My Blog

PART 2 His name is Strong, and my husband named him, and that matters to the story, so let me back up. My husband’s name was Earl. We were married fifty-three years. He was a quiet man, a machinist, with big scarred hands and a way of fixing things without being asked. Two years before…

PART 2 I have to back up now and tell you about our son, and about a dog, because the two are the same story and I didn’t know it until that morning. Michael was a good man. I’m his father, so take that for what it’s worth, but it happens to be true. He…

PART 2 My dog’s name is Saddle. I have to tell you how he got that name, because people always ask, and because it turned out to matter in a way I could never have planned. I’d adopted him as a puppy the year before, back in Ohio, from a litter a coworker’s dog had.…

PART 2 I have to tell you about that name, because I’ve thought about it every day since, and because I think Mia told me everything in that one word and I just wasn’t ready to hear it. “Friend.” A nine-year-old with no friends, asked to name the one creature in the world that had…

PART 2 I reached in through the broken window and I got the doors unlocked and I pulled that puppy out, and the heat that came out of that car with him is something I can still feel on my face if I think about it. He was limp. That’s the thing I wasn’t ready…

Part 2:  I started volunteering at the shelter on Power Inn Road in February, on the Saturday-morning shift, mostly because my own house had gotten too quiet and I needed somewhere to be at 8 a.m. I’m forty-one. I do payroll for a hospital system. I am not a dog person in the way the…

PART 2 It was a morning in late November, three winters into the empty-box walks, with the first real snow on the ground, when Walter came out his front door and there was a dog at the bottom of the porch steps. Not a nice dog. Not a movie dog. A wreck of a dog.…

PART 2 His name is Echo, and the boy he was running after is named Caleb, and I am Caleb’s mother, and I am writing this because the internet got the dog famous before it got the story right, and I owe both of them better than that. We live in Hixson, just north of…

PART 2 Her name is Nava. We named her that because my wife is half Israeli and it means something close to “beautiful” — and because when we got her, at eight weeks old, from a backyard in Oildale where she was the only puppy left in a litter that had been advertised on a…

Part 2 I should tell you about how Marcus and Biscuit slept, because the sleeping is the whole heart of this, and you cannot understand the fourteen nights without it. It wasn’t just that they slept in the same bed. Lots of kids sleep with the dog. It was the specific architecture of it, built…