I’ll make this one short since many of us were up late with sugar junky children on Halloween, or barking dogs who were on high alert for tricksters…
There was a season in my life when I knew a very noble German short-haired pointer. Her name is “Boot.” She lives in Merced, CA, but it was New Zealand before that, and the Great Plains of Laramie, WY for her youth. It was this latter locale where she taught me a great deal about dogged perseverance. Somehow, perhaps with a tenacity only rivaled by Boot herself, my buddy Jason managed to train her to hunt upland birds. In spite of her energy as one of the fastest dogs I’ve ever seen, and her stubbornness, Jason managed to train her not to blow the birds out of cover before we could work up to her, where she would be found on point in regal fashion.
Most dogs have a distinctive personality, and it usually mirrors their owner’s. Jason and I were hunting pheasants in Southeastern Wyoming one day, and I heard Boot’s soul as a dog expressed in a screaming howl that registered with us as “displeasure!” We laughed together as a bird I winged went down in a barely frozen pond. The ice broke up as Boot swam though it, and the cadence of her howl was like a shrieking bellow that could only mean tortuous pain in the frigid water. The shock of the water’s temperature on a sunny day may have played a factor. Once Boot was fully immersed she couldn’t bail on the task, and once Boot was in she had to keep going, something still propelled her forward. The drive to grab that bird in her teeth outweighed her desire to fail. The task was simple—do what she was born to do. Jason and I weren’t great hunters, and Boot made do with our feeble efforts and mediocre shooting.
A few years later we all were in Gadsden and we did some duck hunting. I still remember Boot glaring at us about the wood ducks we missed. It is like that sometimes. But while reflecting on the last week of sub stacking I find myself thinking about dogs and their intuitive breeding that wires them to keep going. Even when the odds are stacked and the reward is a piece of slim Jim back at the truck cut with a sliver of cheese you must keep going. Somehow Boot knew this at a level that I am only now beginning to trust. If you do something long enough, eventually your friends will notice your efforts. Then maybe they will tell their friends, and eventually you might get back to the truck for that slice of cheese, and the dehydrated piece of jerky.
As a father I am struggling with my son’s delayed development issues. I thought my piece of cheese would be a conversation with my boy by now. He is nearly four, and has fewer words than most his age. We call him a “wild man” but that is because laughter is the best medicine for pain. There was a time when I wasn’t proud enough of myself as a human being because the traditional benchmark of success in society seemed to be a person’s wealth. I wrote because I wanted Trey to someday be proud of his father. Then with the culture of fear that arrived with the Covid 19 pandemic, I began practicing writing, because I thought I needed to leave something behind for him— in case I am not always around. Then he would have my words as a measure of me. I’d rather be here in person and so I am a regular gym person (rat would be hyperbolic) now, but life is really unpredictable. In an instant a person can be saved or lost.
My father-in-law just received a double lung transplant and is a regular miracle of science and divine intervention. He was on death’s door, and then in an instant a phone call from Vanderbilt changed his terminal diagnosis, to “Mr Scott, how would you like to get some new lungs today?” A few months of therapy later he is back on the road to clean health. He will take rejection meds, and be immune compromised, but he is driving forward for all the joys of life. We watched part of the Auburn game with him on Saturday. It was like this new person with fresh lungs now understood firsthand the power of prayer and of God’s hand in his life. It was beautiful to hear him talk this way. There is hope for my son too; we hope and pray he will learn to speak as his peers do, all the while knowing he will do it in his own cadence. He hasn’t been diagnosed with autism, and even if he were, we will always do our best with him.
I tell myself: Trey is taciturn by choice. He is like a laconic cowboy on the plains, and it will all be alright, someday, I hope and pray. The hope is that we can pull him into traditional behavior patterns with a lot of devotion, and energy, and time, and love. When he continuously dumps his toys on the ground rather than playing with them we laugh, because I don’t feel crying productive of anything. I love being his father, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it. He is just what God intended for us, and when it hurts we laugh (and shake our heads). Trey is our gift from Him. That is when it dawned on me, Boot was not screaming “displeasure!” Instead it is all the more likely that she was shrieking in raucous laughter. Sometimes the things we are most passionate about also hurt the most, and all we can do is laugh, and keep going.