My Blog

Part 2 I want to tell you about Roy before the dog, because the dog only makes sense against the man. Roy was not a sad man, exactly, and that’s the part that’s hard to explain to people. He wasn’t moping around. He laughed. He fixed your carburetor and gave you grief about your riding…

Part 2 Let me tell you about Biscuit, because you need to understand exactly how ordinary this dog is for the rest of it to land the way it landed on me. I got him at eight weeks old, nine years ago, from a litter a coworker’s dog had. He was the fattest, laziest puppy…

Part 2 Let me tell you about Ranger and my father, because you can’t understand the eleven minutes without understanding the eight years. Dad got Ranger when the dog was two, fresh out of the training program, a green young Shepherd with too much drive and not enough sense. They were paired the way K-9…

Part 2 I want to tell you about the woman before I tell you what happened, because the whole thing turns on who she was and how she moved through the world. Her name was Dana. She was in her late thirties, and she’d been paralyzed from the waist down for about six years —…

Part 2 I want to tell you about Walt, because the man matters as much as the dog. Walt’s wife, Eleanor, had died four years before. They’d been married fifty-one years. I remember the funeral — the whole street went — and I remember that in the worst of it, in those first raw months,…

Part 2 Let me tell you about Daisy, because the kind of dog she is matters to all of this. I adopted her from a shelter five years ago. She’d been found as a stray, thin and pregnant — though by the time I got her, the puppies had been weaned and adopted out, and…

Part 2 I want to tell you about Lady and my father, because you can’t feel what happened next without understanding the eight years that came before. Dad got Lady from a shelter the year after Mom passed. He always said he didn’t go looking for a dog — he went to “just look,” which…

Part 2 I need you to understand Lily before I tell you what happened next, because the question only makes sense if you know the kid. She was not a fearless child in the way people mean when they say that — not a daredevil, not reckless. She was afraid of the dark. She was…

Part 2 The dog’s name was Maple. The rescue had named her and it suited her, so we kept it. She was, I have to say, a deeply unbothered animal. You’d think a dog who’d been hit by a car and lost half her ability to move would be timid, or anxious, or broken. She…

Part 2 Let me tell you about the silence, now that you know where it’s going. For two years we lived with a dog who never made a sound, and we told ourselves a comfortable story about it. He’s mellow. He’s the strong silent type. We even joked about it — “the quietest dog in…