Leap of Faith

BC Pires writes a weekly column for the Newsday called Thank God It's Friday!

He came to us via 15 years of imprisonment, near-starvation and physical abuse, and 45 minutes on my wife’s bicycle, her left hand cradling his head, his emaciated body stretched along her forearm.

A long-haired, short-breed dog, his white fur was the colour of the cane-field mud, through which he’d dragged himself and the six-foot-long, heavy iron chain attached to the rough rope around his neck. He really didn’t need the extra misfortune but he was already nearly blind in his left eye.

Perhaps weeks after his escape, he was so thin that, trimming his matted, grimy fur, my wife almost snipped off his tail, mistaking it for a thread of the rope she’d cut from his neck. With his head appearing so much bigger, he looked more like an apostrophe than the Sealyham Terrier-Bolognese cross he might be, if he were not just a Little Bajan Pothound.

When my wife asked if we could keep him, I said, “Of course!”

Because I could see he’d be dead in hours, and I’d get the brownie points without having to do anything more than dig a very small grave.

He lived.

We called him Bond. James Bond. He was obviously such a sophisticated mofo.

He’s been with us for three years now.

He grew to look as strong in three weeks as he had looked feeble that first day. However, his rapid sensory deterioration could justify the vet’s estimation, based on an examination of what was left of his teeth, of an age of 15 to 20 years. In that first year, he lost sight in his left eye completely and his hearing on both sides. Last January, his right eye began clouding over with cataracts. Since he went totally blind last October, he’s found his way around the house and yard by smell alone.

But being blind and deaf has not bothered him at all. He rushes outdoors when he imagines the other dogs, asleep in the basement, are barking at the postman and stands barking furiously at the flamboyant tree. God alone knows how he figures out if we have left the gate open but he’s out into the street like a bullet, barking deliriously and running full pelt – crashing face-first into dustbin, fence, flower bed, neighbour’s gate, pile of bricks, before stumbling upon the park across the street. Taken for a walk on a leash – he prefers night walks, since it’s much cooler, and he can’t see s--t in the day, anyway – he will break into a run if you do: not having any idea of what calamities lie directly ahead doesn’t affect the joy of feeling the wind in his hair.

He’s the living personification – canine-a-nisation? – of, “They can slow me down, but they can’t stop me!” And we can’t even slow him down (unless we pull him up on our laps, where he will lie still for hours, gleeful with the patting he’d never had before). After he’s fed, with the other dogs, in our under-the-house, if I forget to help him into the garden, he climbs up, by Braille, an uneven concrete block “stairway” on to a ledge. He can’t see the concrete blocks on the other side leading four steps down to the garden but he remembers they are there. He knows, though, that he will fall off their irregular structure if he tries to go down them one-by-one.

So he walks back and forth along the ledge, preparing himself.

And then, after 20 seconds or so, he leaps out, literally blind, into the air.

Sometimes he lands on all fours, a perfect gymnast’s dismount, and trots off; sometimes his fall is cushioned by the croton hedge. So far, he hasn’t landed head-first on the hard sharp concrete edge of the septic tank. But, every day he’s called upon to do it, this little fella, who should have died years ago, probably not long after he was born, leaps out into the unknown.

My son calls it a perfect illustration of “a leap of faith.”

And, magically, it reaffirms my own faith that, in this hard life, in a cruelly indifferent universe, we can, if we persevere, find love and acceptance for whomever we might truly be. And, with our small, broken selves, and our defiant hope and courage, make a big difference, if only to a handful of others.

BC Pires believes in the God of Small Things. Read more of his writing at www.BCPires.com. Merry Christmas!