The Benediction

The footsteps…you might think they were ponderous and heavy in their slow motion…their repetition…playing it over and over in my head with a strange fascination with the incongruous satisfaction the repetition brings. The short, timeless, movement of a particular time…a very particular time that happened only once but it outshines most others…it returns unbidden in the unexpected moments…the moments when it is needed…when I don’t even know it is needed but the feeling it brings on its arrival tells me a void has been filled…a satisfaction has been achieved and the profound benediction of being OK has been applied…oil and soot to the forehead...still available like an echo long after the footsteps have died away.

My father and I were carrying the lifeless body of my pet dog wrapped in an old blanket. I had one end of the blanket gathered up in my hands and he had the other. We walked across the yard without speaking. He was leading the way. I was a young teenager growing to manhood. He was a middle-aged man growing to old age. Our dog was the only dog I had known and been our pet for years. We walked across that short distance of yard and just before we got to the back of the garage where we were going to bury her, one of her feet fell into view from the folds of the cloth and we saw it. Dead and stiff and suddenly before us as the thing itself…not just the weight unseen in the folds of the blanket. And Daddy stopped and tucked her foot gently back out of sight and he looked at me and asked if I was alright. I said that I was.

And together we buried our dog.