Happy Birthday, Gromit!!

Oh you thought I was done writing poems about fictional beagles for awhile, huh? Silly. Ridiculous. How could you even think that? How could you say that?

Thats right, today is everybody’s favorite silent British clay dog’s birthday. Gromit, of Wallace and Gromit fame, was born on February 12 of a year I could look up but would find too depressing to acknowledge.

This canon is established in The Wrong Trousers, arguably the most defining entry in our crazy inventors’ filmography. I watched The Wrong Trousers a lot as a child on a VHS recording of the first three W&G shorts airing on NBC. Every sick day, I’d be puking in the popcorn bowl and watching my favorite little clay guys.

Today is a mostly-poem newsletter, and I want said poem to speak for itself, so I won’t linger too long, but for as much comfort as I took from Wallace and Gromit as a kid, I always felt like there was this melancholy to Gromit’s character. I’m realizing in hindsight that perhaps it was projection, but I sympathized with the ways Gromit felt overlooked. I sympathized with the responsibility he felt to clean messes he didn’t make, and more-so, I sympathized with the slight bit of panic you can see in his astonishingly expressive clay face when he realizes no one can hear him. That even when he’s not on his own, he kind of is.

I think it seems hard to be Gromit. Wallace is a good man, a caring man, smart man, even, but also kind of a dipshit. He puts Gromit in difficult situations that Gromit then usually needs to find the way out of, often times pushing them both to the brink of death. Nonetheless, you never doubt the love they have for each other. And so the poem I am leaving you with tries to make sense of that. It is a poem about how difficult it is let love and forgiveness coexist. Happy birthday, Gromit. Have some Wensleydale on me.

Happy Birthday, Gromit

i could count the years, but 

i’d rather leave them nameless,

i’d rather leave you ageless

I think i’ve known what it’s like

to live in dog years. i know you do too, 

gromit, i know how unfair it feels.

there weren’t supposed to be so many 

years in those few years. how do you 

make sense of it, gromit. when you 

save wallace from his trousers, 

from his hubris, over and over,

you roll your eyes, but you’re 

always there to. your sleeves are

always rolled to help him try to help you

in the ways he’s supposed to, 

but the breeze should be on your fur, 

gromit. you’re always tasked 

with serving the cheese even though

you never asked to be here. there. excuse me.

i guess im asking if you found a good 

spot to plant your forgiveness, gromit, which 

bones are you letting it grow beside

when you see wallace i know you 

feel more than the danger he’s put 

you in, i know you love him because 

i do too but what makes that make sense, 

gromit. i guess ive probably seen enough 

of your family photos to know your answer

to that. i guess i just don’t know mine. i guess 

i’m asking what you can invent out of

olive branches. im asking if there’s anything 

we’re missing in your silence because i know 

what can be hiding there, i am 

telling you that every painstakingly crafted frame 

of my own animation is somewhere hidden in it

and i’m trying to turn it into music 

to make me something i know as well

as the reprise you share, i am trying to share it too

and that has to mean something, gromit

doesn’t it.