A Man’s Best Friends

“Look, look, brothers. Look at all God's little stars. They swarm like bees.”                    

 —Ivan Turgenev

I know landing on the moon was a pretty big deal. But you’d have to think selectively breeding wolves into tiny teacup poodles also signified one giant leap for mankind. I look at huge dogs and think how crazy it is that potentially wild animals laze on the couch next to humans, most of whom have been granted the power of reason. It’s freaky to me in a primal sense but it also seems so meant to be. 

My dad, however, probably didn’t see it like I do. He wasn't too thrilled about pets in the house. But we had two dogs in my youth. A third was out of the question. The next-to-last straw with our beagle, Clyde, came when my dad walked barefoot through our unlit dining room to grab his car keys from the china cabinet. Some rather runny “dog dirt”, as my parents called it, smooshed between his toes and that one small step for man launched into orbit some rockets of a different nature. 

It was 1977 and you know the deal. Money was tight. My parents had to pay for dog food, veterinary care, and our pup needed to go outside five minutes before my father’s ten o’clock bedtime. Most nights, my dad noticed my brother Ned and I disappeared sometime around nine fifty-five. Someone with responsibility had to pick up the slack (and some other stuff). And nobody but nobody enjoys stepping in shit unless it’s the figurative kind— the kind that brings you luck. So, there we were. 

I watched my dad come and go to work every day for the many years I remember. He’d been at it since he was 15 when his mom died in 1940. He took military tours of the Rhineland, Normandy and the Ardennes where at age 18 he watched a friend— whose name he could not utter— get killed by a mortar shell. At that moment, my dad stood by helplessly.

He didn’t tell me much about the war, and it seemed he said even less about his childhood. I knew there wasn’t a lot of milk and honey in the West Pittston kitchen. The reason I knew it was because my mother made sure I knew it. The reminder got delivered any time I complained about poor me not having this or not having that. 

He got up for work at five bells when we lived on Broad Street, in a town about twenty minutes south of Scranton. On the few occasions I saw him at that hour, he was a little crabby. The most he said was good morning, I’ll see ya later, or make sure you shovel the sidewalks. His testiness bugged me before the sun rose, but it could have been my guilt since I could go back to bed. Or maybe I was just getting there in my aimless stupor after high school. He’d finish his Cream of Wheat and scrawl a note on the chalkboard about dishes done or not done in the dishwasher. He’d then leave for his postal route in Wilkes-Barre— snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night always be damned. His morning grumpiness vanished when he greeted his customers. I’d say they were fond of my old man. I’d seen abundant proof. During the holiday season, he needed a wheelbarrow to cart cookies, fruitcakes, wine, scarves, gloves, and cash-filled Christmas cards into our house.  

Something about my dad’s perspective on pets changed after 1978, the year we lost Clyde. In 1981, he made another friend on his mail rounds. Any notion of dogs disliking mailmen and my dad disliking dogs got shot to hell. Out of nowhere, a shaggy German shepherd mix named Sheba, like some prescient spirit animal, met him near the corner of Edison and New Alexander in South Wilkes-Barre. Her tail was sweeping side to side like the pendulum of a frenzied metronome tipped on its back. My dad didn’t carry any milk bones in his mail satchel, but he possessed a gentle disposition. I believe animals and little kids sensed that. In fact, I know they sensed it. 

After retiring from the Post Office in 1990, he volunteered in my sister Molly’s classroom for seventeen years. From age sixty-five to age eighty-two, I guess he could have spent much of his time tending to the beads of reckoning on both sides of a crossbeam parting heaven and earth. I guess he could have done that. But the precious and fading time spent with his daughter and her students held far more value than what could be counted. 

The kids in Molly’s class were diagnosed with autism. The children capable of verbalization called my dad “Mr. Mike”. I’d visit the classroom now and then. Molly’s colleagues adored my dad. Our friend, a much younger and happily married girl named Marianne, claimed my father was her husband in a past life. All in fun, but my dad’s cheeks would turn red as a radish when she joked about it. The kids— God’s little stars indeed— hugged my dad, napped on his shoulder, tugged at his crew-neck sweater, and threw the occasional Fisher-Price ring at his noggin if he wasn’t paying attention. All the while, he wore this huge smile as if nothing in the world could ever be wrong. But everyone who knew him during those years knew better than that.

Molly and her classroom aides and therapists took great care in shielding the children’s privacy. She protected student identities like those stone-serious guys guarding the crown jewels in the Tower of London. Molly’s unwavering propensity to follow rules frustrated me— under certain circumstances.

Molly (after evaluating a child): “I met some friends of yours the other day. But I can’t tell you who they are.” 

Me: “Well, thanks for letting me know that but why even bother if I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

Molly: “I’m just telling you. They said to say hello.”

Me: “I guess you’ll have to tell them hello back since there’s no way I can tell them.”

Molly: “Okay, smartass.”

Molly would never name names. But outside the school I met parents of Mister Mike’s kids—some I knew and some I didn’t. The ones I knew named names and talked freely about Molly’s encounters with their children. Some of the ones I didn’t know heard my name and asked if I was related to Mike and Molly. When I admitted to it, they told me how maybe their son or daughter didn’t speak much but now talked more than ever. Or looked people in the eye. Or made their way into public places. Or found pockets of peace that previously eluded them. I heard a half-dozen stories like that, and I feel my dad had contributed to the children’s progress. And yeah, I’ll give his pal Molly some credit, too. 

My father’s canine pal, Sheba, followed him along the mail route each day. He’d feed her a snack at his lunch stop in the Pantry Quik parking lot. When they reached her home toward the end of the run, she ambled inside. The dog’s owners were perplexed. Sheba didn’t care for strangers. 

On my dad’s days off, the substitute mail carriers approached the dog at the meeting point. When the fill-ins drew closer, she wanted nothing to do with them. Sheba lowered her head and trotted home. This routine continued for eight years until my dad retired. The lovable girl continued to show up on that corner after her buddy hung up his mailbag. When my dad’s permanent replacement arrived every day, she turned around and went home. After a few weeks, she didn’t show up at all. When my father heard the story, he set off for Sheba’s house and bid her what would be a final farewell, slicing yet another piece from the man’s heart. 

He was a teenager when he lost his mom but another good chunk of my dad’s heart died in 1986, when he had to also say farewell to my older brother Ned. It was a couple days after our father’s 61st birthday, which fell on Valentine’s Day. The phone rang. The coroner called and said they had a body matching my brother’s description. He’d been missing for about a week. When they walked in the cold room and Molly collapsed in his arms, one would have to conclude that the image was forever etched upon the stone tablet of my dad’s psyche.  

Good old Ned. He used to call my dad from anywhere when Notre Dame lost on football Saturdays. Ned rooted for UCLA. 

“Dad. What’s the Notre Dame score? I have them on the card and if they beat the spread I’ll win ten bucks. But the TV’s broke here. I can’t find the score.”

By the second or third football season after the third or fourth phone call, my dad knew the score inside-out with my brother the ballbuster. 

“Yeah yeah, Ned,” he’d say. “Just get home.”

You see, all my dad cared about throughout his life was good health, some measure of contentment, and that safe arrival home for his wife, children and grandchildren. But as you now understand, it hadn’t always worked out that way for our father. 

He never strayed far from his front porch but we did get him home safely in June 2013, from a critical care unit to a bed wheeled in the middle of the dining room on Broad Street. Under the smoke of his own chimney. I feel we’d still be driving him around to modest restaurants for simple meals of meat and potatoes had he not been afflicted with leukemia. His friends and nephews and nieces came to say goodbye before a nurse bathed him and combed his everlasting boot-black hair in a neatly slicked side part. You’d think, after all he’d suffered through (there was more tragedy) in eighty-eight years of life, that his locks would have turned stark white like billowy tufts of April onion snow. 

The visitors as well as the nurse had left the homestead on the second day of hospice care, and my mom and Molly walked upstairs. I knew he could still hear my voice as we occupied that room alone. That room where he’d so often flashed his sparkling and munificent smile over Easter hams and Thanksgiving turkeys. I whispered in his ear about how I could not ask for a better father. A father and grandfather whom we could depend on for anything at any time day or night. I whispered that he could go—if he felt it was time. He hadn’t been conscious or moved the slightest bit for a day or so. And I learned why. The hospice people, as caring and well-meaning as they were, directed us to push this liquid from a small plastic plunger to the space beneath his tongue. I am not casting blame. But I hadn’t realized at the time that I was effectively euthanizing my father—a fighting Irishman I loved like no other. Like so many other times in my life, I had no clue— no fucking idea what I was doing. For this turn of a phrase, to some I apologize. I’m not sure how else to say it. I just did not know this garbage helped shut down his beating heart. 

I later expressed this hunch to a doctor of medicine, and his deliberate silence implied he didn’t disagree. Imagine my thoughts when I’d known the truth. But I guess that’s just the way it goes. I guess that’s medical protocol. 

Our souls mixed it up for one last moment as he raised his hand unexpectedly and finally. It slid along his chest presumably toward his forehead, as if on the path to saluting a commanding officer in World War II, amid the pines and poplars of bomb-blasted Belgium. The hand only made it as far as his heart when my dad drew his last breath. I called in a hush to the second floor. 

“Mom. Molly. Dad’s gone.” 

He hadn’t wanted Molly to witness it. She was his running mate for all those classroom years and then some, and I have always been good-naturedly jealous of their relationship. When my dad got sick, my sister was there at every turn, every rise, every fall. As my hair grows grayer and my own time slips away, I wonder if it’s not too late to adopt a daughter. But me and my dad had this way of our own. 

“My boy,” he’d say. “Enjoy your life. Just don’t hurt yourself or anyone else.” 

Often in vain these are words I try to live by. When I abide by these words, less often do I fall. 

There are mere words and then there are deeds, and the deeds went beyond things my dad did solely for me. Anytime my wife or kids needed anything, my father was at our front door before the landline’s handset clicked back into its base. I hope to be that same person for my three sons. And as for finding that daughter? I’m only half-serious. My sons always pick me up after I fall. 

I sometimes feel battered in mind and spirit, but my dad must have felt I was strong enough in some respect to be the one by his bedside as his soul winged it to the hereafter. That gave me some peace. Then and now. Now and forever. At his wake, I set sadness aside. There was no need for tears. I smiled at everyone who greeted me. I’d been gifted with joy. Filled with pride. For the simple and sorrowful journey he took. For the difference he made in our lives and those of the blessed little kids compellingly drawn to this man—our Dad, our Opa, their Mister Mike— like divine bees to a bloom.