His Dogness

I miss my friend Mike.

I met Mike about 20 years ago when I went to do a story on his house, which he built off the side of a boulder on the other side of the mountain from Hanging Rock State Park. In our years as friends, I went to see him more than he came to see me because I was always happy to head his way and get a taste of the Stokes County woods.

When the weather was warm enough, we would sit out on his porch. We didn’t have to talk about anything in particular but Mike sure came in handy when I had something to talk about. He gave the best advice of anyone I know. When I had something that I was wrestling with, Garnet would sometimes suggest that I go see Mike to hear his thoughts.

The last time I saw Mike he and a buddy had their heads under the hood of Mike’s old truck trying to figure out what why it wouldn’t run. When I called back later to find out what the problem turned out to be, Mike said that a mouse or some other animal had eaten through the fuel line.

At Mike’s memorial service, lots of people got up and told stories about Mike. In one of them, a niece talked about the day Mike came over and saw her report card on the refrigerator. Her parents had put it there in hopes of motivating her to do better in her academic classes.

Mike looked at the card, noted that she had gotten really good grades in art and music and asked her whether she cared for the other subjects. Not particularly, she said. He asked whether she liked art and music. Love them, she said.

To which he said, “That works out well, then, doesn’t it?”

Another niece told a story about driving around with Mike in her brand-new convertible one glorious day. At a light, they pulled up beside an older man who could barely see over the steering wheel of his town car.

Mike looked over at him and said, “Great day, isn’t it?”

The man looked back and said, “My wife just died.”

Mike and his niece looked at each other. Then the man, having, at Mike’s prompting, taken in the world around him, looked over at them and said, “You know, it is a pretty nice day.”

Mike’s ability to offer life-affirming perspective was one of the things I particularly liked about him.

I have Mike to thank for His Dogness coming into my life. I had been looking for a dog but had not yet found the right one when he called up one day to say, “I found your dog.”

He was driving down the road, he said, when he saw this dog standing at the side of the road as if he were waiting for a bus. Mike picked him up, took him home and gave me a call. He was absolutely right that he had found my dog.

When Mike picked up Buster (His Dogness), Buster didn’t have a collar. We surmised that someone had probably dumped him. Sometime later, after Buster was an integral part of my life, I said something to Mike about horrible that day must have been for Buster, being dumped like that.

If whatever had happened to him that day hadn’t happened, Mike said, he wouldn’t have picked up Buster and he wouldn’t have ended up with me.

“Best day of his life,” Mike said.