On the drive to the mountain house to dig a grave for my parents’ Black Labrador Retriever, my father, the math teacher, tells stories. Stories about the different dogs he’s had over the years. The one they took in the car out to California in the 70’s, the cocker spaniel, who rode in my mother’s lap the whole way. The English Setter mutt they got from my cousin when I was a boy – how the first time we left her alone, she clawed and chewed through the kitchen wall.
He starts to count them, stops – can’t bring himself to say how many there were.
It’s then I realize how numbers won’t account for the loss. It’s not in their nature. They will balance the checkbook, sure, but once all the bills are paid to the animal hospital in Atlanta, they will no longer calculate the cost. And they could easily count the beats per minute of my mother’s heart, but not how I held her hand over the passenger seat for so long, we felt each other’s pulse in our fingers.
Up at the mountain house, digging, the numbers told us the size of the box, and by those numbers, we determined the size of the hole – but numbers did not keep digging once we hit solid rock. A tape measure, marked with numerals at even intervals, kept track of the depth of the cavity as we dug – but when the time came, only aching shoulders could fill it in. Had I wanted (for what reason I don’t know), I could have measured in degrees the angle of shadow where the stone statue of St. Francis stood waiting to mark the grave – but not my father’s exhaustion as he leaned on his shovel under the flood light.
So, on the way to the mountain house to dig a grave for my parents’ Black Labrador Retriever, my father, the math teacher, tells stories. About how they initially found him, ten years ago, wandering the streets of the nearby town of Jasper, collarless, coat matted with mud, smelling at a patch of weeds (maybe trying to catch a whiff of home?). And about my father’s first dog, losing him when he was a boy when the dog ran off from his family while they were visiting Chicago. About how he promised that from then on he would bury every dog he ever owned with his own two hands.
My father, the math teacher, who is not one to shed tears – telling stories.
I know, I know. It’s only a dog.
But we’re only human.
