We were never quite sure where he came from, but some weeks ago a big black dog ambled sideways up our drive, his huge pink tongue hanging askew in search of a good drink of water. He promptly sacked out on the steps near my front door, and there he stayed, sleeping near our potted plants.
My wife and I both grew up with dogs, she with a hyperactive Irish setter, me with a yippy collie and an all-American mutt that could have been a mixture of any handful of breeds. But we aren’t dog people anymore; dogs need a little more attention than our cats, who are more independent and private, and in need of human companionship only on occasions of their choosing. So we weren’t interested in keeping this big, goofy orphan. As a matter of fact, we wanted to send him home as soon as possible, if he had one. We took to calling him “Dog” because we knew that as soon as we gave him a name he would be more of a permanent fixture around our place, that we would soon be going through an adoption process, and making an appointment at the vet for his shots, and buying him a rawhide chew toy. So we avoided looking straight into his big brown eyes, knowing too that if we did, we’d be hooked, and we’d be keeping him.
Despite his more endearing qualities, he had some irritating ones as well. As far as our barn cats were concerned, he was a terrorist. Not used to expelling much more energy than it takes to chase a lethargic chipmunk or swat at a butterfly, our trio of outdoor felines suddenly found themselves challenged by this furry goon every time they stepped a paw out of our barn door. They literally disappeared for a few weeks, living in our hay loft, venturing down a ladder for meals and water, paranoid, I’m sure, that we were actually going to keep the psycho who was holding them hostage.
The dog, so enthusiastic in his appreciation for a dish of food or a pat on the head, liked to reward us by jumping on us, treating us like awkward dance partners, leaving big muddy paw prints on our shirts and blouses, and bloody scrapes and scratches on our arms. His always active tongue slurped and lapped at our faces, our legs, and our hands, and his tail, more of a British bobby’s truncheon, actually, beat our shins black and blue.
In our pre-Dog days, I sat on my garage step to put on my work boots or walking shoes, often sitting there in the sun to listen to birds and to the breeze as it blew through our big white pine. After he arrived, my moments of solitude were now rewarded with generous whiffs of dog breath, doses of dog saliva, and whacks on the side of the skull with that blackjack of a tail. I gave up sitting on our deck to work a crossword; my new pal thought that our small green deck chairs were made for two.
Despite his size, Dog couldn’t have been more than seven or eight months old — an overgrown kid really, and we quickly understood that he also needed to chew… At first, it was our broom handles; then he started on the wood pile near my office door, reducing several nice-sized lengths of tulip poplar to sawdust. He carried off three pairs of sandals, consumed at least two flower pots, and opened up a couple of bags of top soil I stacked near our barn before I planned to use them.
Almost immediately we began to advertise him in local newspapers as “found.” We put up his picture on the bulletin board at our town bank, and we asked just about everyone in a 10-mile radius if they were missing a four-legged version of Gomer Pyle. Despite the fact that Dog was well-fed when he arrived at our home, that he even wore a collar, we soon became convinced that his behavioral issues had led his previous owner to dump him in the country, a solution that some people take at the expense of others.
Time passed; so did our patience. Dog began to make my lawn his own executive bathroom; I was convinced after cleaning up a couple of his messes that an elephant was running loose in our neighborhood. He was a ferocious mole hunter, and on the hillside near our wood line where the ugly little miners run rampant, Dog soon turned the area into a Mesabi Range of open pits and gouged earth. He howled like a lonely wolf at the sound of my leaf blower, ran alongside my riding mower like a sled dog. He hosed down shrubs, flopped in flower beds, walked around our driveway with our garden hoses in his mouth…
Finally, relief came in the form of the Parke-Vermillion County Humane Shelter and Pat Tryon. Pat told us that Dog, despite his penchant for mischief, was welcome there and that from the physical description we gave her she could tell that he would be sent to Wisconsin on a special truck that took displaced animals to a state where strict spay and neuter laws make such refugees relatively rare. Once there, he’d be adopted.
So, one afternoon, we loaded him into the bed of my truck — we were convinced he’d shred my seats — and headed to the shelter north of Hillsdale and his new future. The trip wasn’t a pleasant one. Despite the fact that he was pretty well-behaved as we made our way through the country, Dog wasn’t too happy about being around large trucks and motorcycles when we got onto the highway. My time with him soon became the equivalent of a WWF cage match.
To complicate things, it rained on us — hard, and an accident on Indiana 63 forced us into a detour that eventually made our odyssey one of nearly 60 miles. But we arrived, both soaked and smelling about the same. His required fees were paid, he was registered — more like booked — and then Dog made his presence known by greeting a large cat in the office rather rudely. He was named “Clark” by receptionist Kelly Blacketer and was to undergo a personality test that afternoon; Pat said she expected him to pass with flying colors.
Now, before you think we ran out on Clark without a thought, you should know that both of us had feelings of guilt. He looked a little lost when he was placed in a pen near a baying hound on one side and a manic chow on the other. That ever-present tongue lapped at Joanie and me through the wires, and both of us, at the same time, did notice those big brown eyes of his, too.
But Clark will soon be a cheesehead, placed with an owner who will give him the attention he needs and deserves. I hope that he’ll be happy and that his new owner treats him with the respect that his previous one didn’t, that he’ll have a long life of chewing up other people’s shoes …
Tonight, well, I’m going to sit on the step and listen to the birds.
Mike Lunsford can be contacted at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail, c/o the Tribune-Star, at P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Visit www.mikelunsford.com for information about Mike’s book, and please, donate to your local humane shelter. The Parke-Vermillion Humane Society is located at 1884 S. State Road 63, Hillsdale, IN 47854.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: The happy ‘tail’ of a dog named ‘Clark’
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Taking a road less traveled in this illogical life
If you can still recall reading the poetry of Robert Frost in your high school English class years ago, I imagine that you can conjure up a line or two from his “The Road Not Taken.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
Man Falls Off Crane, Dies After Police Standoff
Witness Describes Fla. Face-chewing Attack
Raw Video: Cop Shoots Man Eating Another's Face
Man in Crane at Texas College Says He's Armed
Unexpected Smog in Pristine National Parks
Obama Honors Fallen Troops at Arlington Cemetery
Raw Video: Deadly Explosion at Minn. Paper Mill
Dairy Farm Uses Chiropractor to Help Cows
Romney Promises World's Strongest Military
Russia Condemns Ally Syria Over Massacre of 108
Air Canada Plane Makes Emergency Landing
Raw Video: Earthquake Shakes Evacuees in Italy
Obama Pays Tribute to Vietnam Veterans
Beryl Knocks Out Power in Florida
Raw Video: 19 Dead in Qatar Shopping Mall Fire
15 Dead in Northern Italy's 5.8-magnitude Quake
Service Dogs Help Wash. Soldiers Battling PTSD
Raw Video: Memorial Day Aboard Intrepid
New Ticks Spread Across Southeast, Diseases Rise
Beryl Makes Landfall on Florida Coast
Los Angeles Bar Bans Bachelorettes
Hamster Plays Dead
Beyonce Shows Off 60 Pound Weight Loss at Concert
Drunk Women Breaking Into Houses: A New Trend?
LeAnn Rimes Rocks Short Shorts
Gordon Ramsay Carried Off Field
Man Dies Getting Lap Dance
Kim Kardashian Claims Items Stolen from Her Luggage
Bear cools off in Calif. family's pool
Ep. 3: Chopped Desserts
Air Force dad surprises family at baseball game
Justin Bieber Wanted for Questioning for L.A. Scuffle
J.Lo and Marc's Friendly Reunion
Jet makes emergency landing after debris falls off
Cynthia Nixon Ties the Knot
Woman, 80, Falls Out of Skydive Harness Mid-Jump
Keira Reveals Engagement Ring
