My 12 years with Harper: Part I
My first dog, Harper. 2013 - 2025.
I learned from a young age that boys who keep their noses buried among the pages of a book garner negative attention from peers and positive attention from adults. Given that the adults make the rules, dictate the weekly allowance, and command the keys to the family auto, I learned to satiate the “grown-ups” and tolerate the taunts of adolescents. The act of tolerance became easier as I learned the power of a good book. Fiction or non, adept prose could export me further from my childhood home than any other contraption. Thus, the bibliophile in me was born and for as long as I can recount, I have never been caught, anywhere, anytime, without a book haphazardly wedged into the corner of the dash of my truck or stuffed in a crevice in my knapsack.
I think, by definition at least, I can begin to claim that I am now the proprietor of a small library. On either side of my living room’s derelict fireplace, built-in bookshelves sag under the weight of mass-produced literature, biographies of names you would recognize and a few that you wouldn’t, correspondence and journals of explorers and vagabonds, tutorials and how-to’s, history of both man and his natural world, and a smattering of whatever else falls among such forementioned classifications. For those still wanting, auxiliary piles can be found in most other rooms of the house. This is a result of my terrible habit to leave one room with book in hand, arrive in the next, and, upon interruption of some domestic nature, commit to returning to the book after I’ve set it down in a secluded corner or end table, only to repeat the behavior at a later date, and continue doing so, until a pile takes shape.
A common practice I have observed since becoming a homeowner, now that my library is in plain view, is that guests often feel compelled to inquire about at least one title, perhaps two, when visiting. I am then obligated to disclose the year I acquired the title in question, share what inspired its procurement, and inform my guest of whether I’ve read it or not. For those I’ve read, I tend to provide an unsolicited assessment of the work; for those that I haven’t, a regal excuse is quick to my tongue as to justify why that title hasn’t been digested yet. There are, I am sheepish to admit, quite a few on the shelf as of the time of this writing that are yet to be read. This is intentional, though, as what good is a library if all of its secrets have already been discovered by its librarian? In fact, it would be one of these “unread” books that served as the catalyst for this, My 12 Years with Harper, and why, of all things, I’m telling you about my bookshelves.
I stirred early on January 12th, 2025. For a moment, my memories of the preceding twenty four hours were blurry, and I was as much at peace as anyone can be who wakes up, still fully dressed, on the couch on a freezing-cold Sunday morning. And then, as the turbines in my mind began to turn, a boiling tempest erupted from the depths of my heart and I wept. I wept because I was now awake enough for the fog in my mind to clear and I could no longer divert my eyes from the cinema projector that was playing across my mind. Everywhere I turned, there, in perfect high-definition IMAX, I saw her dark, amber eyes looking back into mine. She lay on the table, wrapped in a fleece blanket, with a catheter in her left arm. Harper, my first dog, was dying.
An interim reprieve would arrive. It’s more the result of the body temporarily reaching its capacity to ache and expunge every last tear drop than it is a matter of closure or acceptance. And I knew that. I knew that the tears would mount another uprising; likely within the next few minutes. I rolled myself off to the couch and onto my feet. Like a parched gazelle that cannot afford to think of much more than the next drop of water, I navigated to my bookcase in search of escape. I don’t think I was cognizant of it at the moment but in retrospect, I believe my body was functioning out of some sort of conditioned response developed at an early age. Maybe, by opening up a book to read, my mind would be forced to focus on the words of a page, rather than the movie playing in my mind. Maybe I could escape the torment, one page at a time, just like I did when I was a boy.
My eyes ran across the shelves, searching for a life raft that I could climb aboard. A book about the crusades… hmm, no… that could be a bit dark. I kept perusing the titles, eager to settle on something before the tears returned and rendered my eyesight, and therefore my ability to select a book, completely and totally incapacitated. Brothers Karamazov…hmm, no… that will call for more patience than I have right now. The clock was ticking. I could feel the reservoir filling. I think this one is about a dog… That seems fitting... I reached for Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck.
I don’t know why or how I thought that this particular piece of Steinbeck’s work involved a dog, I had not yet read it, but my suspicion was confirmed as I pulled the battered paperback off the shelf. The faded color cover, indicating the age of this particular edition, depicted a man and his dog sitting on a hilltop. Above them, and below the large letters of the title, “In Search of America” caught my eye. I thumbed it over in my hand and read the back cover. This was the last gate I needed to pass through before making the commitment to read or not to read. I shuffled back to the couch and set the book down beside me. The reservoir was now full. I thought of Harper and again, I wept.
For most of the day, in between exhausting bouts of tears, I just stared at the book. I was debating whether or not reading about someone else’s dog, on the heels of losing my own, would be like pouring salt into a wound. I can’t tell you why the thought didn’t cross my mind hours earlier when I was standing before the bookshelf. This debate, to read or not to read, to pour salt or not to pour salt, carried on until the sun sank below the snow. It carried on until I had reached a point of desperation. I was desperate to be somewhere else, anywhere else, even if that meant reading about someone else’s dog. I picked up Travels with Charley and I began to read.
It only took me a couple of days to finish reading that travelogue from 1962. I found myself genuinely captivated by it all. It is, technically speaking, non-fiction but it still reads like a story and I feel no guilt for thinking of it as such. After all, Steinbeck was a novelist, so it seems reasonable that his nonfiction would have the flavor of a story to it. From Maine to Seattle, from Texas to New Orleans, Steinbeck’s (and Charley’s) observations felt very relevant - timeless, even - sixty-three years after its initial publication. And as I found myself being captivated by its relevance, I began to recognize the chain of events occurring in my mind. I was connecting Steinbeck’s reported experiences to my own. Or, rather, with each report, I would search my internal rolodex and memory bank, connecting names to experiences, and identifying that Steinbeck’s, and Charley’s, America in 1962 held truths still found in my own America of 2025.
As I read about Mr. Steinbeck and his beloved dog, Charley, and their travels together, I thought about my own. I thought about all of the places Harper and I went together and of all the relationships we made. There were things that I had forgotten, either by happenstance or by design, that returned to the forefront of my mind; both good and bad, and some in between. At times, I had to stop reading to think about it all. At other times, I had to stop to cry. Occasionally, I would do both, but it was predominantly the later of the two. Steinbeck’s written journey across America became a roadmap for me to trace my own grief as I reconciled with the last twelve years. It was among those pages that I was forced to stare at my own mortality, the mortality of those I love, and accept that no amount of love is strong enough to survive this earthly domain.
My Twelve Years with Harper is my recollection of moments in time and space shared with Harper, mined from the depths of my memories, rediscovered by way of Travels with Charley, and served to you here, in written word. This is no more a gallant story than it is a journal of my own sins, written for my own selfish purpose as I mourn the passing of my first dog and my greatest teacher, Harper.
To be continued…
