Who let the dogs out?

my September 11 (2020)

Hello, Poetry Friend

The morning we left town for Dad’s funeral our dogs got out. A neighbor called when we were too far gone to turn back. The person we would normally call in this situation, the only person with a key to our house, was Dad, whose ashes were in an urn in the trunk of our car. I fumed and sipped the silver needles tea Dad had bought but apparently never liked and gave to me. The bag was practically full.

The neighbor who called us about our delinquent dogs worked with another neighbor, and our dogs were delivered safely to the vet for doggie daycare.

“Do you want us to keep them overnight?” the woman at the front desk asked when I called to confirm this impromptu drop-in was okay.

Honestly, I was considering letting her keep them permanently. The last thing I needed was to deal with my damn dogs on this day, of all days. But I said, “No, we’ll be back before 5.” And we were.

When we returned home, our naughty puppies were giddy in the backseat, Clover was proud to show us her jailbreak. She had previously dug underneath the fence separating our house from Dad’s, so we’d put up a barrier, hoping it would be enough. But his fence was in bad shape. All she had to do was push. The day after the funeral John put up a new fence.

Back when I was 13 years old and living in the house I would later help Dad empty before he moved next door to us, Focus on the Family aired a radio program titled “A Man Called Norman,” in which Mike Adkins describes his relationship with his eccentric neighbor, who he called Weird Norman. That radio program so inspired middle-school me that I wrote a poem about it titled “A Visit of Charity.” Mom liked it, and somehow it ended up on the front page of the Westlake Picayune, December 19, 1984.

Dad was not weird, but he was eccentric. The day after he died a large cardboard box was delivered to his house — a box of forty-one Hatch chili peppers from New Mexico. Forty-one peppers, just thrown into a box. I have no idea what Dad planned to do with them. That’s the kind of weird he was.

The day after he died I reread my weird-neighbor poem. It might as well have been prophecy. Somehow, thirty-four years before I needed it, something in me knew I needed to learn a thing or two about loving my neighbor as myself.

These lines from the middle of my poem could have been written on September 11, 2020, the day Dad passed away, when I was running late for my daily 2 p.m. visit. (Why 2 p.m.? He wouldn’t let me come over any earlier. Weird.)

            I screeched to a halt as I reached [his] front door,

            Then abruptly stopped, as my heart beat no more.

            I seemed quite reluctant to go right on in,

            Although I’d done this same thing time and again.

            Upon reaching the door, I knocked and called, “Hi!”

            But nary an answer could be heard from inside.

When Dad moved next door, neither of us were exactly sure how to live as neighbors. My husband’s role was clear: yard man, handyman, and eventually, financial spreadsheet man. My role took some trial and error. Dad and I eventually settled into a routine of Tuesday morning coffee-for-him and tea-for-me at a local joint, and Sunday night dinner-and-a-TV show at my house. We took weekend drives down one-lane country roads, while Dad kept a running commentary that could have been titled Fences I Have Known. Eventually he needed me every day.

I did not enjoy being his caregiver. Unlike the cheery young woman in my poem, I did not serve with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. After his death I took great comfort in Kate Washington’s book Already Toast, about caregiving for her husband. I recognized myself in her portraits of caregivers in literature: Dorothea in Middlemarch, Leslie in Anne’s House of Dreams, and the mother and daughter in Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “Jesse Mitchell’s Mother.” Like Washington, I joined a community of women who step up and serve because it has to be done. Thirteen-year-old me wrote the ideal. The truth in literature and in life is less white and more the color of teeth: something you bite and that bites you.

Happy poeming!

Megan