Losing Tink

If you have ever lost a dog, your child in a department store, or your first love this might appeal to you. I started this draft in 2015, when we lived across town, and feel fortunate to have the opportunity to share it with you now.

Tink didn’t want to go for a walk with me, which was strange. Usually she is eager to go for all the reasons dogs love to go for walks, but most especially because she knows by now that once we get to the school yard, with its vast and empty field of green roaming territory, that I will take her leash off so she can run-like-the-wind back and forth and criss and cross and find soccer poles to take a pee on and then scurry down the side of the fence to smell where other creatures have trod or slithered or jumped there before her. Before we go she plays her game with me, scurrying around until I can catch her to put her leash on. Then her tail is a waggin’ and she’s ready to go.

Today she is reluctant. Today, once collared-up, she just sits. But I know she loves to go so we set forth and she trots along. We turn off onto a quiet side street and I drop the leash so she can run a short distance ahead. I’ve been training her to stop and sit on command so I practice those commands as we walk up the street whenever she trots down the sidewalk a little too far, and she always responds. Running with the leash trailing causes her to change her stride awkwardly to avoid stepping on it, but it lets her run free in a controlled way – she is more willing to respond to commands when she has the leash and collar on. This is especially important on any street where cars might show up.

At the end of the cul de sac is the entrance to the asphalt walkway which runs behind the houses, separating them from the school football field, and we move onto the path. We always have two choices, the big football field which abuts the even larger, open fields next to the junior high school and extending to the LDS church a short distance to the right, or to the small elementary school field, down the path a tenth of a mile and then a hard right. Since there is another man flinging a ball to his larger dog at the junior high fields, we head toward the elementary school.

Tinkerbell is a rescue dog. She is a smaller, mid-sized, white pup, and though we aren’t absolutely sure of her breed we think she is a mix of terrier and something else. We had just lost our older dog, Dakota, to cancer when our daughter and her boyfriend (now husband) Jeff found this dog and told us she would be a perfect match for us.

Turns out she was. She had been over-caged by her previous owner and was skittish, but she warmed quickly to my wife. It took almost two years before she would just occasionally let me just put my hand on her head without dancing away. Although she connected easily with some men, like our handyman Bruce, with others she did not. It took two years, but she and I had become close and I think one of the reasons is that I have spent time walking with her, training her on the leash, and I think she needed that experience to trust me. We don’t know if her previous owner mistreated her beyond keeping her in a cage too much, but given her hesitancy with men, we are pretty sure she had a bad experience with a man before we adopted her. Now, at the age of three, she and I both looked forward to our almost daily walks around the neighborhood or to the school.

She trots on ahead, through the open gate into the schoolyard, where a baseball backstop always provides a spot for her to leave her mark. This day is no different. She stops to squat just a second and then we both pause for me to take off her leash and collar. She runs a few yards and begins her inevitable poop.

I don’t know what it is but our dog can be sitting in our back yard for hours and once we go for a walk she has to poop at least once along the way. Has she been storing it all day anticipating that we might go for a walk? Can she summon poop at will, and chooses to make me pull out my orange or blue or black plastic bag to clean up after her? Does it give her some existential pleasure to see the one holding the leash picking up the feces of the one in chains? I don’t know, but man she can do it.

I approach the proffered poop as she trots away to examine other clumps of grass and detritus. But, as is often the case, I can’t spot it. I’m colorblind, and seeing brown on brown, unless it’s a glistening, reflective bit of fecal matter, is almost impossible to see. I have to pace back and forth, examining each bit of turf, eliminating sections of land, trying to narrow the place of poop to one, inevitable and unavoidable, spot.

And I am willing to go on this search, this Indiana Jones quest for scatalogical treasure, at great personal risk (the bottoms of my shoes have often found this prize before my eyes could find it), because I hate it when people do not clean up after their dogs.

I slowly, step by step, walk in an ever-tightening circle, bag inside out on my fingers, ready to scoop it up. I can’t find this Tinkerbell jell. I concentrate, totally focused. Frustrated. How could something I just saw plummeting to the earth just seconds ago have melted into the landscape as invisibly as a commando slipping through the forest?

Of a sudden I am aware that I haven’t seen Tink for a while. Usually she wanders around just a few feet away, or races like a mini-Secretariat down the open grass and then back when I call. I look all around and she is not to be seen. She must be just outside the gate, wandering the path. I give up my poop pursuit for the immediate need to find my dog. I run to the entrance gate and look around. She is nowhere to be seen.

I call. “Tink, Tink!” I whistle. I have an unusual whistle for her, a variation on the normal call so she has something distinctive to know it’s me. I can’t whistle loud, but it’s a little different sound and she knows it’s me when I call. I whistle again, call her name. No response. I look up and down the path. She is nowhere to be found.

She might be wandering through the neighborhood houses just off the schoolyard. I trot between them, right onto private property, between grills and covered chairs and toys strewn about, calling her name. More frenetically now, more scattered and less organized. I am at my wit’s end. I know I have to do the inevitable.

I have to let my wife know what is happening.

That I have lost our precious puppy. The Tink who makes my wife smile every time she (the dog) jumps on the bed. The one she dotes over. Ai yeee! I’d rather stick a fork in my arm. Ten times ten times. I send her a text…

I lost Tink.

Suddenly, the day our daughter Piper wandered out of my sight as I was shopping in a department store, rears up into my mind. The moment I lost her hits me between the eyes. One minute our little girl is there, the next she is gone. I look around. People are standing, shopping, looking at perfume. Women are trying on a dab of this or that and holding up sale items with their children in hand. Teenagers are wandering down the aisles. I can’t see Piper. I panic – start scampering between aisles, up and down – where is she!!!! My heart is in my throat. Did someone take her? Such an innocent, trusting little girl.

And then, there she was.

You turn your eyes in this life for one second, lose vigilance, and it could all be gone. I lost my first serious girlfriend, my high school sweetheart, to one of my friends because I wasn’t paying attention. At least that’s the story I have in my head. Because I was taking her for granted. Their wedding announcement resulted in a night of sorrow (and a lifetime aversion to drinking shots of tequila), to dropping out of college in the middle of a semester and to hightailing it home to live with my parents again, to years of regret. How could I have been so stupid? The pentitentes had nothing on me. Self-flagellation dominated my mind for longer than I care to disclose.

You turn your eyes in this life for one second, lose vigilance, and it can all be gone. One day, as a young boy on my grandparent’s farm, I was sitting on the farmhouse porch, happy with myself. Perhaps my grandmother had made me a glass of lemonade on a 95 degree, 90% Kansas-humid, cloudless, summer day. My grandpa tromped up the stairs and, never one to skirt an issue, told me hopping mad that I’d forgotten to shut the gate behind me and that the cattle were roaming free outside the pasture.

My guts turned to mush in that instant. My inner head exploded – “No, no, no!” My biggest fear was letting down the people I loved. I was the oldest and always had the responsibility for watching over my brother and two sisters. I worshipped my grandfather. Venerated him, and to let him down, for me, was equivalent to dropping the winning touchdown pass in the national championship game, striking out in the bottom of the ninth in game seven of the World Series, or letting down God himself.

We rounded up the cattle with some effort but no losses and that was that with my grandfather. He was quick to anger and quick to move on. I, however, was burdened with the heavier dread of letting down people I loved.

Now here I am and Tink is lost. I love that pooch so much, that little white bundle of furry love. I know my wife will be devastated if anything happens to her. So will my daughter, who loves animals and especially dogs, and even more especially little Tinkerbell and her pup Shelby. So will Jeff, who Tink lets pet her more than she lets me, she trusts him so much. I am letting everyone down.

I am so frightened.

My search moves closer and closer to the busy road, Lake Forest, which runs through our part of the subdivision. Cars here whiz by, especially when school is not in session, and Tink wouldn’t know on her own to stop to let them by. “Tink! Tink!” I run down the fence, scampering between houses like a mad man, ever closer to Lake Forest, oblivious to what anyone might think. She could have gone anywhere, with several paths available. She might be way over at the junior high, but my immediate fear is that she will obliviously run onto Lake Forest, not seeing some approaching chariot of death. I have no idea if I am even close to her, even on the same block. I reach the street, calling, out of breath. Despair and hopelessness begin to impinge upon the fear that had driven me. The end of this story seems ever more out of my control. The fates are now in play. Sorrow is building up inside, waiting to explode at what I might find.

I am not prepared to lose such a loved one, and especially through my own negligence.

Then the unexpected. My phone bleeps with a text from Lana.

Someone got her out of road and she headed here. They rang the bell and she saw me and came home! How did that happen?

Oh…my….God. Ohmygod. Relief floods me, all of me, heart and mind and gut and shoulders and soul and blood vessels. My god, thank you, oh my god.

Did she just get there? I’ve been running all over the place.

She’s here.

I’d left the gate open yet the cattle had been found, taken my eyes off my daughter in the midst of a department store melee and she had been found, lost my first love and eventually found myself again. And now I’d dodged another bullet, all because our little dog knew how to get back home without me. My entire being shudders at the escape.

Tink is found.

Each time I’d been absorbed in myself, in what I was doing, missing the bigger picture, the more important other. Dogs forget and forgive quickly unless they’ve been abused. God – the divine, the absolute - forgives and loves us unconditionally. People are slower to forgive a hurt, but often do if they know you sincerely regret your mistake. But I know that it is almost impossible for me to forgive myself. So it’s joy I felt when our Tinkerbell found her way that day. Or I might never have found myself at peace again. Sound dramatic? It should.

Tink is found.

Tink sits on the couch behind me as I write, cuddled up on a heating blanket, watching. Marcus the next-door cat jumps up on the outside windowsill and Tink erupts off the couch barking and dashes through the house to the back yard where the teasing-scoundrel-feline has found safety on the other side of the fence. Soon Tink and I will get her collar and leash, an orange bag for collecting what she will inevitably leave, and head out for another stroll together, to another adventure. My eyes will not leave her unattended.

Tink is found.

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