by Tod Davies.
Before I was born, before I was even thought of, my father had a dog named Spot.
It was a white dog with one black spot on its head. There is a picture of my father with the dog. You can tell just by looking at the photograph that the two of them really got along. I had my own version of Spot, much later, a dog named Gray, who seemed to me to be, and perhaps was, someone I had always known. Someone who had always been my best and most loyal friend.
There is, maybe, one dog like that in everyone’s life of dogs, no matter how many dogs one has lived with and loved. Spot was that for my father.
My father was a shy man, but he was the eldest of five children in a traditional working class family. As such, he was expected to fit a Procrustean template that no one should be forced to fit any more, at least without severe maiming of the limbs. He was affectionate and kind when he was expected to be powerful and harsh. His father was that kind of man. His father, so family legend goes, ran away from home at the age of twelve and went around the world as a cabin boy on a clipper ship. Supposedly this was because he couldn’t stand the feminization of his family, all girls and a mother.
I now know this story has formed much of my life and the life of my time.
My grandfather lied about his age when he was sixteen and fought in the Spanish American war. In Cuba. There was a picture of him in uniform under the glass top of the table set across from the front door of his and my grandmother’s house. He looked, in that picture, completely self possessed, smug, even, to be in uniform. When I knew him, when he was in his late seventies and early eighties, he was as thin and rangy as he was in that picture. He was a bit of an enigma to me. He had been a painter by trade, and I remember him and my father and my uncle painting our house in the avenues. He was handy. He was frank in his speech. And he was a drinker.
My father’s family, five children and my grandparents, had been caught by the Depression and forced to move to a tiny house in what was then rural Northern California. This was before they moved back, it must have been in triumph, to a house in San Francisco—and it was on the steps of this house that the photo was taken of my father, then in Catholic high school, where he earned modest Bs and played trumpet in the band. A photo of him and Spot.
I learned much later that when Spot was old, my grandfather ordered my father to put the dog down. My father was a shy man, a kind man, one who was given by nature to feel for others and to wish not to cause others trouble or pain. But this was not what my grandfather expected. My grandfather—indeed, the culture my grandfather came from and embodied—expected of my father that he would be hard, adventurous, courageous, hating all the softness of women. He was expected to be a smoker and a drinker.
My father, had he been left to himself, might have been happier than he was. For he did not easily fill such a harsh template. He could smoke, and he could drink, but the rest of it was very hard on him.
I remember: once we were driving as a family home in the family station wagon. It was dark, there were no street lights on the road, and my father ran over a black Labrador dog. It wasn’t his fault. I still remember how impossible it was to see the dog in that light. But my father suffered. That night, I looked out of my bedroom door down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom where he sat on the end of their bed, head bowed, silent. I saw my mother go to him and take his head and hold it against her stomach, one of the only times I saw her offer him kindness and compassion, at least until they were very much older. I saw him sigh.
It must have been harsh, my grandfather ordering my father to kill his dog. I think of how it would have affected me to have been told I had to kill Gray, no matter how old and decrepit he might have been. And I, even though a girl, am by temperament much more robust and wrangling than my kind, shy father. I think about that, I imagine him alone with the dog, shooting it and burying it in the ground, and I find I can forgive him many things that came after that.
There is a place that I visit in my dreams, and sometimes, even, in a state of half-sleep, half-wake. I think of it as my true home, and as true homes should be, it is very beautiful. Its garden is at the edge of a bay where the water is always a particular bright silver green blue. It is always sunny there, with slanted light, as if it is spring sun, or the last sunny day of fall.
When he was in his eighties, my father died. He died in a hospital, where they labored fruitlessly to keep him alive, and, to be frank, tortured him in the process. I had to watch. I remember thinking, “Should I stop this?” as one doctor shoved a catheter down his throat to check for a cancer that should have, in my opinion, simply been left alone. But I knew my father wanted it that way, for he believed in science, and I knew if I spoke, it would have ignited an already close to flammable grief on the part of the rest of the family. So I kept quiet. I went home, and he died while I was there, with my brothers and mother at his bedside. One of my brothers dialed my number by accident, so, in a way, I was there as well, since I could hear the death over the phone. After the nurse had finished telling my family what would happen to the body, I quietly hung up without anyone knowing I had joined them.
Awhile after this, I found myself in dream back in my true home. Walking out in the garden, I saw my father stand by the side of the bay looking confused. I went to him. He looked as he must have in his early twenties, but he never changed much through his life, and it was easy to recognize him.
Also, he was with Spot.
They both looked at me as I approached, and my father said, “Where am I? What is this place?”
I said, “This is my place.” I was the age I am now, much older than he who stood before me now, and he didn’t recognize me.
Spot scratched at an ear.
I said, “You’re very welcome to stay if you’d like. Are you hungry?”
A look of confusion came over my father’s face, but he nodded. I went back to the house and brought out a sandwich and a bottle of beer. I gave these to him. He thanked me. Somehow he had now acquired a fishing rod, and he and Spot stood by the bay with the line cast out.
I left them to it. Later I looked out to see how they were. And I saw my father, with Spot behind him, climb up a rainbow into the sky where they disappeared from view.
(from “My Life with Dogs,” by Tod Davies)