Wake Up Maggie

“Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you”

I’ve been called a dog whisperer. Aunt Cathy called me that and I won’t dispute it. Dogs tend to like me. More than people do. Even the careful dogs, the ones that stay just out of reach.

When I was 14, I’d ride home from school on a spider bike—banana seat, monkey bars, the kind of machine that let you believe you were fast and fearless. A dog lived in a newer subdivision along the way. Not just newer, it was the first on my lonely country road.  This dog was known for chasing bikes, biting pant legs, terrorizing anyone who dared to coast too close. But not me. I’d slow down. Look him in the eye. Sometimes I’d stop. He’d back away, then run beside me like an old friend.

There was another dog, before that. Poochy. Spotted and droopy-eared. A pointer, more or less. I was probably seven. He listened to my secrets and didn’t tell a soul, just rested his head on my knee as I talked to the sky. He taught me about invisible lines—ones mothers drew across floors and thresholds—and how dogs sometimes found their way past them anyway, if you weren’t watching close.

Now there’s Boon. He’s here, beside me as I write this, always within reach. He knows what I mean even when I don’t say it. He knows what “later” means. He doesn’t know clocks, but he reads time on my face. Some part of him listens to the same quiet I do.

And then, there was Maggy.

She wasn’t mine. She belonged to Susan and Linda, their first dog. Small. Foxlike. Shy enough to disappear if you looked too long. She wouldn’t snap or bark—just exit. Under the bed. Behind the couch. Into the fold of shadow where the world couldn’t reach her.

So I did what came naturally. I stalked her.

Zombie-style. Arms stretched out, slow-footed and groaning, like a boy in a backyard too old for games and too young to give them up. My friends were appalled. But Maggy watched. She ran, but not far. She measured. I wasn’t a threat—or if I was, I was one she could easily outrun.

So we played. I’d creep. She’d bolt. I’d catch her, sometimes, and pin her gently to the rug, groaning like the harmless monster I was. Then she’d wriggle loose, circle back. Eventually she stayed. My lap became hers, and I belonged to her as much as she did to me.

Years passed. Decades, really. Mark and I would visit, or we’d go camping in Dolly Sods, high in the West Virginia wilderness. Maggy would find me, and I’d become the zombie again. She still loved it. We still played. It didn’t matter how long it had been. Some games don’t age.

She’s gone now—crossed that invisible line, as they say. The one you can’t coax them back from. But I think of her often, especially as the shadows lengthen along a mountain trail. I still imagine her running just out of reach, then stopping, then turning, just to see if I remembered how to chase her.

And I do.

#mylife