He’s a black dog with a white patch on his chest. Someone found him, tag-less, on the side of the road in Kansas City, and he went from Missouri to Iowa to Minneapolis within a few days time. I went to meet him just as some friends were coming to pick him up and take him home to live with them. The dog got into their car and sat in the backseat with his ears pricked. It was obvious that he was asking a question and the question was something like “Good grief, now what?” We waved at him and he looked at us and then he turned and faced forward. He stuck his head out the window. The car pulled away from the curb. The dog’s ears flopped in the wind. His tongue was hanging out.
Some lines from a Mary Oliver poem went through my head: “I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,/ or full of argument./I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
The dog’s name, now, is Fred.
I thought, “There you go, Fred. That’s the way to do it. That’s the way to live.”
I waved until the car disappeared.

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