Walks with Red
Lately I’ve been thinking about how commitment hides inside routine. There are moments when routine becomes the only proof that something mattered.
Meet Red. That’s a picture of him from fifteen years ago, when we brought him home from the shelter. We were still strangers to him back then.
We are strangers no longer. Now, his muzzle is gray and he moves a little slower. Back then, he forced my routine to change. Now he is the routine.
Red came into our life because my daughters wanted a dog more than anything. I was the holdout who finally gave in. Soon the girls will be leaving for college, but I’ll still have the dog—and the daily walks his presence has forced on me.
I don’t enjoy walking this dog. He stops constantly. Every blade of grass demands investigation. Every morning, he wanders into my office and gives me the look—the one that means he’s ready to go out. I’ve learned it also means that it’s around 10 a.m. Time to allow myself to be inconvenienced.
One such morning, I’d just finished picking up Red’s poop when my phone rang. It was a FaceTime call from my dad. I finished tying up the plastic bag and answered.
My dad and sister were on the call. We said our hellos and shared our weather reports. Dad loved hearing about the weather. Then my sister and I spoke about our day so far—how we’d spent our morning and what we had planned. After that, it was Dad’s turn to speak. He looked away from the camera, swallowed, and when he came back into frame, he told us about a doctor visit and some test results.
I’d always kept in touch with my dad, but phone calls had been a weekly thing. After that FaceTime I decided to make a point of calling him every day. And so that was added to my routine. Every walk with the dog came to mean another phone call with Dad.
The changes came slowly but consistently. Pauses grew longer. Words became harder to find. More and more I would have to call over and over while he struggled to answer. Sometimes he would answer but forget to hold the phone up to his ear, and we’d spend the entire phone call trying to understand one another. Each new call felt like a game of chance. Who would answer today?
One morning he answered with, “The helicopters are back.” His voice was low. Almost like he was afraid of being overheard.
I glanced into the brilliant blue of an early morning sky several hundred miles north from where he sat and said, “Really?”
“Those people are up to something. I see them. They’re doing something over in those woods.”
Red stopped to raise his leg. I waited and tried to think of how to respond. Finally, I asked if he’d heard from my sister and that was enough. He started talking about her.
Each call brought something different. Sometimes he’d be fully coherent, and other times silences would drag on while I waited for him to find words. Some conversations never really progressed beyond the two of us repeating the word hello to one another.
As Red and I approached an intersection, he fixated on some smell. The dog would not move. He had to know what scent was lingering in those blades of grass.
I didn’t mind, because I was caught up in an investigation of my own. I was trying to get my dad to repeat himself clearly enough so that I could understand him. I pivoted and navigated back to the topics he handled best: the weather, the news, and past memories.
On one particularly cold morning, I was shocked to discover that my dad had been involved in a series of meetings with Elon Musk. I’m not quite sure what those meetings were about or how they happened, but the outcome was that Elon was going to send a significant amount of money to both my sister and me. As of today, I have not received this money or heard from any of Elon’s representatives. I am, however, grateful for the comfort this thought seems to have provided for my dad at a time when he was clearly worried about his children.
On my way back home, I ran into my neighbor and his wife as they were out for their morning walk. We stopped and spoke for a while. After we’d said our goodbyes, I realized that I hadn’t spoken to Dad that day. We used to FaceTime almost every day, but we’d had to switch to audio-only phone calls because he had such a hard time understanding how to answer a video call. For whatever reason, though, I decided to try to FaceTime him that day, and he managed to answer on his first try. This was a hopeful sign, because it meant he was having a good day. And he was. I’d caught him shortly after he’d finished his breakfast. He asked several questions about me and my family. He wanted to know what was going on in our lives. It had been so long since we’d spoken.
I’d made it back home. Dad waited while I took the dog off his leash and put him in the house. Then I sat down on our front porch to continue our conversation. I wanted to spend every moment I could speaking to him while all of him was still present. We spoke for several more moments, and I asked him if he had any big plans for the day. He never had plans. His daily schedule consisted of making it to his recliner and watching TV or nodding off, but sometimes that question would reveal a trip to the doctor that I hadn’t heard about. He looked at me with a big grin on his face and said, “I’m going home now.”
The dog had walked into my office every morning for two months. This time when he gave me the look, he had to wait while I put my AirPods in and started the latest podcast episode. Then we went through our morning routine of attaching his harness and heading out.
There’s a place just outside my property line where my home Wi-Fi and cellular signals get mixed up. I’ve learned that I need to wait until I pass that handoff area before I call Dad. Otherwise, the call will sometimes drop. The dog and I made our way to this location. I know we’re there because that’s where the mailbox Red loves to mark is located.
I paused the podcast and pulled out my phone. My finger automatically went to the Call icon, but I pulled back before touching it. I stared down at my dad’s contact picture. I don’t know how much time passed, but eventually I felt Red pulling on his leash. Time to go. I squeezed the stem of my AirPods to begin playing the podcast again and wiped my eyes.
