azenyardhen

I hate standing in long lines. But, we make of it what we can.

We once stood in Central Park for the chance to get tickets to Shakespeare at the Public Theater. We arrived at the end of the line early in the morning, before the ticket office opened. The line was already very long but it grew behind us. While we waited for the line to start moving, we took turns grabbing little cat naps off the side of the path on the lawn and sipping coffee, eating bagels and small oranges. 

When the line finally started to move slow and steady we were still far from sight of the box office. But we became hopeful. We had gone into this with little hope of getting tickets but liked the idea of an adventure and were determined to try. Besides, what better way to enjoy a beautiful early summer morning in New York, than by gathering with family and friends and watching the people and the cool morning giving way to the sunshine warming the park. 

Finally, just as we could see the box office, some theatrical people who were not in the play but worked in the box office, walked down the line telling us all in loud happy theatrical voices that the box office was out of tickets and the line began to disperse.

We are all standing in the long inevitable line of life. Toward the end of the line it doesn’t look like a line at all. It is a teeming mass of humanity bumping into each other, trying to figure out which direction to go and why all of these people are in our way. By the time we realize we are in a line, we also realize we are in the line from the moment of our birth until our last breath. There is no getting out of the line and we all get the big ticket whether we want it or not.

The line of life is random to be sure. Your trip through the line can be long and uneventful or sadly, tragically, much too short. There is no sign saying “You must be this tall to ride”. Unlike elementary school, you can’t be sent to the end of the line. 

There is no front of the line but the longer you move through the line, the more keenly aware you become that your time in the line is growing short.

My mother in law, Bonnie, has entered the ‘keenly aware’ phase of the line. She is 84. She has a diagnosis. She has been handed a standby ticket. 

This is not a woman I have always gotten along with but, with each visit with a doctor, I am more regretful of any of my words or actions that may have caused her grief. This is the natural course for those of us just a little further back in the line.

Each of us can only atone for ourselves and should not expect any expression of atonement before someone disappears from the line. Folks like Bonnie are excused from making amends or a list of apologies. They have far more important business before they step out of the line and we should all respect that as we would want it respected for us. 

On previous occasions when I have accompanied a loved one as they neared the end, I have discovered their burden is only matched by their dignity and grace. In that, all that needs to be said or that we think needs to be said is wiped away and we are left with love, respect, mercy or redemption.

My mother in law and I are redeemed in that a couple of years back we recognized each other in the line and decided to be less judgmental of each other. We were barely waving distance from each other and neither of us could really say who was ahead of the other. It was time to show a little respect, each of us realizing we both have a relatively short time left in line, compared to the time we have spent in the line.

In reality we are only 16 years apart in age so when we honked at an “old” lady or got frustrated at some slow moving “old” man in the grocery store, we were really just talking about people standing near us in the line, saw ourselves in a reflection. 

I began to show her the deference I hoped people would show me and she accepted a few of my more obvious shortcomings and even complimented me on what a wonderful job her daughter and I had done in raising three pretty amazing young men. That compliment meant the world to me.

I am sincerely unequivocal in my praise of her pottery and painting. I love her art. For a long time, I had stereotyped her as the 60’s mom who worked part-time and did art part-time but in reality she had been a young woman who had been accomplished at music and art at a young age, obtained a college degree in art, got married, became a mom, taught high school art, became an interior designer, took her kids to Morocco, and summoned even more tenacity when her husband died in his mid-50’s. In context of her life and times, it was a terrible mistake on my part not to acknowledge her as an artist who also happened to be a mother and a teacher. 

Recently, I remembered to thank her again for the amazing wedding party she put on for my wife and me all those years ago and I remembered to acknowledge her as a good mother/advocate/role model who nurtured two strong daughters and one strong son. 

Bonnie seems to appreciate me now, though she doesn’t suffer fools lightly. I don’t mind walking on a few egg shells to stay in her good graces. Her little dog, Sammy, gets excited when he sees me and I am quite fond of him. Bonnie seems to trust our judgment of character.

Bonnie likes it when I watch a little football with her and cheer for her team without asking her how she is feeling or if she is in pain or if she needs anything. She enjoys it when I take her scrambled eggs and a couple of slices of perfectly browned, uncured turkey bacon, but as her appetite fades even eating that is a chore. 

The line winds through the park and around the lake and where our path ends, none of us can know. Are we lifted and float away? Do we take a conscious step and disappear? Do we sort of “pop” like a bubble emerging at the surface, dispersing into the atmosphere, rising up into space and helping forming a new star?  Do the people we love far below look up and smile and say, “I never noticed that star before?”

In our head do we hear a countdown? Do we get to pick which number the countdown starts with? 

Does a voice say to us, “You’ve reached the end of the line. While your service here is complete, humanity wants you to know how much we appreciate your effort, good nature and patience while you have been standing in the line.” 

At the moment we leave the line, do we have an instant, where we export a memory that plays in a loop in infinity, part of the soul – a beautiful day in a park drinking coffee and eating bagels and fruit and napping on the lawn, waiting to get Shakespeare tickets with people you love? 

If, at the moment we exit the line, no matter the circumstances of our earthly demise, our thoughts when it is our time can only be filled with beauty and love, then I guess there really is a heaven and it makes all this standing around in line worthwhile. 

As a young father, I had this funny little olfactory habit.

Sitting in a law school classroom…

In my little poverty law office in Eastern Kentucky…

Delivering pizzas in Austin while studying for the bar…

Sitting in a courtroom in Dallas, nervously waiting my chance in front of the judge…

Whenever I was alone and away from my wife and young sons and feeling a little lost, I often turned to the yoke of my shirt for the reassurance of family and home, and knowing everything would be okay.

There, I gently inhaled the hugs, the tears, the napping drool, and the slight odor of regurgitated breast milk. These were not dirty work shirts, just lived in, with the faint remnants of my most important job, fathering. You know your love for your child is limitless when none of the smells coming from their bodies offends you in the slightest – are even savored as a tangible vaccine against self-doubt or worry.

These days when the boys are coming home, we encourage them to travel light. Despite our continuing War on Clutter and downsizing the archive of boy stuff, collected or left behind, there are still plenty of clothes here for them to wear.

I love it when one of them grabs one of my old flannel shirts to wear and I can say, “Hey, you threw up on that!”

I love it even more when they say “Do you still want this shirt?” And I reply, “No, it doesn’t fit me anymore. You can have it, it looks great on you.” Sometimes I wonder if they ever catch a faint whiff of mama’s milk. Maybe that sweet infant smell isn’t really in the shirt but worn in my memory.

As I drove Jonas, our youngest, to the airport this morning, we started laughing about a particularly poorly planned water polo trip he took in high school to California. It was a big deal but the night before my wife and I could sense he was being a little blasé’ about his packing.

He was of the age where we insisted he was responsible for his own packing. He had traveled quite a bit on his own to swim meets and water polo events and we were putting more and more responsibility on him. Being a busy teenager was not an excuse for failing to master adult life skills.

We were not hard-asses. We were watching just enough to be sure there were no critical errors (i.e. any mistakes that would cost us money) We didn’t insulate our boys from the pain and consequences of their own irresponsibility or lack of proper prior planning. Our philosophy had a good amount of, “Leap! and (if absolutely necessary) the net will appear!” We were their net but we wanted them to understand a half-ass leap did not guarantee a full and sturdy deployment of the net.

Two miles from the house on the way to the airport Jonas says, “Dad! I forgot my phone charger!” Being a Dad, who on occasion has forgotten his charger, I took a breath and pitied the boy.  I whipped in to a phone store two blocks later and bought the kid a charger and was back on the road to the airport in less than 5 minutes.

As I pulled up at the terminal to drop him off, he thanked me, gave me a kiss, jumped out, and I started to pull away. Suddenly, he whirled around, panic on his face, and yelled through the open window, “DAD! I need tennis shoes! We have to run a mile today when we get there! I forgot my shoes!”

“What shoes do you have?”

“Just these flip flops.”

My desire (anger?) to make this a teachable moment was choked by my desire to be the dad who always has an answer. I put the truck in park and pulled off the tennis shoes I was wearing and handed them to him. They were a half size or so too big but they beat running a mile barefoot. Jonas protested but I insisted.

“I don’t need shoes to drive home.”

He thanked me and told me he loved me three times and he was gone. I drove home feeling like Dad of the Year.

This morning, when we dropped him at the airport after a great long Christmas holiday visit, he had everything he needed and he was just as grateful and told us he loved us several times. As we hugged I could faintly smell that little boy sleeping on my shoulder. On the way out of the airport I was blotting the tears of pride with the yoke of my shirt.

Maybe it’s old-timer’s syndrome, good old days reverie, or maybe, just maybe, I’m on to something…

A remodel at our house this year unearthed some of the family archives of pictures, home movies, from when I was a kid (no, those are not etched on a cave wall in France) and the videos we made of our own boys growing up. The collected, recorded history of several generations, side-tracked me from the work at hand and gave me a pleasant break while waiting for a sub-contractor to arrive.

One family myth was debunked in the process.

“You were a fish”

“You were born swimming.”

Statements like these had led me to believe that swimming had come easily to me as a child. Of course, I have little memory of my 2 and 3 year old aquatic prowess but I know I have loved the water as long as I can remember.

Yes, I was a good swimmer as far back as I can remember. At my first boy scout camp, when I was 11, I easily swam the mile swim beating all of the older boys in our troop and most of the 60 some swimmers attending the camp.

The next year, about 1967, on vacation, my grandparents rented a sailboat for my brother and me, and we promptly sailed off into the Laguna Madre near the causeway from Port Isabel to Padre Island. We clipped along for a good while in the morning breeze but when we tried to turn around, the 10 minutes of instruction we received from the hippie kid who rented us the sailboat turned out to be inadequate and the boat flipped over spilling us into the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico.

My older brother clung to the side of the boat and even though he was a Life scout, he was not a strong swimmer. I felt like the current was drawing us out into Gulf. It probably wasn’t and we would have probably been fine under any circumstance but it felt like we were in danger.

My brother was determined to try to right the ship as we had been “trained” but I was just a skinny kid with little muscle or coordination, except when I was in the water. It didn’t take me long to decide I needed to swim back to the now distant dock and get help. I remember my brother saying, “No, Wait!” as I pushed off and began swimming.

I remember being full of confidence that this would be easy if I just kept my stroke long and easy, and remembered to blow and breathe. I would raise my head occasionally to sight the direction of the dock and then let my head float and continue my rhythmic reach and pull.  When I got tired, I rolled on my back and floated and breathed and gave myself a pep talk to quell the slight panic that tried to occasionally well up in my chest. I was worried about my brother, not me.

The hippie kid and a buddy, were standing near the dock talking and heard me yell. They were shocked that a little kid who had sailed away 15 minutes ago was swimming up to the dock, without the rented boat and the other passenger. They came running and soon we were all three in a small motor boat heading toward the capsized craft, my brother holding on to the side, still trying to right the boat himself.

By this point, clearly everything was going to be okay, but the adventure of it felt like I was in an episode of “Flipper” and I hoped a dolphin would show up and we would become friends and I could move to Padre Island and become a beach bum…

Romantic, adolescent, flights of fancy aside, one fact remained: I swam a long way for help in an emergency and “saved” my brother. He always contended that if I had just helped him we could have righted the swamped boat but I left him and for the rest of our youth in which he was better at almost everything than I was, I held an ace.

“Yeah, but I swam for help and saved your life when you couldn’t swim very well.” Even if it was a slightly inflated version of the truth, he gave me a wide berth with the story because in his heart he knew he was not as comfortable in the water, and, though, almost 6 years younger, I was a better swimmer. He knew, if the situation was reversed and I was a weak swimmer, and scared, we would have been in a pickle because he surely could not have made the swim for help.

So yes, I was a really strong swimmer by the time I was an adolescent, but the home movies reveal it was not always so. The pictures flickering on the old screen from my grandfather’s Keystone 8 projector reveal a hyper-active smiling kid who loved the water but who was not water safe.

I leaped into a “bottomless pit” in Missouri, a gravel pit filled with water, and my grandfather had to jump in, fully clothed and save me. There was another time, when I dove into three feet of water and hit my head on the bottom of the pool and came up bloody and missing a small patch of hair. There was another time when my Mom, I was about 3, trying to teach me to swim, sent me up the ladder onto a dock, and I jumped off the other side before she could even get out of the water. Again, I was saved.

All of these incidents are recorded in part – the camera operator usually had to stop shooting to participate in the rescue – on home movies and it becomes clear that my Mom early on grasped an important fact about me and water. First, I loved it and second, I was a serious danger to myself. She understood clearly, that I needed to learn to swim or my lack of respect for the water would take me away.

So, despite my hyper-activity she patiently set out to teach me to swim. She relentlessly wrestled with me to teach the proper body position and get me to blow bubbles. A life jacket was only used for a brief break in the lessons, giving her a chance to swim some laps.

The movies show her long beautiful, effortless stroke. She could have easily been a champion, at 6’4“, the former Miss Tall Oklahoma from a small town in the very rural eastern part of the state, she never swam in an indoor pool until she was in her twenties, didn’t know anything about swimming other than Esther Williams and Johnny Weismuller from the movies.  But she had a love of the water and her mother, had somehow, also been a strong swimmer.

There is one 4 second clip in the movies of my grandmother swimming and it takes my breath away. My only memory of my grandmother in the water was of her moving around the pool on vacation but not really swimming, just laughing and playing with me and telling me not to splash her because she didn’t want to mess up her hair.

Clearly the teaching of swimming was a strong family value. (I don’t know how my brother got left of that, but he was a much better reader than I was, so I guess Mom figured he was smart enough not to drown, while I on the other…)  In a time and place when there were few pools and most swimming was done in lakes and rivers, swimming was a life skill you learned well or you didn’t go in the water. Respect for water was taught early and reinforced over and over.

But even my mom couldn’t completely conquer my wild, out of control, love of the water. When I got older she put me in lessons with an older fellow she had heard about. He was nice but a no funny business kind of guy and I was finally ready to settle down and learn to swim beyond thrashing 10 yards to save my life. swimming lessons changed my life but probably would not have been possible without the foundation my mother laid for me.

Balance and feel for the water are formed most easily at a young age in a trusting environment with patient practice and repetition. When I say trusting, I mean parents should be their child’s first swimming instructor and, ideally, use life jackets as little as possible. Sure, there will be times when it is appropriate or safety requires but the water, early on, should be a place where parent and child are together, working on skills, not a place where a 3 year old is bobbing in a life jacket for an hour while Mom or Dad work on their tan and have a beer. As a reward to swimmer and parent, for doing 20-30 minutes of work before play, a life jacket or water wings can be used after to let everyone have some fun. Those devices teach the wrong body position in the water and the idea that being vertical in the water is a position of safety is a fallacy that must be unlearned once a child starts serious lessons.

After parent and child have worked together for as much as a season, maybe less, a teacher can be introduced, who at some point, may guide the parent and child in lessons. When the child trusts the teacher enough to willingly (with minimal fussing) separate from the parent to the teacher, it is time for the parent to let go and let the swimming instructor help the child learn to swim. But parents need to stay close to the learning to swim process.

The shift to highly trained and experienced instructor might happen the first few days of lessons or it might take longer. To me the best lesson programs integrate parents as long as necessary in the process. The days of “Mommy needs to leave the pool” are gone. If instructors want parents to help their child learn to swim, the lessons need to be as inclusive as possible. Typically, once a child can glide, balance and blow bubbles or shows an enthusiasm for lessons away from the parent, they are willing and enthusiastic to be taught by someone other than a parent..

As a swimming instructor, I am unsympathetic about the busy lives of modern parents and all of the demands of managing multiple kids and activities. I hear it over and over and, yeah, I was one, once.  I have to wonder, how can you skip over one of the most important life skills? I say, “Tough Cookie”, to those parents. Seat belts, car seats, bike helmets, none of those are optional and neither are early age swimming lessons. Convenience of the parent never takes precedence over the safety of the child, does it?   You chose to have your kids, I know how much you love them, so teach them everything they need to know to survive. Don’t schedule swimming lessons around other activities. Swimming lessons are the priority age 2-6 and possibly beyond and other stuff gets scheduled around them. Teach kids something that could save their life or someone else’s life.

The “Regret” that you didn’t get signed up for the hot new camp everyone is going to this summer is not the same as the “regret” you feel for not giving your child a great swimming foundation when there is a near accident, a water injury or, God forbid, the unthinkable.

First though, parents need to learn the skills of floating, balancing in the water, blowing and breathing, so they can transfer this skill, almost through osmosis, if you will, to the child. I remember gliding from one side of the pool to the other, straight body, eyes down, gently kicking, blowing bubbles with one of my sons hanging on to my shoulder mimicking me. The time with a parent in the water is precious to a child. They love to share fun and games in the water and these are teachable moments. Holding the child in a horizontal position in the water discourages a false sense of security or poor body position.

I was not born a fish, I had to learn to swim. Someone had to teach me. First, my mom, then other teachers and coaches. Build a foundation of the basic skills as early as possible in an atmosphere of fun and play, then, encourage the child to swim with trusted teachers. This will help build a safe, strong, lifetime swimmer. It isn’t easy but it is one of the most gratifying moments of parenthood, when, as happened to me last night, your 24 year-old son, says, “Thank you for the gift of swimming. It is one of the best things you could have ever given me.”

I have heard it said, many times in the last couple of years, “Our country has never been more divided.”

I say this divisiveness and distrust all started with the terrible treatment of President Obama and the right-wing shock-jock style of propaganda news.

My conservative friend, says different. He says the left was way worse in their treatment of President Bush and right wing media is a mere reaction to the liberal bias in media that has existed for decades.

If you go back a little further, we both agree that George Herbert Walker Bush had little to do with it and Bill Clinton had everything to do with it. Reagan, Carter, Ford, were appropriately partisan during a period when evil empires became a better target than our own constant reenactment of the civil war domestically.

Who I really blame for our present divide is Nixon and Watergate. That’s when we started really distrusting each other. Well, that and Vietnam. But that was Johnson’s deal.We were told by those who knew better than everyone else that there was a “Silent Majority” who supported the war, while a non-Silent movement fought tooth and nail to end it.

In the election just completed, the “silent minority from the right combination of electoral states” took over the course of history for awhile.

I also blame Tony Schwartz, a campaign ad guy, who I met in NY, many years ago. He is the guy who lit the fuse of divisiveness. He did the famous ad for Lyndon Johnson that reminded people that Barry Goldwater could not be trusted with the nuclear codes and was going to get innocent children, picking petals off a flower, blown to smithereens.

So, between that moment in the late 50’s and early 60’s with the start of the John Birch Society and the civil rights movement, we began to distrust each other and question each other’s patriotism.

I guess some could say it started with old Sen. Joe McCarthy, who ruined the lives of Communists and sympathizers and even many decent, honorable Americans who were called to testify before HUAC and got blacklisted. Eventually, people got tired of chasing commie ghosts, and people who were not Commies or even sympathizers, but actually just believed in “fairness” and shut down the 1950’s version of the Salem Witch Trials.

So really the last time we were united, I guess was for about a month after 9/11. Oh yeah, I guess we were united after the Kennedy Assassination for awhile. Obviously we were united during WWII, except for the internment camps. I understand we were united after World War II but in those days we didn’t talk about religion or politics.

Before WWII we were always united, except for labor strife, violence, hysteria over FDR’s reign and rebuke by the Supreme Court. WWI, Suffrage, Prohibition, the Depression and anti-immigrant sentiments held us back from unity during the first decades of the 20th century. I think it could have been somewhere right in there where we started distrusting each other.

Maybe you could go as far back as the assassination of Lincoln right after his re-election and the Civil War. Before that we were absolutely united as a great young country dependent economically on slave labor. Of course you can’t really count “race” as divisive factor because it didn’t divide white people and only lasted from the landing of the first slave ship until some point in the future.

Other than these brief periods in our history, we have always been a united country striving for freedom, equality and equity! And on that, my conservative friend and I might agree on some things and quarrel bitterly on the rest.

Zeus found us in late July of 2007. It was so freaking hot in Dallas and we were looking forward to our vacation at the beach in Wilmington, North Carolina at Grandma’s house.

We first saw the skulking, brown and black, brindle canine in the late morning. I say canine not to be pretentious. “Dog” just couldn’t begin to describe an animal that often drew comments like, “Is that a dog? He looks like an alien!”

We noticed him every 20 minutes or so, passing our house, wandering around the neighborhood in the early heat. Every time he made the block, the day got hotter, his head hung a little lower, his tongue dangled loosely to the side of his mouth and the huge paws at the end of his long legs shuffled and flopped.

Every time he made the block, there was more and more chatter around the house about what was to be done. We all worried about him but he wouldn’t come near when called. He was very skittish and had clearly been dumped.

“Worried about him…” means different things to different people in this house. To my wife, it means, “Oh dear, I need to help this dog, find him a home, get him fostered…” She has a plan but it doesn’t always work out and that’s how you wind up with four dogs. To the boys, it means “Cool dog! Can we keep him?” To me, it means, “Oh brother, I hope Shannon and the boys don’t see that dog. I wish I could help him but he was probably dumped for a good reason.”

I quickly decided there was no helping him, if for no other reason than he was big and kind of wild looking. I started making pronouncements from the kitchen.

“We do not need, nor can we handle another dog.”

“We are too busy. We are not good pet owners.”

“Neighbors will report us.”

“What if that thing attacks somebody.”

Silence through the house.

“We can’t afford it. We already have three other wild animals in the house and we were going to need money to send them to college. “

No one laughed.

Practicality aside, I was scared of him. Clearly, at least, part Pit Bull. Those two words “Pit Bull” terrify, and strangle reason and I can feel people’s judgment – “one of those crazy Pit Bull people”. I hear and feel you. I was you.

I shuddered as my 10 year old, Jonas, began carrying out pans of water and food, biscuits and treats. I learned long ago, a man who doesn’t want to help a suffering dog, is a man who sleeps in the metaphorical dog house. Every time the dog came in sight down the street, Jonas was plotting his next move to get a little closer, to draw the dog in.

“If that dog attacks you and drags you off to the woods, I can’t help you.”

My complaints and fears were duly noted and summarily dismissed.

It went on for hours but by late afternoon Jonas was petting the dog and he was laying, panting, under a tree in the front yard. By bedtime, there was a sweet monster sleeping on Jonas’ floor.

St. Duffy, Jonas’ mother, my wife, the patron Saint of abused and discarded dogs, had been prepping to leave in four days for a cross country vacation, the first leg to be taken by her with Liam and Jonas. Caleb would be flying to Indianapolis for the USA Swimming Junior National Championships, and I would follow by car to watch him swim. He and I would join the rest of the family in North Carolina after the meet.

My point is: We didn’t have time to pick up a stray dog.

But, Duffy is a Saint for a reason and within a couple of days, by some miracle, she had connected with a woman named Lori Palmer, who had been on the Dallas City Council, and then operated a rescue for big dogs. You probably know that getting a dog into a rescue is almost impossible but Duffy talked to Lori and told her we already had two rescue dogs but we would help this dog “any way” we could. I cringed a little when I heard those words.

Lori agreed to accept Zeus into her rescue, pay to get the dog fixed, shots, kennel the dog, while we were out of town, and send heart-worm pills regularly, if, we agreed to foster the dog until they could find a suitable home. I knew this dog was never going anywhere but I played along. Jonas and the other two were delighted, made all of the promises that no child can really fully keep about caring for the dog.

He was so powerful and handsome. We named him Zeus. Zeus was king of the gods (which is dogs spelled backward). I think I suggested it. There was no use resisting, I was outnumbered.

Zeus hated veterinarians but loved Vet techs! He had to be muzzled with Vets, Vet techs never worried about him and he behaved like a gentleman.

After our vacation, we picked up our foster dog. The Vet met with Jonas and me to talk to Jonas about training. After 10 minutes of listening to the Vet I was ready to bite him. He was a pompous ass and lectured us quite thoroughly. He seemed to fancy himself some sort of folk legend.

“Now, I can train any dog. Any dog. And I can train you, to train this dog. This dog is going to be a challenge and there is only one way to train this dog. You don’t know this dog and he doesn’t know you. That’s a good thing. You’ll be starting fresh. You only had him a couple of days and he has been here two weeks so he doesn’t remember you. He knows me a little so we’ll bring him in and get you started and then you’ll take him and if you do exactly what I do, you will be able to train him in no time. The key is the cookie. You will always have a cookie.”

The vet tech brought Zeus in and he was thrilled to see Jonas. The vet took the leash and Zeus started growling. The Vet told Jonas, “The cookie is the key. Just give him a little cookie…”

Zeus snarled at the Vet but loved the cookie when Jonas gave it to him. The whole tutoring session was pretty much us trying to keep Zeus calm enough and distracted enough in the small, clinic room that Zeus didn’t tear the arm off of the Vet. Finally, before we ran out of cookies, he let us leave.

As we went out the door of the clinic, Zeus bolted like a kid on the last day of school. Jonas, 10 years old, running in flip flops, and weighing only slightly more than the wildebeest now towing him across the parking lot, hung on to the leash for dear life. He was almost 100 pounds of pure muscle and jowls. I wondered what we had gotten ourselves into?

In about a year, the economy collapsed and the rescue that was trying to get Zeus adopted, wrote us a letter. I saw the words, “with deep regret”, “collapse of the economy”, “unable to continue our rescue work”…

“We got us a dog.” I called out to the rest of the house. I told them the details in the kitchen. They didn’t act surprised or seem much more than very pleased.

“Zeus isn’t going anywhere. He’s my dog. He’s our dog”, Jonas said.

Over time, everyone grew to love and trust Zeus more, within our family. We noticed a change in Jonas. He got a little more serious about school, swimming, and honoring his promise to care for this dog. He was nowhere near perfect but he was good as most any kid I ever saw. He was 10 but I could see real compassion in his heart and it gave me such a wonderful sense of hope for what he will do with his life.

For Zeus, the outside world was a different matter. This was a dog that showed signs of having been abused and we knew he had been abandoned. We trusted him to a point, but as Duffy would say, “The black lab in him is a good, sweet dog but the pit bull has a little dark side.” The boys understood him the way they understood Darth Vader.

Our house at times resembled a busy, small town bus station. We have a front door but also a side door by our driveway, as well as a door into the garage and backyard. With three boys and their friends and our busy lives, the house, especially around the holidays, was like a slapstick comedy with people coming and going and slamming doors. Our closest friends learned long before we got Zeus that they could come and go through the side door as needed. It was rarely locked when we were at home and everyone knew where the key was.

With that scenario, if I admit that Zeus bit people, more than once, reasonable folks may justly think we were insane dog people, harboring a menace to society. There were times when I wondered the same thing.

If I tell you that most of the bites happened while “defending” his home from “intruders”, (actually friends of ours) who entered unannounced and unescorted by our family, is it easier to blame us, his family, for failure to supervise Zeus appropriately? Don’t blame Zeus. As I have said about some of our other dogs, “He wanted to be a good dog, he just didn’t know how. “

If I feebly try to justify our negligence by rationalizing, these were not pit bull attacks like you see in the media, but a warning sort of bite, which mostly did not break the skin, will you judge us less harshly?

So you are probably wondering, how many people did he bite? I can’t. The shame won’t allow my fingers to reach out and hit the number. Does “less than 8”, sound acceptable? It could be more, I can’t remember. After a while, the bites exist in a part of the brain that stores recurring nightmares and reality gets blurry.

Zeus bit more than any responsible pet owner would ever tolerate, yet, all of his victims hardly seemed to mind at all. Some, Zeus should have known well enough not to bite.

He always seemed shocked and embarrassed that he had bitten someone. He would chomp, quick and pretty hard, but, back away quickly, as if he had just tried to bite a porcupine.

I have a voice, like Lenny in The Grapes of Wrath, for Zeus and I could just hear him.

“Ohhh dangit, Ah did noht jus’ do dat, dit I? Ohhh, no, uh oh, I doan know what happe’d…Deff is naw going to like dis.”

We were profuse in our apologies to the bitten. Witnesses and Victims refused to blame Zeus.

“It wasn’t his fault. He was just protecting his home…”

“I shouldn’t have grabbed him around the neck like that…” (well, duh.)

As Caleb put it, “some of the people he bit, deserved it.”

Every time it happened, I was sure we would be sued or I would be jailed, yet, people persisted in vouching for Zeus’ good character.

“It was totally my fault. I would have bit me, if I had been Zeus. He’s such a sweet boy.”

Our family may be insane but our friends are among the most wonderful, generous, forgiving, insane dog people on the planet. If that dog had ever bitten me, this wouldn’t be such a sweet remembrance.

I called vet offices and rescues, anonymously of course, for advice as the number of bites mounted. I knew the easy solution.

Almost everyone outside our family and friends said I had to put Zeus down. I agreed but the other four members of the death panel did not agree. A man who decides to kill a dog who has a wife and three children who are opposed to killing the dog, is simply not going to kill that dog. It isn’t happening.

None of the chomping victims even hinted at advising euthanasia. Heck, they didn’t even snap at me, “You really need to keep that dog from biting people!” As dog lovers they appreciate Zeus’ loyalty and his desire to protect the home. Our next door neighbor, a single lady, told us frequently how much she loved having Zeus around to sound the alarm if he saw, heard or smelled something that wasn’t right.

Zeus had two zealous advocates, outside our family. Our dear friends, Lani and Tammy, were bitten by Zeus. Oh, he had also bitten both of Tammy’s sons, friends of Jonas. I think Tammy would have physically restrained me, if I tried to take Zeus over the rainbow bridge. Lani and her husband, my lifelong friend Dale, tried to talk logically about solutions. Slowly, I backed off and decided to try again.

So, we built a new fence and a large, comfortable kennel. We established protocol and everyone signed a blood oath that if protocol was broken and Zeus bit again, I would turn him in immediately to the city and he would be put down.

Once we became, you know, responsible pet owners and had a safe environment for guests and Zeus, he never bit anyone again. Surprise.

People in 12 step programs for drugs or alcohol often substitute the thing that isn’t quite as bad, like cigarettes or ice cream for the thing that is really bad for them or lands them in jail. Zeus was like that. Squirrels and an occasional rat were his cigarettes. Once he quit biting people, he turned to rodents and became a hero.

Our newest rescue, Beckley, was in awe and developed a healthy respect, when he saw Zeus catch a squirrel in a mid-air leap, killing it with one crush of his teeth.

Zeus loved to chase pretty much anything you could throw and he could fit in his mouth. He crooned like a didgeridoo at sirens in the distance. When he was running at full speed, his stride must have been 12 feet. Despite his size and power he remained terrified of fireworks and gun fire, thunderstorms, and our little chihuahua/terrier mix, Fonzie.

He loved to sleep in Jonas’ bed in the winter and next to his bed in the summer. If one of the boys got a little aggressive with Jonas while Zeus was around, he immediately started to growl but then they would start laughing and Zeus would wag his tail and try to get in their lap. He was great at helping keep those kind of shenanigans to a minimum.

A few weeks ago, we left to take Jonas to college. I kept singing Puff the Magic Dragon to myself in the car and thinking of Zeus and Jonas and how it would be to not have each other for the first time in eight years. Jonas tried to not make a big deal out of it but I could see he was emotional. In the last couple of days as we were packing, Zeus would try to get Jonas’ attention pawing, thrusting his nose and head under Jonas’ hand, and rubbing up against him. Jonas took time in the backyard to play ball with Zeus one more time.

Back home, last week, we noticed Zeus moving slow. He ate sporadically but it was hot as the dog days seemed to drag into the end of summer. On Thursday, we noticed the spotting of blood here and there. It looked like he might be limping. Was it coming from his foot, maybe a tooth in front. Zeus has had lots of little nicks over the years, it never was easy to find them due to his size and camouflage color.

On Thursday night we saw it, a lot of blood in his mouth, and we thought he had a bad tooth or a cut. I took him to the vet on Friday. They ran tests and we had possible diagnoses ranging from a tick disease, to auto-immune disease. We started drugs and he got a shot.

On Saturday he rallied and that night he was standing on the back porch barking his fool head off. Sunday he seemed okay in the morning. We hadn’t seen as much blood.

Sunday afternoon he seemed more lethargic and he went into Jonas’ room and laid down by his bed. By night, we knew he was going to die. We lined the floor in plastic, made a comfy bed, and got Zeus on it. He fell down when he tried to walk. Mostly he hardly moved. He drank water almost constantly.

Then somehow, he rallied again and he acted like he wanted to get up. Duffy grabbed one end and I grabbed the other and we took him out back. There, it was obvious how bad the bleeding was but rallied again and walked unassisted without falling.. He went back to his porch and bed, the place where he has hung out – listening to the birds, crooning his deep bass at distant sirens and waiting for a squirrel to make a mistake – for most of the last 3 years without biting any human. He laid down there.

There he laid until i picked him up and carried him, like a baby, into the vet on Monday morning. Normally the vet techs would muzzle him because, you know, he would try to bite the vet.

The only option that made any sense was to put him to sleep. About 30 seconds after I said I was ready to let him go, Zeus went. They didn’t have time to even give him the shot. I looked down and he was gone. Stopped breathing.

“I Need Some Help! .. I think he’s…dying… I mean,… it’s okay, …it’s o-k.”
I let out a breath. “yeah, it’s okay.”

The vet came back in and pronounced Zeus dead.

I sobbed for Zeus and Jonas and our family. How could anyone feel this way about a dog that made my life a little hellish pretty often? I texted Jonas, Duffy, Caleb and Liam, and told them Zeus was gone and thanked them for making me keep that dog.

He’s been gone a week but we still ache for Jonas and miss the Moose. A boy’s dog will change his life and I saw Zeus do that for Jonas. I am pretty sure I did not properly thank him. Thank you, Zeus.

We worried that Jonas would think Zeus died of a broken heart when he went off to college. But wise Jonas understands Zeus got sick and no one knew until it was too late. And then St. Duffy says, “I look around and Zeus is gone, and then I can see him, in Brooklyn, following Jonas around, protecting him.”

Zeus taught us a lot about loyalty, responsibility, friendship and forgiveness. A dog like Zeus will change a boy’s family, too, and Zeus did that for our family. Thank you, Zeus. We love and miss you.

I have lived in or near White Rock Lake Park for 45 of my almost 60 years. Having lived in Old Lake Highlands first in the early 70’s, again in the 80’s and moving back for good in 2000, I have watched the neighborhood and the lake evolve over the years.

Most recently, I have lived at ground zero of significant change to our “Old Lake Highlands” neighborhood. Call it tear downs or scrapes, the face of the corner of Bondstone and Champa has changed. A year or so ago, a very run down rent house was torn down and a McMansion popped up faster than you can say, “two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun.”

Then, around the first of this month, the two houses next to the McMansion were torn down. One of those was an awful place and needed to go but 407 Bondstone, right across the street from me, was a great home with potential as a remodel. But, I didn’t own the property so that’s really not my call.

I thought back to a time, long ago, about 1982, when I was the first white guy, who dared move into a very tough, all Puerto Rican, forgotten area of Brooklyn, called Williamsburg. The landlord told me I had a million dollar view but he needed to “gentrify” the block. It was the first time I had heard that word. I didn’t last long. Moving in took a hour, moving out took 15 minutes because most of my stuff was stolen in two break-ins.

Williamsburg today? You can’t afford it.Perspective is hard when something you love just the way it is, is taken away. Even if you are poor and Puerto Rican living in a ghetto.

Old Lake Highlands is not being gentrified, that’s over. It was never a bad area but all of the original people, still many here, liked it and stayed and the area got old. Then, young people, families of all genders and shades, began to find and appreciate our funky little part of town and make it beautiful again. The neighborhood association started putting up signs, “Old Lake Highlands”.

Home sale prices have easily doubled in the last 15 years but now that’s not good enough. Our old homes don’t meet the standards for size that people are looking for, so we will, like other favored areas of town, be redeveloped.

We’ll probably need to change the signs to, “Old and New Lake Highlands” in the interim, until we finally get to, “New Lake Highlands”. Surely they won’t call it Old Lake Highlands when all of the houses are less than 30 years old.

I try to keep things in perspective remembering that this was once Blackland Prairie and post oak savannah. I was against the restaurant in the park but I would probably favor the return of a barge on the lake where people could dance under the stars like in the old days. I’m sure a lot of the “Park Advocates” will not like my position but I can’t see how sail boat docks that have been there for years are any different than a new rowing center.

There is an elitism that comes with protecting nature, protecting what you love and contributed to creating and sustaining so call me an elitist. Perspective requires me to remember that some naturalists might despise the dam and favor blowing it up and returning White Rock Creek to its original state. But I don’t agree with that. There is our history as a city, too, and that is worth preserving.

We all want that which we remember as “home” a place of love, fun, peace, quiet, and belonging to stay just as it is. But the fact is, it has never stayed the same.

As our memories fade in our minds, we don’t react well to seeing them bull-dozed, scraped away right in front of our eyes. I raised three boys in this neighborhood and I grew up only a couple of blocks away. The idea that I won’t recognize any of it in 10 or 20 years makes me keenly aware of the temporary nature of everything. Someday, this might be just a Blackland Prairie again, with overgrown ruins of brick and concrete.

I believe in property rights and people are free to do as they please with their property. That said, I wish people shared the same aesthetic that I do and valued the history of our neighborhoods. There are a number of beautiful remodels of these old 1600 sq ft homes around the neighborhood, turning them into 3,000 sq ft homes with an architecture that respects the surrounding community.

We finally met the new neighbors. I plead guilty to not being as welcoming as I could have been.They seem very nice and anxious to live in the neighborhood. I am disappointed we would make someone feel unwelcome simply because we don’t like what they are planning to do with their property.

However, I have talked to some experts. Property values and home values should continue to rise but three, half a million dollar houses across the street are probably going to cause our property taxes to go up. We are concerned we might not be able to afford to live here because someone decided they loved a neighborhood, cut down the trees and built a house that is totally out of character with the other homes.

I know they say they love the area but how do you love something and proceed to make your part of it completely different from the rest?

So, we might see a little increase in our home value, or we might have to move because of the taxes. We had hoped to live out our days here. That doesn’t seem as likely now and since we are middle income folks, we are scared a little about where we will be able to go.

Two big roofs will block part of the sky and change the light in our living room. That light is one of the reasons we bought this house and that is the part of all of this that will hurt the most. Sometimes there is no choice about change. I guess we’ll get used to it but we’ll always wish it hadn’t changed.

My wife says I’m thinking too much about getting older. I say, hey, I fell down, I’ve always been clumsy. Her eyes say, “Bull Shit.” She says, “Self-fulfilling prophesy.” I have always been clumsy, but, I’m like a tree, you are going to have to wait a long time until I finally fall. I don’t know the last time I “fell” without good cause.

I fell out of a tree a couple of times, I think, when I was a kid. Falling during snow skiing and ice skating doesn’t count. Nor, does getting drunk and “jus’ sitin’ dow’ rye here”. I mean, sitting down is not falling. The kind of fall we are talking about here is where you are doing something you have done a thousand times and suddenly, something has gone wrong, and what you are standing on is shooting out from under your feet and you think, “Where’d the ground go?”

I was always, like, you know, what’s wrong with old people? How the hell did they let themselves get like that? Why the hell are they always falling? And the hips! Enough with the broken hips! Do they just tense up? Can we teach them to just go down when they feel a fall coming on?

Finding yourself a few feet off the ground, sideways, without a net, is a time for deep personal reflection about getting older. Mid-air in this leap toward the abyss, a voice spoke to me, and said, “You are 59 and one half years old, and you need to be humbled. You are about to have an epiphany about getting older and this will be your final warning, sir.”

I now believe, the ‘humbling, final warning’ that the voice promised was the impact with the ground. It hurt. It knocked the wind out of me, literally and metaphorically. I laid there an instant before I jumped up, pretty sure I had not broken anything.

Thankfully, the fall left my ego far more bruised than my body. A skinned knee and a bruised hip were the only issues by Thursday. But, I can’t help but feel, so that’s what it’s like to “fall”. Was that the first “fall” of old age?

Our 70 year old Red Oak tree, fell in 90 mph, micro-burst winds on Oct. 2. We had it cut and kept several logs as seats around the patio fire pit. I was standing on, and fell off of, one of those logs. The irony is not lost on me.