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Gladys wore her red dress that evening. The one hanging at the back of the closet, behind the oft worn articles of the day-to-day, in a thin plastic shroud. The one traditionally reserved for special occasions.

Our reservation was at 7:30. December darkness had already enveloped our corner of the world when I arrived. Christmas lights adorned the eaves and awnings, railings and shrubs at many of the neighboring houses. Her yard was dark save the pale yellow glow of the coach light at the intersection of the sidewalk leading from the driveway to the front door. Dry fall leaves that once blanketed the wooded lawn surrounding her mid-century modern brick ranch formed uniform drifts against the back wall of the open carport as if carefully arranged by the winter wind.

I would learn that night that she was approaching her 88th birthday. She beamed like a debutante when she answered the door.

“I haven’t worn this dress in ten years.” She smoothed the skirt with her palms as she tucked her chin and glanced to the side with a coy smile.

“You look stunning. Shall we?” Pale, arthritic fingers, knuckles like pearls on a string, pressed into the crook of my right elbow. We made our way steadily, carefully along the sidewalk to my truck awaiting us in the driveway.

I hadn’t fully considered the details of our transportation. The Tacoma required a bit of a step to get in.

I should have driven my wife’s car.

With her right hand she grasped the handle on the A-pillar, placed her right foot onto the running board and attempted to lift herself onto the seat. She stalled, hovering for a split second, her stubborn knee threatening to betray her efforts to straighten the leg. I put my hands on her hips and lifted slightly. She rotated and sat heavily in the seat, then quickly turned and swatted playfully at my hands as I drew them away.

“We haven’t even had dinner yet young man!” I smiled and offered a meek apology.

Mid-morning, every Tuesday, for the last two years, the homemade bread arrived, hand delivered from Gladys’s kitchen with some sort of unwarranted, self-deprecating apology. The rise was substandard. The crust was too dark. The crust was too light. The grocery was out of her normal flour. She accidentally added too much salt. She hoped it would be edible.

It was always delicious.

It began as an extra thank you for a house call to care for her big, tuxedo-coat, unruly, indoor-outdoor male house cat, Alfred.

It became a weekly routine.

Alfred despised car rides and he despised being caught. When Leo was alive, they always came in together, Leo, Gladys and Alfred. Gladys and Leo side-by-side on the little bench in the exam room not quite wide enough for two. Alfred in a pillow case, knotted loosely at the opening and resting quietly on Gladys’s lap.

Gladys’s Leo lived up to his Latin namesake - bold, gregarious, unfiltered. He teased our technicians mercilessly throughout the visit with generally benign humor. Routine observations and declarations were typically followed by a hearty belly-laugh as if amused by his own wit. Although, Leonito - little lion - would have been more appropriate given his physical stature was as small as his personality was large. Gladys played a supporting role in the production of their life, dutiful, omnipresent.

In hindsight, we suspected the diagnosis long before Gladys made any public declaration. Leo’s garrulous nature and playful comments became sprinkled with dark undertones. Gladys apologized for his angry outbursts at random, routine inconveniences. Our technicians learned to stay clear of arms length to avoid unwelcome contact from roving hands. Gladys’s visits became solo outings. We saw less and less of Leo. Eventually she confirmed our suspicions. Leo was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It had been two years since he succumbed to the final stages of the disease in a nursing home not far from the home they shared for over thirty years.

When I proposed taking her to dinner for Christmas as a gesture of thanks, my wife immediately embraced the idea.

It was a short drive to the restaurant. I suggested Gladys wait for me to come around to her side of the truck before getting out. I grasped her right hand and elbow. With her left hand she grasped the handle on the A-pillar and together we accomplished a less than graceful, but safely executed dismount.

Our booth was tucked into the back corner of the dimly lit dining room. Patrons at various stages in their meal were scattered about. A soft chorus of cutlery against ceramic and hushed tones of conversation mixing with ambient jazz filled the space. Awkward silence settled between us as we studied our menus.

“How is Alfred?” It had been months since my last house call.

“Ohhh, he’s just fine.” Looking up from her menu and smiling at the thought. Her voice was frail and changed key randomly on certain words and phrases creating a squeaky, sing-song quality. There were frequent pauses while she searched for what she was trying to say. “He’s been spending more time inside since it got cooler. He seems more at ease inside since Leo died.”

She fingered her pearl necklace nervously as she perused the menu. We settled on entrees and glasses of wine. She began to fidget less, and we settled into a conversation. She shared details of caring for Leo at home as the disease consumed his mind. He often didn’t recognize her. He became combative when she tried to help him dress. He became more unsteady on his feet. Diapers became a necessity. She was determined to keep him in their home and care for him herself, until the day he soiled his favorite chair.

When Gladys attempted to help him to the bathroom, he fought her, flailing his arms, yelling for her to stop. During the struggle he fell and was unable to get back on his feet. Dodging blows, Gladys tried to help him up from behind, reaching under his arms and lifting. Her porous eighty plus year old spine couldn’t take the strain. She collapsed alongside him. She crawled to the phone and called 911. Leo went to assisted living. Gladys went to the hospital where she learned she had sustained a lumbar stress fracture. Gladys felt like she failed him.

Her eyes welled with tears as she recounted the incident.

Her spine eventually healed well enough for her to begin baking again. Leo died in the nursing home a year later.

Our entrees were mostly consumed. We each had only a sip of wine remaining.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard your origin story. How did you and Leo meet?” I smoothed the napkin on my lap.

Gladys looked up from her plate and caught my eye briefly with her gaze. Her lips tightened into a subtle Mona Lisa smile. She looked back down at her near empty plate.

“I’d rather not say….”

She paused - a lengthy pause as if summoning something within her - something necessary and elusive.

“You see pastor…”

Pastor?

I was puzzled by the impromptu change of address, but I didn’t interrupt. She drew a deep breath and continued, her squeaky, sing-song voice barely reaching my side of the table.

“I was young. We were young. I was impetuous. Sometimes when you are young and impetuous, you do things…things you later are not proud of. I didn’t want to be that woman. The heart wants what it wants. I don’t regret it, really. There were moments…decades ago, but no more. Regret is a cruel master and shame is a prison. I am not her anymore. I recognize her only faintly, a distant memory, from a different lifetime. I’ve made my peace. We had a good life together, Leo and I. We created a beautiful family. I miss him terribly. That is all you really need to know.”

My cheeks burned. I shifted in my seat, contemplating an apology. Our eyes met. She offered a kind smile, a gesture of subtle absolution.

“However, one thing I have never regretted…crème brûlée. Shall we share?”

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I miss Horace. I haven’t seen him in years. Not since Heidi died.

I typed his name into the search bar on my browser, hoping for a update.

I met Horace through Heidi. Although, it was confusing at first because according to the records, Heidi belonged to Helen. I never met Helen.

Heidi always came in with Horace. Turned out, Horace was the neighbor. He lived next door. I later learned Helen was elderly and in poor health. Heidi was a Pekingese with the Pekingese “package”; itchy skin, corneal ulcers, dry eye, herniated discs, periodontal disease.

We saw Heidi frequently which means we saw Horace frequently.

A visit with Horace was a poorly choreographed dance, unpredictable, occasionally awkward; turn, counter-turn, stand. One was tasked with divining the reason for the visit by filtering second-hand history from Helen through Horace, accounting for Horace’s commentary on the reliability of the information and correlating the historical data with physical findings. Then devising a feasible plan with a reasonable chance of successful execution by a pair of aged care-givers with arthritic fingers and impaired eyesight on a fixed income.

Horace wasn’t much to look at and never had a lot to say, but he had incredibly kind eyes. And he loved Heidi. He was younger than Helen but old enough to draw social security. Though I doubt he was as old as he looked. His general appearance, accurate or not, suggested his life had been marked by scarcity and a measure of loneliness. His cheeks and rather bulbous nose glowed red with prominent superficial veining suggestive of a long standing relationship with liquor. He made a quiet life delivering bread to grocery stores until he retired. He had been married, but long since divorced. He lived alone, estranged from his only daughter whom he spoke of maybe once.

The whites of his eyes had a slight yellow tinge and the lid margins were wide and pink, always pooling a thin puddle of tears along the lower lid which contributed to a resting expression of melancholy, even when he chuckled at his own anecdotes.

His hair was epic, even for a younger man, thick, wavy, unruly, streaked with grey, smelling of cigarette smoke. He shaved regularly but infrequently. Often sporting two or three days of thick grey stubble on his heavily weathered cheeks, chin and neck. In warm weather he might wear a faded graphic tee shirt from a few decades back and worn out, off brand denim jeans. In cooler weather, always a Members Only jacket, mid-1980’s vintage, tan with little random stains on the front and dark discoloration at the pockets.

He was trim and moved slowly but easily with only a slight stoop, and he had no trouble carrying Heidi despite her matronly middle.

Words seemed to require effort for Horace. He produced them slowly and with a reluctance which made me suspect the world had convinced him his voice was not always welcome or worthy. Low, slow, gravelly, always deferential, I found myself drawn in, facing him as he spoke, leaning closer to hear and quick to acknowledge tidbits of useful information.

It was difficult to imagine the younger version of him, with the supple body of youth longing for adventure, whose sinew and bone moved quickly, effortlessly. I tried to reconstruct a mental image of twenty-something Horace, astride his motorcycle, confident, reckless, intoxicated by speed and risk, his whole life a ribbon of highway stretching out before him.

What did the youthful version of this weathered creature long for at the age when a young man’s blood runs hot, when loins ache with desire for the mysterious soft curves and edges of another’s body? Did his pulse quicken at the site of the alluring young woman that made him a husband, albeit briefly, and a father? Did the sequence of events even occur in that order? Or, was it the reverse? Is that why the marriage imploded, leaving him to spend his last few decades in the company of an elderly neighbor and a problem ridden, second-hand canine companion? Or, was he a distant, distracted partner who ultimately drove away his human companions with a toxic wedge of indifference? Was it the alcohol? Or, was the ex-wife the unsettled type who sought the company of a new, more intriguing bed fellow when her day-to-day began to feel ordinary and mundane.

I felt certain the younger version of him once dreamed of a different life. A shadow of dread for my own future crept over me. I shivered.

Over time I learned more of how Horace cared for Heidi in Helen’s home and, on occasion, his own. Though I never knew the origin story.

Then came the day that Horace’s name appeared on the medical record.

Helen had passed.

No details were shared other than Heidi had become Horace’s, and Helen’s meager estate had been set aside in a trust with Horace as the trustee to provide for her care.

Years passed. Heidi’s health issues mounted as she aged, her cognition, her mobility, her comfort declined. Horace’s visits became more frequent.

“Is it time?” The words as low and labored as I’d ever heard.

“Maybe.” I asked a few more questions.

Heidi spent most of the day sleeping. Sometimes she was hard to wake. When she was awake, she paced the house aimlessly like a robot. Her back legs skated to the sides when she tried to get up on a smooth surface. Avoiding puddles of urine around the house had become the norm.

Horace shrugged. “Is she in pain?” He couldn’t look at me as he stroked the brittle fur covering her now prominent spine.

Pain.

Owners always want to make it about physical pain when forced to confront end of life decisions, but there are many ways to suffer, many shades and grades of discomfort. Pain may not even be the emperor of all misery, despite our efforts to crown it so.

A life without joy may be as miserable as a life with physical pain.

Dogs experience joy. Of this I am convinced; or, at the very least, the dog equivalent of joy. We see it in their expressions, in their movements, in their work and in their play.

To be joyful is different than to be happy.

Pain can rob us of joy, but so can dementia, so can malaise, so can weakness and incoordination, so can loneliness. Heidi had not known joy for some time. I suspected the same may have been true for Horace.

“I think it’s reasonable to assume she is uncomfortable.” I tried to catch his eye. “Regardless of how much pain she might be in, life has been a struggle for some time.”

“She still eats. She can still get around.” Horace shifted in his seat.

I sensed the angst. “You will know when it is time. We don’t have to make a hasty decision.” I mindlessly ticked off the laundry list of criteria I always suggest owners look for when assessing quality of life; appetite, mobility, cognition, discomfort, etc, etc. I reminded him, “By the time it is easy for us, it’s been hard for them for a while.”

Horace nodded, gathered Heidi’s pain meds and eyedrops and shuffled to the checkout desk.

A few weeks later the appointment appeared on my schedule. The reason for visit read QOL - quality of life. A thorough physical exam normally employs all five senses. Sometimes you only need one - smell.

When I entered the room, I was assailed with the unmistakable odor of a terminal canine patient. The dank, pungent, funk of periodontal disease; anaerobic organisms proliferating in the deep pockets around her remaining teeth, surviving on nutrients scavenged from her periodontal ligaments under the heavy, yellow-tan, cementitious, accumulation of tartar along the gum-line. The faintly bread-like scent of pyoderma; overgrowth of yeast and staph in the folds and crevices of ears and feet and flanks. Both mixing with the ammonia-like smell of old urine, dried in the dread-locks under her tail, her belly and the backs of her thighs - difficult to distiguish from the notes of uremia and ketones on her breath. All punctuated with the stale, chemical odor of cigarette smoke permanently infused into her hair and his.

He held her close to his chest and she barely turned her head to look when I stroked her ear. There was no doubt it was time.

I tried to imagine the younger version of Heidi I knew when we first met; when she was Helen’s pet and Horace was the neighbor; when she carried her tail curled over her back and strutted into the exam room straining against the leash; when she smelled of shampoo and grooming spray and sported little bows in the hair atop each ear and relished attention from any human nearby. But, seeing her in that moment, though I knew it to be true, the vision strained credulity. A scenario not unlike my imagining of her owner, and the simultaneous erosion life and time had wrought on them both.

Quiet grief, like still water, runs deep. Horace barely made a sound as he stood hunched over her now lifeless body. The ever-present tears pooled on his lower eyelids, spilled over onto his weathered cheeks and disappeared into his grey beard as they traversed the deep lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. He turned to leave. I invited him to continue to stop by to visit, though I knew he would never own another pet. He thanked me and shuffled to the door.

We never spoke again.

The search result returned a link to a page from a local funeral home dated a few years earlier. It simply listed his name, the date of his passing and the time and place of his memorial. There was no obituary. Someone was kind enough to upload three pictures. Eight people loved the post.

For most of recorded history humans have wrestled with what happens after we die. Life has always felt too purposeful, too precious to simply be over when it’s over. Beliefs on the matter depend heavily on when and where you were born, and who or what you worship. Regardless, none of our anthropocentric ancient writings give us clear guidance on animals and the after life. However, my naive take on the nature of God in my faith tradition leads me to this conclusion.

If the benevolent creative energy behind the existence of all that is, all that was, all that ever will be, cares enough about us - tragically flawed, selfish, greedy, jealous, stubborn, vindictive, broken humans - to think our souls are worth saving … dogs would most certainly be on the short list.

If so, maybe Horace, Heidi and Helen were able to pick up right where they left off and - for the first time, in a long time - experience community and joy.

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To be a teenage boy in the 1980’s was a headlong sprawl into pseudo-adulthood fueled by the energy of youth, a desire for independence, reckless naivety and unwarranted confidence. They were heady times.

Our parents came of age in a tumultuous era marked by conflict, discord and rebellion against social structures, war and injustice. Some were hippies, some were soldiers, some were McCarthy-ites, some were oblivious. Regardless, the upheaval that characterized the 1960’s - free-love, women’s rights, civil rights, Vietnam, the red-scare - shaped them and scarred them and propelled them into adulthood, many reeling with invisible wounds yet filled with the determination and conviction of youth. Adulthood for many was an ill-fitting suit. Restlessness and rebellion and a desire to be something more than carbon copies of their parents’ generation strained the seams in the fabric and bound uncomfortably where it needed to bend. Divorce rates sky-rocketed. More of us grew up in divided or single parent households than any time in US history.

Our music evolved from rock and roll into heavy metal, southern rock, pop, folk and rap and we blared it through the windows of beat up, hand-me-down cars and trucks with cheap after-market wheels and Cherry Bomb mufflers. We flocked to the theater to laugh and make-out in the back row to movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Weird Science, Footloose, Risky Business, and Top Gun. We left feeling validated and empowered to be and do and live beyond our years.

We longed for the agency of adulthood while we still possessed the vigor, virility and vitality of our youth. We strained at the bit like an impatient colt to run free, to loosen the chains of parental tyranny, those of curfews and chastity, temperance and timidity. We had no idea how unprepared we were. We didn’t know how much we didn’t know, and we didn’t care. We stumbled headlong into life - brazen, immortal - your Daedalus to our Icarus.

It was here our stories converged. I was fifteen, you were twenty. It was my last year at summer camp. It was your first year as a counselor. You seemed larger than life with your athletic swagger, your confident smile, your Wayfarer sunglasses. All the girls I wanted to talk to only wanted to talk about you. My cabinmates and I followed you around camp like ducklings. After lights out you asked if any of us wanted a dip and held out the open tin of Copenhagen you stashed in your nightstand. I was not a tobacco user, but I wasn’t about to turn it down if you were the one offering. An hour later, I barely made it to the door, dizzy and stumbling, to vomit over the porch railing. Later in the week, after lights out, we sat on the edges of our bunks while you held court in the indirect glow of a flashlight, sharing suspect wisdom about girls and dating, about how to strike up a conversation and when to play it cool, which subtle “green light” signals to look for that indicate a willingness to allow a hand under a shirt or below a waistband, and how to be nonchalant about making your move. There were thirteen of us and one of you. We became a tribe that week. You loaned us your swagger, and we wore it like a cape. Don Henley had recently released his hit song, “Boys of Summer”. You and two of your closest guy friends on staff adopted the name for your squad. We felt grafted in, honorary members by association. You became a part of our story.

You went back to college that fall. I went back to high school. We didn’t stay in touch. Months passed and amid the chaos of school and home I longed for the community I cultivated at camp. I was too old to be a camper, so I applied to be a counselor, to follow in your footsteps. As I anxiously awaited summer, I had no idea what was happening in your world. None of us were prepared for what we would learn. During staff orientation week, news of your accident began to spread. In hushed tones, mutual friends muttered, “Have you heard about Tim?” And, conflicting details of the tragedy began to be revealed.

You went back to college. It was some sort of fraternity game or prank. You climbed up a tree on campus one evening to hide and wait. Word was you were planning to surprise some unsuspecting person that was due to walk by very soon, a fraternity brother? A professor? It was never clear. There may have been alcohol involved. If so, no one ever said so explicitly. You fell and fractured your spine, your fifth cervical vertebrae. You were paralyzed from the neck down. You spent nearly a year at Shepherd Spinal center. Your once agile body, the one that ran and jumped and danced, was confined to a wheelchair, never to move the same again.

Your hometown community, Pendleton, SC, rallied to your support. Renovations to provide access and accommodate your chair, your bed, your shower chair would be required in your home. You needed new transportation, a customized conversion van with a lift and special controls. Neighbors, friends, church members organized a barbecue fundraiser to help defray the cost.

The weeks of summer passed quickly. We talked about you periodically. Our community broadened. More staff and campers became a part of our story. The last week of the summer was always filled with tearful goodbyes, hopeful wishes that friends might return the next summer and promises to stay in touch. One afternoon the last week of the summer of 1987, you returned for a visit. Staff and campers from the previous summer flocked to your van to greet you. I waited my turn. I felt awkward, you had always been a little taller than me when standing, now I was looking down at you. In your chair we couldn’t bro-hug and slap each other on the back. I didn’t know what gesture was appropriate, but you were already practiced in overcoming the awkwardness. You raised your right hand. I glimpsed the splint that supported your wrist. It had a little leather tunnel sewn into the palm that allowed you to hold a pen and a fork. Your loosely curled fingers dangled from your hand. Instinctively we touched knuckles and you, in the same comical, white-boy, Vanilla Ice-wannabe, put-on accent that I remembered so well, smiled and blurted out, “Whassup!!!”. Any apprehension I felt melted away. It was clear you were not interested in pity or special treatment. You joked about your new “high-performance” wheels and your brand new van that was sure to be a draw for the ladies. You had that ability to put everyone around you at ease. We reconnected briefly. Then another summer came to an end.

A couple of years later, we received unexpected news. You were planning to move to campus for your final year of college. After your injury, you enrolled at Clemson University to be able to commute from home, but you were planning to apply to law school two hours away. You had not lived away from home since the injury. Your family felt it would be wise for you to live on campus for a year while still close by to establish a routine while they could help out. I learned of this at staff orientation. It was of particular interest to me as I was also planning to attend Clemson University in the fall.

The universe knew what I needed that year more than I, and through the unlikeliest sequence of events, we became roommates. At freshman orientation, our student ambassador somewhat sheepishly announced there was a handicapped student who would be living on campus that year in a specially equipped apartment. He would need a roommate able to assist with his care. Any of us who might be interested were welcome to apply. I confirmed it was you, and I volunteered. You saw my name on the list and sealed the deal.

A wheelchair bound student had never lived on campus at Clemson University. Renovations were made to the Residence Hall Director’s apartment in Lever Hall to accommodate your needs. Historically, the dorm had been segregated male and female by floor, but that year it was to become a female dorm. We were the last of the Lever men. You reveled in that distinction.

The injury robbed you of physical abilities. It did not rob you of your gregarious nature, your humor, or your charisma. Our apartment opened to the area on the ground floor where all the residents waited to catch the elevator. If you were home, the door stayed open. From your desk you could greet everyone coming and going, and you did. If an especially attractive co-ed happened to be waiting for the elevator, you were known to drop your pen and ask politely for assistance, at which point you would introduce yourself and extend an open invitation to drop by whenever. Within a month of move-in day, the entire population of the building knew you and you knew them. It wasn’t uncommon for me to come home from class to find you having a lively conversation with a couch full of co-eds. You became a local celebrity. I had a bit part in your production.

Truthfully, I was wholly uninformed about what I had signed up for. I knew you were my friend. I was familiar with your injury, and I was willing to help make this year a success. I imagined there would be lifting from the chair to the bed and from the bed to the chair. I knew there was a latex bag strapped to your calf that collected urine because I had been recruited to help empty it on occasion, but I foolishly did not fully realize how much autonomy and privacy you give up when you lose control of your body from the neck down. There was no staying up late to study for a test. The caregiver came at 11:00pm whether or not you were done with the reading. There was no getting up early to catch up on missed assignments. The caregiver came at 6:00am whether you slept well or not. We shared a bedroom. When I wasn’t the one scheduled as primary attendant, I was the backup. I was the second person required to lift you from the chair to the bed or from the motorized chair to the shower chair. I knew nothing about draw sheets or condom catheters, weight shifts or decubitus ulcers. I had never shaved someone else’s face, or combed someone else’s hair. I had no idea that even paralyzed legs can have violent spasms during the night that send the pillows positioned to protect your pressure points flying across the room. I was ignorant to the fact that bowel movements were assisted and occurred on a schedule. I was ignorant as to how much of the world was out of reach because it was not handicap accessible. Yet I was amazed at how you navigated life with such grace, positivity and joy.

Time doesn’t afford us the luxury of being able to know how an alternative reality may have played out, how our decisions would have been affected, how we would have gone about our days. We can only speculate. I have often wondered how the trajectory of my life might have been affected had we not shared an apartment that year. My frustrations would have been different frustrations, my distractions different distractions. Would I have had such a formative freshman experience? I doubt it. The wisdom you imparted to me that year were lessons I couldn’t have learned otherwise.

No longer were we teenagers, huddled around a flashlight in a cabin. You were not sharing questionable advice on girls and dating or offering tobacco products to minors. Your circumstances imparted a new appreciation for life, for mobility, for mortality. You modeled for me what it meant to overcome challenges, to achieve a goal, to live with an attitude of gratitude and be joyful even in the face of severe limitations. If I ever found myself beginning to wallow in self-pity, all I had to do was look across the room at you, successfully navigating your final year of college, preparing for the LSAT, completing your applications, making the grades, despite taking twice as long to write or type as a typical student, despite the absence of handicap accessible shuttles to get you across campus to class in the rain or the cold, despite the lack of curb cuts in critical locations that resulted in a long detour to reach your destination. You persevered with a smile. There was not a bitter bone in your body. I could not have asked for a more inspiring example.

Our time together in Lever Hall was marked with laughter, fellowship, hard work and mutual achievement. We hosted parties. We went downtown. We attended games. You often volunteered to tag along when Leigh and I went out to eat so we could take your van and park close in the handicapped spaces. You graduated from Clemson University and were accepted into the University of South Carolina School of Law. We didn’t see each other much after graduation. When Leigh and I were married, you were a groomsman in our wedding, and you caught the garter at the reception. You practiced law in Anderson County, served on multiple advisory boards, then eventually enrolled in seminary at Erskine College to become a pastor. You accepted an invitation to share your testimony and some poignant life lessons with the youth group at our church. Leigh and I attended your wedding to Rhonda, and we celebrated that you had finally found your person and had the family you always dreamed of.

Learning of your passing leaves me feeling a loss I didn’t necessarily anticipate. We take relationships for granted too often. We live as if people we care about will always be available when it is convenient for us to circle back. We wait to say things that should have been said long ago. Now, I regret waiting. I regret not doing a better job maintaining our relationship, not sharing with you how much your example shaped me and informed my worldview; how much my time with you opened my eyes to an entirely different life experience; how much you inspired me to live gratefully, even in difficult circumstances. You made the world a brighter place and me a better person. With your passing the world is a little less kind, a little less generous, a little less joyful and a lot more empty. I will forever cherish our friendship.

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Dear [Lawmakers name],

You can no longer afford to continue to be complicit in this administration’s efforts to break the will of the people in Minnesota. This is no longer about undocumented immigrants and certainly no longer about safety. It is impossible to justify the heavy presence of federal agents there, and certainly impossible to justify the murder of protesters.

You somehow watched the video of Renee Good’s killing and convinced yourself she deserved to die. But, you’ve seen the videos of Alex Pretti’s murder by federal agents. You’ve heard Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem’s dismissive responses accusing him of being a domestic terrorist for attempting to help a woman knocked to the ground by the same federal agents who shot him.

There is no room for convoluted justification of what occurred.

No amount of gaslighting by the administration can change the sequence of events that unfolded and led to his death. His holstered sidearm which he legally possessed and carried is not justification. His attempts to shield his face and dodge blows from the officers is not justification. Any government officials who attempt to frame his murder as anything other than murder are complicit in his death.

You have to take a stand.

If you want to save your party and preserve democratic norms in America, you have to recognize what is happening and stand up against this tyranny. You have to speak out against the Gestapo tactics of federal agents. You have to call for the officers involved to be held accountable.

You have to recognize that federal agents murdered an American citizen.

You have tied yourself in knots trying to curry favor with the gangster in the White House and his dumpster fire administration. You stayed silent throughout the administration’s revisionist history attempts at whitewashing Jan 6. You cast aside the concerns of the capital police that day while you venerate the DHS agents in Minneapolis. If only the protesters on the streets there now could be afforded the same deference you provide to the Jan 6 protestors that stormed the capitol.

Your nauseating double standard is no more obvious than in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, who arrived at a protest with an assault rifle and shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin in 2020. You celebrated his exoneration and labeled him a hero, yet your rhetoric now demonizes the Minneapolis protesters who choose to exercise their right to protest and their right to bear arms.

You have been Trump’s lap dog for too long. You’ve defended his foreign policy. You’ve defended his immigration policy. You’ve defended his economic policy, and all it has brought is global and domestic turmoil.

We were once a beacon of democratic ideals, human rights, scientific and economic innovation. Now we are the laughing stock of the civilized world, no better than Iran or Saudi Arabia, our government killing protesters in the streets.

Our allies are coalescing around a new world order that doesn’t include us because we aren’t a reliable partner. And, this version of American imperialism that seizes other nation’s assets under the guise of regime change and threatens the sovereign territory of our closest friends has sickened everyone in our nation who values liberty and justice and desires a stable world order.

Your party is underwater on all these issues across the country. It’s time to differentiate yourself and do the right thing. All it takes is sixteen of you to stop this madness now. Sixteen people stand in the way of a better nation for 340 million people. We can’t afford another three years of this disgraceful governance.

Please. Stiffen your spine and move yourself and your colleagues towards a more sane, more effective option than what we are witnessing now in Minnesota.

Demonstrate that you still can think for yourself, and demonstrate that you still maintain some measure of integrity.

You have the chance to be on the right side of history before it is too late.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

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I dreamed about work last night.

It was a variation on a recurrent theme. A catastrophe with a patient is unfolding and all my frantic efforts to salvage the situation are thwarted by some random, outlandish circumstance. It is the veterinary equivalent of the dream where you are running, towards or away from something, but your legs just won’t move any faster, no matter how hard you try. Last night, I was in surgery, involved in a complicated procedure. It was not going well. My patient won’t stay anesthetized. I was trying to adjust the vaporizer and calling for more IV meds, struggling to hold an animal with an open abdomen on the table. Organs were spilling out. No one responded to my cries for help. My surgical drapes tear. I break sterility. My patient sits up, and it is no longer a dog, but a child. I wake up tachycardic and breathless. There are other iterations. All equally terrifying. I don’t know what this says about the level of stress and mental anguish we endure in our profession, but I suspect it indicates high levels of both.

I can’t be the only one of us having these nightmares.

Strangely enough, my days don’t feel terrifying. There are occasional moments of panic and the intermittent unexpected negative outcome. On balance, though, my interactions with patients and clients are affirming and filled with joy. Perhaps I am simply haunted by the specter of catastrophe, always one judgement call, one misdiagnosis, one medical error away from devastating a fellow human being who placed their trust in me to care for a precious family member. It is a silent, lonely burden that lurks in the background of every client/patient interaction.

It is the healer’s burden.

I am reflecting on this as I sit here with my most recent book, Cherished Belonging by Father Gregory Boyle, and I’m reminded of how similar our role in society is to his role in society.

Ministers are healers and healers are ministers.

We battle different enemies in different ways, with different words and different rituals, but ultimately, we both pour our energy and our wisdom into God’s creatures - human and animal.

We deal with their fears, their anxieties, their frailty and we seek to understand and to heal - all while managing our own fears, anxieties and frailty. Our work should be more often spoken of as a spiritual endeavor, requiring not only our knowledge and skill, but the full expanse of our human emotional capacity as well.

After 28 years of practice, I’m convinced it is not possible to deploy our full emotional capacity without considering our own emotional health and maturity, i.e. we can’t be our best self in the exam room if we don’t cultivate our best self outside the exam room. And, we can’t begin to understand or address our own needs without recognizing often our feelings of discomfort, imbalance, isolation and conflict are actually symptoms of our own brokenness, not a condition imposed on us by our circumstances, but our scattered pieces longing to be whole.

In our unwell state, we construct “us vs them” narratives to describe our angst and soothe our ache. Our clients are unreasonable. They don’t cooperate. They don’t understand how difficult our jobs are. They don’t appreciate us. They, they, they…

When the truth is, there is only us, with our naturally ego centric perspective and our unconscious devotion to self. Father Boyle asserts that self-absorption drains our life and our vitality. When we see the world differently, with an outwardly directed cherishing, we have the opportunity to “sidestep our egos and allow all mystical moments to move outside ourselves.”

So, is that the solution? I think it would be more accurate to say it is the start of a process. But, I firmly believe Father Boyle is onto something. Healthy spiritual practices, whatever that looks like, have a centering effect that helps us to see the world differently. It is a purposeful discipline that encourages us to look beyond our immediate needs and nudges us toward this “outwardly directed cherishing.”

Abraham Lincoln when questioned about his religion replied, “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad. I feel bad. That is my religion.” Oversimplified? Yes, but more complicated versions of religion have been attempting to provide solutions for humanity’s brokenness for centuries; largely unsuccessfully.

Every day, our community of healers seeks to do good.

Adherents to the Baha’i tradition speak of “the insistent self” which Father Boyle describes as, “I’m worried about me. I wonder about me. I’m anxious about me.” He goes on to assert, “Joy is the other side of our self-absorption. That when we choose to serve, it unites what is scattered.”

We chose to serve.

There was likely a mystical element to why we chose this path. One born of a natural tendency as much a part of our being as our own DNA; born of the desire within each of us to care for another living being, in a sense, to love.

But, what does that even mean?

Our English language is pitiful at expressing adequate detail around the entire concept. We love our family members and we love pizza and we love our favorite shoes and our favorite Netflix series and we love our best friend and we love our spouse, yet none of these are synonymous. Furthermore, love is not a generally accepted term for describing our professional activities.

In Cherished Belonging, Father Boyle posits that the creative force behind the existence of all that is, is at their essence a loving energy that delights in all of humanity and we, as beings created by this loving energy, are infused with a longing for this close connection in our lives as well.

Father Boyle points out, mystics throughout history have tried to put language to this phenomenon. Teresa of Avila writes, “Love begets love.” They saw the world as God’s body. Mechtild of Magdeburg envisioned “the soul losing itself in love.”

How and why does this apply specifically to us?

Teresa of Avila sums up the basic premise in Interior Castle, “When one reaches the highest degree of human maturity, one only has one question left: How can I be helpful?”

It is a question we ask of ourselves every day.

Therefore, if so much of our chosen path involves such a spiritual endeavor, spiritual nourishment is by default important for our emotional wellbeing. Our emotional wellbeing is important to our ability to empathize. Empathy is ultimately a manifestation of love. Empathy makes us better healers and better humans.

Our ability to exhibit love for humanity and the entire animal kingdom stems from a divine love, a longing for which seems innate and consistent across the human race. Yet, there is circular logic at play.

Emotional wellbeing unlocks a spiritual receptivity to this divine love and experiencing this divine love is important for emotional wellbeing.

Father Boyle makes the case that God is all powerful precisely because they are all loving. “God’s power is found in the sustaining love that is always extended our way and accompanies us. Not a God who intervenes but one who energizes us to act…We can feel God leaning into our very own wellbeing and longing for it to flourish.”

As I think of us now, the community of healers, my prayer for us all is that we flourish; that we flourish in our professional roles and we flourish in our personal roles. That we feel embraced by the creative energy within the universe responsible for the existence of all that is, all that ever will be. May knowing who we are and whose we are nurture greater emotional wellbeing and allow us to better serve ourselves and those in our care.

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It’s only been a few months since we learned of you. It shouldn’t be possible to have such strong feelings, such hope, for a minute bundle of cells just beginning to differentiate into tissues and organs. Somehow though, it is. We talk about you all the time. We wonder what you will like and dislike. What activities will come to you naturally and with which will you struggle? Are you a boy or a girl? We speculate on specific aspects of your personality. Will you be stubborn or cooperative, adventuresome or cautious, ebullient or observant? We want to know the answers to these questions and many more.

For now, we wait.

We felt you move for the first time a few months ago. A little roll of some sort. It was subtle, but real. Your mom feels it regularly, sometimes your dad too. It will be months still before we meet. Can you sense how much you are already loved? You will forever be the one that first made us grandparents. We are still getting used to the titles - Papa and LaLee. Grandparents are old people. We don’t feel old. It seems just the other day we were abloom with anxious anticipation for the arrival of your father.

I worry about your arrival. The world has become a mean place. Algorithms, media outlets, our national leaders are determined humanity shall stay divided. We don’t know how to disagree amicably anymore. History teaches us humans need little encouragement to establish ideological encampments. It is treacherous to navigate. I fear it will get worse before it gets better.

What will that mean for you?

There are still millions of kind people in the world, people who choose love over hate, community over bigotry, acceptance over judgment. These are our people. We will introduce you. They will welcome you with arms wide open and love you big. Together, with your cadre of shepherds - parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles - we will ensure you experience the loving path. You will know your worth and we will teach you generosity. We will also teach you to be bold and courageous, to recognize injustice and stand for what is right.

At 3:30 am September 20, 2025, our wait for you ended.

It was hours before we learned of your arrival. We returned to the hotel at 2 am to worry and attempt to rest. You were being stubborn about entering the world. Foreshadowing perhaps?? Your mom had been pushing for 3 hours with little progress, but your heartbeat was strong and regular. You needed a little persuasion from an oxytocin drip and more strenuous pushing before you were willing to join us. Your father’s capable hands received you into the world and passed you gently to your mother. There were tears of joy. Turns out, you were more tightly attached to your mom than the medical team anticipated. More foreshadowing?? The pulpy mass of fetal membranes that had been your lifeline for the last 39 weeks had to be forcibly removed from its interior attachment. Significant blood loss ensued. Your mom was strong and fit, but she lapsed in and out of consciousness as the medical team worked feverishly to stem the flow. Your father looked on, concerned, understanding exactly what was happening, but helpless to intervene. You were whisked away to be cleaned, suctioned and clamped, never missing a beat. After a couple hours of tense activity, the bleeding stopped, and your dad was able to send us an update at 6am. Your LaLee hadn’t slept. We all sensed something was amiss. A tide of relief washed over us once we knew you and your mom were ok.

I am not always thankful modern medicine has eliminated virtually all selection pressure on the human race. Today, I am eternally grateful.

For these first few years, you’ll be shrouded by the necessary bosoms of nurturing women in your life, but I will always be in your orbit, taking my turn to rock or burp; change or play…and waiting.

The world is full of magical spaces and glorious wonder. There are miracles happening all around us every day if we only choose to be intentional and observant: the glory of sunrise, bioluminescence of a tiny firefly, colorful leaves formed of nothing but light and air and nutrients from the soil that decorate the ceiling of nature’s cathedral then carpet the halls in the fall, butterflies that navigate thousands of miles over open ocean better than human sailors with modern technology, fish and turtles that return every year to waters and sands of their birth to continue the cycle of life, the miracle of life itself.

Your LaLee and I want to show these things when you are ready.

You will be equally full of questions, learning how to inhabit your body and your body the world. Big feelings in little bodies are confusing and frustrating. Relationships can be hard. Life can be hard.

There is so much you need to know.

Soon you will walk and run. Your time on the teat will be over. When that time comes, I invite you to take my hand. Let us adventure together. I’ll steady you. We can marvel at the majesty of creation. We can do things that feel dangerous and exhilarating, things that make us feel alive. We can swing from a rope and jump from fallen trees. We can sword fight with sticks, dig bugs in the creek and play baseball in the rain. I’ll help you stay on the path, but I’ll show you where to veer off and explore when it’s safe. Through our journeys you can begin to experience the glorious beauty around and within you. From there, you can begin to occupy your place in the world.

I will lead you for now, until the day when I follow, until the day when you lead…and steady me.

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Little dog, you were the one I never wanted but couldn’t forsake. As you lay there on my exam table, I saw your broken body in black and white images on my computer screen. Your injuries were severe, but not fatal. The wheel of the car had run over your hindquarters. There were pelvic fractures, a dislocated hip, a tibial fracture, but your bladder was intact. Your colon was not perforated, and you had good circulation and sensation in your hind feet. Your thorax and abdomen were spared. When I explained to your owners what it would take to piece you back together, a wave of nausea swept over me when I heard them say, “We can’t.”

You couldn’t have been more than two years old. As I extended my hand to pet your head, you looked up at me with a sideways glance and curled your lip; not a snarl, but a plea, a smile, a submissive gesture despite your pain, and I said to myself, “I can’t.”

I called the person who would become your person.

“I did a thing. It will take a couple of surgeries, but he’s young and otherwise healthy. He’s got a sweet disposition. We will find him a home.”

Which we did…our home.

After surgery, you walked on your two front legs like a circus dog. Your person was your jailer, your physical therapist and your nurse. She carried you in and out to poop and pee, made sure you took your medications, kept you confined while your fractures healed. You bonded. I fixed you, but she saved you. You tolerated me. You adored her.

Wherever she might be, you dragged your bed to that spot to lay beside her, upstairs, downstairs, wherever; five minutes or five hours, no matter. If you didn’t have line of sight on her, you paced until you found her. You knew the sound of her car and the barking commenced when she got within a half block of home.

You eventually healed and were able to walk and run again. We had never shared our home with a more cat-like dog. You didn’t like to be held. You didn’t fetch. You didn’t play. You sought attention on your terms, but you were attentive and ever present.

Though, the perfect pet you certainly were not.

You shed stiff, white needles that burrowed into our socks and then into our feet. You barked. Oh, that bark, never was there a more piercing bark. No wall or door could muffle or contain it. I feared for the windows and glassware every time you got started. Your favorite pastime was to grasp the end of the toilet paper in your mouth and pull it off the roll trailing behind you through the house until it either broke, or you reached your bed. Somehow, in spite of your gimpy leg, you made it up onto the dining room table that year and ate half of my birthday cake.

It is a melancholic tribute to the significance of your life that we mark time by your presence and those that came before you: the Amos era, the Alma era, the Dixie era, the Copper era. Last week ended the Max era. It was time. Your heath had declined to the point where there was no longer any question.

At least weekly for the past few months, your person and I wondered aloud to each other if the time had come. We watched the light in your eyes gradually dim. The expression of joy, once ever present, was no more. We winced as we witnessed you struggle with stairs. Years ago, you lorded over the other dogs in the household. Now, they sensed your weakened state, and we often intervened as they stood over you in your bed, challenging you, hackles raised and posture tense, their direct stare daring you to respond.

When awake, you tottered around like a robot, stilted gait, head down, arched posture, no emotion. Your senses were failing. You couldn’t see or hear well at all. You had always been very reliable with your house training, but no more. We joked when we saw you standing at the back door, “Someone let Max in. He must need to poop.” You stumbled into the swimming pool that night and we rushed outside to fish you out. We started turning on the porch light when you went out after dark.

I fought tears as I gathered the injections required to gently ease you from this life into the next, snapshots of moments we shared scrolled through my mind like a sepia toned montage. We promised you years ago we would be your advocate. We would intervene to protect you from having to endure prolonged misery when infirmity began to set in and it was no longer fun to be you. It is such an agonizing role. We wished for a clear sign from you. It never came. You just kept getting more feeble and your dementia more advanced.

Your person held you in her arms, cheeks wet with tears. I slipped the hypodermic needle under your skin and administered your sedative. You relaxed. We sniffled. As I slowly injected into your vein the purple solution that would usher your ailing body gently over the threshold from this life into whatever world awaits us on the other side, I prayed you off, in halting sentence fragments interrupted randomly by wet snuffles.

“Lord, here comes Max. We pray that you welcome him with open arms. That no longer shackled to this failing earthly body, he might be free to run again, that he might return to a place of joy and belonging, that there might be a little bed for him somewhere that he can drag to a place where the sunlight spills onto the floor and curl up to nap. We beseech you to leave your door cracked so he might always know you are near, and we hope that his humble little smile he offers when you greet him might warm your heart as it did ours.”

We lay you to rest at the edge of a clearing in the woods down by the creek, a cedar cross with simply your name to mark the grave. The house feels different now. We went through your belongings. Your bed was filthy. It had to go, but your collar is still on the island in the kitchen. The spaniels seem a little confused. The mealtime routine is different. You always ate first. It took you so long to finish. There is a deafening quiet when we return home now, your bark forever silenced. Sometimes I think I can still hear the irregular, syncopated rhythm of your nails clicking on the hardwoods, and my thoughts turn to you. Eventually, I hope I can smile when I conjure your memory. For now, I still ache with emptiness. You became a part of our life by happenstance, but thirteen years later, you left us better than you found us. We don’t always know what we need, what it is we are lacking, until the universe provides a glimpse of what is possible.

Pat Conroy in My Losing Season wrote, “When the pupil is ready, a teacher appears.” You weren’t human. I wasn’t ready. There were no lectures, no reading material, only your example. A consistent, unwavering, reliable example of dedication and devotion to those you loved; those with whom you desired a relationship. You set a high bar. At some point, I became ready. Thank you, little dog. We will forever remember you fondly.

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I don’t cry about much these days. I’ve gotten considerably more stoic in my old age, unless we are talking about births or deaths…of nice people and dogs…especially dogs…Clemson athletics, missing a big buck and maybe really good barbecue. And, oh yeah - smashing a fingernail. I’m convinced smashing a fingernail hurts on the order of childbirth. My wife says that’s bullshit.

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Regardless, I teared up a little last week when I shut my favorite bait caster in the tailgate of my truck. My adult children were unsympathetic. They said my rod was obsolete. They seem to think that fishing rods weren’t meant to last ten years. They said I should’ve replaced it a long time ago with a new, high tech model. They said I should buy one constructed of space age material promising more successful hook sets and deadly accurate casts. I disagree. I liked my rod. I knew my rod. My rod felt like an extension of my arm. With a 10” plastic worm Texas rigged on a 4/0 worm hook and an ⅛ oz bullet weight, I knew exactly how it would behave under most any circumstance. l could work that bait over any lake bottom, any structure and tell immediately when a curious largemouth gave it a little taste test.

Nonetheless, it was finished. I made the trek to our local big box outdoor supply store. I hadn’t shopped for a rod in over a decade, but I’d seen the forest of fishing rods from a distance when I’d been there shopping for other things. From far away it looked excessive. Up close it was totally ridiculous. I felt lost. It was overwhelming. Who needs that many choices in fishing rods and fishing reels and fishing rod and reel combos? There were more lengths and weights and colors than I could ever imagine, made out of materials that sounded made up by a science fiction writer on those funny mushrooms I keep hearing about.

I meandered around the fishing section picking up one rod after another, feeling the flex in the tip, feeling the contour of the handle, inspecting the eyelets. Visions of a similar experience as a child, shopping for fishing gear with my Grandad, began to materialize. I was maybe six years old, standing next to him in the fishing section of an outdoor store, looking up at his weathered hands. I studied him studying the lures and line we needed for our trip the next morning. I don’t remember him saying anything or doing anything out of the ordinary. He carefully selected what we needed and proceeded to the check out. I followed along silently, a duckling propelled by his invisible wake.

Grandad introduced me to fishing when I was barely old enough to remember being dragged out of bed while the morning light was still dim. Half awake and likely ill-tempered, I stumbled to the station wagon idling in the driveway and lazily stretched out across the back seat to sleep for the drive. It took a little less than an hour to reach the ponds on our quarter-section just outside Oklahoma City. It was a scene that repeated every other year when I was visiting until I was old enough to get myself up early and help prepare our gear.

Back home in South Carolina, there were three ponds just a short distance up the dirt road from our house, all within walking distance. In 1978, I don’t remember there being any specially branded fishing clothing or polarized sun glasses, at least not at our house. My tackle box was a beat up metal hand-me-down affair with a once iridescent blue coating. Irregular geographic patterns of exposed metal were visible where rust had gradually undermined the finish. It held a collection consisting entirely of hooks, split-shot and bobbers, maybe a Mepps rooster tail, a crank bait with beat up eye paint, a green and black beetle spin, pliers, a stringer, and a squat, rusty-lidded glass jar with an Uncle Josh Pork Frog inside.

Before I was coordinated enough to cast, I was allowed my pick from the bundle of cane poles in the corner of the garage. They stood there, collecting spider webs throughout the off-season, all pre-rigged with a length of 8 lb monofilament, a hook, a weight and a bobber. Then the year came when I graduated from the cane pole to my first Zebco 33 with the push button reel. From the shore, with the flick of my wrist, I could cast to the deep water, to the mysterious places out near the middle where I always suspected the fish were hanging out when the bite was slow along the shoreline. It felt like the whole world was suddenly within my reach.

On those summer days when I would tire from riding bikes or shooting BB guns, I would gather my rod and reel and tacklebox and kick rocks ahead of me as I walked to one of those ponds. There were no bait and tackle shops close by, and our sandy South Carolina soil was too dry and loose to reliably provide a source of worms or grubs to dig. I depended almost exclusively on what we had in the kitchen, what any southern fisher-boy in the 1970’s would reach for - Wonder bread and bacon.

I could pinch a little piece of that soft, white bread and mold it around the barb on a tiny little Eagle Claw hook like clay, pinching and mashing, mashing and pinching, until it was a firm little bead. Sunfish and Bluegill would congregate around the baited hook like buzzards, circling and darting, until one mustered the courage to snatch it up. If the bread was stale, or if the fish just weren’t interested in a bland diet, a small piece of bacon fat carefully folded and threaded on the hook would often produce results. Our neighbor kept an aluminum jon boat on the bank of one of the ponds. I helped myself to it regularly. He didn’t seem to mind, or if he did, he never said anything to me. After a few hours, I might have a stringer full of bream or I might only have a sunburn. In either case, it was magical.

Before I cared anything about my best friend’s dad’s collection of porno mags, before my interests were hijacked by cars and dating, before weekend activities included figuring out how to beg, borrow or steal a couple of beers for us to share at our impromptu field parties, before all the typical distractions of adolescence consumed my free time, a tight line and the anticipation of what might be on the other end, made my pulse quicken. There were times when I could almost feel the water and creatures within calling to me. I was powerless to resist.

Standing there in the forest of fishing rods among aisle after aisle of lures and gear promising to fill your live well with all manner of fish, I wondered why anyone would ever believe you could catch fish without braided line, without 3 rods, 6 colors of soft plastics, 4 colors of spinner baits and 5 different crankbaits, without polarized sunglasses, without branded spf 50 fishing shirts and without expensive boats and trucks and trailers.

I’d felt at least a dozen different rods the same length and weight of my recently deceased model. None quite felt the same. Maybe it was the setting; sensory overload. Maybe once I had my reel on it, and I wasn’t surrounded by dozens of strange people and billions of unnecessary fishing related SKU’s, it would feel right. Maybe I needed to pick one and give it a chance; take some time to get used to it. I don’t know. It didn’t feel right. A disembodied sense of homesickness welled up within me. Only, this feeling was heavier, a strange emotional cocktail of loss and longing for something, someplace that you treasure, and despair in knowing what you long for is no more. It is gone, merely a memory, a ghost of something that once was and will never be again.

I carefully placed the rod I had been inspecting back on the display rack, turned and began to walk toward the exit.

There’s a gas station not far from the boat ramp where we fish these days. The aisles are cramped. The floor is worn. It’s dusty. The fluorescent lights have fly specks all over them. They sell crickets and night crawlers, hot dogs, boiled peanuts, tobacco and ice cream. I’ve seen some rods in there; just a few. Maybe one of those will feel right. If it does, I’ll pick one up. And, maybe a little Wonder bread and a pack of bacon too…

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I must confess.

When you are away, my world seems to shift a bit on its axis. I inhabit the same spaces and places, but somehow they are different. Sounds and colors seem muted and time is more like a slurry than a slipstream. The bits and pieces of our life that are uniquely you, the abundance of perfectly placed, thoughtfully matched, throw pillows, the laundry organizing, the mail sorting, begin to unravel after a few days. Throw pillows gradually become arranged in a random pile somewhere near their original location, the laundry semi-sorted into simply white and non-white, the mail loosely arranged into major categories; bills, overt propaganda/trash and correspondence that needs a second look because it may be of transient interest to one of us.

The dogs seem similarly confused and out of sorts. One refuses to eat his food when I place his bowl in front of him for the first couple of feedings. You know which one. He cocks his head sideways and looks at me as if his food is only good if it comes from you. Hunger, I suppose, eventually convinces him otherwise, but it takes a minute. The others eat just fine, but at night, when it’s time to settle down for the evening, they seem restless, as if they can’t get settled. The social structure is amiss. There is one lap missing. They seem perplexed.

My routines begin to adapt to your absence. There is an autonomy and lack of accountability that is simultaneously freeing and melancholic. Is it possible to be lonely and mischievous? No matter. I suppress a twinge of guilt. Is this a lightness I sense? No negotiation, no discussion over what to watch, or eat, when to sleep, or read, what hobby to pursue, or whether to just be idle. Free to be selfish. I smoke my pipe on the porch and wallow in the sensation.

Lack of accountability breeds a bit of rebelliousness. The drying rack for laundry stays folded in the corner for the entire duration of your absence. All my clothes go in the dryer, on low mind you. I may be cavalier, but I’m not ignorant. I wash the sauce pans in the dishwasher, the fancy ones you bought a few years ago that you said never put in the dishwasher. It seems really unlikely to me that they could be designed to withstand being directly on an open flame and somehow vulnerable to damage in the dishwasher. Confident in my analysis and unfettered, I brazenly arrange them amid the plates and bowls. With an air of arrogance, I press the pots/pans setting and close the door.

Having come clean on this now, I’m fully aware that any future malfunction or premature wear that besets our cookware will immediately be attributed to the three times they were washed in the dishwasher. And, if my t-shirts happen to be tight across my shoulders or only reach to just below my waist band, my drying indiscretion will be immediately called into question. My pulse quickens at the thought of being detected. I rehearse defending my actions, then quickly suppress the thought.

A couple of days pass. The parts of my inner world that depend most on you begin to become a little disheveled, as if the metaphorical edges begin to unravel. My internal monologue begins to change in tone. I think it is a coping mechanism. I’m not entirely certain.

Around day five, rebelliousness borne of independence begins to morph into loneliness. The dogs seem more settled in their new routine dependent on only one human, totally centered on my every move. But, the opportunity to function independently, without negotiation, without compromise, has lost its luster. I function just fine. Work is an effective distraction, but the never ending list of tasks around our home that you mysteriously complete without detection and without fanfare begin to feel overwhelming. The salt shaker is empty. The plants on the porch are wilting. We are running low on dog food. The hamper is full. The fridge is empty. Excitement about preparing my meals with music and wine has dwindled into a weary desire for cold cereal and take out. The quiet at night that was so peaceful has become suffocating. I anxiously await your return.

I can’t remember what time your flight lands, but I’m certain it is today. I check the email you sent with your itinerary. There is much to do. Throw pillows to replace. Laundry to fold and put away. Countertops to clean. I must remember to get the pots and pans out of the dishwasher. Punch list complete, I confirm your arrival time. Five hours away. Not much longer. I sense some anxious anticipation in my chest. It feels like I’m smiling.

Perhaps I will sit on the front porch, and wait…

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Whetstone of creation
Thief and benefactor
Reshaping all that is, all that was, all that ever will be
Mountains, deserts, coast lines and canyons
Flora, fauna, humanity 


A day, a year, a decade
A lifetime, a millenia, an epoch
Robbing, enriching, cleaving, joining
Armed with the elements and eternity


Everything is sacred, yet nothing is spared


Animate, inanimate
Mineral, vegetable, 
Animal, spirit,
The heavens themselves


Simply substrate 
Shaped and reshaped by the promise of sunrise, the reassurance of sunset


And, in the gloaming, as the work of the day turns to memory, 
The incident light becomes rich, more tangible, 
Shadows lengthen, the ambient hue gradually more muted, sounds soften into murmur, yet details emerge
The glory, beauty and promise of morning transforms into comfortable, exquisite, serene, elegance 


The fine line at the corners of your eyes, the happy commas that frame your lips. 


Textures and contours invisible in the brilliance of midday stand in stark relief. 


A white hair clings to your brow and trails aimlessly along your cheek. 


The world transforms as if taking on a magnificent cloak. 


The smile in your eyes tells of life - of hope and disappointment, joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, satisfaction and regret


The sun, a blinding white orb only hours before, slowly, gradually changes hue as it approaches the western horizon and begins to sink into the shadow of the earth. 


You bow your head, fold your arms, burrow into my chest, my arms insufficient to shield you from the ravages of time, but adequate to hold you against me, meager protection from the storms of life.  I savor the stirring aroma of your hair,  the sensation of your skin against mine, the rhythmic rise and fall of your chest, a comforting metronome, my slowly weakening body holds your slowly weakening body, and all is well with my soul.


The gravity of the day settles on the shoulders of creation, 
Weariness and contentment swirl together as warm colors mix with the Brownian motion of life,
Blinding yellow to soothing sienna, 
The crescendo that began with the rising in the east turns to decrescendo in the west and the earth sighs. 

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June 22, 2025 - The Department of the Interior issued orders that all National Parks, monuments and museums under their jurisdiction post signs with QR codes requesting park visitors report any negative information being shared about past or living Americans.

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History is complicated.

It is multifaceted, multidimensional, filtered through the lens of human experience and therefore impossible to depict accurately from a singular perspective. There are as many accounts as there are witnesses and as many perspectives as there are social classes, ideologies and paradigms at play. Motive is often attributed, negative impacts minimized and valor manufactured. While the prevailing perspective is always provided by the stakeholders with access to power and influence, alternative versions of the narrative exist and though the plot is similar, there are different protagonists, different antagonists and different themes.

It is human nature to embrace a narrative that is sympathetic to the groups with whom we align, but this ego-centric retelling is prone to romanticize rather than record. Details that reflect poorly on our ancestors leave us wrestling with uneasy feelings of being somehow complicit or strategically advantaged. We soothe ourselves with excuses that seek to rationalize injustice by claiming our generation cannot hold historical figures accountable to a contemporary ethos. Had we been faced with the same dilemma, in the same era, with the same limited perspective and the same life experience, we may have arrived at the same unjust conclusion.

There is truth in this. However, such rationalization neglects to account for the presence of the competing perspective. And, there is always a competing perspective. It may be a tiny whisper among a cacophony of consensus, but it is always present, and it is uniformly muted in the retelling.

How we confront the multifaceted nature of our history is relevant to all of the cultural issues we face in the 21st century, from how we discuss and teach our national conflicts, to how we frame discussion around colonization and displacement of indigenous populations in the building of our nation, to how we rationalize our history as a nation that once participated in and benefited economically from chattel slavery, to how we craft consistent immigration policy. These discussions permeate our classrooms, boardrooms, courtrooms and capital buildings.

The value we obtain both as individuals and a society from a deliberate and critical examination of the events of our past, is a more comprehensive understanding of who we are and why we are.

Much as an individual might benefit from a close examination of how prior triumph and trauma have shaped their world view and contributed to their psychosocial profile, a society that is willing to do the work to completely unpack their shit and sit with their shame and grief and pain to fully examine how the ripple effects of an event have resonated over time throughout the different demographics involved, can begin to understand similar aspects of the national, communal psychosocial construct.

With a more comprehensive understanding in place, functional community relationships can begin to be restored. Reconciliation can begin to take place and rifts that result in dysfunction can begin to heal.

Communities can begin to heal.

Sanitizing or selectively constructing a comfortable narrative serves only to reinforce our collective fears, anxieties, stereotypes and blind spots. It robs us of empathy and traps us in a destructive state of delusion, division and conflict, unable to reconcile, unable to heal.

This recent order from our administration in Washington seems to indicate our leaders prefer their electorate remain in this perpetual state of dysfunction.

It doesn’t have to be this way….

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We are very much a product of our time, our place and our people. And, although we are born with innate, instinctive personal traits, talents and tendencies, our biases are shaped by our experience moving through the world.

This is as true today as it was for the generation of Americans born in the early 1900’s, only the world was a very different place. The economic, agricultural and geopolitical climate produced a population of hard working, plain-spoken, unapologetic men and women who won two world wars, lived through the great depression, survived the dust bowl and the boll weevil, witnessed the civil rights era, hippie culture and the cold war, saw the first man walk on the moon and the accompanying explosion of technology. They were scarred by scarcity, hardened by their proximity to death and loss, bewildered by the seismic shifts in pop culture and politics and incredibly proud of their nation albeit with notable blind spots they preferred not to acknowledge.

My wife’s grandfather was among them. I realized years later, I didn’t really know her, until I knew him. I became acquainted with him second hand through stories told and retold. Stories of entrepreneurship, founding a boat trailer manufacturing company behind the family home in West Columbia, SC and building it from the ground up into a small, but profitable enterprise with retailers across the southeast. I learned he had a closet full of ultra-suede blazers from the high end men’s store in downtown Columbia, one in every available color. In pictures, he was tall and thin as a young man, as he grayed his girth increased to a healthy, middle aged diameter, making his physical presence more imposing. He was the only person I knew who cleaned his patio grill after each use as thoroughly as his kitchen stove, and scowled menacingly if questioned as to why.

My wife told of the many ways that he showered her with affection, his only grandchild, throughout her young life, fishing at his pond on Sunday afternoons, buying her lavish gifts for every special occasion, paying for her private school education and her college degree, ultimately allowing her to become the first in her family to graduate with a Bachelor's of Science from a 4 year institution. I learned he always carried a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver in the glovebox of his car. I heard about his divorce and remarriage and the subsequent tension it created in the family.

There were also many accounts of his plain spoken, brutally honest demeanor, feeling no shame in pointing out that your cheeks were a little fuller or your clothes a little tighter than when he last saw you. He remained unmoved by the civil rights movement, was notorious for using racial slurs in conversation and had no use for political correctness of any sort. He struck me as the kind of man who forged full steam ahead into life on his terms, ready to overcome any obstacle in his path, maybe wrong, maybe right, but never in doubt.

When introduced, I was cautious. His gaze was direct in a way that suggested a measure of judgment. In pictures and in person, he carried his head tilted back ever so slightly, leading with his chin, looking down the bridge of his nose as he talked. I thought of him as one might think of an unpredictable family pet, generally harmless, even enjoyable, but capable of inflicting a wound, unexpected, maybe unprovoked, but not likely fatal. I was dating his only granddaughter. He was notoriously unfiltered. I got the feeling that he regarded me as one might regard a new mole on one’s face, bound to happen as we age, but not necessarily welcome and to be regarded with some amount of suspicion. I think, after a while, he realized I wasn’t cancerous, and I wasn’t going away. We got along just fine.

Eventually, things went sour with his new wife. I suppose when the fire in a man’s loins burns late in life, unrequited in his marriage bed, he gives little thought to whether the lonely, younger, middle aged woman willing to satisfy his longings might one day be more mobile, more forceful and more accurate with a broomstick when the passion decays into the mundane routine of coexistence and exposes the crazy. Claiming he was too old to endure another divorce, he moved in with my in-laws. I saw him more frequently then. A bout with pancreatic cancer and then, years later, tuberculosis, rendered him a fraction of his former self physically, but his gravelly voice and his big personality were undiminished.

Since the cancer treatment, he couldn’t seem to stay warm. It was not uncommon to find him sitting in the recliner, bundled up in a puffy parka, under a blanket, by the fire, eating cheetos. If it was evening he may be sipping his signature drink, port wine mixed with brandy, 1:1 ratio. He was a talker and was prone to inviting passersby to join him. At which point, he would normally start making proclamations about whatever happened to be going on in the world or in the household, and daring anyone to disagree. That was where I found him one winter morning when I came in from a hunt. Stiff from a cold morning spent in a ladder stand overlooking a hay field on the edge of a pine wood, I poured a cup of coffee and sat down on the sofa across the room from where he sat in his recliner. I don’t remember how the conversation started. Old men seem to sense the long shadow of mortality beginning to overtake them, and decide they need to share.

“I was hot-blooded in my day, hot as they come. Cheeto?”

“No thanks.”

“She wasn’t you know, Doris wasn’t. She was cold-blooded. I was hot blooded and she was cold-blooded. No way it could work.” Doris was his ex-wife, my wife’s grandmother.

“I hear you. That’s tough. You need anything from the kitchen?” I went to get a biscuit and sat back down.

“They never did get my medal from her. It's still over there in a box somewhere.” Some combination of indignation and resignation crept into his tone and he gazed out the window. I understood to whom and where he was referring, his second wife and the house they shared after the divorce.

“I was in Patton’s army, you know?”

I did not know. It was common knowledge among the family that he had served in World War 2, but details were either forgotten or untold. It wasn’t until much later, when recounting the details of our conversation with my wife, that I learned she had never heard these stories, and she didn’t know if her father had.

“I was first infantry.”

The silent pauses in the conversation became heavy with anticipation, and I listened intently to every word. He told of fighting across northern France into Belgium and arriving just as the Battle of the Bulge was concluding. I imagined a once green idyllic countryside pock-marked with craters, criss-crossed with barbed wire and littered with the wreckage of military vehicles and damaged buildings, dark with soot from fires ignited by bombs and mortars that preceded the foot soldiers. He told of a battle taking place across an open field. He was pinned down behind an earthen berm by enemy fire. He was returning fire with a belt-fed machine gun when his ammo suddenly stopped feeding. He yelled at his assistant gunner lying prone beside him whose job it was to feed him rounds. When he received no response he looked over his shoulder. His assistant gunner was slumped over the box of ammunition with a gaping exit wound visible in the back of his skull. He pushed his lifeless body out of the way and continued firing.

I assume they won that battle, he never really said, but he went on to describe how he and his fellow soldiers harassed the POW’s in their charge, lining them up in nothing but their underwear and making them dance for their amusement by shooting at their feet. He chuckled as if the memory still entertained him. I cringed, my contemporary perspective being much different than that of a young soldier who had lost friends to these men and their army. Mere days earlier having been in their crosshairs, the subjects of their ire and the targets of their bullets and bombs.

He recounted another mission. His unit received intel that an enemy command center had been established in a farmhouse near their position behind enemy lines. High ranking German officers were expected to be inside. His commanding officer asked for volunteers to mount a covert attack by sneaking into enemy territory under the cover of darkness. He and a fellow soldier sneaked behind enemy lines, avoiding booby traps set up along the way. When they made it to the house, they heard enemy voices within. They attached explosives to the house, armed the fuse and fled into the darkness under enemy fire, crawling across the battlefield. They made it safely back to their unit. Seconds later the charge detonated, completely destroying the house and the defensive positions within and around it. He was awarded a bronze star for his brave, selfless act. He beamed at the memory of his accomplishment and fell silent, returning to his bag of cheetos and re-situating himself under his blanket.

Reflecting on this conversation and this season of life, I’m struck by how poorly we do end of life preparations in our culture. Our natural inclination is to shelter our elderly, pretending that if we just manage their environment well enough, restrict their activity well enough, monitor their movements well enough and take them to the doctor often enough, we can preserve them indefinitely. When, in doing so, we risk robbing them of purpose and dignity, stripping them of all that gives meaning to their existence and relegating them to the status of relic, an antique implement, no longer useful, shelved, protected, moth-balled indefinitely, waiting to die.

If life expectancy is a metric of an advanced civilization, is there a way to qualify the measure? Should we give some consideration to the personal toll imposed on the individual, the family and society when we fail to encourage the elderly to continue to be productive members of society, facilitate the pursuit of their interests and allow them to have agency, even if it involves some degree of risk? We should all want to live as long as possible, but we should also want that life to be comfortable and meaningful. The tragedy in the death of an elderly human is not the death itself. Death is inevitable. The tragedy lies in the mismanagement of our final years, sacrificing meaning, purpose and quality for the hope of having a little more time, often for the benefit of the youthful at the expense of the elderly.

A few weeks later we received a call from my mother-in-law around 10am. She was in the kitchen when she heard a loud noise from the end of the house where all the bedrooms and bathrooms were located. The door to the hall bath was closed but not locked. Lying on the floor in front of the toilet in a slowly expanding puddle of blood, she found him with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. That morning, for the first time in his adult life, he had been unable to get his pants on by himself. Ashamed and frustrated, he called my mother-in-law to his bedside to help him dress. Proud, determined and fiercely independent, he vowed he would never be an invalid nor a burden. Mindful of the cleanup that would be necessary, he shuffled to the bathroom with one of the many revolvers he kept nearby at all times, closed the lid on the toilet, sat down, aimed the revolver across his chest and squeezed the trigger. The bullet missed his heart and the largest of the major vessels, but it inflicted tremendous damage on his lungs and the surrounding tissue. He bled heavily. EMS arrived and transported him to the nearest hospital where his condition deteriorated. The relentless assault of time eventually took from him what Nazi bullets and bombs never could. He died that night in ICU hours after being admitted, my young wife by his side.

My mother-in-law still lives in the house where he took his life. She cleaned the bathroom, threw out the rugs, suppressed the memory of hearing the shot and finding him on the floor. But, in the turquoise tile that covers the walls, a few inches above and to the right of the toilet tank, there is a comet shaped depression in the enamel, the tail, a tiny ladder of small, parenthetical cracks that gradually get shorter and closer together, the leading edges tinted gray by lead from the bullet as it grazed the wall after exiting his chest cavity. A tiny memorial, incidentally etched in tile by his final act, a glyph to be interpreted: fuck infirmity, fuck pain, fuck adult diapers and fuck assisted living. Or, fuck everyone who would have willingly, gladly, lovingly sacrificed to meet these needs? Courage or cowardice? Practical or selfish? Maybe both. Either way, a testament to a colorful life, a desire for independence, a stubborn nature and a soldier’s dogged determination that characterized both his life and his death - on his terms and his timing by his design…maybe wrong, maybe right, but never in doubt.

Comfort enfolds creation
Amorphous, viscous, heavy
Gently enveloping;
 
As fog rolls from hillside to valley 
Obscuring the stark lines and barren branches 
Of trees that claw at the sky and probe the ground 
Threatening to betray the secrets that lie beneath
The brittle crust of detritus accumulated on the forest floor

Shrouding the remains of triumphs and tragedy,
The life force of countless anonymous beings
Who were born, struggled and died on this earthen canvas

To the gods above who witnessed it all with calculated indifference
 
Grief, shame, greed, regret, joy, desire, infatuation
The distilled syrup of carnal pleasure and utter devastation seeped into the soil 
Transforming the brutal landscape into an ethereal majesty
The sharp corners of its truth shrouded in mist

And the land is quiet, still, serene
Enveloped in a heavenly blanket for a moment 
Before sunlight and wind disperse the succor 
Exposing the harsh, beautiful reality beneath 

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Human beings throughout time, around the globe, regardless of creed or color, have an innate understanding of justice, compassion and relationship that is critical to living in functional communities.

When theology affirms these truths it is constructive and life sustaining. When theology seeks to justify qualifying these truths; designating only certain classes, certain races, certain genders, certain ethnicities as worthy, it is destructive in ways that are inestimable.

If it does not manifest love, it is not of God. If it does not ring clearly of grace, it is not consistent with the message of Jesus’ gospel…

Thus began my wrangling…

Dear Bible,

It’s been awhile. I know. I’m sorry. I haven’t forgotten about you. I just haven’t been able to bring myself around…yet.

I suppose I just feel especially conflicted recently; for years really, if I’m honest. Everything feels so…polarized…and toxic. It’s not really your fault. What else could you have done? Although, let’s be real, what the actual fuck?? You can be really vague, and you contradict yourself. Anyone with a modicum of creativity can use your words to support any position they desire.

I do get what you’re trying to say. The story of “God’s chosen people” and all. This covenant relationship that materializes over successive generations, eventually culminating in the inclusion of all nations and races, but come on? Couldn’t you have stayed a little more consistent with the messaging?? Advocating for genocide in early chapters doesn’t really square with the “love thy neighbor” vibe later on…

Do you have any idea how many millions of people have died violent deaths at the hands of crusading church followers who justified their actions using the words on your pages??

Do you have any idea how many millions of God-fearing people have struggled with their own self-worth because supposed “church-leaders” weaponized a few words scattered here and there throughout your pages and use them to foment bigotry and prejudice??

Maybe you thought at the time you were taking a fairly liberal stance, but it’s the twenty-first century. We understand the human condition and the natural world much better than we did 2000 years ago.

It’s pretty clear you should have been a little harder on the issue of slavery and a little more empowering on the issue of women’s rights. Maybe Jesus should have actually addressed some issues related to sexuality??

I mean, holy shit, he had plenty to say about money and the kingdom of God. Save some of that air time for some other pretty critical elements of the human experience …like sexuality.

I’m sure there were plenty of attractive young men and women in the ancient near east, and I’m sure your disciples were as horny as every other twenty-something single male roaming the streets of Jerusalem. I’m also sure they had questions…

In three years of active ministry, you never once thought to go there?? Maybe that was some of the early teaching that nobody bothered to write down. Regardless, it sucks.

People can’t seem to get their shit together now, and it is partly because you don’t fill in the gaps very well. Your ambiguity in critical areas leaves us careening between the ultra-liberal and the ultra-conservative.

Scholarly liberal theologians with great imaginations and “supporting” apocryphal documents somehow have unparalleled insight into the minds and motives of ancient authors which grants them agency to massage your words, soften your edges and imagine what your message might be to a contemporary audience.

Sometimes they seem so smug. I wonder if at some point they cease to worship God and begin to worship their ability to manipulate your words. Doing so seems to please them greatly, like some sort of mental masturbation. Gross.

And, the ultra-conservative. Holy shit. Grant a few narcissistic, narrow minded church leaders power afforded to the priestly class?? What ever made you think we could get that right??

Before public schools and the printing press, you equip a handful of literate individuals with the keys to the kingdom, the authority to absolve sin, and the means to collect money. What could possibly go wrong???

I’ll tell you one thing that has certainly gone wrong.

Christian nationalism.

Spoiler alert, recipe for disaster…

Combine poorly qualified leaders espousing bad theology and empowered by the pulpit, with a few faithful followers, social media, and a huge ego. Bake for 50 years in mostly white, mostly closed, rural communities with a zero-sum collective mentality toward ethnic and racial inclusivity and…voila.

A legion of charlatans is born, mis-leading hundreds of thousands of people into believing that the flag, our freedoms and our national identity are somehow derived from a conservative reading of your pages. And, that somehow our flag, “old glory”, is not a symbol of an inclusive nation of immigrants seeking a better life and religious freedom, but a symbol of a conservative brand of Christianity meant to adorn our church signs and car windows as a sign of God’s favor.

These mis-informed theologians in the pulpits pound your pages with clenched fists using your words to divide us into camps of true believers and wretched apostates, fomenting fear and mis-trust of people who don’t look like us, talk like us or believe like us, into a mandate for some sort of Christian caliphate where history is more nostalgia than fact, and minority groups seeking access to the same opportunities white America has enjoyed for centuries can continue to be thwarted in their efforts.

It’s madness, and maddening.

A little more clarity could have gone a long way toward preventing all this. Way to go.

Although…

I suppose I haven't given up on you entirely.

I still see wisdom in your words.

I see the life and ministry of Jesus consistently depicted as one of servant leadership reaching out to the broken and marginalized with a message of love and grace.

I see evidence of a God who seeks a relationship with humanity and offers a means of reconciliation to make it possible.

I see flawed humans getting it wrong - a lot - but also getting it right.

I don’t suppose I should be shocked that we can’t seem to get it right. Maybe we do more than I realize. I should probably be more open to that possibility.

I don’t know - feels like we mess it up all the time.

Maybe I need a 21st century recalibration. Not totally convinced at this point, but it certainly deserves some consideration.

Maybe you could help with that…

Anyway…sorry to dump all this on you. Just needed to vent. We should get together soon.

Best wishes,

Dan

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Why is it that making friends is so much easier when we are kids?

Is it because childhood is the age of authenticity, the time in our lives when we are the raw version of ourselves, long before self-awareness leads to self-consciousness?

Is it because at that critical age we are all well springs of optimism, having not lived long enough to even be aware that our hearts might require guarding someday, before betrayal, before disappointment, before becoming cynical and jaded, before we eat from the tree in the middle of the garden - an age of innocence?

Were we just more free in that naive state to form close bonds with our peers? Or, was it something organic within us at that age that compelled us to connect, to share, to play, to explore the world around us and to begin to explore what it means to be in relationship with another human - to have a best friend and to be a best friend - when holding the title of best friend was a badge of honor that we cherished? Maybe most of us had a childhood best friend.

Mike was my best friend.

I don’t remember how we met - whether it was at school or just hanging out around the neighborhood. All I know is once we met, there was rarely a day that we didn’t hang together for at least a little while - especially in the summer. For probably 4 or 5 years, I was at his house or he was at mine. Before the era of helicopter parents, we roamed the dirt streets of our neighborhood looking for adventure until darkness drove us back inside. He had bunk beds and he let me claim the top bunk when I slept over. He had an older brother and an older sister which dramatically increased the cool factor. We loved to play war with the other kids in the neighborhood. We dressed in old army fatigues and developed elaborate rules of engagement. We argued about how high you had to count while lying on the ground after you’d been “shot” by the opposing team. Mike had the best patch of woods behind his house and an unfinished concrete block barn that made a great command central. When our parents weren’t looking, we sneaked our BB guns onto the battlefield and upped the stakes on the action.

We rode bikes. God almighty did we ride bikes. Nothing was out of range for us on our bikes - not the sand pits, not the painted desert, not the 7/11 gas station across Whiskey Rd or Mundy’s Grocery. We could ride some damn bikes. I still remember Mike’s dog - 3-legged-Lucky, the Irish Setter, right on our tail wherever we went. He actually had 4 legs but one of his front legs was injured in a hit-by-car incident and it always just stuck out in front of him, useless, tapping the ground with every stride. But, somehow he always kept up.

Aside... I’ll never forget the time we were fishing at the pond and somehow we hooked Lucky in the nuts. It wasn’t just any fish hook either. It was a huge crank bait with 3 treble hooks along its length. Forty years later, I don’t remember how we got it out. I just remember the wrestling match that ensued when we tried to hold him down to retrieve it!

We were like brothers, only better, because we never fought. I don’t ever remember fighting with Mike. Not that he was passive - I witnessed some fights between Mike and his older brother over the years. There was a temper underneath his normally laid back attitude if provoked. I just don’t ever remember having a reason to be mad at Mike. We were play-fighting one time. I hit him on the shin bone. Broke my hand. I had to wear a cast for a month. But, we weren’t actually angry-fighting.

We built ramps out of old boards and cinder blocks and launched ourselves over them on our bikes at top speed to see who could jump the highest and the farthest. Once, I went full-send on his bike. I wrecked and hurt my arm. I lashed out like it was his bike’s fault - left a black mark on the top crossbar from the sole of my tennis shoe. He was pretty pissed. I had never been the object of his anger. He didn’t say a word. Just picked up his bike and walked off. I felt an inch tall. Eventually, we just got over it.

We did so much stuff together. I can’t even begin to list or remember it all.

We camped out in the field across the road from his house - big groups of the kids in the neighborhood. The older siblings usually organized it and Mike and I just tagged along. We never slept. We just did stupid stuff all night long. I’m pretty sure all my parents knew is that I was spending the night at Mike’s. I didn’t feel it was necessary to share the details of our outdoor “not-sleeping” arrangement.

We antagonized our elderly neighbor, cutting through her backyard on foot to go to the creek to play or to take the short-cut to my house. On the occasions when she happened to see us trespassing, she hurled profanities in our direction in her distinct New England accent. We would break into a run and look over our shoulder to see her shaking her walking stick at us. Her scruffy little black dog must have had terrible eyesight as he was never that concerned. He stayed by her side, never offering to give chase. We were convinced if given the chance she would have beaten us within an inch of our lives with that walking stick.

If we didn’t feel like shooting BB guns or slingshots or anything else outdoor related, some afternoons we would utilize the scraps of wood in Mike’s dad’s garage to make little cars or trucks or other useless items. None survived childhood, but we were proud of them and we managed not to cut off our fingers.

After a while Mike and I started hanging out less frequently. We were getting older and our interests were evolving. I started playing football. Mike didn’t play. I tried to recruit him, but he wasn’t interested. Looking back it was really weird and sad. There was no formal goodbye. We weren’t in the same class at school anymore. We went from being inseparable to hardly seeing each other. When the winds of life blew us in different directions, the friend that I once loved like a brother, and I just grew apart quietly, gradually, unceremoniously. I was too young and naive to recognize the tragedy in a forsaken friendship.

Isn’t that ironic? The beauty of close friendship squandered on those least appreciative of its value and least capable of curating it. Does it still hold some lasting benefit? Some token of gratitude? A lesson we can carry into adulthood? Maybe... But, in this moment, all I feel is emptiness.

I never knew Mike as an adult. But, knowing him as well as I did as a child, I feel I can safely make these assumptions. He was quiet. He was kind. He was considerate. He was a devoted son, husband and father. He was a low maintenance, easy-going, fun to be around kind of person. He probably had little tolerance for drama. I wish I could sit down with him now and have a beer. We could reminisce about all the fun times we shared as best friends in grade school. But, I waited too long...We are never guaranteed tomorrow, right? Carpe diem and all the other bullshit advice we hear and never heed.

This I know. My heart aches for a friend that I once had who is no longer among the living. For the family and friends who were close to him, those fortunate enough to share in his journey, with his passing, the sunrise is a little less bright, the spring rains are a little more melancholy, our hearts are a lot less full and our memories are a lot more precious.

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My child, your journey has just begun.

As you ready yourself for this next chapter in your life, it is our prayer that as you go may you be peaceful but not passive, bold but not belligerent, courageous but not callous, determined but not foolhardy.

May your success be measured not just by your credentials and your capital, but by the lives you touch.

May your sails always be filled with the winds of hope.

May you sense the warmth of God's mercy and grace on your darkest day.

May you come to know that there are times when the best way to lead is to serve. And, that sometimes we are first when we put ourselves last.

Go forth into the world with the reassurance that you never walk alone, and may your legacy be the betterment of everything that bears your mark.

Your chin started to quiver and the corners of your mouth turned down slightly as I shared the news. I saw the tears well up along your lower eyelids. Before they spilled onto your cheek, you dabbed them away with a tissue and looked away. Bonnie nuzzled your hand and whined.

Dogs have an amazing capacity to detect grief.

I’m certain you wondered whether or not to believe what I was telling you. I was never more dangerous than during those first six months after graduation. My life was underwater. Work was a black hole, consuming my life and everything in its vicinity.

You stroked Bonnie’s head and struggled to maintain your composure. Clyde began to sense that something was wrong and he limped over to offer his condolences as well. I stumbled over the rest of my findings and the treatment options. You were gutted. What you may not know is that I was feeling gutted as well. I was new to this. It was awkward and uncomfortable sharing this painful moment with someone I had only just met. I’m sure you noticed me shifting my weight and squirming nervously as I talked. You thanked me and told me you just needed some time to think. You promised you would call me in a couple of days and let me know what you had decided. You clipped on their leashes and picked up your purse. I lingered in the exam room for a second, then turned and walked away.

Neither of us expected our day to start this way. You came in that morning to get Clyde checked out. He’d been limping for a week or so. You decided at the last minute to bring Bonnie with you as well. There was a little lump under her chin that you had noticed recently. None of this was on your radar.

I was new to the profession. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I knew enough to have unwarranted confidence in my ability. I would come to learn it was a misperception. I had merely progressed from a crawl to walk. It would be years before I would run.

I suggested that we look at Clyde first. He was limping. I questioned you at length about any strenuous activity or recent injuries that he may have sustained. You couldn’t think of any. I started at his paw and worked my way up the limb. I felt each toe and put each joint through a range of motion. I did the same for the wrist. Then, I slowly moved up the leg, squeezing firmly every few centimeters with my fingertips. I examined the elbow for any swelling. I applied pressure across the lower region of the humerus then flexed and extended the elbow joint through a full range of motion. Clyde was being very cooperative during all this. He was tense, but he never really protested – until I squeezed just below his shoulder joint. I squeezed again – more gently this time – same response. There was no doubt I had located the source of the pain. I silently wished it was in a different region of the limb.

I explained my findings and suggested we take an x-ray. You nodded in agreement. I walked Clyde back.

While Clyde was in radiology, I suggested we look at Bonnie. Bonnie was not visibly ill and she wagged her whole body in anxious anticipation of receiving attention as I approached and knelt down in front of her. You pointed out the bump under her chin. I patted her side and rubbed her belly to get acquainted. Then, I carefully ran my fingers along her neck and over the edge of her left mandible. Immediately, I felt what you felt, a firm, smooth, slightly lobulated structure under the skin right where her submandibular lymph node should be. Only, this was much larger than a normal lymph node. I felt along the ventral border of her right mandible. The lymph node on that side was enlarged as well. I sighed and sat back on my heels.

I saw the look of concern on your face.

I explained the lump was a lymph node. I explained how lymph nodes are commonly enlarged when they are stimulated by an immune response in the body – bacteria from an infected wound or a bad tooth, a virus or some other pathogenic microorganism that gains entrance to the body - all potential causes of lymph node enlargement. I suggested that we obtain a needle aspirate from one of the affected lymph nodes and make a slide of the cells that could be examined under the microscope. You agreed. I stepped out to gather my supplies.

Bonnie squirmed a little when I poked my needle into the lymph nodes to get my sample, but it only took a second and we were done. I prepared the slide and peered into the microscope. As the cells came into focus an uneasy feeling began to swell in my stomach. I was hoping for a diverse population of white blood cells. What I was seeing on Bonnie’s smear was a uniform population of immature lymphocytes. A horde of zombies reproducing at an alarming rate, crowding out normal functional tissue and replacing it with non-functional cancerous tissue. I was looking at a battalion of cancer cells gearing up for an offensive against Bonnie’s body. They would move stealthily through the lymphatics and infiltrate her internal organs – her lungs, her spleen, her liver; seeding themselves in the capillary beds and establishing new tumors that would gradually grow and crowd out normal tissue. I was looking at lymphosarcoma, and in my mind’s eye, as I sat in front of the microscope, I could see this insidious, destructive process taking place inside Bonnie.

Clyde’s x-rays were done. I got up from my seat in front of the microscope and headed back to examine his images. With one glance, the uneasy feeling in my stomach began to swell again. There, in black and white, right where Clyde was painful when I pressed, just below the shoulder joint, there was an unmistakable lesion. The normally uniform, homogenous, milky appearance of the cancellous bone was replaced by an irregular lytic pattern that more resembled Swiss cheese with tiny holes. The cortex of the bone was obliterated and the covering over the bone – the periosteum – displayed the characteristic “sunburst” pattern of bone tumors. Clyde had bone cancer in his proximal humerus – most likely osteosarcoma. I sighed and glanced at my watch. It was only 10am.

It was about 4 months or so before I saw you again. We had to help you get Clyde out of the car. He had lost about 30% of his body weight. His coat was dull and rough. He barely lifted his head up off the exam room table when I walked into the room. His front leg where the tumor originated was barely recognizable. It was three or four times normal size and covered with weeping sores. It smelled rotten. You knew his time had come. I secretly wished you would have acted sooner, but no judgement. I have made that mistake, waiting too long at the end. Even when it makes total sense in your head, it never feels right in your heart.

You stood across the table from me stroking Clyde’s fur. I asked about Bonnie. Without looking up, you replied that she had been away for a few weeks not long after her last visit. Bonnie had begun to lose weight, and her lymph nodes had gotten much larger. She stopped eating. You took her in and had her put to sleep. Now, it was Clyde’s turn.

I slipped the needle into Clyde’s vein and a small plume of blood flashed into the line. I loosened the tourniquet and slowly injected the thick, purple-ish liquid into his vein.

His body relaxed. His breathing slowed. His heart beat ceased.

He was gone.

I stood there with you in silence.

You were looking down at Clyde’s body. Your cheeks were wet with tears. Your shoulders heaved as you sobbed, but you barely made a noise. Your grief seemed especially profound. I passed you a tissue and placed my hand on your shoulder, then awkwardly withdrew it.

How fucking lame.

I expressed my sorrow for your loss. You nodded, your reply was seismic.

“I had a son.”

My breath caught. I listened, transfixed.

He was a beautiful little boy – my only child. He was born with a heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. The doctors told us there was a surgical procedure for correcting the defects, but it was very risky. We decided not to do the surgery right away. If he survived the next few weeks or months, we would consider it then. And, he did survive. He was the light of my life. He was never as big as the other kids his age. When he walked up the stairs his little lips turned blue, and he could barely catch his breath. My husband and I kept trying to convince ourselves that he would have an adequate quality of life without having to undergo surgery. The doctors had told us that the surgery would be easier if he were physically larger. So, we waited. We were terrified of the prospect of surgery. But, when he started kindergarten, we knew we had to do something. If he tried to run and play on the playground, even for a minute, he turned blue and it took him a long time to catch his breath. We agreed to have the surgery done. According to the surgeon, the procedure went well, but my little boy died in recovery.

My world fell apart that day. I cried until the tears just stopped flowing. It was as if my soul was an empty well. The next few months were a surreal blur of deafening static and darkness spent enveloped in a heavy blanket of grief and confusion. Familiar smells, sights and sounds that brought back memories of time spent with my son closed like fingers around my throat, stealing my breath, but not merciful enough to suffocate me. My husband and I separated. The loss became an impenetrable barrier that prevented any form of communication or understanding. I prayed every day that the ground would just open up and swallow me. Rescue me from my torment. In the depths of the most profound, empty, desolate loneliness that you can imagine, I decided to get a puppy – something to love that would love me back. When I arrived to meet the litter, there were only two left – a boy and a girl. I couldn’t bear the thought of separating them, so I took them both home with me.

When it seemed that my life was slipping into an abyss of darkness and despair, the companionship of two puppies rescued me. I named them Bonnie and Clyde…and now they are gone.

I stood across the table from you, both of us staring blankly at Clyde’s lifeless body. I struggled to find a word or phrase to offer some comfort or hope. After hearing your story, every thought that came to mind seemed cliché and callous. I just stood there with you as she stroked Clyde’s fur.

I never saw you again, but I’ve never forgotten you…never forgotten your story. The experience shaped me as a clinician, as a human, in profound ways.

I often wonder what happened to you.

Are you ok? Did you succumb to grief? Become addicted to something that made life tolerable? Did you end it all? Did anything I did or said make any of the experience less painful…or more painful?

I hope the darkness eventually lifted and you were able to get to a place where the memories of your son and the memories of your dogs were less suffocating and more joyful - even if bittersweet.

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“Damn it, Scarlett.”

Pete’s feet searched the dark floor in a clumsy, semi-circular motion. He clicked on the lamp on his bedside table and located his glasses. One house shoe lay beside the bed. A recalcitrant shock of thin grey hair shot skyward from his forehead.

“Where’s my shoe?”

Scarlett lay on her dog bed a few feet away. Though she was now awake, she did not move. Her brow furrowed slightly as she rolled her eyes in his direction. It was early for her.

“Scarlett... You thief. Bring me that shoe.”

Pete was never a fan of wood flooring in the bedroom. It felt bone chilling cold on his feet first thing in the morning. Dottie insisted. Carpet was too hard to clean with a dog and a kid in the house. He came in from the fields one day and it was all gone. The new wood floor was almost complete when he walked in. He felt a brief flash of anger but let it pass. He loved Dottie more than the carpet and truthfully, the wood looked nice. He resigned himself to being more intentional about wearing house shoes. For the last 15 years, he always knew where his house shoes were at any given time.

Scarlett moved her head a little in his direction. Her body language and facial expression conveyed an aura of annoyance at being disturbed to search for a missing house shoe - even if she was the one who swiped it during the night. She pushed her front feet out forward, dipped her chest to the floor and yawned. Big stretch. The slightly chewed house shoe, still moist with saliva at the toe, lay by the edge of her bed. She picked it up in her mouth and trotted over to where Pete sat on the edge of his bed. She dropped it at his feet and propped her chin on his knee. Her eyes seemed to say, “I’m sorry”. Pete knew better. Repentance implies a desire to abstain from a particular act or behavior. It would just be a matter of days before this whole scenario would play out again. Pete knew it. Scarlett knew it. Pete cupped her head in his hands. He gently wadded up her ears and rubbed the sides of her face. Her thick tail thumped approvingly against the bedside table.

“Time to get up.”

Nagging aches awakened in his back and knees, radiating up, down, out, and around, as he slowly straightened himself to full, somewhat stooped, height. He began to shuffle toward the bathroom, each step getting slightly longer and stronger than the last. Standing in front of the toilet, he fished around in the opening at the front of his pajama pants.

Come here you little bastard.

His fingers located their quarry and aimed at the bowl between his toes. Seconds ticked by. Scarlett paced anxiously.

“Just a minute, damn it.”

Pete sighed, remembering a time when he had no trouble locating his occasionally turgid organ at this hour. He vaguely recalled the sensation of vigor and stamina that had gradually evaporated from his body over the last decade or so; his crippled man-hood a harsh metaphor for the immutable wrath of time. Urine began to trickle into the toilet bowl at a frustratingly slow rate. He tapped the last of the dribbles and stuffed his shriveled-up relic back into his pajamas. Scarlett led the way to the kitchen.

Pete flipped the switch on the coffee maker as he made his way to the back door. It hissed and gurgled and belched to life, extruding a thin, black stream filling the carafe below. Pete watched Scarlett investigate all the familiar spots around the house, do her business, find a stick to chew on, then return to the back door where she stood and pleaded with her eyes to be let in. Pete acquiesced. A few minutes later, dressed and coffee in hand, Pete opened the door to the garage.

“Come on girl. Time to go.”

The sun was just beginning to peep above the eastern horizon. Pete gently laid the fishing rods in the bottom of the boat and stowed his tackle box carefully in the bow. He opened the passenger side door of the truck and Scarlett lifted her front feet onto the doorsill. Years earlier she would have leapt gracefully onto the seat, but a lifetime of glorious wear and tear had left her hips stiff and sore. Pete fully understood how she felt, and he gently lifted her back feet up onto the passenger side floorboard. Scarlett climbed into her spot on the seat and sat down trembling with anticipation. Pete checked the boat trailer one final time, then climbed into the driver’s seat and pulled slowly out of the driveway.

Familiar sights paraded by the windows of the truck as they drove. A montage of snapshots, hearkening to past experience that both illustrate and define the life they’ve shared. They passed the neighbor’s farm where the boy would often go play or read comic books with friends after school; where Dottie would spend days canning garden vegetables with the farmer’s wife in the summer and where Pete would while away countless hours in conversation with the farmer about the weather and commodity prices and politics and more about the weather. The gas station on the corner, where year after year Pete went to buy fuel for the truck and the farm equipment, sometimes on credit when crop prices or yields were disappointing and cash flow was tight. It smelled like cigarettes and diesel fuel and the display in the glass case at the register always contained the same collection of air fresheners, pocket knives, tobacco tins and lighter fluid for as long as anyone could remember. Pete and Scarlett rode in silence watching the world wake up around them through the bug speckled lens of the truck windshield.

Pete slowed and turned into the parking lot of the local diner. Several trucks already occupied their usual spots outside the front door. He stopped alongside the building where there was enough room for the boat without obstructing traffic.

“You wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Scarlett turned her head to acknowledge him but did not budge from her spot. None of this routine was new to her. Years ago the boy would wait with her. In those days she sat in the middle. She never complained, content to be between her people, but when afforded the opportunity to be by the window, she would stick her head into the wind and experience the torrent of smells that bombarded her senses. When the boy got older, he sometimes went into the diner with Pete leaving Scarlett by herself in the truck. At first, she seemed anxious, as if wondering whether they would return, but they always did. Looking back, it was both foreshadowing and preparation for when adulthood would claim him - physically, emotionally, intellectually - and leave her alone, the sole sentry of the automotive outpost, if only for the ten minutes it took Pete to get sausage biscuits and a coffee refill to go.

Scarlett eyed the shifter knob on the steering column. Pocked with tiny depressions from prior trips, she leaned over, sniffed, and tested the resiliency once more in her back teeth. Inside, Pete chatted with the cashier at the checkout counter while he waited on his order. A matronly woman with ample features and thick grey hair spiraled into a lop-sided arrangement on top of her head emerged from the kitchen with a bag in hand. Pete smiled briefly and looked away. He felt himself suck in and straighten up. A lifetime ago the round little wrinkled woman had been supple and shapely. He vaguely remembered the smooth texture and resilient weight of her adolescent breast in his hand that clumsy, drunken night after the football game. Unconsciously, he swiped at his left earlobe with the tip of his index finger, as if wiping away the unwelcome memory of a long gone, ill-advised kiss. Small towns provide no safe harbor from the wake of the past and shame has a long half-life. The same twenty or thirty people cycle through your life experience, day after day, year after year, constant reminders of ancient regret. Pete paid the cashier and returned to the truck.

“Goddamn it, Scarlett!”

Pete shoved her to the passenger side.

“I just replaced that knob.”

Scarlett cowered and looked away. Pete breathed deeply and felt a familiar upwelling of guilt in his chest, her defeated posture reminding him of the boy when he became the object of Pete’s wrath during his youth. He was not a troublemaker, nor was he weak or lazy. He just had different ideas of what constituted work.

“Here...”

Pete unfolded the wrapper from her egg biscuit and parceled it out in bite-sized pieces, a peace offering. Scarlett gingerly accepted the morsels from his outstretched fingers and with a single deft chew/swallow motion she consumed each bite eagerly. The boy used to feed her the biscuit. His face would blossom into a wide smile when she ate from his hand. Pete soaked up the sound of his musical giggle as Scarlett licked the biscuit residue from his fingers. He was convinced feeding Scarlett the biscuit was more thrilling for the boy than catching fish. No matter, either way, they were together, and it was comfortable.

Pete guided the truck and trailer out of the parking lot and onto the highway. The sun was visible on the eastern horizon casting long westward shadows. Its energy warmed the cool morning air creating an ethereal mist rising gracefully from the dew-moist vegetation carpeting the fields and fallow ground that bordered the roadway. It was his favorite time of day. For years he would rise before sunup - especially during planting and harvest season. Dottie was always up with him. They sipped coffee and pondered the weather, the growing conditions, the crops, the prices of fertilizer and herbicide, the price of corn, wheat and soybeans, the boy’s future, their future. He ate a light breakfast and headed to the shop to ready equipment before heading to the fields to tend to whatever needing tending. Dottie inventoried the pantry and the icebox, planning the day’s meals and the logistics of her to do list. Getting the boy off to school was always item number one.

Pete thought back to when Dottie first got sick. She became too weak and tired to make coffee in the morning. He took over that task, taking a cup to her bedside to seek her counsel before starting his day. The boy was old enough at that point to get himself ready for school. He seemed aloof, a little bewildered and profoundly sad during that time. It was only in retrospect that Pete realized how unmoored the experience had left him, the boy too. Pete knew the land, the equipment, the markets, the plants. The boy knew school, words, numbers, formulas, theories. Dottie knew them. She knew their likes, their dislikes, their favorite foods, their favorite activities, the comfort of their routines. She made the house a home. Pete didn’t realize any of this of course until the cancer settled into her vital organs and took her away. He never realized how much of his ability to be a father depended on her ability to be a mother. He tried to be what the boy needed. The boy didn’t know what he needed. He only knew he didn’t have what he once had. They each sought comfort in what they knew - Pete in the land, the boy in his books. They gradually became more isolated from one another. The boy became a young man and moved away to the university, consumed and content with books and ideas. Pete stayed put and continued to turn the soil, year after year.

Scarlett watched it all unfold, confused and anxious. After the boy moved out, Pete would occasionally catch her pacing and whining, going from empty room to empty room, as if she were expecting him to suddenly reappear. Never allowed on the furniture, she began to nap in Dottie’s chair. Pete turned a blind eye. One morning Pete found a worn-out sweatshirt wadded up, flattened, covered with hair in the corner of the chair cushion. It belonged to the boy. Scarlett had retrieved it off the shelf from his closet and added it to her shrine. She became Pete’s shadow, as if attempting to fill the void with a constant presence. Their conversations became more frequent, one verbal participant and one non-verbal. The emptiness became a little less suffocating, and though the darkness never relented, life went on.

Pete slowed the truck and tapped the blinker lever downward. The road to the pond was unpaved and pocked with irregularities. He navigated cautiously. Scarlett sensed their destination was near and a nervous energy welled up inside her. Pete backed the boat to the water’s edge and got out to ready the launch. He whistled to Scarlett.

“Come on.”

Scarlett bounded off the seat and ran a lap around the truck and trailer before stopping by the bow. She looked anxiously at the boat and bounced up and down on her front feet wanting to jump up but knowing she would never make it.

“Settle down. We’ll be on the water in just a second.”

Pete climbed back into the truck and eased the trailer down into the water. Scarlett heard the truck engine turn off and the ratchet of the emergency brake. Pete pushed the boat off the trailer then pulled it around onto the shore. Scarlett leapt onto the bow, forgetting about any stiffness in her hips that she may have been experiencing earlier. Pete climbed into the boat behind her.

The sun was above the eastern horizon now. Its rays glinted off the small ripples on the surface of the water like thousands of flickering lights. Soft morning winds waxed and waned effortlessly. A gauzy veil of shape-shifting fog hugged the surface of the pond. Whistles of wood ducks rising off the water drifted on the breeze. The smells of mud and water, fish and moss filled Pete with a familiar sense of belonging. A sense of calm gently washed over him. Scarlett settled into her spot on the bow. The angled rays of the morning sun illuminated her coat. She basked in its warmth.

Pete fumbled through the tackle box. His fingers brushed a silvery broken back minnow that he rarely used. The boy had given it to him for Father’s Day some years ago.

Not that one.

It was a fine lure, but losing it would be unbearable. He located the white, top water jig he was seeking. As he tied it to his line, his eye was drawn to the empty seat at the front of the boat where the boy used to sit. For a second, he saw the memory of a thoughtful 12-year-old with curious eyes and windswept hair studying the flora and the fauna, more concerned with observing than obtaining, with understanding than consuming. He saw an innocent smile that all but disappeared after Dottie was gone. He saw the boy he thought he knew but never really did. He cast. As his line sped gracefully toward the clumps of vegetation along the edge of the water, he was flooded simultaneously with peace and loneliness in this sacred space.

Scarlett heard the zing of the line leaving the reel and turned her head in Pete’s direction. She studied Pete’s face. She studied the empty seat in the bow. Pete studied her.

Does she know? Does she miss him, too? Does she know how much I miss him? She seems to…

As he slowly, carefully jigged the lure back to the boat, Pete found himself quieted and somehow hopeful. He glanced at Scarlett and softly uttered in her direction.

“I hope he’s happy.”

Part prayer, part declaration, the antecedent understood, the boy, the boy named Aaron, the boy named Aaron whose comfort came in the form of knowledge not nature. The boy named Aaron who desperately missed his mother and never understood his father. The boy named Aaron who sought solace in distance; distance from the suffocating pall that befell his unrecognizable household once his mother was gone.

He hoped Aaron was happy.

Scarlett studied his face and sighed, a voiceless witness to the invisible ache. Fully present. Fully engaged. Not capable of comprehending the complex range of human emotion, but finely attuned to its wavelength. Somehow perfectly equipped as healer, confidant, companion, yet blissfully unencumbered by the role. She lay her head between her front paws and listened attentively to the sounds - the sound of the wind stirring the leaves in the trees, ripples lapping the sides of the boat, the mechanical whir of rod and reel plying the water - the sounds of succor and solace, sustenance, and healing, seeping into the brokenness, content in the moment, oblivious, yet crucial.

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Thank you for checking out my substack! Before we go too far, please don’t feel obliged to subscribe! This is not a commercial endeavor for me at this point. I won’t be posting any premium content for now. Truthfully, I can’t guarantee what and when I will be posting, but I will! So stay tuned!

A little about me. I am a veterinarian by trade, but also a woodworker, outdoors person, conservationist, humanitarian, husband, father, grandfather, human. I write to process my thoughts. I write to cope with frustration and internal conflict. I write to communicate more clearly with people who are dear to me. I write to create something that someone may find lovely - even it is only me. Here you will find personal essays, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, political rants/reflections, theological rants/reflections (there is so much to rant about), prayers, poems.

Initially, I plan to post works that I have hoarded away in my Google drive. Some have been posted previously to an old blog or published in an obscure literary journal. If one feels familiar, that may be why. My plan is to revisit and revise. A writer’s voice evolves over time, and I want the collection here to be a current version of me. When I run out of old material to revisit and revise, I plan to post short narratives exploring the sublime in the ordinary.

I need that in this season of life.

Maybe you do too. It’s so easy to become disengaged. But, our ordinary is only ordinary because it is familiar, predictable, and therefore boring - to us. To another, our ordinary may seem extraordinary. When I am intentional, awake and fully engaged in my ordinary, I can begin to appreciate the little extraordinary elements and it invites me to a place of gratitude, to a place of satisfaction. I hope to explore that space more thoroughly and share it with you here.