Canter Bridge

I did not expect to think of Sammy today.

Poor Blind Sammy, our rescued Rhodesian Ridgeback with his sick eyes surgically removed, left us before this year’s Spring sun had found its way to warming his long wheaten body. We were an ocean away. The stricken dogsitter’s voice reported through the phone that Sammy had gone out to lie down in his favorite place along the fence and fallen asleep. Inexplicably, he never awoke.

Tender friends had seen to his cremation before we could get home.

The saddest thing is that we were not with him to ease his final passage, Sammy alone in the backyard and his sister Rhea doubtless worrying—if dogs worry in our way—over his unmoving form.

I did not plan to think of Sam these eight months later on an after-work run with nimble little Rhea through Indianapolis’ Holliday Park.

But Summer’s end and Autumn’s entrance have announced themselves gently this year, and a wooded path in the twilight calls out for an evening run before a late dinner.

Rhea’s sharp eyes and lightning reflexes notwithstanding, she slows to pick her way over roots and stones and the park path’s ups and downs. Having left my glasses at home, I decelerate with her as my late-middle-aged body lumbers cautiously over ankle-twisting terrain.

Maybe this is why Poor Blind Sammy comes back to me in my mind’s eye this evening. Sammy never slowed.

Trusting his master’s leash-in-hand guidance, the Samsters prowled forward in his oddly leonine gait, heedless of the trees with which his poor noggin would collide if his owner’s attention faltered for a moment. Sammy had been through too much, knocked his head literally and metaphorically against too many bigger things, to mind much the perils of a harmless little park’s path.

He was a hero, that boy. Struggling with a bit of twilight, I wonder how he did it. How he lived his life with such zest, how he leapt to his feet and raced for the door through our mapped-out home whenever he knew a run in the park was coming up. How he loved to love his too unloved life when he could have been forgiven for curling up listlessly on his bed, leaving the wide outdoors and the park path to dogs with eyes.

How did you do it, Sammy?

Sentimental anthropopathism splays itself too easily across a dog-lover’s page. But let us sin boldly …

Sammy was heroic. Sammy never complained, though if you press me I will confess that I can’t say exactly what canine complaining would have looked like. He loved nothing more than to wrestle eyelessly with his quick little sister. Perhaps the bond between them traced itself back to having begun life at the hands of cruel people. Little Rhea leapt all over Sammy. He leapt back, often at the air as Rhea evaded his sightless, playful lunges. Hours of circling, growling, toothy play. They’d take their rest in the sun, then spring to their feet when a chain’s jingle suggested that their master and the park awaited.

I did not expect to think of Sammy today.

But Rhea and I had slowed to pick our way over the uneven path and there he was, racing ahead of us.