Light Blue Male

He was the last of the litter. When we got there to meet him his mother, Ginger's owners simply called him "Light Blue Male," as they identified he and his brothers and sisters by the color ribbon they had around their neck. I ran around the back yard with him. The puppies weren't old enough to go home yet, so we came back on Nov. 7, 2000, and brought the newest member of our family, Ivan, our Golden Retriever puppy home with us.

Golden Retrievers weren't new to me. When I was nine, our family mutt, Lucy, died and I was given the choice as to what kind of dog we got next. I went for a Golden then, and named her Morgan, after Morgan Le Fay, of Arthurian fame and infamy. Ivan's name, how many years later, circled back. I dug the story of Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. There was Tolstoy's short story, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." And as we would come to know him, there was also "Ivan the Red," or "Ivan the Terrible."

On our drive back to Easton from outside Baltimore, we stopped at Wendy's and got him some fries, as friends had done likewise with their new puppy coming home.

We quickly learned that Ivan's sense of direction went in a straight line. If he could find a weak point in a fence, he was through it; if not, he was over or under it, and then he was a nose-to-the-ground bolt, not thinking of coming home until corralled and dragged him in shame.

I have never had a more unforgettable pet. Or a pet who dealt with more changes, all in stride. Ivan joined our family before our daughters Anna (12) and Ava (9) were born. He moved with us from one house to another. He has seen cats come and go, birds and fish, and another dog join him. None of it really phased him.

Water dog. Watching him run and jump, dock dog style off a floating dock in Wye Mills, there was little doubt of his water roots. Most of the time he swam, I had to get in with him and keep him on a leash, or he would swim straight out from the shore into open water.

Training partner. I have run trails with some speedy humans. But none could touch Ivan, whether an 11-mile trail run, or five, anytime I thought I had more energy, I was quickly proven wrong. Some of my favorite times with him, were out running together, watching him in complete doghood.

Car traveler? Not so much. On his first trip to Butler, Pa., Ivan traveled in his crate and proceeded to chew the rubber mat he was lying on to shreds. On shorter trips as he got older, the nose in the wind with the window down, must be universal for all dogs.

Voracious Omnivore. Ivan should have been dead long ago. He has been on a steroid that kept him from pulling his fur out for itchy skin. The steroid made him eat like a tornado with teeth. Baby-proofing a house is easier. He scarfed whole steaks and pizzas off the kitchen counter; ate a box of pancake batter; tore through a box of Swiss Miss hot chocolate packets (on a then white area rug); chewed through aluminum cat food cans; tore through juice boxes; and would get butcher knives out of the sink and carry them to lick them clean. He had a gut lined with iron.

Ceaseless family member. Ivan helped raise two babies, as well as having their friends over. He had toddlers use his fir to pull themselves up; he was pawed and pet and smushed at every turn. Between kids, other animals joining the family, he has been steadfast, and only ever redirected with his tongue, licking kids off of him. Just don't try to take his dinner.

This past Sunday, on Sept. 7, Ivan turned 14. He outlived pretty well all the other dogs he knew as a puppy. He slowed down a lot this summer and I wasn't sure he would see Labor Day. Last Wednesday, he took a turn for the worse and we took him to the vets: tumor in his stomach, lymphoma. It was a matter of days or weeks. He couldn't get up without help, was quickly losing his quality of life. He couldn't do the things that always made him happy.

Yesterday he stopped getting up, or wanting help. When the vet came over, he could tell he was in more pain, his stomach had gotten much worse. We made the tough decision, but the only one that felt right, to let him go. So we held him in our arms and said good-bye.

One minute the dog you have loved is in your arms and hurt and panting. And then he's not. His body is there and he looks the same, but he's gone. Free from pain, free from the body that had broken down on him.

A number of people have talked about the poem, "The Rainbow Bridge." I haven't read it and am not sure I will. When I over the course of my life about a family pet, Ivan is the first name and face that comes to mind. He epitomized what that meant. Seeing him at peace at the end of his life, I also see him at the peak of his life, running, chasing squirrels (he once caught one), rolling in the cool dirt, swimming and eating.

Of all the nicknames he had, the one he most earned, just now, is Ivan the Unforgettable. The light blue ribbon he wore around his neck was the color of the sky. And now the sky will be Ivan's color to me. The color of the sky: light blue male.

And time and memory dance

I hope Einstein is right. And Billy Pilgrim. And Frederick Buechner. Right with regards to time, that it's relative and panoramic and bendable.

Billy Pilgrim (as recorded by Kurt Vonnegut in "Slaughterhouse-Five") clues us in on the Tralfamadorian view of time, where they "can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance... It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

Children have a more useful concept of time. Our girls have said "Yesterday" or "last year" to describe the same memory at different times when they were younger. Buechner nails it by explaining, "It is by its content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity."

This might hold still for adults: I have memories from when I was three years old--my parents bailing out a sailboat they had after a storm, or the inside of my nursery school classroom--that are more vivid and clear than things that happened last week. Our memory alters time.

Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. - Buechner, "The Sacred Journey"

Neither time, nor our memories are fixed. It's more like they're dancing. Yesterday, our eight-year-old daughter Ava and I set out on our bikes to a cemetery a couple miles up the road, where I recently learned my great grandparents were buried. All the Valliant relatives I've known were buried in the Oxford Cemetery. This great grandfather, Jeremiah, died in 1919, decades before my dad was born.

Ava and I had to explore the cemetery to find the grave, an ancestral scavenger hunt in play. We both lit up when we found it, not far from where we parked our bikes, though we'd walked the long way round and come back to it.

"It was cool to meet my great great grandfather today," Ava told me later in the evening.

"Meet." I didn't correct her. It was the perfect word. Time and death are grown-up ideas, not useful or relevant to an eight year old.

Life, death, greatness and cutting the grass

In the morning, I'm reading about Branch Rickey. Jimmy Breslin's book about a man who changed the world by calling up the first black baseball professional baseball player in the all white league. Breslin can write, he's someone to emulate, and reading him makes me want to change the world like Rickey and Jackie Robinson.

But I cut the grass instead. Our Founding Fathers and the other world changers must not have cut grass or had chores. How the hell can you change the world when you are doing yard work? They went out and did big, great things, unbothered by filling up the gas can or emptying the dishwasher. Everyone has those motivations toward greatness from time to time, but details get in the way.

Taylor Spies is someone that seemed destined to be a great man. You got that sense meeting him when he was 14. Then he died in his sleep Thursday night/Friday morning. He was 37 years old, married, with two sons three years old and younger.

I met Taylor at Easton High School in the Youth and Government program. He might have been five feet tall standing on a phone book at the time. We thought of him as a sort of younger brother and gave him a wedgie for the ages at an Annapolis hotel. He would still laugh about it when we talked. None of our friends escaped wedgies in those days.

The next time Taylor and I connected, we were both working around Easton and would see each other daily at Coffee East. I left smiling and inspired after every conversation. Every time.

I'm cutting the grass and listening to Nas, his album "Illmatic." Nas says, "I never sleep cause sleep is the cousin to death." I've often felt that way, not wanting to sleep for fear of missing something big. Taylor's death resurfaces that thinking. Wednesday he is posting pictures of his boys, Friday dead.

Nas is on shuffle on my ipod and next he says, "Life's a bi*** and then you die, that's why we get high... cause you never know when you're gonna go." Nas is wise beyond years and words but I don't want to believe him.

I don't know what I think about God, but I don't want to see life that way. I think about going on Anna's field trip this week and being there to see her get her school award for her straight-A report card. I think about taking Ava to her first Major League Baseball game and the Nationals' Ryan Zimmerman hitting a home run. When you add up all the little moments, all the things that happen only once ever, that we get to experience, to be a part of, and it has to add up to something more than "Life's a bi*** and then you die."

Then there are Taylor's boys, who will have a hard time remembering their dad as they grow up. They'll see pictures of him, maybe at the ages we knew him, and wonder what he was like, what he was thinking. They are lucky to be Spies's because their uncles, grandparents, cousins and great family will make sure they remember Taylor.

It's later in the day and I have not become great like Branch Rickey. I haven't figured out a way to capture Taylor's great light and put it in a lantern to carry with me.

I cut the grass. I ran out front with our seven-year-old to catch the Good Humor truck and get the girls Fat Frog pops. I watched the Nationals win in extra innings. It's later and I'm sitting in the back listening to the wind with a Dale's Pale Ale.

Melancholy blows in like the clouds that are beginning to cover the sky. I think about Taylor and about Alvin Sanger, another great soul that left us this week. I can picture both of their smiles and how excited each of them got when they saw you--like you were the one person in the world they were hoping to run into.

Maybe being able to picture that so vividly--me, who wasn't one of their closest friends or family--the fact that they can have so strong an impact, maybe that's how we get beyond Nas. Each of their personalities, their accomplishments, their families, their friends, their lives as examples, they certainly live on. They are still with us.

In an interview, Nas talking about how he came through the death of his mother, said, "This is what happens. This is life. You've got to keep living on."

I did not become great today. But maybe, having known Taylor and Alvin, remembering them today, thinking about the ways they are still part of the people they touched; maybe it's through knowing great people like them, that we touch greatness.