While Donna was going
through her bi-weekly bouts with chemotherapy and radiation treatments we had
lost another member of the family—one of our three dogs, Bailey. We weren’t
exactly sure how old he was, but he must have been at least fifteen since we
had found him (on Bailey Road) a year or two after we had moved to Middle
Tennessee. Bailey was a great dog, very independent and one of the smartest dogs
I had ever had the privilege of living with. We never had him “fixed”,
therefore, he used to wander from time to time. Sometimes he would be gone a
week or ten days before we would hear his claws scratching on the side door to
come inside. Bailey was a reddish-brown miniature Golden Retriever mix weighing
in at about twenty-five pounds. He must have been part collie too, having
strands of black hair running down the sides of his long floppy ears.
After having
lost Bridget and Ginger a few years back, Bailey was the first of the Tennessee
dogs we had to say goodbye to. It was the morning of July 26th 2010.
Now there is some discrepancy of the date because Donna remembers it
differently. I was getting ready to take the boys somewhere that morning. Donna
thought it was school, but it was the middle of summer so it must have been the
Kids on Stage camp. I have always been pretty good with dates and I remember it
was Mick Jagger’s birthday. Nevertheless, Bailey was struggling and we knew he
wouldn’t last long. The night before he was moaning and whimpering so badly I
had to give him a Tylenol with codeine to pacify him. It seemed to help, but we
were up most of the night trying to comfort the dog and planned on taking him
to Dr. Woody’s in the morning as soon as I got back from taking the boys to
camp. Donna said it happened while I was starting up the car. By the time I had
gotten back he was gone. Now the surviving animals were Bruno, the black lab,
Mowgli, the black cat, Josie, the tortoise shell and calico mixed cat, and
Piper, the Cairn terrier I had found the year before.
One morning
before the cancer took hold while Donna was at work and the kids were in
school, I saw something out in the yard crawling through the high grass. I
squinted up my eyes to see what in the world it was. At first I thought it was
an injured rabbit or cat but as I ventured closer I saw it was a small dog with
thick white hair that looked like Toto from the Wizard of Oz. I puckered my lips and called her over and watched
the dog inch its way toward me. I could see the dog had been out in the
wilderness of Thompson Station for quite some time by the tangled and matted
hair, but she didn’t look starved, in fact she was a bit plump. I coaxed her
into the house and gave her a drink of water and some dry food which she went
after ravenously. I called Donna to tell her I had found what I thought was a
purebred and her first reaction was, “Oh no, not another one.” I told her she
was probably lost and would go around to the neighbor’s houses and inquire if
they had lost a wee doggie. After exhausting my search without any luck, I
decided to put up a few signs.
When Donna and
the boys came home, they saw the wee dog which I had named Piper and were
enchanted, even loved the name. I noticed that Piper had a wide gap between her
nostrils and thought she might have a cleft palate. On further inspection I saw
there was a pinpoint hole there like a third nostril. Very unique. I also had
the sneaking suspicion, because of her bulging tummy and swollen nipples, she
was pregnant. After taking her in to Dr. Woody’s, my suspicions were
confirmed—she was pregnant. He said it was too late for an abortion and would
be having the puppies shortly. I constructed a birthing box from an old TV
carton and put blankets and pillows inside of it.
One morning I
came down to check on her and she was in the process of giving birth. The puppy
was half-way out of her and didn’t seem to be coming out. When she finally
released the poor puppy, it was still born. I didn’t know what to do, but
thought she might have more to come. It was obvious that the still born puppy
and been much too big and I figured Piper had mated with a much larger dog than
she was. I called Dr. Woody and left a message. When he called me back, I told
him what was going on and he said to bring her in immediately. Of course it was
a Sunday. They did an emergency C-section to remove the remaining puppy and
sadly that one was also dead. The bill came to over $900. We rationalized it by
saying it would have cost that much to buy a purebred Cairn terrier. Poor Piper
was now the newest addition to the Haymer household since nobody else had
claimed her. One of the saddest and most pathetic sights I had ever witnessed
in my life, was when Piper had befriended a toy doggie about the same size as
one of her lost babies. She would snuggle up to that little white toy dog with
the brown spots and pretend to nurse it. It never left her sight. I guess it
helped her through the mourning and grieving process.
Now it was time
to bury Bailey. There wasn’t room in the backyard pet cemetery behind the patio
fence anymore so we had to start a new one. There was a small area next to my
putting green more than a hundred yards from the side door of the house that
seemed right. I dug a hole in the clearing between two trees and covered him up
with some sand and peat moss. I made a sign from some scrap wood and painted an
inscription. After surrounding the grave with fieldstones I place the sign
close to where his head was and we all said goodbye to Bailey. As I am writing
this, sadly to say, four other animals have joined Bailey in that pet cemetery.
On a lighter note,
before Bailey’s illness, I had seen a sign posted that two softball leagues
were starting up. One was a men’ team and the other a co-ed. I wondered, at the
age of fifty-eight, if I could still manage to play the game I had loved so
much as a kid, a young adult and a thirty-something. The last time I had played
the game, I had broken my ankle sliding into home plate on Labor Day in 1987.
Yes, I was safe but was out of commission for months. But now I was the oldest
player on the team, or the next oldest as most of the players on the men’s team
were in their late twenties or early thirties, but I surprised myself at how
easily I was able to move around the bases. Although I couldn’t bend down as
low for those hot ground balls to second, I made only one or two errors the
whole season. The format was slow pitch where the ball had to sail an arc
between six and twelve feet high. I alternated between playing second base and
pitcher, the same two positions I used to play in Little League when I was a
kid. One of my best pitches back then was a knuckleball and I thought I could dust
off the cobwebs on that pitch and see if it would translate to underhand. I
remembered the time when I used to employ that pitch back in the old days I had
a tell. When I used to dig my fingernails into the seams of that ball I would
inadvertently bite my lower lip. The batters, after a while, had seen that tell
too, and would know what pitch was coming and wait on it like it was a
giftwrapped birthday present. My catcher approached the mound and told me what
I was doing. After that I would purposely bite my lip and then throw the
fastball. It worked like a charm. Now, to my surprise as a gripped the seams
and let go a floater, I saw that I still had it. I was amazed that, even in
slow pitch, I was able to strike out a few of the weaker players.
The next year,
at fifty-nine, I was going to give it another go. My goal that year was to get
through the season without an injury. I ended up on the blue team where I was
at least twenty, maybe even thirty years older than most of the team except for
Coach Tom, who was the pastor at the Thompson Station Baptist Church. Over the
years, I had watched the church transform from a quaint one story building into
a “megachurch” with three or four outbuildings as big as a WalMart. I was
mildly upset that I didn’t get to pitch that year since Pastor Tom did most of
the pitching. That really didn’t bother me as much as what happened after every
game. All the players would line up on the pitcher’s mound, take off their hats
and say a prayer to Jesus. I guess I could think of worse things to do after a
game, but still I felt uncomfortable. Who was I kidding? I was living in rural
Middle Tennessee where there are more churches per square mile than gas
stations, markets, golf courses, swimming pools and restaurants combined. The
closest Jewish synagogue was thirty miles away.
One evening, one of the players requested a
special prayer for the brother of one of the players that was struggling with
alcoholism. The team all held hands, closed their eyes and prayed that this
individual would see the light and Jesus would take away his desire to drink. I
remembered how, when I and some of my friends had problems with the drink, we
would go to an AA meeting and work the twelve-step program. I thought I would
suggest this to the players so I spoke up saying, “Excuse me but, in addition
to praying, has the guys ever thought of going to an AA meeting? It seems to
work for a lot of people.” Twenty pairs of eyes looked at me like I was the
anti-Christ. I felt the top of my head wondering if I had grown horns. The guy
next to me poked me with an elbow and said, “Don’t be rude.”
“Rude? I was
only saying that AA is not such a bad idea.” I knew I was speaking to deaf
ears, so I bit the bullet and waited for the prayer to conclude. What planet
was I on? I, as everyone who knows me well knows, have nothing against Jesus,
but to assume that all people on earth have the same beliefs as you is a
misnomer. They acted as if AA was a cult and was diametrically opposed to
Christianity; after all most of the steps in the 12 step program talk about a
higher power. The small-mindedness of these folks astounded me. Well, our team
ended up winning the division, but that night after that prayer meeting, I had
decided to hang up my cleats. At least I had made it through the season without
an injury, which was my goal. I was getting into golf again anyway, and thought
about getting a job at Forrest Crossing as an ambassador where by working one
day a week you could get free golf. I was already playing two or three times a
week with my newest and best golfing buddy, Sunset Slim. But it was costing too
much. If I got that ambassador job, think of all the money I would save! I went
down there that fall but they said they were full up and would probably be
hiring again in the spring. I didn’t get the job in the spring, but I would get
eventually be hired the following year. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.
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