She stopped. Out on her own, loose, free, selective hearing in full beast mode and my commands certainly not being selected, I’d never seen her stop on her own except to pee. But she stopped. And looked at a man on a bench. And I was too far away to grab her.
Three months earlier….
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Accepting a new job, your first “career” job; moving halfway across the country and leaving behind the protective watch of loving parents, even if it meant moving into the same town as your sister; buying your first home; and beginning your family with the addition of a brown ball of fur were all hallmarks of crossing the threshold into full-fledged adulthood. Foundations, the four cornerstones upon which to build a life.
I would’ve wagered the job as the first cornerstone to crumble. The ink still glistened on my Master’s degree in Healthcare Administration – what did I actually know about developing supplementary programs for patient care at a hospital? But the job was great. Fulfilling. Incredible team. Beautiful setting in Brookings, South Dakota. And a paycheck that helped pay off student loans faster than I thought. Likewise, Mom and Dad were thrilled to see me leave the nest, and being closer to my sister helped us reconnect after so many years apart. My little farmhouse on a few acres of South Dakota dirt was the right mix of strong foundation and fixer-upper to give me something to do to improve its “equity,” whatever that was.
No. It was Piper, the demonic chocolate Lab whose primary purpose in life appeared to be to torment me. Young man, young dog…this should’ve been the whole man’s best friend thing. Bonded, tackling a new life together, the stuff of movies. But I couldn’t keep this up. The “Terrible Twos” everyone warned me about were real and here and horrifying. It wasn’t fair to her. And, being honest, it wasn’t to me, either.
Covered nose-to-tail in black farm muck – equal parts mud puddles and cow pies – after another evening jaunt through the spring countryside, she stood at the edge of the back deck, chained to her tie out, and wagged, her butt swishing in obvious joy of our “game.”
“Come,” I said evenly. She wiggled over, sat, and leaned against my leg, gazing up at me adoringly. Oh sure…now you listen….
After my dive-tackle that finally corralled her, we matched. So I stripped off my jeans, t-shirt, and socks outside on the deck, unclipped her, and carried her inside for a joint shower.
On my “big move” two springs before, I’d struggled the entire ten-hour drive from Athens, Ohio, to Grinnell, Iowa, trying to come up with a name for the chocolate Lab puppy waiting for me, because, why not make a pit stop to add a brand-new puppy to this life adventure, right? How hard could a pup be? I’ve had puppies growing up before. We’ll figure all this out together! So, my small pickup packed to the brim and hand-me-down furniture solid under a tangle of tie-down straps, I chatted with the GPS navigation.
“In a quarter-mile, take exit 83B, I-65 north to Chicago.”
“What about Pearl? Opal? I wonder if there’s a brown gemstone…”
“Merge onto I-65 north to Chicago.”
“Hershey? Tootsie? No, no candy. Or coffee. So Mocha is out.”
I threw a phonebook of names at the nice lady guiding me to Grinnell. She didn’t help.
But at the breeder’s, I peered in at the five rambunctious pups in the playpen. I told them hello, and they all ignored me. Except for one. Her hazel eyes locked on me, her eight-week-old head tilted to the side, and she trundled over like an enthusiastic yet uncoordinated bear cub, unaware of how her big paws worked. A bear cub. Cub.
I briefly thought of the name Ursa, from the star constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, but realized it was too close to Ursula, the villain from The Little Mermaid. As a kid, my sister hated Ursula, and considering she was to be my primary dog-sitter, I didn’t want her to cringe each time she saw the pup.
Then I remembered the float plane Dad and I took on a Canadian fishing trip the year before. A Piper Cub.
“Piper,” I said.
Right amount of boldness. Right amount of spunk, character…Piper. The kind of pup who’d bound around with a happy attitude and keep me active and in-shape. Just the kind of spiritedness I wanted.
Or so I thought.
We started out that first night strengthening the immediate bond experienced at the breeder’s. With boxes piled inside the old farmhouse’s living room, we got our first taste of a true prairie thunderstorm, complete with a power outage and a late-night text from my parents letting me know a tornado watch had hit my new home. I didn’t even know what radio station to listen to, let alone keeping tabs on severe weather alerts.
The wind and torrents of rain slammed into the side of the house, and an ominous gushing-trickling-splatting filled the living room. As water will do, it found a way, right through the window air conditioning unit and onto the carpet of my new-old house. In pajamas and no shirt and stringing together curses, I scrounged through box after box until I found a headlamp and my tools; I tacked several towels around the air conditioner and spread some underneath the window to soak up the water. Thunder raged, lightning flickered, pretty sure we were going to get sucked up and plopped into Oz…and there sat Piper, ears back, whimpering, plastered against me, one paw lifted up, wanting nothing more than for me to hold her.
Which I did. She wagged and licked my nose, then bit it. So we wrestled on the floor and played during the storm. We really were in this together.
The next nearly two years devolved into a masterclass in canine catastrophe. Early on brought incessant play-biting, futile house-breaking, and sleepless nights from whining and yipping. That one I finally surrendered to and brought her onto my bed, a wonderful idea when paired with poor house-breaking.
As Piper got older and the realities of home ownership set in, I snagged overtime at the hospital whenever possible and needed to leave her alone for longer periods. At first, she stayed in her crate; but puppy bladders are only so big, and I wore out hosing down her crate – and her – every time I came home. So I blocked off the entry mudroom and left her in there. It looked like an explosion of birds after she made short work of my expensive down jacket. Later, I forgot to put up a pair of leather boots. So, back into the crate, followed by more accidents and baths. Once house-breaking finally sort of clicked, we tried the mudroom again, all articles of clothing removed. She set her appetite on the linoleum by the door. More home repairs. Back into the – now bigger – crate. Checkcords, electronic collars, e-fences, harnesses, whistles, treat-training…I tried it all.
“She’s bored,” co-workers told me. “She needs training and structure,” my sister said.
“Maybe this wasn’t the best idea,” I told myself.
At a year-and-a half old, a romp in the yard with a tennis ball turned into a game of hide-and-seek in a half-mile-square unharvested South Dakota cornfield when she caught scent and sight of a ring-necked pheasant. Right at dusk, no less. My frustrated searching turned to desperate pleading for her to come. I pictured her turned around, lost, lonely, a hungry coyote closing in she thought wanted to play…and then she appeared, ambling out the end of the cornfield. Smiling. Hey, Boss, did you see that? Wow! Desperation vanished; frustration returned.
More training, structured training, on the weekends had to be the answer. Everyone – and every dog – at the training class was her friend, and I’m convinced they let us stay as long as they did to serve as the examples of what not to do. Eventually, and mercifully, I spared the training staff at the pet store the trouble and let them know we wouldn’t be coming back. Pretty sure I heard a cheer while we left carrying another couple of toys for Piper to destroy.
All the while, work grew busier. Or, to be honest, I let it. At work, I actually found some peace and quiet, and made excuses to stay late or take on more responsibility, which only spread me thin and underserved our patients with stagnant programs. Kids confused and angry trying to keep up on schoolwork while battling a disease. Elderly lonely and disoriented without any visitors. Men and women grappling with radical changes to their lives. And I was supposed to be in charge of helping them. So much for the strong “job cornerstone” of this new adult life. Just another failure.
“I’ll train her tomorrow,” I’d tell myself in the evening after she’d pee by the backdoor.
“We’ll play in the yard tomorrow, Pipe,” I’d tell her when she’d drop her a in my lap, huff, and snag one of my slippers to resuming shredding it.
And now a wet Piper lie on her pad, the black farm muck mostly cleaned. I studied her, snuggled down and sleeping, exhausted from her adventures. Angelic. Blissful. And fleeting.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. A boy and his dog were supposed to be joined at the hip for a dozen or so short years, each fulfilling the other, collecting poignant memories to raise a glass to over and over.
I’d let her down. She was a dog, after all; she existed only in the world that I provided for her – and my world, right now, apparently didn’t have room for a dog. She deserved better. She deserved the proverbial farm and the kids to stretch her spunky and spirited legs. Something impossible for me to provide.
“Three more months,” I said quietly, hoping she didn’t hear. “If I – we – can’t figure this out in three more months…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
We didn’t figure it out. A month later, another cornfield chase, this time with my sister in pursuit, who came to let her out and watched her vanish like the baseball players in Field of Dreams.
Next followed a month of worry and anxiety after I came home to a tipped-over garbage can, the remnants of the previous night’s steak dinner scattered across the floor, and three piles of Piper puke. She didn’t look right. Weeks of worry and medication and vet visits and credit card debt later, she was right as rain and rarin’ to go.
I allowed myself to finish the sentence: It was time to find her a new home. A new family, one to give her what she needed. I knew I’d always be her family, but something worse was bound to happen on her adventures – outdoor, gastric, or otherwise – that would be impossible to come back from.
We’d been regulars at a dog park on the outskirts of town, a haven of freedom for her. The first time I watched how she acted around other dogs, I actually – foolishly – considered getting another dog to make her happy and maybe calm her down. Trial run: dog-sit for a friend. The other dog didn’t calm down; Piper revved the other dog up. My house suffered.
But at the park, playing and running, I caught glimpses of what her life could be like if I stepped aside. I’d made acquaintances there and figured they’d help find Piper a new home. I turned her loose inside – she bounded up to a familiar golden retriever and husky – certain this was the last time I’d be the one bringing her here. While the thought tore at my heart, I also, guiltily, felt a measure of relief.
Maybe our bond involved telepathy, for Piper, apparently, had another idea, and it involved advertising her magnificence to any and all potential families who might be watching. For when a boisterous border collie entered the area, Piper barged through the gate and took off.
She darted around the park enclosure before it dawned on me that city parks are far more dangerous than cornfields. I sprinted after her, bellowing her name while she beelined for the kid’s park of swing sets, climbing structures, and a gigantic, wooden, medieval-castle jungle-gym. She dashed inside.
In a crouch I followed, banging my head repeatedly on the structure meant, obviously, for ten-year-olds. That familiar frustration bubbled.
“Piper! Come!”
A wave of shrieks and screams and cheers and giggles rippled throughout the structure. Ah-ha! I flanked her, tracking her progress by more shouts of happy children surprised by their new friend.
I leapt off an upper-level bridge as she came around a corner, and dropped right in front of her, striking, I hoped, an intimidating superhero pose. Startled, she skidded to a stop, one ear flopped back, tongue lolling to the side, eyes wide and wild after, in her mind, the most epic game of tag we’d ever played.
“Piper…” I said calmly, standing. “Come.” I pointed to the ground in front of me.
She licked her lips and hung her head, dejected, the sad child told the play date’s over, time to go, and no ice cream on the way home because of how you behaved.
Her head shot up, ears perked. Her nose lifted, searching the breeze.
Uh oh. That fantastic Labrador nose had captured something. Back home, it usually meant a pheasant or a deer or a rabbit or fresh manure. I heard the countdown in my mind. On your mark…get set…
“Piper, don’t you even think about—”
Her head whipped toward the other side of the park and a collection of benches and picnic tables and a smattering of families enjoying outside meals unaware of the late-arriving canine party-crasher.
She bolted.
Like always, I chased.
She covered the seventy-five yards from the playground to the picnic area like a racehorse. Amid my shouts of every command I thought she knew, I only saw her bursting through the “Happy Birthday Sophie” banner stretched from one picnic awning pillar to the other, landing in the middle of hot dogs and potato salad.
She stopped. Out on her own, loose, free, selective hearing in full beast mode and my commands certainly not being selected, I’d never seen her stop on her own except to pee. But she stopped. And looked at a man on a bench. And I was too far away to grab her.
I shouted her name; she ignored me and tip-toed to him, appearing to stalk, preparing, I knew it, to leap and pounce and slobber him to death. But she continued her slow approach, her head low, her nose working overtime.
I jogged to a stop. “Piper,” I whispered, but she kept walking.
The man stared in the Lab’s general direction, but I couldn’t tell if he actually saw her. Faded jeans, sub-bleached from life on a farm, I’m sure, hung off of bony legs, and his gray t-shirt sported a ring of sweat at the neck. Shocks of white hair spilled out from under a black ballcap, pulled low to keep the August sun off his eyes. On the hat, a yellow shield containing a black diagonal stripe and a black horse head; “1st Cavalry Division” arced over the shield; “Vietnam Veteran” rested above a bar of colorful service stripes.
“Pipe…”
She sat in front of him and gently rested her chin on his knee.
The shouts and laughter from the playground faded. The music from Sophie’s birthday party vanished. The remarkable summer day blurred at the edges of my vision. All that remained was the Lab in a quiet moment with this man.
He lay a weathered, trembling hand on Piper’s head.
The tip of her tail swished back and forth, flicking woodchips to either side.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, my throat dry and voice hoarse. “She just slipped out of the park.”
The old man rubbed one of her velvety ears and slowly scratched behind it. Piper turned her head into his palm and closed her eyes.
“No trouble,” he said. “Can I give your dog a hug?”
Piper looked back at me. It’s okay, her eyes said.
Dumbfounded, I made a weird gesture I hoped conveyed, By all means. The man leaned forward and wrapped thin arms around Piper’s neck, and pattered her on the back.
Piper didn’t move a muscle.
The old man stood, tapped her on the nose and told her to be good, and shook my hand. Firmly. His eyes twinkled, and he left.
Piper shuffled to my side at heel, sat, and leaned against my leg. Together, we watched him walk away. I gazed down at my dog – my dog – and her head tilted up to me. Did I do good, Boss?
“You did good, Pipe. Real good.”
I knelt next to her and draped my arm around her shoulder.
“Maybe all you needed was a job. And I know right where we can start.”
Copyright 2023, by Jake Smith
