When we were young

The sleepy, frail dog that lies on our living room floor is an imposter.
He spends his days stretched out across a lambswool pillow that occupies an entire corner of our living room.
He gets up for water, occasionally to eat, and occasionally to go outside or, more often these days, inside if no one is there to open the door.

He smiles at me when I sit down beside him and rub his head and back and chest and tell him what he good boy he is. But his eyes say this mild and mellow fellow is not really with us - not like he was before.

A friend's recent adoption of a wheaten terrier sent my mind reeling back to a time when Micah moved as fast and as erratically as a whirling dervish. He was known as the jumpy dog, the licky dog, and the dog that would chase your children up the swingset and refuse to let them down for an hour or more, barking and flailing his 35-pound body toward the top of the slide.

He was a runner, too. He would escape our-half acre, fully-fenced-in yard and make a run for it any time he could. When that happened, we'd jump in the car or set out on foot to canvass the surrounding blocks. Eventually, someone would spot him sniffing around a garbage pail or stalking a squirrel. A mix of commands, cajoling pleas and sometimes a physical 'gotcha' were required to get him onto his leash and back home where he belonged.

Embarking on his greatest adventure, Micah headed south one day and we never caught up. We didn't see him for more than two weeks. We posted ads and answered ads and even found someone else's wheaten that was lost. (But we gave him back.)

Finally, I got a call. Someone from the neighboring town had seen my newspaper ad and thought they had our dog. The man told me how he spotted Micah high-tailing it alongside the interstate the same afternoon he went missing. By then our dog was tired enough and thirsty enough to climb inside his rescuer's car without a fuss.

I thanked him profusely. Unspoken, though, was how the man obviously had waivered over the question of returning to us our beautiful, silky, well-bred dog. Apparently he had crumbled under the intensity of Micah's insistently manic nature. The harried rescuer handed him back to me with a slightly sheepish look.

Nate, the youngest of our three kids, was only 4 years old when we adopted Micah. Nate will be going off to college next year, and Micah's frail, grandfatherly status signals to me that an era is coming to an end.

I look forward to this new phase of life, as I slow down and follow Micah into the valley of the older and wiser. But I will always remember fondly those last rambunctious years of the previous century when Micah was a wild young thing and our family of five lived in a different, perhaps more innocent kind of world.