Lost and Found

Remembering the dog who found me

NOT LONG AGO I lost my latest pair of expensive eyeglasses.

Sadly, I seem to lose my spectacles on a regular basis. My wife, Wendy, jokes that I’ve lost or misplaced so many specs, she’s resorted to keeping a running account with Warby Parker.

Just for fun, I tried to make a rough count of eyeglasses I've lost over the 23 years of our marriage.

I gave up after counting the six I’ve lost or misplaced in the past year alone.

At least one of those pricey pairs of specs was never found. It vanished into the magical Land of Lost Things without a trace. Of the remaining missing five, Wendy found two pairs in the pockets of old work shirts and a third in a sports coat I haven't worn since Christmas.

The fourth pair turned up in a rose bush where I was doing some early spring pruning. The fifth and final missing pair - my hip, whiskey-hued tortoiseshell sunglasses - finally revealed themselves in my golf bag, where I left them weeks ago.

Dame Wendy's theory to explain my penchant for losing my glasses is that I have so much on my mind - i.e. deadlines, books to read, garden stuff, my aging golf swing, the general state of the world, etc. — that there's little room remaining in my brain to remember where I leave things that I don't deem particularly essential.

My explanation for this expensive problem comes from my being nearsighted and only needing glasses to see objects in the distance including, but not limited to, golf balls in flight, birds at the feeder in the yard, faded street numbers, the fine print on any document, UFOs and interesting cloud formations.

When I'm reading, writing or examining something up close, I typically remove them and — apparently — forget where I put them down. A simple case of out of sight, out of mind.

This problem got me thinking about more important lost (and sometimes found) things in this world, including honest politicians, people who care about the environment, and lost animals.

Every time I pass a stray dog walking along a busy highway, my heart aches. I’ve saved more than a few and taken them to shelters — and even kept one that crossed my path in heavy traffic and saved my life.

Back in the fall of 2005 I was heading to speak at an arts festival in the park when I saw a young black pup bolt across the busy highway, barely escaping being run-over by a truck.

A short while later, as I was leaving the park, I saw the same black pup streaking back toward the highway. I got out of my car and hollered: “Hey, black streak, come here!”

Amazingly, the dog stopped and looked at me.

“Yes, you!” I shouted. “Come here!”

The pup raced toward me and joyfully leapt into my arms, a wiggling black female that licked my face. I asked a couple kids playing basketball and a maintenance workers if they knew who owned this beautiful pup with the soulful brown eyes.

“She’s been around here a couple weeks,” the maintenance guy told me. “We think someone just dropped her off. A lot of soldiers from the base do that when they ship out.”

“She lives in the woods, mister, eating birds and stuff,” one of the kids said. “How’d you catch her? She’s fast as lightning.”

I put her in my car and drove her to three different shelters that turned out to be full of lost animals. Our final stop was a no-kill shelter where the owner gave her a shot of wormer and pointed out that the pup was sitting on my new car’s console, leaning heavily on my shoulder.

“I think that dog found you,” she said with a smile.

So I took her home and fed her a can of Alpo, which she promptly threw up along with lots of junk, including small animal bones.

Then I gave her a bath. The bath water was brown. But she came out looking like a shiny baby seal.

I phoned Wendy to tell her I’d found a beautiful black pup running wild. Or she found me. “I’ll try to find her an owner,” I said, since we already had a pair of golden retrievers back home in Maine.

Wendy laughed. “I think she’s already found her home with you.”

That night I heard soft snoring and discovered her lying upside down on the pillow next to mine.

I named her Mulligan, Mully for short, a second chance dog.

She grew into a gorgeous animal, a mix of Scottish border collie and long-haired retriever we eventually learned from her DNA.

But the wild never quite left her. When I took her home to Maine, she spotted a deer and chased it deep into the forest. I called her name for twenty minutes before giving up, fearing I’d lost her. Just then she came back, panting and smiling. The retrievers were deeply impressed.

In those days I was triangulating between the arts magazine that I helped start in North Carolina, a writer in residency at a distinguished university in Virginia, and our home in Maine. Mully went everywhere with me and seemed to love being on the road. She thrived on meeting people, especially little kids, a natural ambassador.

Many years later, as wise old lady of fifteen, she was frequently by my side riding “shotgun” during the four years we traveled the 800 miles of the historic Great Wagon Road together.

In the book about that journey, which comes out this July (The Road That Made America) I include several accounts of our final traveling days together to historic places and events.

Her old legs finally gave out on a late summer day three years ago. When the kindly vet came to ease her pain, she made a slow circuit around the Asian garden we built together on her ancient legs — her daily routine — before finally lying down at my feet, placing he chin on my shoe.

The dog who found me has just turned seventeen. She looked up at me with those wise and soulful brown eyes and knew what was coming.

She was ready to go. But I wasn’t.

In a world where so many things are lost and found — including silly eyeglasses — we’ve adopted a trio of beautiful rescued dogs since that sad summer day. They give us plenty of joy.

But losing my best friend Mully has left a hole in my heart that can never be filled.