Golden Days Book Excerpt

     The first summer, when she was just a pup, when she had first checked on me in the night, I assumed she had to go outside.
     “Amy want to go out?” She looked at me, quizzically. What the heck is his problem?
     “Amy? Okay, Amy go out?” Well, okay, if he has to, but this is really weird. It’s Pitch black and scary out there and morning has got to be a long way off and I’ve got to make my rounds and get back to bed.
     We’d creep through the house with a flashlight, out the side door, crossing the patio and the wet grass to the top of the bluff.
     The Bay was making its liquid sounds. Far off, we could hear the surf breaking up and down the outer-beach and sometimes the hollow crash of an immense breaker. Starlight that had started toward us a million years before reached us at last that night. Looking out from the bluff at the Milky Way extending horizon to horizon, filling the vast night sky, it felt as if we were alone together in interplanetary space, as if the earth were moving in space and time, an island adrift in a sea of stars, and that if we didn’t hold on, we would fall off.
     “Here. Amy go here,” I’d say, pointing the flash, light’s beam on a nice spot in the poverty grass on the crest of the bluff.
     What the ...? “Okay, here. Amy: Amy go here.” No dice. She stares at me. “Okay, but I’m telling you, this is your last chance, okay? I’m not coming out here again, okay? You understand that, right? This is it.”
     No.
     “No?”
     No.
     “Okay. Last chance. Here, okay?” I say, flashing the light around the grass. “Amy go here.”
     No.
     “No?”
     No.
     By then, we had both scared ourselves with thoughts of what might be lurking at that time of night out in the dark behind the bayberry thickets: coyotes? bears? drug runners? kidnappers? I scooped Amy up onto my shoulder and hurried back to the house, locking the door behind us.
     We both go back to bed. Several hours later I again feel the presence, the swish of a tail, the eager eyes. “See, Amy? I told you. You have to go out. And this time, you’re going to do something, okay?” And out we’d go and back we’d come, no farther ahead.
     After several nights of this, a glimmer of slowwitted human comprehension: Amy didn’t want to go outside. In fact, she has extraordinary bladder control. Rather, she was making her nightly bed checks.
     Several times a night, from bedroom to bedroom she goes on her rounds to make sure everyone is all right. As long as we say hello or give her a pat, off she goes, satisfied that all is well. But if we’re sleeping soundly, out like a log, she’ll make her soft whining noises or bat her tail against the bed or rest her head on the mattress, staring at us until we awaken. If, perchance, a bedroom door is closed and her little noises fail to draw a response, she’ll stand next to the door and wag her tail so that on each sweep it slams against the door. And if we’re really out cold and that too fails to do the trick, she’ll lie down outside the door, stretched right against it; and just like Atticus Finch watching over Jem at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, she’ll be there all night, and she’ll be there when we open our doors in the morning, thumping her tail and making her morning sounds of greeting.
     Up from her bed in my parents’ bedroom, out into the hall, through the dark living room and kitchen she makes her way each night for her nightly head counts, down the back hall to my sister’s bedroom. A quick check. Into my room. All is well. Everyone is in. All present and accounted for. Everything is as it should be. And so, back to her bed and to sleep.
     Like a card counter in a casino, she always, constantly, in the back of her mind is counting who is there and who is missing; and if the numbers don’t add up to four, she senses that something is wrong and worries. She’s like Nana, the nursery watchdog in Peter Pan who tended the Darling children, Wendy, John, and Michael. Watching over us is pretty much a fulltime job for Amy, what with the vigils at the front door, the bed checks, the worrying.