“Is that dog part coyote?”

“He’s actually a husky/blue heeler mix,” I responded to the guy standing outside his house on Water Street.

This was last weekend, back when it was beautiful, before Indiana’s fourth winter of March set in.

“Beautiful dog,” he said.

A moment later, a man walked around from the side yard.

“Part wolf, right?” he asked. Or maybe it was more of a statement than a question?

“No, he just told me he’s part heeler, part husky,” the other man said.

“Well, he’s a great looking dog!”

I thanked them both and headed down the road toward my house.

Well, our house.

Because the Chip era has officially begun.

Yes, it’s official, I’m a dog dad again. And so far, getting to know Chip has been a fun ride.

Some of his favorite things so far are long walks in the park, belly rubs, car rides, and running away.

Chip lived next door to me on First Street for most of the first six years of his life. I’d sometimes watch him through my upstairs window, playfully nosing around his back yard, not knowing that one day he’d be mine.

Chip just turned six this month, on March 2^nd. My former neighbors, who have been kind and loving parents to him since 2020, needed to rehome him. They have many kids who are having kids, and Chip just doesn’t know his own strength sometimes.

I’ve always said since Lucy passed that I wasn’t yet ready for another dog, said it so many times that it reminds me of a chapter in a book.

But it’s been more than five years, which is really hard to believe, but true.

One day last fall as I was getting ready to move, my neighbor Dave mentioned they were going to need to look into rehoming Chip. We talked for a bit and I said I MIGHT consider it, not really giving it another thought.

I thought about it some more. I prayed about it. I talked to Wende about it. Her initial skepticism turned to delight as we took him on the first test walk, down in the old stomping grounds, past the spot on the river by the girl scout cabin where Lucy would often roam. He didn’t pull on us as we walked him. As other dogs ran to the edge of their fenced in yards barking, he didn’t return the barking. He gently tugged at us out of curiosity, but didn’t pull with ferocious force. When I remarked that he needed to lose a few pounds, he just glanced nonchalantly back at me as if to say, “guess that makes two of us, buddy.”

On the second play date, things were going even better, Wende and I laughing and smiling as he stuck his head out the car window on the way to Jonesboro. We chatted up a family with their dog down at the Gas City dog park (yep, the one straight out of Lucy’s Way) and brought him back to the house in Jonesboro.

After he carefully sniffed out each room of the house, we let him out into the back yard. He was enamored, running through the yard and sniffing several patches of grass where Lucy and Freckles once frolicked. He quickly dug a hole and buried his bully bone. Eventually he settled into a spot next to me on the patio, and it seemed all was well.

As Wende walked through the yard, at one with nature, I went in and out of the house a few times. All was well.

Then I heard it.

“Hey! Heyyyy!”

I walked out the back door just in time to see Wende’s hands swiping air as Chip, like a greased pig, slinked his fat butt through the seemingly smallest of holes in the fence. Wende turned, looked at me, and threw her hands up in the air with every bit of her expression saying, “what.the.hell?”

I gave chase, running out through the garage to see him turn and race back toward me. “Good boy,” I said, pointing to the open garage door. He ran halfway into the garage, swiveled, and raced past me across the street to the other side of the block.

As I ran around the back of one neighbor’s houses, already huffing and puffing – Chip would stop long enough for me to get close and then playfully dart away – Wende went another way around another house and had the same success. At one point, I saw him flash between houses and a moment later, heard the German shepherd the next door down barking. An instant later, Chip shot back the direction he’d come, the German shepherd giving chase until he was safely off his land. About that time, the German shepherd’s owner yelled for him to get in the house as I raced past, apologizing profusely to the man standing in his driveway, slack jawed, holding a bag in each hand.

Great way to meet the neighbors.

When I dropped Chip off that day, I told Dave I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. I thought about the way Lucy used to act. I thought about the love and tolerance I’d needed to practice with all my furry friends of the past: Freckles, Jasper, Ellie and Pepper.

Each of the dogs I loved before carried their own distinct personalities. Just like us humans, every dog is different, unique, and special.

Pepper, my first dog, came into my life because of the same crime Chip committed, running away. Had it not been for that, I may never have met him.

Jasper was an amazing and loyal friend, and we put him through a lot, introducing new dogs into his life with him agreeing, very reluctantly, each and every time.

Ellie was such a brief moment, but I still believe to this day that was her purpose, to swoop in and live a big and brilliant life in a short time.

Freckles was such a good buddy, his greatest sin being his ability to nearly lick someone to death.

Lucy, well, hopefully you know a thing or two about her at this point.

And now there is Chip.

The hole in the gate is fixed, that was done later that same day after he ran off, And I know the day will come when I sit at this desk and look out at Chip frolicking in the backyard as I write. That day will come, eventually.

For now, he is quite loyal, right at our sides when we are outside with him. We’ll keep it that way for a bit.

It’s definitely a fun time. The Chip era begins just as the Spring tour for Lucy’s Way gets ready to start. I’ve got events lined up for April. It all starts in Huntington on April 17. Actually, it starts the day before with my first speaking engagement of the year, reading from Lucy’s Way for a group at an event organized by my friend and Lucy’s Way superfan, Anne Click.

For the Huntington event on April 17, I’ll be one of nine or so local authors set up on Washington Street just off of Jefferson Street. Shoutout to Rex at Turn the Page Books and Music in Huntington for name dropping me to the event organizers. Rex runs a great shop, and he keeps a few copies of Lucy’s Way on hand.

Following the Huntington event is the big grand opening of Bookworm Orchard in Marion, slated from 10-3 on April 25. This event will feature nearly 30 local authors. And since you asked, signed copies of Lucy’s Way are already on hand at Bookworm Orchard, which is currently under its soft opening hours of noon-6 on Thursdays and Fridays and 10-6 on Saturdays.

And just for fun, as I thought back on all the dogs I’ve loved before, here is Chapter 2 in its original form, which was originally titled “Meeting Madora.” This chapter went through an overhaul when it was decided early in editing that the intro could be confusing and misleading to readers that were just meeting Lucy and myself.

I better go. I think Chip needs a nice, long walk into whatever beauty the day holds.

It’s a new era, and I can’t wait to see what it holds.

2- Meeting Madora

Every being in the universe is an expression of the Tao.

It springs into existence,

Unconscious, perfect, free,

takes on a physical body,

lets circumstances complete it. 

–Tao Te Ching, v. 51 (Stephen Mitchell translation)

 I didn’t want Madora. It was too soon for another dog. I told Cindy this, and I told her this in many ways.

“No. Nope. No way. Absolutely not.”

There may have been a few other variations as well, but that’s it in a nutshell.

When Cindy set her mind to something, though, it usually happened. And after our brief conversation about the little red beagle puppies she’d seen in an online ad ended with me reiterating something along the lines of … “No. Nope. No way. Absolutely not.” … she disappeared for around four hours. When she came back, she wasn’t alone.

This was June 1, 2006, and when she returned to our apartment that day she had with her an eight-week old puppy, a tiny little female beagle, completely covered from head to toe in her own poop.

Cindy was still so shaken by the drive home that she spared no detail telling me how this puppy had “frosted” the crate she was in on that nearly two hour drive from top to bottom with her own excrement, baffled at how something so small produced so much poop in that amount of time.

I had to admit right away – or at least after we cleaned all the poop off of her – that she was a most beautiful and welcome addition to the family. She spent most of those first days sleeping. And it filled me with an internal peace seeing this little tiny living being at peace. When she was sleeping, she brought a calm that made me think that maybe things really were about to turn a corner, that maybe I really could get back to being okay.

When she wasn’t sleeping, there wasn’t much peace to be had. It was a constant game of “Let’s see how quickly I can poop and pee where I’m not supposed to before I can be scooped up and set outside to potty!” When newspaper training was introduced, the papers became a new obstacle in the game to dart past and acrobatically avoid when trying to get to a spot on the lightly-colored carpet that had not yet been drenched with urine or discolored with feces.

Cindy, my partner for more than two years at this point, got her from a humane society in Morgan County, Indiana, and while I feigned being upset she came home with a dog I was glad that it came from a humane society. Around seven years later, I would grow even more grateful that she had come from a humane society when I found myself working at one in my home town of Marion, experiencing both the joys and sorrows that go with working at such a place.

I also said that this dog was Cindy’s responsibility. I had not made the decision to get this dog and I would in no way be the main provider or main person responsible for training or caring for this dog. I’m not sure how long that stubbornness lasted, but it was short lived.

Her kennel card stated she was a beagle mix born under a trailer, one of nine puppies, and the humane society told Cindy that her mother was a full-blooded beagle. A tiny raised scar stood out on her freshly shaved belly from her spay. The kennel card said that she was one month and three weeks old. We decided on April 1^st as her birthday. The math made sense and I figured it was a pretty easy date to remember, unaware that she would soon live up to the holiday associated with it as she would already have grown well beyond her anticipated size within a matter of months.

The kennel card also noted that her name was Madora. Neither Cindy nor I really cared for the name. It wasn’t a bad name; it just didn’t fit the look or the vibe of this dog. She had a reddish-blond coat but at that point was definitely leaning toward more of a red head. Lucille Ball came to mind. And since she was a beagle, I immediately related her to the godfather of all beagles, Snoopy from Charles Schultz’ Peanuts. Out of the many characters from that cartoon, Lucy certainly wasn’t the nicest or most relatable, but the name had a great ring to it.

So it was quickly settled. Lucy it would be.

*****

It was the summer between sixth and seventh grade, and we were leaving for family vacation at Cedar Point, when I met my first dog.

A small blur of black and white splashes strutting up the middle of First Street like he owned the whole road, a tiny rat terrier, maybe 10-12 pounds. I remember my dad laughing at such a small little thing taking up the whole road like that, doing his best impression of John Travolta in the opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever and owning that road like he owned the world. If I remember correctly through the stains of time, my dad had to give a quick honk to get him to scoot to the side of the street so we could carry on.

When we returned from vacation a few days later, our downstairs neighbor Bill asked if we wanted a dog. Bill and his wife Tina were a young married couple who had moved in downstairs and I’d attempted to drive crazy with my loud 12-year old behaviors. I’d spent more than one afternoon sheepishly knocking on their door, head drooping, with my dad standing right behind me so there was no escape, waiting for one of them to answer so I could apologize for my most recent loud behavior that had caused Bill to bang on the walls or call upstairs the previous day in an effort to shut me up. As I became more and more of a rambunctious teenager, Bill would call upstairs and ask me to turn down the music I was blaring or to quick kicking a ball loudly up and down the hallway, things I would always do when my parents weren’t home. Bill was always nice when he called, always talked to me on my level. I remember him coming out to the back yard one evening and playing soccer with me. I remember so clearly the smell of fall in the air that October evening and how the sun splashed across the yard just as dusk took hold of the night and my fleeting youth. I remember that evening so clearly, standing at the end of childhood, on the edge of puberty and ready to fall into the abyss of teen angst.

Something else I remember about Bill and Tina was that they were dog people and they had big hearts for dogs. They had a beautiful white dog, Sheeba (SP), and they simply couldn’t have another. Bill had been feeding this stray dog that had come up on the porch while we were away, and he said he had even run an ad in the paper to find the owners to no avail. When he opened the door, out strutted John Travolta. And that’s how Pepper came into my life.

Pepper was a wonderful dog, and I hope he and Lucy’s spirits have connected in the big doggie park beyond. Even though I took on the responsibility of Pepper as my own, he became more of my dad’s dog over the years. My dad ended up toting the responsibility of taking Pepper on walks in the morning and evening as I grew into thinking that girls and friends were more important than a family pet. I always loved Pepper, but I just wasn’t a responsible 13-year old pet owner.

What I do remember was that Pepper was a part of my life as I grew from a boy into an adult, and he experienced those milestones right along with me. He watched all the different friends of my youth come and go, always greeting them at the top of the stairs, barking and tail wagging.

He watched me bring soulmates through the door. And he was the only one who watched me cry uncontrollably and swear that the pain would never go away when they turned out not to be soulmates.

He was there when I was 14 and came home after getting high for the first time.

And he was there a few months later, when I took my first drink, had my first drunk and hangover early in the summer after my eighth grade year.

He was there as I put on my cap and gown to head to my high school graduation, and watched me depart with the goal of being the first member of my immediate family to graduate college.

And he watched me walk back in that door, hair down to my shoulders, stoned out of my head and sad beyond measure.

He saw me at my best and my worst.

Pepper was well loved and eight years after he came into my life, in March, 1997, I got the call at college that he had passed away under my bed at home.

A few months after Lucy passed away, I randomly grabbed a journal off my shelf one day and found a folded piece of notebook paper tucked between the pages. It was a letter I wrote that was dated and signed July 3, 1995. It was a letter about Pepper, one that I wrote when I thought he was about to die. He would end up sticking around another year and a half, but in that letter I wrote about him being a part of my life, of how he knew when I wasn’t okay. I wrote that with him passing on, that a piece of my life would die along with him, and that something else would come along to be a form of an angel to watch me and to become a piece of my life. I titled the letter “An Angel’s Care.”

Unfortunately, Pepper didn’t teach me a great deal about responsibility. But I did learn the pain of loss when he left us. And he prepared me for what was to come down the road with the other four-legged friends I’d come to call my own.

*****

I think I may have met Jasper even before I met Cindy. It was 2001, and my niece Heather brought by a little black hound dog she was watching for her friend Cindy for a few days. He was spunky and full of life, a temperament told by his wildly wagging tail that no unsuspecting and uncovered leg could walk away from without welts.

By the end of 2003, Cindy and I had started dating, and of course Jasper was part of the package, which was wonderful as I’d not known the companionship of a dog since Pepper.

Jasper filled the hole of 4-legged companionship I’d been missing for years, and Cindy filled the same hole of female companionship I’d been missing in my time being single since graduating college.

Unfortunately, my alcoholism was already well out of control at this point, though still somewhat hidden to people as long as I made sure not to spend too much time with any one person.

Obviously, that doesn’t work in a relationship and it was only a matter of time before Cindy would realize that my hard-partying ways were just a disguise for how bad my drinking and drug use really were. I would drink with friends on a Wednesday night – sure it was the middle of the week – but the difference was those friends would then go until the weekend without drinking again and I would be out with a different group drinking the next night. And so on and so forth.

Still, Cindy had a big heart and saw a good person inside of me, and I’m sure it had a lot to do with the way I felt about and treated Jasper. So in August, 2004, we got our first apartment together in Indianapolis and I officially became a proud doggy daddy.

Jasper was around four at the time, and with Cindy doing most of the work, my job consisted of taking care of Jasper. I would walk miles with him around the expansive apartment complex and I grew as a pet owner with Jasper even as my alcoholism increased.

So there were also days that Jasper didn’t get all the attention he deserved because Cindy would be at work and I would be, well, drunk. But I did manage to take good care of Jasper despite my disease growing increasingly worse and getting my first OWI in Ocotber, 2004, just after my 28^th birthday.

Ellie, a tiny little tri-color beagle, came into our lives that December.

Cindy’s dad wanted a beagle for Cindy’s little 5-year old brother Jake for Christmas.

So we found an ad and took a drive out into the country one day close to Christmas. We were with Cindy’s cousin Tiffany and one of us made the pick. I believe it was me, but we all know how memories get over time.

We named him Elvis, who became Ellie once we realized that Elvis was a girl.

Through a series of events that basically involved Cindy’s brother no longer wanting to be a dog owner, Ellie became ours sometime the following spring. Late that summer the four of us moved to Kokomo, Indiana with my drinking getting bad again despite that OWI causing a brief stint of something I would call not drinking more than I would call it sobriety. By that point, I was also eating gas station speed like candy.

At any rate, Ellie and Jasper were brother and sister and in May, 2006 I came home from work one afternoon and decided to take the dogs to the park. I harnessed and leashed the dogs, walked them past black trash bags stuffed with my clothes and belongings and loaded them in the car to take them to the nearby park.

Jasper hopped in the front seat as was usual for him, and Ellie jumped in the back where she could settle herself into the middle of the back seat and poke her head in between us.

We didn’t make it to the park that day. Waiting to turn left off the highway, I checked my rearview mirror and then watched the line of oncoming cars as I waited to make the turn. One, two, three cars speeding past. Waiting for the fourth car so I could make the turn, I heard the screech just before the impact from behind.

*****

And now, here was Lucy, the next dog in a lineage of dogs I had grown close to in my life.

In those first few weeks with Lucy, I wasn’t overcome with a sense of awe or an immediate attachment as if we were meant to be best friends. More often, it was a mix of agitation and bewilderment along with a splash of irony over how something so tiny could accomplish so much destruction.

She was small enough that I could hold her in one hand, gushing over her floppy ears and tiny little nose. 

And as soon as I placed her on the ground, she could find something twice as big as her to chew up.

She was small enough to put down on the ground and watch her getting to know her legs without a fear of her getting too far away, because even as she started running, her legs were too small to get far without being scooped back up and gushed over some more.

And then once back inside, she would move with the grace and agility of an Olympic runner to squeeze off a log of poop in what seemed to be milliseconds.

One of the first pictures I took of her was dated June 3, 2006.  In it, she is striding through a sea of grass, tongue hanging out. Caught by the camera in mid stride, one-paw out ahead of her, she looked purposeful, as if she was going places, and as if she were putting the world on notice that she had arrived.

This was going to be a heck of a trip.

“Here I am world! I am ready to play!”

And we would play. And we would love. And we would mourn. And we would grow.