…pause…

“Okay.”

“You know, you don’t have to say yes, just because I ask you if you want somethting.”

“I know. It’s just that I think that maybe I don’t want it, until I hear you say it. And you wouldn’t be suggesting it if it wasn’t a good idea, so I go with it. Usually the last thing I hear always sounds best. That’s why I should never be on a jury.”

“Yeah, defense counsel would totally want you.”

…pause…

“Is she hot?”

“Also, we’re going to need to make up a fake-sounding name for you, which will in turn be Photoshopped onto the fake card. And even though it will probably be too small to be picked up by say… a camera-phone, people will notice it at the pump, and we need that kind of personal touch for our advertisement. Something that says ‘This is my name… and it’s here on this card’. How about…  ’Chris Morgan’? I like that. And lastly, Chris… may I call you Chris? Lastly, we’re going to make one of your eyebrows twice as bushy as the other.”

“Cheese!” 

The ball doesn’t travel in a straight line. I mean, unless you really zing it. In the backyard, where there’s more space, you can really zing it, but the eventual outcome remains the same: It’s going to lose altitude. That’s called gravity, baby.

But what if gravity said, “Screw this, man. You guys do whatever the hell you want.” Then, you could really chuck that thing, and it’d just keep going.

It would sail in a perfectly straight line, whiffing past curious peasant farmers, exotic and surprised animals, and foreign dishes that you or I might find gross. Onward it would sail, until it came back and hit you in the back of the head 30.516605 days later, assuming both that you could hurl it at 34 miles-per-hour, and remember exactly where you’d been standing.

And sure, that might be really cool, but what if everyone did it? Then we’d have to crawl around everywhere we went, or risk being pelted by multiple transcontinental Whiffle balls, and the sky would be all dark and whiffly-sounding. And maybe not everyone has access to a Whiffle ball, so people in distant lands would have to throw other stuff, like funny hats, passports, or Berlitz language tapes.

They’d have to pass a law, and get all the countries to agree: Don’t throw things around the world, just to try to hit yourself in the back of your own head, thirty days later.

“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.”

From his bodycast, Nate blinks once for yes.

I have.

This particular weekend, I was getting ready to color my hair. I had planned to sneak away to the bathroom by myself for half an hour, but sacrificing the rest of the family’s quality of life wasn’t worth that, so I invited Liam along to “help.”

“Hey, Bean! Want to help me color my hair?”

I’m sure this sounded like a much more interesting endeavor to my three-year-old than it actually was and I could tell later that he was somewhat disappointed that I had decided to forego using the rainbow of broken nubs from his Crayola box and had, instead, opted for a bottle of goo in a very suburban shade of brown. Warm Medium Brown, actually. Man. Could there be three more neutral, boring words strung together EVER? They should have just called the shade, “Nice.” Well, it was Nice-N-Easy, so I guess they did in a way. This is getting more depressing the more I write!

Liam was extremely interested in the array of plastic gloves and bottles I removed from the “Nice” box. He looked at me and asked, “What color is Mum-Mum making her hair?” (I’m not sure when this third-person-speak of his will end, but I kind of like it right now. Might be awkward in the 5th grade if he still sounds like Tarzan.)

“Ummm…well, just brown, buddy. I’m actually trying to make the gray hair brown so it all matches.”

He looked at me, confused.

“Some of Mummy’s hair is gray. See?” I pointed to several colorless sprigs but could see that he wasn’t focusing on them. “Um…here,” I said pointing to a more prominent patch of gray at the top of my forehead. I put my finger on my forehead under the white patch .

“See there? What are those?”

Liam studied the area above my finger and sat back down, unimpressed.

“Wrinkles.” He said matter-of-factly.

You. Little. Shit.

Now. Here’s the thing. I don’t think he and I or he and ANYONE have ever had a conversation about wrinkles before. How the fuck did he know to say, ‘wrinkles’?? Are the lines and valleys on my face such that they embody the purest essence of wrinkliness and therefore transcend the normal flow of knowledge and learning, standing on their own as the epitome of “Wrinkle?” He knew without knowing that they were wrinkles. See? Depressing!

On the plus side, I now have at least two things in common with Gandalf, who is awesome. So, there’s that…