I recently visited an old friend. Aunt Jenny opened her door and there was George, looking frail but wagging his long black tail with a white tip, staring at me the same way he always had. Intent eyes filled with love and wonder and obedience. He didn’t seem to recognize me at first, but when I got closer and lowered my hand, he leaned forward to smell it, and I could see him light up. He leaned in to lick it and put my wrist into his gentle mouth. He knew it was me.
George is thirteen and deaf in both ears, with hips so stiff that it’s hard for him to get up the stairs. We stared at each other as I sat on a chair to visit with my favorite aunt, who had supported me during the worst of times and been my friend during the best. We talked about family, about her move north from Pueblo to Denver, about her thriving children.
I’d been living in Belize for much of the past three years and—not wanting to subject him to the ticks, snakes, parasites, worms, and heat of Central America—had made the tough decision to leave George with her before I left. I don’t have children of my own, but he’d been my boy since we first met when he was three months old.
It was Memorial Weekend 2005, and I was living at 8,000 feet in a cabin on a lake near Rye, Colorado. The wind had been howling all night, which worried mesince I was meeting a friend the next morning at Spinney Mountain Reservoir, where we’d be chasing big rainbows and cutthroat from float tubes. We could literally get blown across the lake with little chance of making it back by fin power. I’d promised to meet him at 6 a.m., so I got up at 4 to make the hour-and-a-half drive to the tiny town of Hartsell.
