The Wikiness

Dear Mes, 

I wasn’t at your side in 1998 when you crossed the “rainbow bridge” to your afterlife, which I suppose holds endless green meadows teeming with flocks of pliant sheep that you direct and protect for eternity. You had your father’s shepherd heart, and you shepherded me and my growing family through my young adulthood.  You were at my side through my master’s study and my first jobs, through dating, marriage, and then kids and apartments in the city, and houses in the suburbs. You heeded my smallest commands, anticipated my behaviors, and always seemed to know when I was feeling blue. 

You enlivened each place we lived with your playful spirit, and never complained, tolerating cats, birds, reptiles, and rabbits as housemates, stoically forbearing when my kids pulled your tail or tried to ride you. You adapted to each new home, evincing the same positivity and confident smile I knew when it was just the two of us. Your vigilant intelligence watched over me, and then my wife and kids.

Thank you, old friend.

And forgive me that at the end, I wasn’t there

You were too weak to make the annual trip to the shore of Lake Michigan, a lake in which you’d plunged and swum after countless branches and balls. After 16 years of faithful friendship, your eyes and hearing failed, and you had to be carried outside to relieve yourself. I was with the kids, so you were left home with Jill, who took you on that last trip to Dr. DeVries.  In your feeble state, no one could have imagined the energetic, loving dog you’d been. 

How beautiful and strong–how capable and courageous you were!

And yet I never chose you. You were not originally mine.

That summer day in 1982, my roommate Bill Stagner, your first dad, told me he was driving out to the countryside beyond Shirley, Illinois, to follow up on an ad he’d seen in the Pantagraph and would I like to come along?

We arrived at a beat-up farmyard, and from underneath a jacked-up Dodge came a set of puppies, freshly weaned from their shiny-locked mother, a little Cocker Spaniel the farmer had hoped to keep virginal to breed for profit. But at your mother’s first menses, your real dad, the crafty worker dog herding actual sheep on this farm, got to her first. Hence, this litter of unwanted pups, free to any who wanted them. 

Bill wanted you, a little guy, all black but for a white patch over your heart. You had your mom’s silky smooth hair that grew in locks, like an afghan, or like dreadlocks.

Your behavior was as unconstrained as your hair. You had a warrior’s unquenchable spirit. Did Bill recognize your unbridled nature when he named you after the notorious Jacques Mesrine, France’s public enemy number one? 

After your first year, when it was just the two of us, and after a neutering that made you look up at me from licking your empty ball sack with accusing eyes, you grew to respect me and yield to my leadership, which made possible the loving years that followed.

Thank you again, dear friend!

P.S. Kyle, Anne, and Faith send their love.