Petlife logo

The Raising of Ambrose

Never Give Up.

By D.P. MartinPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 17 min read
Like

Ambrose was a black lab. My black lab. Radiant obsidian fur everywhere, save a tiny patch of brilliant white in the middle of his chest. The smallest from a litter of six puppies, my dad called Ambrose a million different names over time, but he never let anyone call the dog a “runt,” perhaps, I fathom, because my dad had been the smallest of three offspring himself.

The yippy little superball came to us in the winter of 1974, when I was not quite six years old and quite unfamiliar with having companionship at all, let alone having a pet. My parents owned and operated a convenience store which was attached to our house via a hidden, narrow set of stairs and a thick oak door. Generally, Mom and Dad disappeared through that door at 6:30 in the morning and appeared only briefly in the house once or twice in the following fifteen hours. My older sisters were sophisticated enough at ten and eleven to have no interest whatsoever by playing with their kid brother, unless, of course, it involved one of them applying make-up to him while the other pinned him to a dining room chair. My childhood best friend – up until Ambrose – was a black and white Zenith television.

I look back today and it’s clear that Ambrose’s arrival is one of the most well-defined geologic changing points in the narrative of my life: the Zenithocene Era ended, followed by the Early Ambrosian Period, when a tiny ebony puppy collided with a small living room carpet in Southern New Hampshire. Moments after my sisters realized that there was no way they were safely applying makeup to the puppy, their interest in him waned. And this is how the floppy-eared rapscallion became gravitationally entangled with the boy who knew the names of every actor to ever appear on Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch.

I no longer had my own bedroom. It was Ambrose’s pad now, too. When I started school, the rapidly growing Labrador became a hunched-forward, sulking window magnet until the school bus spat me out at the top of the store’s parking lot entrance. We snacked together on foods from the store I shouldn’t have ever shared with him, played catch in the back yard with tennis balls and frisbees, and every night he would pretend to fall asleep on the floor adjacent my bed until he heard my parents click off their lights one room over, then his eyes would blink open. I always wondered if Ambrose could tell the exact moment when they fell asleep because he seemed to have a nightly epiphany: his head would suddenly whip up from the carpet, looking toward their room, then quickly he’d jump up on to my blankets, curl up into a tight circle of dogdom, and with a deep and satisfied breath, race me to sleep.

When I was eleven years old, our time at the store-attached house was nearing an end. My parents had worked five straight years of a hundred-hour weeks, rarely taking very short vacations, and generally Christmas was the only full day they would regularly take off. Even Thanksgiving was a half-day for them because, after all, people always ran out of milk or realize at the last moment that they’d forgotten canned cranberry sauce or whipped cream for the pie. My parents were tired, and soon they would sell the store and move across town. But in my last summers in that house, Ambrose and I would explore the woods behind the store, finding concord grape vines, exploring the paths teenagers made so they could party by the river, and feeding torn bits of white bread to the fish.

In July of 1979, I walked Ambrose down the main entrance path of those woods to an old, overgrown path that acted as a shortcut to the party-place by the river, where I often found loose change between the empty glass beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts. Moving was always slow through this path because thorny vines were ever-present and exposed tree roots made a sprained ankle possible with virtually every step. I’d walked this path a hundred times, but this time would be my last.

My sneakers crunching down on debris covering the thin expanse of exposed ground, Ambrose was patiently sniffing the ground a few feet behind me when the first wasp stung me. I felt a hot rush of adrenaline from the pain, and immediately I thought it was a ‘pricker bush’ stabbing me in my right calve, so I stopped to quickly reach down and remove it. It took a moment – perhaps three more stings – to realize I was standing where a nest of ground wasps didn’t want me to stand. I screamed. Then I panicked, stung several more times from ankles to knees as well as the backs of my hands. The landscape made a way to get out of there quickly impossible, but the stings of these damned insects were so painful I realized ‘damn the wasps, full speed ahead’ was my only option before becoming a mass of swollen red bumps. Trying to recall the details of those moments, I recall only flaring eyes and flailing limbs before finally hitting the open path at the river’s edge, where I took off like the devil himself were behind me.

In all, I was stung twenty-two times. As soon as I got to the party-place opening, out of breath, I instinctively scooped handfuls of mud from the bank of the water and pasted the cold, thick goop to my legs. The relief was surprisingly quick but by no means total, yet comically, the very next instant my peripheral vision identified a literal pile of coins not six feet away from me. I was still crying from the pain, but my vocal cords overrode the hysterical bawling with the excited exclamation, “money!” I was dumbstruck by how much money was just sitting there in the middle of the woods with no one within a quarter mile of me. I may have been a pincushion of wasp fury, but I was an eleven-year-old boy in 1979 discovering a veritable fortune in shiny American currency – almost fourteen dollars' worth – and it was a better pain reliever than mud or Tylenol ever could be. I was still sniffling as I began stuffing coinage into the pockets of my shorts, and my thoughts turned to hoping my shorts wouldn’t fall down to my feet as I brought my financial windfall back home.

With my shorts stuffed with heavy coin ballast, I intentionally stayed away from the river’s edge as I turned to go home. There was no way in creation I was going to go near that scrubby path again, so the walk would be much further, but these main paths were wide enough to drive a golf cart through, and they were flat and rootless, so there were no real worries. My mind definitely knew about the buckshot pattern of red, wickedly painful bumps on my legs and hands, but the banker in me was trying to figure out if I should tell my parents about the money, or better yet, how to spend it. I’d need to come up with a plan before requesting parental first aid… but wait. I stopped in my tracks. What was I forgetting? In yet another wave of back-and-forth emotional tides, I realized what was wrong.

Ambrose. He was nowhere to be seen.

How much time had passed since I remembered last seeing him? I called out his name, once, twice, then a dozen more times. I walked back to the edge of the shortcut path and called him, but there was no response. If he had ever been out of my visual range before, one call of his name would see him darting to me through woods or brush or perhaps even brick walls, but now there was only the sound of my voice followed by the anxiety of silence.

I took the longer, open path home, calling his name every few feet, listening for his thundering charge toward me. Nothing. What was I going to do? Wait: I bet he must have darted home as well! He must have been stung, too, and chose to dart off in the direction where he knew there were no more stingy-things. That made complete sense. I felt a rush of relief, as if an older version of me had taken over and tried to reason with the kid version of me.

When I got home, there was still no sign of Ambrose. I went into my room, funneled the coins from my pockets into my piggy bank – a thick black plastic version of a public telephone with a recently cut two-inch square hole on top – and went into the store to tell my parents about my injuries and the absence of our dog. Thankfully, it wasn’t rush hour, and my Dad watched the store and my mother stopped stocking cigarettes to tend to my many stings and calm me down. When my sisters got home, they went out to patrol for Ambrose.

They had no luck. In the hours before bedtime, I made a poster to tape to the glass entrance door of our convenience store, using my very best penmanship. Lost dog. Answers to the name “Ambrose.” My Mom provided a picture of him and provided instructions – to tell us at the cash register or call this number if you’ve seen him. I stared at the poster from the door to the house, looking at every customer who came in, hoping each person who regarded the poster would say something to my mother right away. I silently cursed every customer who didn’t seem to look at the poster. I did this until it was dark outside and my parents turned off the lights and the signage, then locked the door.

Kids fear monsters in their closets, they can fear the dark. They can be frightened for so many reasons, some of which we remember from our childhoods, and some we recognize from being parents. But I can tell you from firsthand experience, there are very few things that can make nighttime last longer for a child than not having his dog sleeping peacefully near his legs. All these years later, on that night in July 1979, I can remember hearing the sound of the light switch in my parents’ room click off, and I remember soaking my pillow in tears as if I had lost my best friend. Because I had.

The next several days began the same way. I immediately ran into the store, still in pajamas, to ask if anyone had seen my dog. Then I’d get dressed and go outside, into the woods, as close as I could get to the path of angry ground wasps, all the while turning my vocal cords into confetti calling out Ambrose’s name. I’d have dinner with my sisters, who didn’t say a word to me, then I’d watch the door to the store for a while, then I’d look out my bedroom windows until it was dark, then I’d pray. Several times, I dreamed dreams where Ambrose was not only present, but he also spoke fluent English, some where he’d see me from a distance but not come running to me, others where he just disappeared into a dark horizon, and without saying so in any language, asked me why I didn’t want him, or a more direct “where are you?”

Another week went by. A couple of our customers had taken puppies from the same litter as Ambrose’s, and seeing the poster, expressed their concern and their hope for his eventual return. I learned that my parents didn’t actually name Ambrose, but that the people who owned his mother named all the puppies with the first names of famous authors – Emily, Edgar, Ernest – and my parents decided to keep the name. I didn’t know who any of those authors were aside from Edgar, but I had an appreciation for the thoughtfulness of the people who named them. I think that even learning this little bit of trivia gave me hope.

Perhaps it was that I continued to pursue hope, continued to spend my summer with a routine of asking the same questions and doing the same fruitless things day in and day out, but it was August when my parents finally decided to tell me.

I didn’t get all the details until much later, but three days after Ambrose disappeared, a customer, a man who lived just down the street from the store, called to let my Mom know that he’d heard screeching brakes, followed by a loud and consistent yelping. He dashed outside to find the car had left, but a black lab – a black lab with a lone tuft of brilliant white fur on his chest – was in terrible distress on his front lawn. He had dropped everything he was doing to wrap the dog in a thick blanket and drive him to the vet on route 28, where the doctor and nurse did “everything they could.” The only humane thing to do was to gently put him down. I had not heard that term before, but the context of the story left no doubt as to what it meant. The nurse petted him the whole time, and she continued to whisper to Ambrose that he was 'such a good dog' until he breathed his last and was gone.

I didn’t cry the same way as I had always cried before. There were tears, but I calmly walked to the front door of the store, took down the poster, removed the picture to keep near my bed, and threw away the paper I’d written on in my best writing. The next two days were spent in my room, walking through the door only to use the bathroom or take in a mandatory meal. The rest of the time my door was closed, and I watched television on the black and white Zenith on a tray table near my bed. I doubt that photo ever left my fingers, even if I was sleeping.

August slowly crawled by, and at some point I began leaving my room again. One sunny day, at the verbal “request” of my mother, I actually went outside. The back yard was manifestly barren to me now, and the idea of kicking a football or calling a friend over to play something else were obscene things that weren’t about to happen. The things I used to do – shooting a basketball, bouncing a superball against the wall to catch with my Fred Lynn outfielder’s glove, or hitting a golf ball with my sister’s cheerleading baton because I didn’t actually have real golf clubs yet – were not interesting exercises to me anymore. Instead, I looked at the entrance to the woods, a hard dirt path dusted by pine needles surrounded by an arch seemingly carved into the trees. It was my version of the doorway to the mines of Moria. My legs began moving me, an automaton, toward it.

I knew I was punishing myself for letting down my puppy. It was a sentimental journey of self-pity, walking toward that stupid scrubby path of stinging insects and hating it as if it were a sentient entity. I could have done something different, I guess. My first thought was that I should have run toward the house instead of toward the party-place, that way I would have stayed with Ambrose and knew where he was.

There was an enormous oak tree in a wide clearing before the scrubby path, an area which once seemed to have a house on it a hundred or more years ago. I sat down against the oak and wished that I could cry, or scream, anything that would finally get everything out of my system, but all that happened was I continued staring off into that overgrown patch of stabby vines and bushes, exposed rock-hard roots and ground wasp nests. I stared at it for several minutes until, finally, I noticed that I wasn’t alone.

From the other side of the clearing, where an ancient block of white building foundation stuck out of the ground, there was a movement, and my head slowly turned toward it. It was moving very quickly, and my instinct was to jump up and hide myself on the other side of the tree, but instead, I froze. It was a dog that was darting toward me, as fast as an animal could run. It was a black dog. A black dog with a brilliant tuft of white fur on its chest.

If there was one thing about that moment that I remember most, it is, ironically, that I blacked out. Maybe for just a second, but my mind called time out and left me for a tic.

The dog was so out-of-his-mind excited that I was knocked over and being wailed on by his wagging tail. He was slobbering on me. Weeks after being told that he was hit by a car and euthanized, Ambrose the dog returned to me, without a scratch that I could see, happier than any puppy I had ever seen before or since. I think it was the first time I ever used the “F” word, although I don’t know if I used it in a question or a statement. All I could think of is ‘they were wrong.’

I kept my hand on his collar – and it was clearly HIS collar – the entire way to the entrance of the store, where I picked him up, walked him up three stairs, and carried him inside that glass door. I don’t think my mother reacted with the same language or level of unconsciousness that I did, but it was definitely an epic (and loud) reaction, nonetheless. Later, I’m pretty sure my Dad hugged him and, wet-eyed, called him a “little runt.” He was allowed.

It was several months later – just before Christmas, I think – that we learned that Ernest the dog had gone missing at around the same time Ambrose had. Ernest lived about a mile further down the road away from us than where he – a virtual twin to his brother – had the unfortunate encounter with a car, and where was attended to by the customer who had seen my handmade sign in the door and reasonably thought that it was Ambrose who had been humanely put to sleep.

As an adult, I’ve written two stories about prayer and divine intervention that without question find their roots in the events of summer, 1979, and Ambrose the Miraculous Black Lab. My pet, my best friend -- and whose pet isn’t? -- had been returned to me when such a happy reunion was without question… impossible.

If there were “best moments” from my childhood, they weren’t met on carnival rides or eating buttered popcorn at the Tri-Cinema, they weren’t at Red Sox games at Fenway or playing pinball machines at a Salisbury Beach arcade. The perspective of nearly half a century gone by alights much more than memories, it illuminates those things for us which, of course, we couldn’t realize at the time. We were young and had that living to do and experience, and the nostalgic realizations could rendezvous with us later. But if I could go back to my youth for just a minute or two, I’d choose to be under the covers of my bed, just one more time. A white plastic nightlight bathing the room in a mild, pale glow, and the anticipation of those paws jumping up to settle nearby me. There could be no moment more appreciated than that one night in particular, listening to the deep, contented sigh of a young black lab, freshly curled up near my legs on the bed, safe, warm, with a full belly, knowing he’s not alone, and happily ready for sleep.

Ambrose… all these moments pass. Continue being patient. We’ll do it all again one fine day.

dog
Like

About the Creator

D.P. Martin

D.P. Martin began writing a first novel in third grade - and had it survived mom's cleaning habit, it would certainly have been a number one best seller. D.P. calls New Hampshire home, raising one son and three hyperactive cats.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.