy.

Henry’s teaching is obvious, inarguable. Then I wonder at the weirdness of this conclusion from where I started: weird enough to feel contradictory, obnoxious, heretical.

I was born to duty, responsibility, propriety, obedience, subservience to expectations vouchsafed from afar. You did your duty as you ate your succotash, like it or not. “From those to whom much has been given, much is to be expected.” Feelings were for wimps, losers, renegades. Exuberance was suspect (“Are you feeling OK?”).

I ingested these ground rules hook, line, and sinker. No doubt! I would do my duty, sergeant, suppressing all irresponsible and dangerous desires. (The most dangerous – and delicious – was sex. I blushed. Sex was for procreation, you degenerate, not recreation!)

I’m not sure what woke me to the contrary conclusion. Chafing in harness, perhaps. The charm of music and the music in words. Sex (shhh). The drabness of life squeezed dry of joy, like breakfast cereal without milk or sugar. Feeling, even unhappy feeling, was so much more rewarding than compliance!

I sensed this but did not act on it, except in stolen interstices, when my absence from duty would not be noted. Then I bolted. My midlife crisis appears so typical and punctual in hindsight it feels almost a cliché. I ran away – age fifty – from duty into delight – into doing what I pleased, propriety be damned; into joy, Jane, scribbling – more recently to Rome, now Henry.

Duty still dogs me, mind you. I’m as submissive to the demands of joy as once to those of status. I shut my door and scribble, bemoaning my dereliction. You may have heard me grumbling. I could make and be so much more, damn my sloth!

Henry grins at my absurdity. Gladness means relaxing, his licks insist, not scrambling to make or do. Why after a cuddle must I start up rigid in a rush? Why should failure to write make me feel bad and sad? Why should I rue my kind? Of Henry’s gladness curriculum, I’m only a so-so scholar, we both conclude.

Joy, for me, is mandatory, dictatorial, often grueling. This is a human peculiarity dogs don’t fathom. I live to rejoice, yes, but also ache. The paucity of time and fatuity of our kind aggrieve and enrage. Living is sweet, partly because it hurts.