The saying goes like this, although I try not to write with clichés.
“You may not get the dog you want, but you’ll get the dog you need.”
My brother has a yard at his big house on Highway 61 in Grand Marais. A big yard. Mown. With planted tall red pines and planted stunted red oaks, and tall spruce and recurring birch. Like in a realtor’s ad.
I pulled up in the wide, three-car drive, and let Foxy out and she was in a heaven of her own, running the big mown yard from side to side, length to length, stopping with one foreleg up to catch wind of the past deer and rabbits. She ran laps, ever widening, around the trees. The yard is on high ground and around the acreage is drainage and thickets and she went into them – the diamond willow and crabs and unmown grass. She scared up a hare, and then another, and she barked. She barks when she’s on to fast game like rabbits or deer or flying partridge. She circles wide and when she tends to Highway 61, I whistle her back. When she tends off the acreage I whistle her in and she dances up to my brother, who talks sweetly to her and touches her sweetly, which she accepts for a moment.
Looking very relaxed, Foxy poses for a picture on the couch. Photos submitted by James Egan
Inside the big home, Foxy high steps on the strange tile and carpet. When we go downstairs she comes down, and my brother says, not sarcastically:
“Huh. She knows how to go down stairs, huh?”
Yes. Although I don’t know how she knows.
In the basement is a passage out under a porch and we go out, and Foxy – outside again – runs free and cold and clear into the yard again.
It is a terrible thing to say that I did not get the dog I wanted. And I dare not say that she is the dog I needed.
My concern is whether my girl got the man she deserved. The man she wanted. The man she needed.
If I do nothing more than struggle with that, to wrestle with that, to realize that, then I am happy.
The most important thing to me is whether my girl got the man she wanted, or needed. Or deserved.
On any given day, Foxy is likely to break out in a beautiful full-throated song. The lyrics never change, just the passion with which they are sometimes delivered.
And that is my testament of love for my pup.
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