A blue zone is a place where people are known for living unusually long lives. Much has been made of what they eat, how they exercise, and who they keep company with. I wish them well, though reaching 100 on a steady diet of beans sounds like something you should discuss with the people you share a house with.
My blue zone is called October.
That’s when I leave the office behind and walk into a temple of lemon-sequined aspens with a dog whose entire reason for living is somewhere up ahead. A grouse flushes, I swing, and a small section of the forest receives a vigorous pruning. The dog looks back. We’ve had this conversation before.
I feel better already.
Out on the prairies, my annual physical begins when someone opens a dog box. Pheasant season will tell you things about your condition that you’ve successfully concealed from your doctor. Try following a bird dog through heavy cover into a Dakota wind. By noon, you’ll have a fairly complete picture of your cardiovascular health and some questions about whether lunch is uphill.
Everything I do the rest of the year supports this October habit. Bills to pay and obligations to meet, but somewhere in the back of my mind, a dog is working a fenceline. I’m only partly listening. This has been mentioned at home.
Other mornings, I’m tucked into a wetland with a shotgun and untold optimism, watching a duck consider forty acres of decoys before landing beside an empty bleach bottle half a mile away. The dog watches it, too. Neither of us has much to say.
Still, nowhere would I rather be. Cold fingers around a coffee cup, that wonderful marsh smell, a little wind picking up. Surely the next bunch will work.
People who know me modify their expectations in October. Calls go unanswered. Texts accumulate.
“He must be hunting,” they say. “It’ll be a while.”
I appreciate being understood.
What I struggle to understand is why people schedule major life events in this month. Any real friend would have the decency not to die in October. If not, he’d understand if I couldn’t make it back for the service. We were close. He knew what the dogs meant to me.
I’d expect the same consideration myself. Hold something in February. Tell a few stories. Whoever gets my shotgun should bring it.
Weddings are harder to excuse because somebody actually chose the date.
June was available. People have been getting married in June for years with perfectly satisfactory results. But you picked the Saturday when the aspens are turning, and the dogs have finally worked themselves into shape. Now I’m expected to shave, put on dress shoes, and spend the afternoon explaining to strangers how I know the groom.
I know him well enough to wonder where I went wrong raising him.
Of course I want him to be happy. I’ll send a wonderful gift and offer him my heartfelt blessing.
“Sorry, son. I’ll make it to your next one.”