The Dog With the Old Soul (13 page)

Jerry and Donna White

My wife looked up from the newspaper
she’d been reading. “You have to go get this dog.”

A dog?
We hadn’t had a dog in years; our beloved Petunia and Whippet had spoiled us from any possible replacements.

She held the paper out toward me. “Read it. The dog is deaf. No one wants her.” I knew by the tone in her voice, we were about to get a new dog.

“But what will I do with a deaf dog?” I asked.

“Train it,” my wife replied.

“How can I train a deaf dog?” I pleaded.

“Teach it sign language,” she said.

After years of marriage, I knew when I’d been overruled, and the very next day I went to the local pound.

Maggie was a cutie, a half-sized Dalmatian mix with a bobbed tail of all black. Maggie was only a couple months
old. It was love at first sight. Attached as I had been to our old black labs, there was something about this little one I could not resist.

From the get-go Maggie was always super-alert to her surroundings. Unable to hear what was going on around her, she had to continually turn her head to be aware of events. When I took Maggie to the fields behind our house for our daily walk, I noticed she would keep a close watch on me. Even when she chased rabbits, she would periodically stop to check on my whereabouts.

As my wife predicted, I taught Maggie sign language. She learned three signals: “Come here,” “Stop doing that” and “Look or go over there.” We had had two dogs before, and they were all much smarter than me. Maggie was the smartest. She quickly learned to obey my hand signals, but she also realized that she did not have to obey the signals if she did not see them. Maggie developed the habit of not looking directly at me when she had a different idea of what she wanted to do next. She would face slightly to the left or right and could see me only from the corner of her eye. As soon as I gave a hand signal that Maggie did not agree with, she would turn a blind eye and proceed to do as she pleased, even if it meant on several occasions that a deaf dog was crossing a road. Maggie was lucky, as well as smart.

Friendly by nature and always sure of an enthusiastic welcome, Maggie liked to go visiting in the neighborhood. Of course, we had a dog-proof fence, but why should that have slowed her down? There were places to go and people to see.

The sight of someone calling out to his or her dog at the end of a day in an effort to bring it home is a common one—calling the dog’s name hopefully at first, then impatiently for a few more minutes, and finally shouting the dog’s name in anger before stomping back into the house with a muttered, “Your dog is gone again.” But what do you do when the dog is deaf? You make it a point to learn all her visiting spots and check each one when it appears that she has once again climbed a tree.

Maggie’s favorite place to visit was the neighborhood Waldorf School on the Unitarian Church grounds. She quickly became a favorite of the children, who called her by name amid a lot of petting. Of course, one of the teachers had to bring Maggie home.

“The children really like Maggie and they always look to see if she is waiting for them at recess,” the young teacher said. “She is so cute and friendly. The children want to bring her into the classroom but we cannot allow that.”

Maggie visited the school and church grounds many times before we discovered her tree-climbing trick. If Maggie went visiting and school was not in session, she would explore the church. More than once the church administrative assistant called me to inform me that Maggie was there. “Hello, Jerry? Well… Maggie is attending church again.” She’d climb on a front-row bench and appear to show great interest in the proceedings. Nobody seemed to mind, but nobody was sure which set of religious beliefs she was observing. She liked all the groups but seemed especially fond of the Buddhist services. Everyone in that group knew her by name.

Since she was a puppy, she’d slept beside our bed, on my side. I still wake at night and reach down to make sure she is covered by her blanket, only to remember she is sleeping in our flower garden. We had to put her down at age twelve. Maggie has been in the garden for over three years now. We miss her every day.

Gordon M. Labuhn

It looked like a small, fuzzy black rock
in the center of a busy four-lane street. Out of curiosity, I scooped it up as Karen and I zigzagged between cars on our way to get a steaming cup of coffee at our favorite greasy-spoon café. The fuzz ball was wet, soft, and it wiggled. The newborn’s eyes were still matted shut.

“It’s a kitten!”

In our café booth, we sipped our brew and Karen dipped her napkin into a glass of water to administer a therapeutic bath. Other customers gathered around our booth to see what we’d found and to share in the rescue. For a bassinet, the waitress loaned us a large coffee cup lined with a napkin. The kitten was so tiny that her head didn’t even clear the rim. We named our newborn Rocky before we realized its gender; then we renamed her Roxanne.

Like every newborn, Roxanne required and received considerable TLC. We set up a nursery in the bathroom and embarked on a journey to save her. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get her to take nourishment. With an eyedropper, we thought we succeeded in getting one or two drops of warm milk into Roxanne’s mouth, but we weren’t sure.

In desperation, we rushed to the local veterinarian’s office. Gently the vet examined our tiny friend and we were given ointment for her infected eyes. “You should know this now,” the vet said gently. “She isn’t likely to survive.” Instantly, Karen and I became undaunted, determined to win her battle for life. Roxanne had no one but us to care for her.

Karen, a registered nurse, took her ten days of accrued vacation time to work a miracle. Our six-year-old neighbor, Julie, volunteered to be an assistant nursemaid. Young girls are a great help to newborn kittens during the day, but nights were a struggle.

Our rescue Roxanne’s routine went like this: every forty-five minutes, day and night, the eyedropper wet kitty’s lips with warm milk, and four times a day the ointment was applied to her eyes. After two days Roxanne’s eyes were getting better. Ours, on the other hand, were getting redder. Sleep deprivation chipped away at our stamina.

Progress in feeding was slow, but with persistence nourishment dribbled into our infant drop by drop. On day four Roxanne tried to walk. Wobbly and unsure, she promptly fell into a saucer of milk. It was drink or drown. She quickly weaned herself off the eyedropper. We cried.

Like every parent of a newborn, we worried about what the future would hold. Young Julie had fallen in love with Roxanne and was desperate to keep her, but pets weren’t allowed in her family’s complex. Both Karen and I traveled for business frequently; we couldn’t take care of her long term. Once Roxanne was over her initial survival crisis, we planned to seek a permanent home for her.

Karen taught Julie how to knit, and together they made a one-inch-wide, five-inch-long soft strip, which I dubbed a bookmark. When Roxanne was not sleeping on the bookmark, she played with it vigorously. She was becoming a wide-eyed scamp, always on the move. Her prognosis for life turned from gloomy to hopeful.

The twists and turns in a kitten’s life are not much different than for any vulnerable newborn. I was scheduled as a guest speaker at a meeting in a Springfield, Illinois, hospital. Roxanne couldn’t be left alone, of course, so at the age of three weeks she had her first long-distance car trip in a towel-lined cardboard box. She was accompanied by a saucer, a baby bottle of milk, a dab of soft kitten food and her woven bookmark. Karen came along on the trip and planned to wait for me in the car and read while Roxanne slept.

On my way to the meeting room in the hospital I passed a nursing station. One nurse was crying softly as her coworkers gathered around her.

“Anything I can do to help?” I asked.

A nurse at the edge of the small group shook her head sadly, still looking at her friend, while she whispered to me,
“Oh, it’s so sad. This morning she accidently ran over her daughter’s kitten.”

Ah, I could help, after all. I whispered in return, “Don’t let her leave. I’ll be right back.”

Believe me, there is no greater pleasure in this world than to give a gift of love to a wounded soul. Karen and I brought in Roxanne with her box, saucer, bottle of milk and yarn bookmark. Willeen, the crying nurse, adopted Roxanne quicker than a cat could blink. She left work with the goal of taking her daughter out of school for the day to have a healing celebration. We had found a permanent home for Roxanne where the bonds of affection would be strong.

Story’s end? Not quite!

A year later it was my good fortune to be scheduled for a return visit to Springfield. On our trip Karen and I reminisced about our experience in saving Roxanne. Was she still alive? Did she have any major health problems? Would we get a chance to see her? When we arrived at the hospital, our questions were answered by Willeen, who was waiting for us at the door.

“Roxanne is fine. Would you like to see her?”

“Yes, we would love to,” we said in unison. A quick trip to Willeen’s home during the lunch hour was arranged.

It was a thrill for Karen and me to see Roxanne comfortably lounging in an old apple tree. She was so black and silky, so at peace with her life.
Amazement
is a weak word to describe our shock in discovering the tattered and faded yarn bookmark draped over Roxanne’s perch. We coaxed her to come down. Roxanne picked up her bookmark, came down the tree bottom
first, made a beeline to her cat door and disappeared into the safety of her home.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “She still has the bookmark that Julie made, after all this time.”

“Yes,” Willeen said. “She carries it everyplace she goes. Last year I washed it, and she sat on top of the washing machine and meowed the whole time it was being washed. I felt so sorry for her that I gave it back to her without putting it in the dryer.”

Roxanne still holds a place in our hearts. I like to think that Karen and I, like the bookmark we gave her, hold a small place in hers, too.

Mark Lukas

It’s a crisp, sunny Sunday afternoon
in Central Florida as Zak heads down the driveway and turns his truck onto the street, towing his new Jet Ski and trailer behind him. A placid golf course community with dogwood-lined streets, our new neighborhood is perfect for a family of four.
We’ll all be happy here,
I think, still standing in the garage with tools in my hand, as Zak turns and waves to me. This is the last time I’ll see my sixteen-year-old son alive.

Just minutes before we’d had a father-son chuckle together as Zak searched for bolts to install the new license plate on the trailer. Listening to his fingers riffle through the metal in the nuts-and-bolts storage bin, I asked him what he was looking for. “I need bigger nuts,” he answered back casually. Immediately he froze when he registered what he’d said to his dad. He turned and looked over at me with a sly smile. He knew what a mistake that comment was.

Sixteen-year-old boys have very little fear; they all think they’re invincible. Zak and his friend from the high school soccer team, Jason Lewis, died that night when the Jet Ski sucked up a line from a crab trap, disabling the engine. They’d set out into the Gulf of Mexico at about 2:00 p.m., and when Zak didn’t show up for dinner with our friends that night, we tried not to worry. A cold front blew in from the North, and the Coast Guard would not search over the water because of the fog. A fishing boat found the boys nine miles out the next morning. They hadn’t made it through the night, dying of hypothermia.

Zak’s death was the beginning of the end of my life as I knew it. My twenty-year marriage dissolved; my relationship with my daughter faltered. I lost my whole family the day Zak died.

Zak was my hero. His life was full. He lived to play. He was very popular and he loved people. I think his goal in life was to make people laugh. His popularity came from being a great athlete; he was always one of the first picked and everyone wanted to be on Zak’s team. True, Zak was not a good loser, but he was often a winner. By the time he was twelve, he was dribbling a soccer ball past me and his soccer coach, laughing as he zipped by. He played soccer at a high level on a traveling competitive team, and he played varsity soccer as a high school freshman.

Zak didn’t like working out alone with a soccer ball. At a professional soccer game we’d gone to watch as a family, he thought he spotted the answer to this dilemma: during the opening ceremony an amazing border collie dribbled a soccer ball with incredible speed and skill. We met up with the owner after the game.

Zak reached down to pet the border collie and asked, “What’s the dog’s name?”

“Silk,” the proud owner told us.

That was it. We were hooked on the idea of having a soccer dog like Silk in our family.

“Zak, if you had a dog like Silk, would you put down the video games and go outside for soccer every day?” I asked him.

He smiled and nodded.

We purchased an Australian shepherd with the intent of teaching her how to play soccer. Did it really happen? No. With our busy lives, no one put the time into the training. Instead of being a soccer dog, Kobe ended up being really good with a Frisbee.

Soon after Zak’s death I found myself living alone. It was time to try and teach a dog how to play soccer. It was, I thought, a way in which I could feel somehow close to Zak. I derived some small comfort in following through on something we’d talked about doing together. When I went to pick out a border collie pup, there were two males roughing each other up and a scrawny little female who just sat there and watched her brothers fight. I pointed at the female. “I’ll take that one.” I named her Ms. Z after Zak. At first she was an awful lot like Zak—feisty and high maintenance, full of energy and very demanding. How could I channel this into soccer playing?

Turned out that I owned the perfect training ground—a fourplex housing unit. One of the units needed a new floor put in, and to save money, I was doing the work myself, down on my hands and knees every day, putting in new tile. The puppy
would go with me every day and roam around the apartment while I tried to get things done. Of course, she wanted to play. To keep her occupied, I had a hard rubber ball that was really too big for Ms. Z to get her mouth around. I tossed the ball and she chased it. A simple game.

She would whine and talk to the ball, venting her frustration and inability to get her mouth around it. Once she maneuvered the ball back to me, I stopped whatever I was doing and I heaped big praise on her and then threw the ball again. After a couple days of this and no small amount of doggy swearing and frustration, she finally learned how to maneuver the ball to me. One day something seemed to click in her mind: she realized that she had to bring me that ball if she wanted me to play with her.

Anyone who has ever spent time with a border collie knows that they need a job. Bred to herd, if they don’t have something to do, if they don’t have several hours of exercise a day, it won’t be pretty. Sooner or later they will eat your house. Soccer became Ms. Z’s job. She was getting pretty good at it, too. After a few weeks of playing soccer every day, we went to visit my sister and her twin eight-year-old girls. One of the girls tossed the ball to Ms. Z and she caught it! I still remember their excitement and astonishment.

Catching a soccer ball between her wide open mouth and her paws has become Ms. Z’s signature statement. As time went on, Ms. Z really started to think all humans were born to play soccer with her and she would adore anyone who would touch a soccer ball. She would play with anyone. It didn’t matter where
you were or what you were wearing. If you touched the ball, then you became her instant best friend.

I started to wonder just how far this could go. I went out and purchased two female border collie pups and named them Sweeper and Keeper, and did they ever live up to their names. Then I found Bek—yes, he is named after David Beckham—in a litter of brown-and-white border collie puppies. My intention was to become a soccer dog breeder and trainer. With three females and one male, this would be the start of something big. Soccer Collies was formed.

Soccer Collies is much different today than when we started. The business has evolved from a one-on-one encounter with a soccer dog to a group activity. Here’s a description of what we do: groups of kids ages two to ninety-two play the goalkeeper position as an incredibly talented soccer dog scores goals. A lot of goals! It’s a competition involving speed and agility, as the dogs quickly show their human competitors who has faster feet. There’s always laughter, especially when adults play against the dogs.

In the past years Soccer Collies have worked everywhere—from companies like Google and Purina to sports organizations like Major League Soccer and Women’s Professional Soccer. My dogs have entertained the crowd at places like the U.S. Open, Nokia Plaza and the Staples Center.

Training soccer dogs and promoting the soccer dog movement have become my life’s purpose. Nothing will ever replace my son, Zak, but working with the dogs gave me a reason to live again.