All week I’ve been weeping. I cried during Jasmine Crockett’s DNC speech, which toggled between levity-zingers and personal gravity. Tears rolled when Doug Emhoff stepped onto the stage as “You Get What You Give” played (New Radicals. See funny Doug walk-through dance moves here) and then continued to be choked up during the story of his first Kamala moments (and how to pronounce her name, explained by her great-nieces is a heart-swell smile moment). Michelle? What can I say about my state during that? I was an eye-moist mess for the entirety of the hour-plus roll call because it was just pure effin’Fun, which somehow confused my emotional meter so much I got misty: Joy? Here? Politics? What? (also, this comparison of RNC&DNC roll call is hilarious and spot-on). Then, of course, I sobbed uncontrollably watching Tim Walz’s son Gus be … just literally be … as his dad accepted the VP nomination. In that particular case, there were a series of things rolling around inside me.

One of them was a creeping awareness that he might(would) become the target of the small, sad bullies (otherwise known as Trump sycophants) who would hold this pure spontaneous expression up for ridicule. Even writing that, my heartbeat speeds in my desire to protect him, a person I don’t know, but who reminds me of so many of the kids I used to teach during my brief years doing writing workshops in the NYC school system. I may have been amazed at how mean kids could be to each other (and really, the roots of this deserve a lot more attention than I can include here), but it’s my amazement at the meanness of adults that stultifies. When I think of this, the blood whuzzs in my ears and my pulse elevates. It’s as much about my realization that I can’t control people’s actions as it is a pure desire to protect. But in those moments, I step away from the beauty of the moment created: Whether a piece of writing a student had read bravely even as other kids laughed and the teacher stood silent or, in the case of the other night, Gus loving his dad for all the world to see. I’ve turned away toward the ugliness and that becomes the thing I try and control.

Fool’s errand, that.

I get it, the trying to repeat that fool’s errand over and over. To make sure everyone’s fine and protect them from the ugly. It’s not like it’s a terrible impulse, it’s just that there’s no way to actually accomplish it. When the first emotion comes up, it’s anger. Of course it is. Anger feels more accessible and immediate, more primal and protective while also corrosive and blurring. I can locate it faster than I can situate tenderness. It also (falsely) suggests control, the opposite of understanding that things are going to go as they go. I’m definitely not saying that going passive is a thing because for real, right here, right now, a lot can be done to move things forward into a better, happier, more wonderful place for humans. Which is probably why I wept pretty regularly during the DNC happenings in Chicago. There are things to do, and I can help. But I can’t control the outcome.

Last Saturday, I had an in-real-time example of the limits of how much I can do before I have to just let go.

Two dogs appeared in our yard last weekend. They ran willy-nilly around the house panting, squeezing under the porch, trying to get into our shed, on the move around and around. They didn’t seem to want to leave our yard. I watched for minute out the window while they circled—D had gone to a jobsite—and I thought maybe they’d just stopped in on their way home but after the twentieth (or one-hundredth) time around the house, I got a bowl, filled it with water, and went out to see if they had any helpful info on their furry selves so I could get them home. They both had collars, his with a tiny red bowtie, hers with a piece of twine that had been snapped off suggesting she’d broken free from somewhere. But neither had any ID tags. It appeared that she had also just given birth. And although they were midsize for sure, they appeared less threatening than frantic. I’ll call them Buster and Belinda.

The intensity of their happiness when I came out was overwhelming: body-slams against my legs, gulping water like it was some doggy-champagne, and, most heart-rending, looking at me with eyes so full of … I don’t even know what … love? need? Many things there are no words for? I haven’t spent any real amount of time with dogs so I’m not used to that kind of eye-contact sensation. (The kind of looking into eyes I do with Desi and Lucille is much more guarded. Again, I could go down the whole psyche of dog and cat people, but I’d make a mockery of it.) I followed them around the yard as they broke into the shed, tried to get into the house, and generally just went bananas, all the while trying to settle them down so I could figure out a next move. Finding the leashes from the cat harnesses, I managed to bring them into our carport, where they finally dropped onto the ground. She seemed to go straight into a nap, while he put his shaggy head on my feet as I posted pictures and put out a message on NextDoor to see if any of our neighbors had misplaced their dogs. Someone wrote back saying he thought they belonged to a home five miles away with a construction sign out front. I called the construction-sign place and the guy who answered the phone said, “My dogs are right here. I think my wife saw those dogs in our yard yesterday though.” He was quite nice about it although this news didn’t make me feel comforted.

I called the local vet in case they might be micro-chipped and found the place is closed on the weekend—as is every vet in the neighboring four counties. The nearest open animal shelter is about an hour-ish away. Putting them in the truck and driving seemed a bit out of my abilitiy in that moment. I found the local Greene County animal control number and found out the guy’s phone was broken so all I got was a disembodied voice yelling “I can’t hear you [static.crackle]. My [static.crackle] busted.” I called 911, who told me to call the animal control guy, then said when I explained his phone was broken, that maybe he’d get in touch when it was fixed. That was all they could do. I mean, this wasn’t a real emergency for them. Buster and Belinda weren’t carrying guns. They hadn’t set the shed on fire or broken into our house. I was basicaly on my own in this situation. In that moment, I did get angry, again, an easier emotion to access than the realization that there was a very limited amount of things I could do to get this story to a happy ending.

I decided to get up and make some signs to post up and down the street, but when I started to move, Buster got a bit panicked and whined a bit with a “Don’t Go” look that cracked my heart. So I sat back down. I thought of calling my friend J, who is a dog-whisperer, and asking her for advice except suddenly B&B decided to be on the move. I followed them out of our driveway and up the road. There was a house one street away that I thought they might live. I’d passed it before on a walk and one big bowser, with another close behind, had come bounding into the street and right up behind me. I’d kept moving slowly and a woman yelled for the dog to come back. But maybe these sweet fellas were actually from that house. I hadn’t gotten a very good look. But now, B&B turned up that street and I thought, yes, I was right, they do live there. But then they suddenly ran fast back into the woods next to a seemingly empty house. My heart sank. I went up the driveway and knocked on the door but there was no sign of life. Also no sign of Buster or Belinda. Totally disappeared.

I couldn’t really accept it, this non-happy ending. Or at least to me it didn’t feel happy. I’d wanted more than anything to be able to bring them back to where they lived. Be able to say, “are these your dogs” and be met by “Oh, I’ve been looking all over for them. Thank you for bringing them back.” But who knows, for Buster and Belinda, running freely through the woods may be there idea of a happy life (I read Call of the Wild a lot time ago, although come to think of it, perhaps that pooch-protaganist was not altogether happy on his own. I don’t know if my heart can handle a re-read.) What I was left with was the knowledge that I did all I could think to do. Believe me, as the night went on, I came up with a ton of what-if scenarios but accepting the situation as it was, that’s what I’m left with. I got face-to-face with the realization that as much as I want to solve all problems, obviously that’s not possible or realistic or even sane. I’m not a superhero even if I do think capes can look great with certain outfits. I remembered how desperate I always was to know I was doing exactly what was needed for my dad. Desperate isn’t too big a word here. And a lot of times while I was rolling over that emotional waterfall, I was missing just sitting and watching a baseball game with him so obssessed with wondering if I’d bandaged up his arm correctly and hadn’t cut off the circulation. Again, all of this was fueled by love. but also by worry and a soupçon of wanting to give a nudge toward a happy ending. One that maybe I had a hand in.

It doesn’t work that way. The election will go as it does, Gus will continue to be beautiful in that moment, Buster&Belinda have loped off to somewhere I have no idea about, and here I am. Mostly fine, very emotional, letting go of the leash (at least sometimes).