Sunday evening phone calls have been a tradition in the
Pasley household ever since Tex went off to college.
Tex is not much of an e-mailer and we’re not much for texting.
While he humors me by saying he reads my blog posts the fact of the matter is
that we pretty much get our news about him and he about us in those Sunday
phone calls.
Here at AINL that system has worked surprisingly well even
though we don’t have cell service and cannot make long-distance calls on the
government’s phone line. To compensate we’ve worked out a system where Tex
calls us at a phone in a maintenance shed about 200 yards down the hill from
our trailer.
At the designated hour we pull up a couple of chairs amongst
the odd assortment of tools, grass seed and emergency response vehicles inside
the cavernous shed, put the phone on speaker and catch up on one another’s
news.
The news last Sunday night was that Hank had died the day
before.
There was other news to share, of course. Tex got a raise
and Betsy locked the keys to the cash register inside the register when we closed
up at the visitor center Sunday evening.
But the news we’ll all remember from this particular Sunday
night phone call was the news about Hank.
Hank was smart. As Betsy often said; too smart. I sometimes
felt that we were unfair to Hank; that he should live his life out corralling goats
on a big ranch, or at least chasing Frisbees in the park, rather than herding the
three of us around our little house. But he never complained. He always seemed happy
and content just to be with us.
Hank was testy, often snippy, with strangers. In fact, Hank
didn’t really like anybody but the three of us.
But us he loved and trusted, unconditionally. My God, I hope
we lived up to it.
Even though Hank was Tex’s dog, he was our dog too; my
fourth dog. I distinctly remember the deaths of the first three, and I’m sure I’ll
always remember the phone call in the maintenance shed at Little Sand Bay,
Wisconsin too.
Many times over the years I have told the story of that
traumatic day in September 1969 when I found out that my beloved dog Muggs had
been crushed under the wheel of a truck that was delivering caskets at my Dad’s
funeral home, where we lived in an upstairs apartment. Muggs had likely sought out
the shade under the truck on a hot Missouri afternoon as he waited patiently,
but expectantly, for me to come home from school.
It’s a good story to tell because it’s simultaneously odd,
poignant, funny and sad. I told this story to Tex many times and he recounted
it in an essay he wrote for his middle school English class.
I thought about that essay when Tex told us about Hank on Sunday
night.
Tex was 11 when we got Hank and I was glad when he decided
to take Hank with him to Arizona, even though I’ve missed them both very much. I
knew when Hank left that he would never be back; that Tex would be the one to
deal with his death. I was sad about that, but glad about it too.
There are a lot of good reasons to get a dog for a kid, but
dealing with the death of the dog might be the best of them.
I am forever grateful for the time that Hank had with his
friend Alecto, the dog of Tex’s (now ex) girlfriend; and the best friend Hank
ever had. I’m really glad Hank moved to Arizona with Tex.
Betsy’s photos of the sun setting on Lake Superior are
posted in tribute to our faithful dog, Hank.
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