Sundog
Dispatches From Inside the Fire: Part 9 of 11.
Petey Everett Vernon Dale Whitney Simmons. The Dog with Six Names.
I was 10-years-old or so. Getting Petey was dad’s idea. Mom was pissed. The dog was a tornado. Green eyes, liver and onion colored, tail cut short with an electric saw because that’s how things worked back then in Oklahoma.
He was born to hunt birds in fields. I was born to play sports on field. We were at best a mistimed mismatch. I’d take him for a walk, let him off the leash, and he’d take off across a wheat field like a rocket. I’d yell and chase. By the time the sound got there he was a speck of red dirt on the horizon.
So he ran off for good one morning. Mom wouldn’t let us miss school, and she certainly wasn’t missing work over it. My theory was that a farmer picked him up and gave him a better life than a chain that ran along a clothesline between a telephone pole and a shed in our backyard.
I cried for a few days and waited thirty years.
Until October 2015 when another one jumped from the back of a green van in a parking lot somewhere in Maple Grove.
And I didn’t want him.
Sheri found a family near Bemidji raising golden doodles to fund care for their autistic son. Seven hundred dollars. I’d found an Iowa breeder selling them for seventeen hundred.
Two curly sisters jumped out first. Then a straight-haired boy and “golden doodle my ass” jumped out of that van and went straight to a pine tree. Not as cute. Not curly. Was not interested in me or anyone else.
I said maybe we should get one of the girls. Sheri said no, let’s get the dog we said we were gonna get. Fine. Whatever. We loaded him up and away we went.
Two weeks later she apologized. Not for picking him. For making me wait years to get him. I think she was rightfully concerned about adding yet another thing to the list of things to care for. And my ability to do it.
But I’m the one with an apology: You were right. Again. Thank you, Sheri.
His name is Jordy Nelson Simmons. He doesn’t care about apologies. He cares about the lake, the snow, the walking loops. Forced to wear the same Green Bay Packers collar for a decade (sorry, not sorry). Loves eating footballs but hates watching me watch football. Would rather be outside in the sticker bushes.
More than 10 years later, 20-30 missed walks a year. In a decade that included a pandemic, one ACL surgery that could have been two, a career cliff, ER visits, hospital stays, death — we walked.
When he tore his ACL chasing footballs — he’s named after a wide receiver, after all — I slept on the floor with him the first couple of nights. When a pitbull attacked him in the street, I stepped in. When we drove seven hours south on I-35 to sit with mom in the hospital, he rode shotgun.
My family laughed when I said I was training him to be a pet therapy animal a few years ago. He passed the first and only exam he ever had to take.
He’s too special to not share. He creates happiness.
He’ll come to my desk when I’m working and stare me down. Doesn’t bark. Doesn’t whine. Doesn’t even blink. Just stares until I relent.
When I’m cursing at the computer at midnight, he goes upstairs. Hates screens with a fiery passion.
The loop at the bark park is two miles. We take one of the many paths counter-clockwise, through two gates. Same route for the better part of a decade. The world changes around it.
The loop doesn’t.
As for the screens, well, I’ve been building AI tools for two years. Millions of tokens. Autonomous agents that run while I sleep. And one of the best parts of my day is singing a jingle to Jordy on the way to a bark park. That’s what computes.
There has been a lot of darkness the last two years. But also plenty of light.
We’re still chasing that light.
Jordy is a type of fire. The good kind. Look at his coloring. That’s fire and light and goodness with a tail that wags magnificently beside boots on the move.
He’ll be on senior food soon, but he’s still all puppy at heart.
Seventy going on seven.
There’s a word for when the sun hits the ice crystals just right on a brutal January morning and a second sun appears.
Sundog. Saw a few this winter. A few in the sky, and one right in front of me, walking a bit sideways, left hip a little in front of his right.
Sun and dog. Light plus loyalty. Shows up when conditions are bleak.
He’s never saved my life. He just made me realize it didn’t need to be saved.
It was always pretty great.
And better with sundogs.
Derek Simmons has a tattoo of his dog on his right forearm and jingles stuck in his head. The goodest and the bestest turns eleven in August and still beats him to the end zone. The human writes Standard Correspondence because the alternative is walking in silence, which honestly doesn’t sound bad either.
The next dispatch drops next week.