Unleashed Challenge

Valentine’s day is a wonderful day to be born, unless you are a puppy who needed a blood transfusion for a heartworm invasion. I do not know how Chip got his name, but he was a full-blooded Collie with a big heart. He was very much of a protector just like Lassie from when I was a child. Even still he was a bit ‘nibbly’ when he wanted full attention. He was like that mother in Church whose children misbehaved, and the look did not quell the wiggles. He had a pinch that would garner all the focus. It did not leave a mark and it did not break the skin, but it sure smarted.

He was given to me by the ‘boyfriend fiancée’ after the broken marriage. Bouncing me off the screen door did not hurt, but the red flag sailed too far up the flagpole to ignore. It was then that the real adventure began with a 4½ -year-old child, a dog, and a cat. The Army had dropped me off 2,200 miles away from home and would not let me back in after the marriage landed in shatters either. The next year’s Valentine’s Day was not so far away, but the mother sweetheart built a cave for the little traveling show. Ryder trucks have or at least had a great benefit to them in the way of sliding doors between the driver and passenger seats of the cab. Once opened there was all the room in the hull of the box truck to roam. Three sheets of ¾” plywood later, I had a cave.

Packed around the cave was the clutter of a broken family’s home. But inside the cave was the clutter for what remained important: a son, a dog, a cat, food and water bowls, a litter box, and the army cot. This was no longer a Valentine’s Story but a winter Christmas story. Sometimes, it is just time to make the ‘call.’ It had been time to make the ‘call.’ At almost twenty-six, I was going home defeated and what some would call a failure, but I was going home. Leaving on a new adventure is always exciting, but thinking on the reality, it is also frightening. Armed with a dog, a cat, a small boy, a thermos of hot chocolate and a recorder to blow did not seem like quite enough protection against the winter cold that would greet us as we traveled North. Yet, the dog was smarter than all of us put together.

The trip would take two and ½ days with little sleep along the way. I would drive as fast and as far as I dared before crawling onto the cot with my small son and sleeping for a bit. As I tried to keep going on the final leg of the trip, the temperatures had dipped and the snow had begun to blow. Everyone who drives in the dry falling snow knows the mesmerizing tunnel it creates turning the mind into a blind zombie. Soon the dog had enough of that circus and picked up his stainless steel two or three-gallon pot by the handle and threw it at me. With his water empty and the need for the restroom, Chip profoundly said, “Enough already. Pull over I want out!”

He got his water. We got more hot chocolate and I got the final three ½ hour nap which was all he allowed me to sleep because his fur coat was apparently not any warmer than ours. Had our guardian dog not done his job, his charges may not have continued their adventure this side of Heaven’s Gate. Hypothermia was not so far away I think. Then, with a thermos of coffee and the chatter of a young man before he would go back to sleep we finished our trip with everyone in style. The cat having escaped only once did not leave the litter box the remainder of the trip. It suited her just fine. Chip kept a watchful eye on me and God watched us all pull into my parents’ drive on Christmas Eve 1991. Chip is now gone. The farm is also gone, but the parents remain even through this season.

There is always something comforting to know you can make the ‘call’, no matter how tall you might be. One day, no one will answer, but every Christmas has a memory, even when they are cold and defeated, long and weary, there is hope in the retelling somewhere. From the hindsight of decades, that particular trip left only one casualty really. When we unpacked, we found the happiest, brightest, and healthiest looking aloe vera plant for soothing all that was wounded. Until it thawed out that is, having frozen solid to the core, because it didn’t get to ride in the cave and it did not have a dog to guard and keep it warm as I did.