Michael J. Fox and his boyfriend, Gus

It’s been 35 years since lightning sent Michael J Fox back to the future. Hill Valley’s the clock never really recovered. The film prop’s hands are still stuck at 10:04 a.m., but the clock has been removed from the perch that made it famous, in the courthouse plaza on the backlot of Universal Studios, where correspondent Lee Cowan was conducting a virtual interview with Fox.

“Oh yeah, I knew that sounded vaguely familiar to me,” the actor said.

We thought this was a great place to chat with Fox, now 59, about the other a jolt in her life – her beloved dog Gus, now 12 years old. He’s pretty much a mutt – Great Dane, Fox calls him.

Gus features prominently in Fox’s latest book, “No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality” (Flatiron Books).

“You know that no matter what your situation, no matter how you feel, this animal is with you and is connected to you, and you feel like it’s a force multiplier,” Fox said.

Gus has been with Fox for almost half since Fox battled Parkinson’s disease.

Some days are better than others – this one was somewhere in between. “It’s very come and go, it’s not off, literally intermittently,” Fox said.

“Good days, bad days?” Cowan asked.

“Yeah, and today I’m relatively safe, but I’m too much, a little too much on drugs, because it’s different every day – you get what you get.”

What he had two years ago was a tumor that had to be removed in his spinal cord. But when he got home, in a wheelchair, Gus was waiting for him.

“He goes around the wheelchair a bit, with that kind of sock woof woof, woof woof, and I set down in front of the wheelchair right in front of me, and I looked at myself, and I said, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ ”

Cowan said, “Dogs just seem to have it when you’re not looking your best, don’t they? When you’re not feeling well?”

“I know with Gus he’s doing it, he knows there’s something different about me,” Fox replied. “And your instinct when you have a chronic illness is, sometimes, to isolate and make your world as small as possible so you don’t have to do so much. But a dog will open up to you.”

He swears the reason people stop to talk to him on walks in Central Park is because of Gus, not because he’s Michael J Fox.

In the park you will find a bench with a plaque. It reads: “For Mike Fox and Gus. Real New Yorkers.” Fox’s wife, Tracy Pollan, gave him for his birthday – a reminder that Gus is just as human as anyone who sits on a bench.

Their walks together mean more than most of us will ever really know, especially as Fox’s walk gets harder and harder.

But he is not focused on the future; he’s learned to be in the moment, times like this – when the restorative power of a drooling kiss says it all.

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Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Publisher: Remington Korper.

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