The Love of a Father

When you’re a small boy, you don’t care about the significance of a dog’s pedigree or what the word even means. You just spend a lot of time playing outside and have a dog named Tricky hanging around you and your brother. You don’t care about much else.

I was four or five years old when Tricky bit the neighbor’s boy in the face. I don’t remember any of the events leading up to that fateful day; they are inconsequential. However, I remember the frantic commotion that began seconds after the incident. He was around three years old.

There was a lot of frantic movement and a ton of emotion as Dad grabbed the .22 rifle with one hand, Tricky with the other, and briskly walked to the car. When George and I realized that Dad was going to shoot Tricky, the sobbing began. I don’t think I understood the gravity of what was happening, but I didn’t need to. Once George started crying, I joined right in. George was always the stabilizing force in my life.

Isn’t that what big brothers do?

Before long, after Raymond had been bandaged up and was recovering, Dad returned-sans Tricky. In the brief dialogue upon his return, he indicated that Tricky got away and couldn’t shoot him.

Thirty years later…

Our family traveled out of town to visit Dad. During a casual conversation around the kitchen table, I randomly said, “I wonder what happened to old Tricky?”

“What do you mean?” Dad asked. I responded, “Do you think some family found him? I wonder what happened to him?”

There was a short pause, and Dad retorted. “I shot him.”

Needless to say, I was a bit shocked to hear that, after all the years of thinking that Tricky had gotten away.

But Dad understood something about dogs and boys that I would realize years later when I was an adult with my own children.

Once a dog has bitten someone for the first time, the chances that it will happen again increase, and Dad wasn’t about to let that happen to his boys or anyone else’s child. At the same time, he understood how easy it is to break a child’s heart, and he didn’t want that either.

Looking back, I’m glad Dad didn’t tell us the truth about Tricky because now I understand the love of a father.

He was protecting his boys from physical harm and, broken hearts.

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash