This month, my dog Sailor turns twelve years old. Throughout his life, we’ve done our best to spoil him with memory foam dog beds, three-foot-long rawhides and even paying a little extra for pet-friendly accommodations so we could take him with us on vacation.
My Dad doesn’t get it. “He’s just a dog,” he says.
But on Sundays, when he watches Sailor limp in after a long afternoon spent rolling in the grass, his pink tongue hanging from his graying face, Dad says the only thing we agree on all day, “It’s going to hurt when that one goes.”
We bought Sailor at a yard sale when he was just a puppy. The lady who took our money, chain-smoking in a shaded lawn chair, said he was a beagle. But when Sailor’s legs stretched to the height of a Labrador it didn’t matter.
He and I had shared too many early morning walks down Highland Avenue, he hadn’t growled when our first-born son pulled on his ears and he’d made each of those rented houses, where Katie and I were struggling to begin, feel like a home. He was family.
But now that Sailor is older than all of us, I know the big day is coming. The thought is enough to pull me away from the never-ending television to sit with him in the grass. Together we stare at the space above the trees where the sun has just gone down, at the new darkness.
As the shine of the night’s first star begins to lead my mind away from the present, to the days, months, years after the big hurt has separated those who are gone from those who are left, Sailor drags his long tongue across my face.
The stink and slobber bring me back. And here we are, soaking in the warm summer heat to the sound of bullfrogs croaking in the ditch. And I try to remember everything before it’s over.
The glow of Mom and Dad’s television across the street my crazy Paw Paw staring at me from his window the sound of my children giggling from their bedrooms Katie painting her toe nails pink
I look at Sailor, at the circle of gray around his brown eyes. My chest begins to churn with the feelings that can’t survive outside the heart. Distracted, my mind slips, and the song of the bullfrogs begins to be drowned out by the familiar high-pitched hum of worry.
Then, just in time, Sailor blesses me with a second dose of slobbery grace.
