Happy Monday everyone! This week, we’re continuing with our series of Table Talk conversation cards. If you missed the previous cards and want to go back and print them out so you can use them at your family table, or with your book club, or at your next meeting or holiday party, you can get them here:
— Conversation Card 1 click here
— Conversation Card 2 click here
— Conversation Card 3 click here
— Conversation Card 4 click here
— Conversation Card 5 click here
— Conversation Card 6 click here
— Conversation Card 7 click here
— Conversation Card 8 click here
On the porch today, we’re moving on the Card # 9, which comes from Beth Webb Hart’s book, Moon Over Edisto:
Isn’t it Amazing how life separates us from people and then reunites us again? A chance meeting on the street, a search on Facebook, the annual class reunion… We never know when we’ll cross paths with someone we thought we’d lost. My husband and I were once reunited with friends from our newly-married days because we happened to pull through just the right toll booth on an Oklahoma turnpike. The conversation went something like this:
Toll booth operator: “Hey, Sam! Is that you? Where are you livin’ now?”
Us: “Central Texas. “
Toll booth operator: “Why, did you know that Brian and Donna are thereabouts too? Y’all must be right down the road from each other. You should get in touch.”
Considering that we were lonely young parents, living far from our own family and out in the middle of nowhere, this was an amazing discovery. It was the beginning of many back-and-forth get-togethers between two growing young families. There’s something incredibly special about people you have so much in common with that, at the end of a long day, you think nothing of plunking all your dirty kids in the bathtub together, and then tossing them into one bed so that the adults can sit on the porch and talk a little longer. Years and moves have taken us here and there, and that passel of boys is practically grown now, but we’ve never lost touch with these special friends again.
Perhaps the strangest separation and reunion stories in our lives, though, involve one very special friend. There’s no tale or “tail” in the life of our family quite like that of our many curious reunions with Pecos Bill.
I’ve written about him before, so if you’ve spent much time here on the porch, you might know that take Pecos Bill held a special place in our family. He was the first family dog. The shortly-after-the-honeymoon dog. The one who expanded our family from two to three and then faithfully stood guard over all of us as we went from three to four, and from four to five. Over the years, Pecos Bill fearlessly protected us from everything from raccoons, to midnight coyote raids, to marauding peacocks and rattlesnakes curled up by the back door.
There was only one problem with Pecos. For all his faithful hours of companionship and late nights standing guard, he was deathly, wildly, insanely afraid of thunderstorms. Whenever lightning and thunder came along, no matter where we were living or what kind of yard we had, if we weren’t home to lock him in the garage (and sometimes even if we were), he escaped and ran for the hills in search of a hidey hole. He climbed, he jumped, he opened intricate gate latches, he tunneled his way through mountains of soil — whatever it took. We never knew where he went, or how far he traveled, or when (and how) he would come home, but over the years we were reunited with him in a number of unusual ways. Here are a few interesting recollections from those reunions:
UPS driver: “Brought your dog home. Well… I guess it’s more like he decided he was comin’ home. I pulled up to a ranch about 2 miles down and Pecos just walked off the porch, climbed up the steps to my truck, and sat down. Guess he figured I was headed your way.”
New neighbor at Grandma’s lakehouse: “Ummm… there’s a big black-and-tan dog in our bathtub this morning, and he doesn’t seem like he wants to come out. Can you come get him?”
Warden overseeing chain gang of Lampasas County prisoners: “The dog just walked out of the woods all of a sudden, and sat right down there with the inmates while they were stopped for lunch. I guess he thought I might need the help. I figured he was yours. There’s no other place around for miles, except the county rock pit.”
Husband: “You know that ‘mystery’ critter we’ve been hearing under the ranch house for two days now? The thing I’ve been setting all the cage traps to try and catch? I went out at 3 AM in the rain, to see if I could figure out what it was, and it’s our dog. He pulled the door off the crawlspace, and he’s been hiding out under there because of the rain lately.”
Sweet little lady living along the north fence: “Pecos Bill turned up on my porch again. We waited out the storm together last night. I’m gonna make him breakfast and then I’ll bring him on home later in the mornin’.”
Boy child: “Mom, there’s a monster under my bed and it’s Pecos. Can he stay tonight?”
There was no end to the wild stories we heard, or the people we met when Pecos decided it was time to flee. After many hours of effort, and hundreds of dollars of doggy containment devices, we finally acquiesced to the fact that life with Pecos would be a series of short separations and happy reunions, all depending on the weather. He never would’ve left us for any other reason.
And then, finally, as the baby boys he protected with such devotion grew up, there was the separation for which there would be no reunion. There have been other dogs since, but none with so many stories as Pecos Bill. He was the first, and the first dog is a tough act to follow.
There’s much debate in the theology about whether dogs go to heaven, but if love is the bridge between this world and the next, then somewhere on that fine, fair, front porch where the sun shines every day and there are no storms, Pecos Bill is lying with his old white nose rested his on paws, just waiting for the most amazing reunion of all.
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