Old Dog

Our society likes to kill things.

We kill people: men, women, and children. We kill animals: the ones we eat and the ones we find inconvenient. We even kill that which never had a chance to really live. We kill hopes, dreams, and reputations.

This seems to be a universal trait that applies to the entire human race; uniting us in a rapid degenerative decent from God's original creation. It seems a morbid bond we share. One you don't discuss around dinner tables.

I have wondered at death, getting older as I am. I have wondered what it will look like; if I will be able to see it coming. I wonder if my daughter saw it coming, that night when it had rained so hard and the driver of a Silverado plowed into our old Pinto, crumpling and twisting it like so much tin foil. I often wonder if she was scared.


Perhaps that is why the day I saw the dog in the field I thought of her. I had been watching this golden retriever cross the field from my parking space at work. The dog had stayed parallel to the railroad tracks with its head bent low, never stopping as it made its way to the road in front of me. Traffic was scarce and I had just come from a bad day so I decided to watch it. I like dogs. They're a lot like kids in their loyalties. They forgive easily if you tell them you love them, and they trust you to protect them. But this dog didn't belong to me, didn't even see me, and I can't tell you the comfort I found in that.

It was dingy, obviously a stray. There was nothing but industrial warehouses as far as the eye could see so I couldn't help but wonder where it had come from or how long it had been going. The dedicated forward movement of the creature made me uneasy; the way it never looked up. Some kind of blind need seemed to keep it going. I'll never know what that need was.

The street had been completely quiet as I had watched the dog approach, which is why it was such a shock when the car hit it.

Like most bad things, it had come out of nowhere and too quickly to stop. I don't know the moral value of the person who sat behind the wheel of the car, but the way had been straight and their line of sight clear. I can only guess that they had been distracted by something else. I can hope. But, we are society of killers after all. I had known a young man in my youth that liked to spend his spare-time 'opossum bashing'. This was the act of taking a baseball bat to a mother opossum during mating season and then hoping to pick off the little ones one-by-one. Maybe there was someone out there that just didn't like dogs. Maybe there was someone out there that didn't like kids either.

Either way, they never stopped. They didn't even slow down. The sound of the impact made me nauseous. I witnessed the slow-motion rotation of the thing as its hind-legs broke and its body flipped through the air. It had never even looked up, and like the car, had never slowed down.

The car was long gone. The dog lay on the far side of the road unmoving. I hadn't realized I was sweating until I reached for the car door handle and my hand slipped right off. I wiped my palm on my pants leg and got out. It was as I walked toward the road that I first thought of my daughter. She had also been unmoving by the time the ambulance had shown up. I remembered wiping blood from my eyes with broken fingers and looking over at her; twisted in what was left of her seat. The booster chair had somehow managed to wrap itself around her in a kind of possessive embrace. And it didn't take looking for her breathing or feeling for her pulse with my mangled hands to know that she was gone.

I could see the same thing, looking at the dog. It was broken in a way that could not be mended. I remember walking toward it willing it to get up but knowing that it wouldn't. I also remember hesitating before I stepped off the curb into the street. I looked both ways like a child - deliberate. I expected my death car to come speeding down the road to answer the questions I have asked for so many years now. But there was no car for me. And then there was disappointment. I have been left here to experience each exquisite agony that life can offer. I have wanted so many times to die. And yet, I couldn't bring myself to cross that road. In the end, all I could do was sit on the curb and stare at the ruined figure of the retriever.

I sat there until the sun went down and I could no longer see it. During that whole time, not a single car passed by.

I still picture that dog with its head down, striding out into the road without one thought. Did it see death and welcome it? Did my daughter? Will I?