I’d gone in to get the boys something from the refrigerator, and ended up sitting on the far wall with my back to the corner, where Charlie’s bed was, my head in my hands. The boys followed me in, uncertain.

“Da-da trine do?” asked Nate.

“What is da-da tryin’ to do?” repeated Liam.

***

I’m not sure what woke me up. It might have been the thunder, unspooling from a low, distant rumble into a flashing crack-shot that rattled the windows. Or it could have been the sudden and complete absence of sound that immediately followed as the power flicked off, taking the white noise with it. Whichever was responsible, I was suddenly awake. It was the middle of a workday, but I was home in bed. My allergies had linked hands with the giant bubble display tube virus and together, they had clothes-lined me into a sick day.

It was too dark in our bedroom, and it sounded like the wind was trying to get its fingers under the glazing and shake the glass out of the windows. I went across the room, pulled back the shade, and peered out into the side yard. It looked like a special effect from “Twister”, only with fewer cows, and more realism. I have personally weathered Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, then several typhoons in Japan, and what was playing out in front of our window now was as dramatic as anything I had seen while pulling aside any of those shades then.

Still hopping into my clothes, I met Jill in the darkened hallway. She’d been putting the boys down for their naps, and was coming out of Liam’s room.

“What the Hell?” I asked.

“It came on quick.” she responded. “When I left Nate’s room, it was a little dark outside. By the time I made it down the hallway to Liam’s room, the rain just exploded! Dude, it was like when the dancer pulled the chain in Flashdance.”

“And I just looked out Liam’s window, and saw Charlie in the driveway, running laps around the Sequoia.”

Shit. Charlie doesn’t do rainstorms. Before her hearing began to fail, she would tremble and cower at the first hint of rattling wind or smattering drops. Now, she usually sleeps soundly in her corner, peacefully oblivious. But this time, she was in it, outside - in the middle of what looked to be the worst storm we’d had since moving here. I started down the stairs, taking them two at a time.

As I opened the side door, a branch as big around as my arm fell sideways across the fence by the driveway. The rain was alternating between blowing sideways, and blowing even more sideways. It was hitting the side of the garage so hard that it looked like smoke going around the corner. The porch and driveway were papered with wet and rolling leaves, twigs, and branches. And Charlie wasn’t there.

Marveling that only minutes earlier, I had been sleeping soundly in a warm, dry bed, I opened the door, jumped the steps, and started out into the eye.

***

I’d gone out to the store to get soup, and I’d come back with a puppy.

“Do you really need a dog right now?” my mother had asked over the phone when I told her that I’d gone out to get soup, and had come back with a puppy.

“I do. Besides, she’s a Basset Hound.” I said, holding her on my lap and pulling her loose folds of skin into my hands. We’d had a much-loved Basset while I was growing up, and if you asked anyone I’d ever shared a barracks with, getting a Basset Hound immediately upon shedding the chains that bound me to the Marine Corps was right up on the list with ‘refusing to cut hair until I have to pull it out of the crack of my ass’.

She had good markings, and her face was cleanly brown and white, with starkly-defined borders between. Her ears were long and as smooth as velvet. She had thick, oversized-paws, and was puppy-clumsy and playful - her teeth were needles, and her breath was pure eau-deu-puppy. Puppy breath defies the confines of the written word, but if you’ve ever smelled it, then you’re nodding right now, and I don’t need to elaborate. It’s like ‘new car smell’, but inside a puppy’s mouth, and without the possibly harmful benzene and formaldehyde. When she growled, she sounded like a little dinosaur.

The woman at the pet store told me that they’d been calling her “Jacqueline Basset”. But that didn’t seem to fit her, and was a bad pun anyway. Later that week, I got her AKC papers in the mail, and the woman had jotted a quick note to me: “Good luck with your new puppy!”

I was living in a third-floor apartment. Sometimes at night, she would bark and howl, and I’d stack the couch and chair cushions around her crate like a fort, hoping to muffle her enough to stave off any complaints from my adjacent neighbors. There was another Basset in the complex, and sometimes I’d trade raised hands with the couple who walked it as I took my new puppy up the hill over by the apartment car wash.

At times she’d waddle up to the landing going up to the loft, and turn around and sit, looking down at me - her face sagging forward until I wondered how she could see. I’d join my fingertips to my thumbs and put my hands up over my eyes as though looking at her through binoculars. She’d start to growl, and then bark at this strange behavior. I called this her ‘barking place’, even though she soon began to bark at me immediately when I did it, regardless of where we were.

I was still simply calling her “Puppy” when I went home for Christmas later that month. My sister was pregnant, and I joked that my puppy was actually the first grandchild. Puppy got into both the candy dish and the cat box during that trip, eating things from each that she shouldn’t have. Want a new spin on Christmas cheer? Watch the looks of dawning horror on your family’s faces when a Basset puppy comes galloping into the living room, shakes her head, and sends a litter-riddled cat turd flying through the air - Christmas’ nastiest lump of coal, special delivery!

I received “Travels with Charley: In Search of America”, by John Steinbeck, as a gift that year. I unwrapped it, held it up, and looked at the dog. “You look like a Charley to me.” I told her. She wagged her little puppy tail, and it was set. Although I decided later that she looked even more like a Charlie.

Charlie slept in my lap almost the whole eight hours home.

***

“You boys leave Charlie alone!” Jill yelled across the yard. “She’s an old girl!”

I looked at Jill. “Charlie’s like: ‘What the hell? This is NOT how I envisioned my golden years! I did NOT sign up for this’.”

The boys ran towards the swingset, and Charlie slowly settled back down into the grass, possibly planning escape routes; possibly reflecting on these small, ever-present people; or perhaps simply feeling relief at settling her old bones back down into the cool grass.

***

Senior and I were sitting on the couch in his living room, watching Gordon and Jett, his Black Lab, play with each other. Gordon was going for the cheap shots and snapping at the larger, more solid dog’s front legs.

Sometimes, they would stop to rest, smiling and panting and occasionally pulling their oversized tongues into their mouths to take a swallow before letting them unroll and loll again. Sometimes one or the other would disappear and could be heard messily lapping from the water bowl in the kitchen before running back into the room. They were really stinking up the place, and if you pet one of them, you had to be prepared to wipe your hand off afterward.

Charlie lay on the couch beside, and on me, and eyeballed them, growling them away if they drew too close. She’d grown into her paws now, and each time the dogplay did come near us, I could feel her claws curl down as she tensed and readjusted. Sometimes, she would nudge me with her cold nose, and I’d absently rub my arm, then stroke her head as we sat there.

Gordon had his paws on Jett’s back, and was now using him to walk back and forth across the room, like a bear in the Russian Circus. Senior, still looking at them playing, and years away from getting any grandchildren from me, smiled.

“Son, you’ve got a lot of good years left with those dogs.”

“Yep,” I nodded.

Although I had no way of knowing it, I would reflect upon this moment many times in the coming years.

***

“We normally weigh her on the scale in the back,” I told the technician. She looked at me uncertainly.

“It’s okay,” replied another, who’d been there longer. “That’s Charlie, and Bill is family. Besides, he’s the only one who she’ll let pick her up.”

We went back into the lab area, Charlie padding closely behind me. I bent down and picked her up. She was pitifully easy to lift onto the scale.

29.4 pounds. 4 pounds less than two weeks ago, I noted sadly. And about half as much as she was in her prime. She’d been steadily losing weight over the last year, but especially over the last few months, and it appeared to be hastening. Her once-meaty haunches were now alarmingly sunken, and where there was once shiny fur and a solid back, there was only dry, shedding hair, and too much backbone. Her sharply brown and white face had been replaced with one that was now entirely white.

She’d had a kidney infection a month earlier that we’d successfully treated, but the weight was still coming off. Four days earlier, she’d started throwing up, and was unable to keep anything down, not even water. She was trying, but nothing would stay. So I made a last-minute appointment for Saturday morning to see Karen, Charlie’s main veterinarian for almost 14 years. Karen’s the kind of vet you call by her first name, and she’ll come to your house for Halloween parties. Once, when it had been a long time since I’d been in, she hugged me.

Karen or not, Charlie doesn’t do vets. As we waited in the exam room, she trembled and panted. I stroked her from the top of her pointy Bassety topknotted head down her neck, and onto her back. I spoke calmly and soothingly to her and let her know that things would be alright. She stopped panting and sat quietly at my feet.

Undoubtedly, Karen would come in and prescribe something to her to ease her stomach, and then we could concentrate on getting some weight back on her. Maybe some vegetable oil in her food would even bring her coat back a little.

She greeted us, reviewed the file, and began Charlie’s examination. I told her about the last few weeks with Charlie. I was still talking when Karen gently interrupted me.

“Stop.”

“Stop what?” I asked, blinking. But I knew.

We talked for several minutes. Eventually, Karen left us alone, and for the last time, I made a lap for Charlie. I held her and loved her, and told her that everything would be okay. I stroked her head and her back, and soon, there was a little pile of shed hair on the floor beside us. Everything she had ever been to me, she was in that moment.

She was my Old Charles; she was my funny puppy. She was my Whirl. My brown-faced puppy, barking at the top of the stairs, and my old white-faced girl, lying in my lap, exhausted.

Unashamed, I wept, and the tears I shed were those of a 23-year-old boy, freshly on his own for the first time, holding a puppy in his jacket and bringing her home. They were the tears of a man of 25, moving into his first house, and spending long weekends alone but for his hounds. They were the tears of a 30-year-old, checking to make sure his dogs were okay after being T-boned at an Interstate off-ramp. They were the tears of a man of 38, a husband and daddy now, sitting and looking down at his beloved hound and hoping desperately that he was making the right decision.

A short time later, Karen came back in, and Lori, who had also known Charlie for many years, was with her. With wavering uncertainty, I turned, and lowered my face until it rested on the top of Charlie’s head. I prepared to do the last thing for her that I ever could.

Karen didn’t say anything. The door drifted shut, and closed silently behind her.

***

I could hear a cat meowing.

I was in the driveway two houses away, and there was still no sign of Charlie. The rain was hitting me so hard that it hurt, and I was holding my elbows in front of my face as I yelled into the din. The possibility that I had left my sickbed and run into a tornado only occurred to me later.

And now, just under the deafening wind, I could hear a cat meowing - a thin ribbon twisting and curling, swept through a roaring river of sound. I turned to look towards the house, and saw not a cat, but my neighbor Clarie, standing on her side porch. She was yelling, but I could barely hear her. Her mouth was moving, and she was pointing to the house next door.

I followed her waving hand, and turned, calling Charlie again. Just then, I saw her, lower to the ground than usual, and looking like a boiled otter. She scrambled almost apologetically up to me, and I scooped her up into my arms and sprinted back through the limbs and the bedlam to our house, meeting Jill in the driveway.

Later, from a place of dryness and safety, I thought about what it must have been like for her, lost and alone in a strange place while the world fell down around her. Then, even through her cataracts, bloodshot eyes, and the perfect storm, recognizing me… and possibly against all her instincts to the contrary, coming to me. Knowing that I was there, and that she was found, and that I was her safety.

I watched her, asleep and still drying, lying on her bed in the corner, and I no longer felt sick at all.

I had protected her from the storm, as she trusted I would.

***

“What is Da-da tryin’ to do?” repeated Liam.

“Daddy’s sad. Daddy’s sad because Charlie’s not here.”

“Where’s Charlie?”

“Charlie got sick. She had to go to the vet with Daddy, and then she had to go to sleep,” I said, fighting the rising lump in my throat.

“That’s Charlie.” Liam said. “She’s old dog. And she’s sick out there.”

“That’s right, buddy. She was sick out there.” I brought them both closer to me, and Liam nodded again.

“Charlie’s gone.”

I nodded too, no longer fighting the lump.

“Yes, Charlie’s gone.”

 

 

ever type something one-handed and hold a grunting 7-mont h old as a 3.5 year repeatys incessantly “Hhide Liam hide liam hide liam!” and simultaneousy throws his blankets over your keyboard, whi?ch is ?baslanced on a pillow on your lap while a two year old yells “dada. stand. UP!” and pulls your feet?

I have.

These moments. They’re accumulating faster than I can take note of or savor them. They’re the little grooves at the edge of the Interstate that are supposed to keep you awake if you get too close - dozens and dozens, blurring together… shifting and flickering to form an unbroken whole. Together, they create a timeline, stretching out to the vanishing point - in front, and behind.

Stay awake, Da-da.

Of Rockets and the Geneva Convention

For Nate’s second birthday, he received his Most Favorite Toy Ever - The Little Einsteins Pat Pat Rocket. Rocket has a cockpit that opens, a speaker that emits rocket-type noises, and lights on the front that blink in time with these noises. He’s manned by all the Little Einsteins who Nate loves to watch in their various mass-marketed DVD adventures. Each Einstein has been given a single, defining character trait: Leo leads the group, June loves to dance, Quincy plays music, and Annie chain smokes.

Nate gleefully lumbers up and down the hallways in a barely-controlled fall, hunched over Rocket like Quasimodo, with one hand on each of Rocket’s flared back fins. Rocket’s cockpit canopy is prone to pop off a little too easily, and it is slightly beyond his ability to clip back into place. His growing concern over the fact that Rocket is in two pieces is unfortunately coupled with both an inability to fix it himself, and a stubborn insistence to attempt to do so anyway. 

“Doit! Do-EEE! Hep!” he demands, insisting on doing it himself and perplexingly, asking for help at the same time. About every third time he asks for hep, he will accept the hep. He slowly taps the loose canopy over and over against the clip it fits into. He’s like one of those hapless, disoriented beetles that try to mate with discarded beer bottles - there’s a lot of tapping, but no results. Sometimes, he comes tantalizingly close, and I resist the strong urge to simply snatch it from him, click it into place and hand it back. It’s like watching someone with an inner ear problem try to thread a needle in the back of a moving pickup.

His favorite Einstein by far is June, who loves to dance. He calls her “Dooooon!”, and the first few days he had the Einsteins, she went everywhere with him. Dinner, the bathtub… he even took her back to his crib. I’ll let the teeth marks on her head tell their own story. 

Liam also loves Rocket. When things are good, he and Nate take turns, with one watching longingly from the kitchen while the other shambles up and down the hallway. When things are bad, it’s pretty much the same thing, just with more screaming and a sudden spike in slap-fight activity. Liam has to hunch a little further over Rocket, but they both laugh and generally love it.

At night as we get one of them ready for bed, the other is usually at the sink in their bathroom. They’ve both adopted the curious and slightly disturbing practice of waterboarding the Little Einsteins. They each fill their miniature bathroom cups with water, then methodically pour water onto each Einstein’s face before dunking them headfirst into the cups, often leaving them under for extended amounts of time. Even June is not safe from this practice.

Of Tricksiness and Improbable Movements

Liam has stepped up his trickery. For example, we tell him to “Buckle up!” after he climbs into his booster seat, and he appears to be agreeably doing so, and most times, he is. However, we’ve noticed on several occasions that he was simply going through the motions, then hiding the buckles and keeping his arms over his lap. He’s palming the handcuff key.

If he’s supposed to be asleep for his nap, we’ll sometimes hear him jumping from his bed to the floor with all the stealth of a bucketful of bricks. Once, on about the sixth chandelier-shaking landing, Jill interrupted our conversation and said, “Did you know that Liam isn’t asleep? Yeah. He’s upstairs, jumping.”

Sometimes he sits on the side of his room opposite his bed and shakes the radiator pipes. Once, he was doing this, and I walked over downstairs and gave it a good shake back. I heard his footsteps scurry back across the room, where they presumably took him back into his bed and stayed there with him.

One afternoon, I opened the door unexpectedly on him, and caught him sitting on the floor with his blocks. I stared at him, and he stared at me. I struggled to keep my poker face, and he didn’t know which way the wind was going to blow. Finally, he broke the silence.

“Hi Da-da. Liam just woke up!” he lied cheerfully.

Another day I walked in to find him sitting in the middle of his bed, sucking his thumb. All his curtains had been pulled down, so I asked him how that had happened.

“Nay-nay did it. Nay pulled down all those curtains.” he replied.

“Really? So Nate got out of his crib, came into your room, pulled down all your curtains, then went back into his room and got back into his crib? Nate did that?”

He took his thumb out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and responded, “Naynay pooped in Weem’s diaper too.”

Of the Inherent Hilarity of Tooting

Sometimes, when I’m changing Liam, he tries to toot on Da-da. I’ll yell, “Don’t toot on Da-da! NO toots!”, and he’ll strain to the point that I worry he’s going to give himself a hemorrhoid. It probably doesn’t help that I’m either laughing or trying not to laugh the entire time. You try not to laugh while he’s grunting and pushing, and his ass looks like a dry-heaving starfish. Once, he succeeded in blowing the diaper cream completely off my finger, like he was blowing out a birthday candle. The lad got me.

Of Being Fat and Reaching New Gastrointestinal Milestones

Note to Sam: Sam, you’re fat. Maybe the heftiest of them all. Like, 97th-Percentile-Tubby. By definition, that means that you’ve got bigger tits than 96 out of every 100 other babies who were born when you were. Seriously, where are your wrists, dude? You look like a pack of Ball Park Franks. I bet you’d be delicious to an alligator - all chewy and pink - nothing to spit out. Of course, he’d have to get you after a diaper-change, because damn. Now that you’re on solid food, you’ve soared to new levels. You can spackle up some serious adult-sized stanky. And you smile when you do it. Of course, you smile at almost everything. And I don’t care if you annihilate a diaper or have dimples where bones should be. I love you, baby.

Of Sleeping and Waking

Sometimes, Liam does sleep when he’s supposed to, and he wakes up pretty cute and with a head and eyelids two sizes too large. Several weeks ago, he rubbed his eyes and told me, “Yellow egg is sleepy and his mouth looks like a pentagon.”

I sat on his bed next to him and listened intently.

“Purple egg isn’t sleepy; he’s just waking up slow.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant, but I appreciated the number of words that were in each sentence, and how earnestly the information was relayed to me. I don’t know if it was that he was half-asleep, or half-awake. Maybe that he’s half-and-a-three.

Nate sometimes wakes up and cries in the middle of the night. One of us will go upstairs and hold him in the cushy Pottery Barn rocker until he calms back down. If you try to put him back into his crib too early, he’ll hug you like a Spider Monkey - a Spider Monkey that can say “No! Bed!”

Sam wakes up several times a night, or so I’m told.

Of Easter

All three boys were visited by the Easter Bunny, and he hid many eggs and baskets. Nate delighted in finding his behind the hallway door, and sat down immediately to explore its many unexpected treasures. We led Liam directly to his and basically pushed him towards it. Visibly agitated, he declared “No Easter Bask-KEEET!”, thereby continuing his unbroken streak of acting in completely the opposite way that one would guess a three year old would act. Sam sat in his highchair and smiled. They all got stacking robots, spinning tops, and sugared snacks. Sam also got a helicopter that was immediately commandeered by his brothers, which caused him to smile again.

Of These Scenes I Don’t Want to Forget

Nate, hearing any unfamiliar noise, dropping whatever he’s doing, finding one of us, then tapping his ear while asking repeatedly, “Whazzat? Whazzat, Da-da? Whazzat Muh-mum?” until we tell him whazzat is.

Me, trying to wash Liam’s hair while he screams, and eventually just stepping back and letting Jill take over. Then listening to her calmly talking to him, involving him in the process, and finishing the job as he looked up and actually smiled at imaginary airplanes.

Liam and Nate, dragging their disconnected swings back under the swingset and collapsing into them, understanding the ‘what’ and the ‘where’, if not quite the ‘how’. Then, with little hands firmly grasping the sides of each swing, sitting expectantly and waiting for something to start, like the guy in the old Memorex ads. Me, walking over to them sitting there in the grass like two broken puppets, and Nate looking up and saying, “Hi Da-Da!.”

Jill, under her umbrella in the backyard, kneeling and picking up toys in the rain.

Me, standing at the kitchen window, feeling the coolness of the glass, and watching Jill picking up toys in the rain. And appreciating how lucky I am. How lucky I am to have found my perfect accomplice. How lucky I am to be holding firmly onto her hand as we’re pulled along like two kids in a crowded funhouse through this uncharted adventure. And how lucky I am to be dry, and inside, instead of out there, picking up toys.

Sunday mornings that smell like cinnamon bagels, sound like slamming screen doors, and look like small boys running through tall grass.

Sam, giving us blueberry raspberries.

Of Seizing the Moment

But too much time has now passed between when I observed these things, and when I found the time to write about them. Most of these things are already done and gone. They were really gone the moment they occurred, and trying to capture them here is like trying to catch moonlight with a butterfly net. They are as tinny echos, chasing each other down hallways like carefree footsteps and pealing up through the unfolding leaves of spring, like laughter from a sandbox.

Rocket’s canopy is now in a different room than Rocket, and Nate doesn’t seem concerned to see one without the other. This morning, I saw June laying forgotten in a plastic pumpkin, alone but for Leo, group leader. I can’t remember exactly when I last saw Nate with either of them. He’s moving on.

Liam no longer needs to resort to slight of lap to escape from his booster, as with a little effort, he can defeat his buckles even when clipped. And when he does buckle up, he clips in not around a diaper, but around a Pull-up. So there’s no need for changing tables or diaper cream. He’s moving on.

It’s also stopped raining, so Jill no longer needs her umbrella.

Thankfully, Sam is still pretty fat.

For the moment.

Fatherhood becomes me.

“You want me to play with blocks on the floor? For an hour?”

No problem.

“Wait. Put you in the laundry basket and run around the dining room? Even though you’re going to wail like you lost a finger when I tell you that Da-da’s too tired to do it a seventh time?”

Okay.

“What’s going on here? You just yanked the tray out of the DVD player, and spiked the delicate remote control into the newly refinished soft heart-pine floor?”

Alright, sir.

I miss them when I go to work. Sometimes when they’re asleep, I want to wake them up (Jill would debrain me). To my detriment, I will usually pick up their juice cup one more time, or read them one more book. Especially if they say “Puh-weeze”, or “PEECE!”, both of which mean “please” in Liamese and Naterish, respectively. Although, now Liam mimics reading the book to me, and Nate’s only good for about half a story before he snatches the book and tries to entice us into a good chase. I can usually bring him back with the guess-which-hand-has-something-in-it game. Or I’ll say, “Where’s Da-da?” and cover my face. Seconds later, fat little fingers will be prying at my hands… then, he’s mine. He’s powerless to resist.

I try to express how I feel about them, and find that all the tired phrases I’ve always dismissed as cliches really do have meaning behind them.

I feel it in Liam’s face when his deserted playground is suddenly overrun by ten-year olds just out of little-league practice, and he panics at the top of the slide. I feel it on the back of Nate’s new haircut as he yanks his hand from mine and runs back out into the flickering storm and disappears behind the shed. I want to get between them and the unknown. I want to protect them.

And as Liam rushes to me from the bottom of the slide and the little-league boys dance like Gremlins against the sunset, I love him. And when Nate toddles back from around the shed and he’s holding a dandelion that he’d seen from his swing and suddenly remembered as we ran from the storm, I love him. And I want to pick them up at the playground and in the gathering rain and just hold them and make them understand that I would do anything for them.

One day, they’ll be the ten-year olds, and the little boys I know now will be gone. And I won’t even notice the difference until I’m reminded by a photo, or a song, or a dinosaur shirt, impossibly small. Or maybe even a dent in the floor shaped like our old remote control. But by then, my perspective will have drifted and all that will be more real than this. And there’s no way I’ll be able to express to them exactly the little people they once were, because from my new perspective, I’ll have forgotten it a little bit myself.

That makes me sad, anxious, and exhilarated—all at the same time. Perhaps “sad” isn’t even the best way to describe it. Maybe it’s more of a bookmarked nostalgia… to be referenced again later, from a different part of the story.

More than I knew I could, I just love being their Da-da.

So yes, fatherhood becomes me. And now, I’ve become fatherhood.