Well, you know how it goes, there are in-laws and there are outlaws and sometimes you are on the “outs” with your in-laws. One of the realities of Thanksgiving in my childhood home was a never ending barrage of relatives that would stop by to “shake and howdy” with everyone.  Okay, everyone had their own meal, but you never knew who might drop in before, or definitely after dinner.  It started early in the morning, when my maternal grandmother would show up to help my mother cook Thanksgiving dinner.   When I say help, I mean that she would flit around the kitchen making passive aggressive comments to get my mother in a bad mood.  “I think you are opening that oven too often, but you do what you want.”  “Oh, box stuffing?  Haven’t you been baking enough bread to have some crusty loaves to make your own?”  “Store bought pie crust?  That didn’t exist when I was raising children.”  And it would go on like that, until the tension in the air got as thick as pea soup—pea soup that was put in the freezer last year.
            The real traffic started after dinner, when the round of family visitors would randomly show up.  Early in the afternoon it was folks stopping for coffee and dessert.  Keep in mind, that deer season started the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the diaspora relatives would be trickling into town too.  My mother’s sister had a husband that came every year.  They lived out near Philadelphia somewhere. Uncle Lester was a nice enough guy, but wasn’t that familiar with the ways of wild critters or the places that they live.  One year, he shot a buck and proceeded to drag it out, probably a mile drag or so.  People saw him and congratulated him.  Several hours later, he was still not seen, and his vehicle (a sedan with tarps in the trunk to catch the blood) was still parked on the hardtop road.  Panic ensued about six o’clock, three hours after the deer was killed.  Dad and I had hunted in the morning before he had to go to work at 3 o’clock , but we had not seen Uncle Lester.  They called dad at work, which never happened.  You just didn’t call dad at work.  This, of course, was before cell phones, but even at that, it wasn’t like the factory had telephones on every hallway.  Someone had to go find him, and then it was a big production to have someone fill in at his post while he walked to the phone.  You only called if it was serious.  I once got in trouble at school and was fairly defiant about the matter, feeling I was in the right.  I got paddled.  Sat down.  Then the principal said he was going to call my father at work.  I felt the color leave my face and being right didn’t matter anymore.
            “We don’t know where Lester is!” mom yelled into the phone.  Followed by “Uh uh.  Hmm.  Okay.  You’re father wants to talk to you,” mom handed me the phone, which was attached to the wall of the kitchen.
            “Yeah?” I said.
            “Have your mother drive you out to Lester’s car.  Take the big flashlight, and all the bulbs for the light and all the D batteries we have. Take a couple small flashlights to change batteries in the big flashlight if you need to do that.”
            “Okay,” I said.
            “He must be on the main road, they say he shot it back towards the old coal mine. That is close to where we run hare.”
            “I know where you mean.”
            “Don’t leave that main dirt road.  When you get to the coal mine turnoff, you should see drag marks on the snow.  If you do not, just turn around and go back to the car with your mother.  If you find him take him out to his care.  Tell him I said buck the deer, I will get it get it in the morning. I will be home at 11 o’clock tonight.  Don’t call me back unless you don’t find him or he is dead or something.  If he is okay, I will get the details when I get home.”  Only, he didn’t say “buck the deer.”  Sure enough, I found the drag marks, going the wrong way down the main road.  There wasn’t much snow, but enough to see a bit of blood.  I found Uncle Lester a couple miles later, he saw my flashlight and came running to me.
            “I am right here!” He said, then “Bobby?”
            “Dad sent me, let’s get going.  You walked the wrong way.”
            “I gotta get my buck!”
            “Dad said buck the deer, he will help you get it in the morning,” only I didn’t say buck.  I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, but I had been given permission to use the biggest cuss word and it felt really rebellious.  Everything worked out, and the buck was fine the next day, a little frozen.
            Anyway, all these visiting hunters stopped by in the evening  of Thanksgiving to tell hunting stories, drink a beer, and then maybe watch the end of a football game.  The house would get claustrophobic with people watching TV in our small living room.
            Dad and I always hunted rabbits on Thanksgiving morning.  Just to escape the process of my mom and her mom getting into each other’s way in a small kitchen.
            “We ain’t in no hurry to shoot a rabbit,” dad would always say.  If we could get a good chase until ten o’clock, we would then shoot.  Well, he would let me shoot.  It can be tough to get a really long chase, and often the rabbit would hole up after an hour.
            “I could have shot that one,” my child-self would say, “It was going to hole anyway!”
            “Find me a rabbit!” Dad would yell to the dogs and they would leave the hole to beat the brush, “You can shoot later.”
            The year after “Wrong Way Lester” as the joke come to be called, Dad asked me on Thanksgiving Eve, “How’s your patience doing?”
            “What?”
            “I think tomorrow we will go to a spot that will have a lot more hare than cottontail.  You can’t shoot a hare until after Christmas.  You gonna be able to tell the difference and resist?”
            “I think so.”
            “You better know so.”
            “I will be careful,” I said.
            “I am only worried about the first circle if it is a hare, it might short circle and not run very big.  Otherwise it will be obvious by the size of the circles.”
            An overgrown clear cut adjacent to a huge stand of hemlocks in the Allegheny National Forest was our destination.  Tall grasses were feeding the cottontail and hare, the hare would run the hemlocks, the cottontails would stay closer to the sumac and cattails, running into the thick cover where the tree tops were left from the last logging operation.  The first rabbit ran into the hemlocks briefly and circled back.
            “Shoot it,” dad whispered in my ear as it hurtled across the dirt road towards the thickets.  I collected the cottontail before the dogs arrived to potentially tear it up.  After 20 minutes or so I saw a big hare burst out of the cattails and into the hemlocks, crossing the road 80 yards in front of me.  A few minutes later the dogs opened up and off they went. “That was a hare!” I said.
            “Good,” dad lit his pipe and walked towards the truck.  He unloaded his gun, and told me to do the same.  We sat on the tailgate, and just talked.  The kind of talk where there is long bits of silence.  We joked about mom and gram.  Then we would talk about school.  When the dogs would come back we would get up to look for the hare and watch the dogs cross.  This was before GPS, and the two beagles we owned would go way out of hearing and we had no idea where they were.  I am going to guess that they were running for about three hours or so when they started getting close for about the fifth time, and their frantic chase song was getting louder.  I am going to guess it was three hours or so, only because we got home right before meal time, which was one o’clock.  Mom had a rule that we needed to be back by then, but we sometimes were late.  The chase may have been longer than three hours.  Like I said, there was no GPS handheld with a clock on it then.  
            Dad tapped out his pipe and started sprinting for the hemlocks. He was 6’ 2’’ and long legged.  I am only 6’ and long waisted.  Years of smoking took away the 4 minute mile that he could rattle of in youth, but his ¼ mile sprint was still pretty strong, even at almost 60 years of age.  The dogs were a little pooped, and were not easy to catch, but were not too difficult once he was close enough to yell “Down!”  He grabbed Princess and leashed her.  She was the tougher to catch. I was there just a few seconds later and leashed Duke. We cleaned the rabbit, and headed for home, about a half hour away.  We pulled in the driveway, and I put the rabbit in water to soak in the basement refrigerator where we kept mostly fishing bait and dad’s Schmidt’s beer.  Then we put the dogs in the fenced yard.
            “You want me to put them in the kennel or let them run in the yard?” I asked, “I bet they are content enough not to try and dig out?”
            “Let’s kennel them,” he said, “Lord knows who might stop and make them bark, or who might accidentally open the gate.”
            The kennel was an above ground shed that dad build, with above ground runs with wire floors over a cement pad to catch the refuse.  He had electricity ran to the kennel, and even an electric heater he could run.  Each wire run extended into the insulated shed, where you had a box with a lid.
            “You like Turkey?” He asked.
            “Yeah, why?”
            He climbed the three steps to get into the shed.  I followed, and was confronted with odor.  Not dog odor (I had to clean that entire kennel every day), but the smell of  food.
            “What is this?” I asked.
            “I started a crockpot of rabbit stew early this morning before daylight.  You can eat all the turkey you want, but after we eat dinner, I think we will come out here.  We have all kinds of people stopping by to hunt this year.  Your mom’s brother is back in the area, and he has a few kids with him.  Lester will no doubt be around. There won’t be enough seats!”  He pointed at two lawn chairs he must have brought to the kennel from the lawn shed. “We can sit out here and eat supper.  They will leave faster if I am not there.  Plus, I only left 5 beers in the refrigerator, they won’t stay too long!”
            After dinner (I went light on the turkey)  we chatted and had dessert.  It got to be 3 o’clock or so, and dad said, “Hey, where is the other leash?”  Our leashes always hung on a peg just inside the back door/mud room.
            “I hung mine up,” I said.
            “I did too,” dad said.  We always had leather leashes, with French snaps.  I checked the floor.  Nothing.
            “Hey!” Dad yelled in the general direction of my mom, “We re going to run out and look for that leash we lost!”
            “Okay!” mom yelled.
            “Hurry back,” gram said, “Lots of company is coming.”
            “Do my best,” dad said and we drove out the driveway, headed in the wrong direction to get where we hunted.
            “What’s going on?” I asked.
            “Here,” dad threw the leash to me, which had been in the truck all along.
            “I don’t understand…” I held the leash.
            “If they see my truck, they will find me.  I am parking it behind the kennel.” He laughed.  We rushed around, parked, and closed the truck doors as quiet as possible.  In the bed of the truck he pulled out a cooler with 4 beers and 4 RC colas.  And a big piece of cardboard and tape.  
            “What’s the cardboard for?” I asked.
            “Blocking the window in the kennel so that they can’t see the light from the kitchen.”   I rooted into the cooler, and got a pop.  Dad let the dogs out of the sleeping boxes and into the shed part of the kennel.  The beagles were balls of energy, as they were not in that part of the kennel very often. 
            “I almost forgot!” He slinked out the kennel, closing the dogs in, and returned with a big smoked ham hock for each of them.  Their eyes bulged in ravenous zeal. We sat with the dogs, talked, and ate rabbit stew on paper plates.  We used an old radio to put some music in the room for the times between dialogue, when we just scratched a dog’s ear.  I put it to a station that played older country music, on AM radio, the music dad liked.  About 7 o’clock dad said, “Go get the the dogs their supper.  See who is still here, and tell them you are feeding dogs and that I am thinking about going out to look for that leash again.”
            “PHHEW!” I spit RC Cola out at the thought of being gone this long for a leash.
            “Hi mom,” I said.
            “That took forever!” Mom answered, “I was worried.”
            “No one here?”
            “My brother was here with his three boys,  and are gone. Your grandmother went to my sister’s house.  She took Uncle Lester’s family with her, except for Lester.  He wants to talk to your dad.”
            “Okay,” I grabbed the bowls of Purina covered in turkey gravy and went out to the kennel.
            “All clear?” dad asked?
            “Just Lester, everyone else left.”
            “Here,” he opened the doors of the run to put in the food and he added a second water bowl for each hound, “Those ham hocks will make them thirsty.”
            We walked in the house and Lester was there, “You went out all that time looking for a cheap leash?” Lester laughed his sort of hoarse cackle.
            “Shit,” dad said, “If I sent my little boy out into the night air to fetch your bucking ass last year, you know I wasn’t going to strand my favorite leash.” Only he didn’t say bucking.  
            

            “I’ll be back,” my wife said, as she set her phone on the table and wheeled around to go to the restaurant’s restroom.  The waitress flitted by and asked, “Need a refill?”
            “Sure,” I said, and get my wife a third glass of the carbonated water and lime.” Then, the table started buzzing.  This is pretty typical whenever my wife’s phone is on a table.  I looked, and saw that it was a phone call from Wesley, our son.  Well, he’s a stepson.  That was established early in our relationship, after I married his mom.
           “I told my dad that I call you dad too,” Wes said to me when he returned from a weekend visit.
            “Yeah?  How did that go?” I asked.
            “He doesn’t want me to do that.  He got mad.”
            “Well, just make life easy and call me something else.”
            “How about if I call you Bob?”
            “That works fine with me.  I’ve already been trained to answer to that name.”
            Two months later, Wes came home from his dad’s house and said, “Dad got mad again.”
            “What went wrong?”
            “He was calling me to the kitchen and I said, “I’ll be there in a minute, Bob!  He was mad I did not call him dad.”  He was 9 years old then.  He is 26 now.
            Anyway, the buzzing table went to voicemail, and my shirt pocket started buzzing.
            “Yeah,” I answered, seeing it was Wesley.
            “Hi Bob,” he said in his baritone monotone, “Do you know where mom is?”
            “She is in the bathroom,” I said, “What’s up?”  I could almost guess what was up—he was looking for some money.
            “I am playing a few gigs soon, and I need some money.”
            “Where is your paycheck?”
            “Well, Bob, if I still had that money, I wouldn’t be calling you.”
            “Alright bud, stop by the house.  I have a few jobs I could pay you to do.”
            “Can’t I just get what I need, and pay you back?”
            “Only if you give me your debit card, and I will get the money in cash when your direct deposit paycheck clears, before you spend it all on video games and pizza.”
            “Okay,” the monotone came through the phone, “I will come over tomorrow after work.”
           “Get there before it rains, scooping dog dirt in the yard is better before it liquifies,” I gave him a little encouragement.
            Renee heard that last part as she sat down, “Aren’t you worried that you will hurt his self-esteem making him clean poop?”  Much of modern life is concerned with self-esteem.  I have never understood this obsession, but my father was more concerned that a person would have too much self-esteem rather than not enough.  “Confidence doesn’t need affirmation, and it doesn’t need to brag,” he would say.
            “If he gets there too late,” I said to my wife, “I will already have it scooped, and there will be less work he can do.  And my self-esteem will be fine.  I have been picking up turds for, well, how many years?  Since 1985….
            Nostalgia hit me and I was back to 1985, with my first beagle.  Back then, sawdust was free.  Any store that sold lumber had free sawdust.  Dad got it in a giant burlap sack from the local building supply center.  We had an outdoor kennel with wire runs, and a cement slab underneath.  Every day, rain, shine, sleet, or snow, I was out there with an old metal coffee can that was filled with water, Pine-sol, and a toilet brush.  I would scrub the wire with the brush and knock the feces to the sawdust that covered the cement slab below. The sawdust collected urine too.  I then got a hoe and drug all the sawdust out, and I then shoveled the sawdust into a big metal can, lined with the extra heavy duty garbage bag.  Lastly, I scattered fresh sawdust under the wire runs of the kennels.  Every. Single. Day.  The garbage bag went to the end of the driveway each week on garbage night.  I scrubbed so much wire with Pine-sol that I cannot use it in my house.  Renee mopped with it when we first got married.  I took a whiff, and full of nausea said, “Can we please never use Pine-sol again?  I know it is a great product, but all I smell is dog shit when people use it!”
            Wood pellets, which are made from sawdust, cost over $4 per bag last winter.  I figure I shoveled enough sawdust as a kid to pay for a new truck at modern sawdust rates!  After cleaning kennels, I could walk over the hill from my house and jump hare or cottontail to run, and that was one of my favorite things to do as a kid.  Whenever anyone asked, “Where is Bob?” My mom would say, “If them dogs ain’t in the yard, then he is in the woods.”
            “In the woods” was the term used for everything from camping, to fishing, to making tree forts, or just walking.  We didn’t have hiking.  Hiking is what people do when they have to drive to the woods before they start walking.  When you live in the woods, or right next to them, then it is just called going for a walk. “The woods” had been timbered, mined for coal, and timbered again over the years.  My dad had a deer stand on a spot he called the clear cut.  The “clear cut” was covered with tall trees about 20 inches in diameter, so how long ago was it a clear cut?  At some point in my father’s life, it was definitely done, but he it wasn’t recent! I was 30 years old before I even considered the fact that my dad lived his entire life within a mile of the house where he was born, except for a couple years in the Philippines during the Second World War.  He spent 60 of his 64 years within 100 yards of those same woods that I roamed every day.
            Dad grew up in those same woods.  As a kid, he climbed a tree and beat the crows away to get a hatchling.  He fed it, and it was trained to roost in the yard, and flew down to his shoulder when he would go outside. It even said a few words from time to time.  In those same woods, as a kid, he carved his name on a. Flat rock with a hammer and chisel.
             “Where is that rock?” I asked.
          “Somewhere on the edge of Gordon’s pasture.  The Gordon farm also bordered the woods.  I can’t tell you how many times I looked for that rock, and I am sure that it got tilled over as the pasture and fields were moved and adjusted.  Being chased by the Gordon’s bull was almost a daily occurrence for me, if I had dogs out and they bounced a cottontail in the fallow field.  The bull would get aggravated at the dogs and I would rush in like a rodeo clown to give it a bigger target.  I see people with arm tattoos that look as if barbed wire is running around the circumference of the bicep.  I have had barbed wire around my arm, diving out of the cow pasture—I wished I had a barrel for an escape.  Speaking as a guy who has had actual barbed wire on me, I have no desire to get a tattoo of the stuff. I much preferred chasing the hare, they never went in the farm, but stayed in the woods.
            I was looking for that rock again not too many years ago, and decided that it was gone forever.  I sat next to a dead log, and carved my name into it.  That log will definitely decay into nothing, if it hasn’t already.
            In the 1950s dad had beagles, and he would open the kennel door and turn them loose in the woods next to the Gordon farm.  If he had to go to work at 3, he would leave, and the dogs would come home eventually.  One day, his beloved Prince dog never returned.
            “I saw the dog with your brother, Clarence,” a guy told my dad, “He was hunting the bottom fence row.”
            Dad found the dog, dead, shot.  He felt Clarence killed the dog out of jealousy, because it was a far better hound than any Clarence had.  I hate to think someone would be that cruel to anyone, let alone a sibling.  I think it was just as likely that Clarence shot at the rabbit when the rabbit was first jumped, and Prince was too close.  He left the dog lay, not wanting to tell dad.  That’s just my hunch.  At any rate, dad got out of beagles right after that, and never got another until 1985, when I begged for one.
            I was allergic to dogs my whole life.  A friend had a beagle, and we would take it out all the time, into the same woods.  I was hooked and wanted a dog.  I remember praying every night to no longer have allergies to dogs.  Then, we figured out that dogs no longer bothered me.  We were in my cousin’s house one day, a cookout got rained upon, and we went inside with the intent to eat and leave before my allergies flared up.  We stayed for hours with no problems!  My cat allergies never went away, I still have them to this day.  I still get stuffed up in a barn with horses or cattle.  A friend has goats—yep, they make me sneeze and snot too.  But Dad and I got beagles, and built the kennel.  I probably spent more time with those beagles, in the woods, than I did with anyone as a kid.  Guys will often pay someone to start a beagle puppy, or pay someone to condition dogs or take them to trials.  I never minded the solitary hours of being with dogs and listening to the chase.  It always allowed me to think, and relax. They were always enough company for me, and to this day I tend to hunt rabbits by myself.  I don’t need lots of conversation interfering with the hound music.  I was probably conditioned to be like that as a teenager when all my friends were more interested in sleeping in on summer mornings, and fixing cars in the afternoon.  I just went to the woods.  I couldn’t afford a car, so I ran dogs and then would beg dad for his truck.  Once in a while he would let me take it out on a date. 
            One day, dad and I watched our beagles—his Princess and my Duke running a rabbit, and he said, “Thanks for getting me back into beagles.”  He said it matter-of fact, looking at the dogs, not me.
            “I had to beg enough!” I said. Princess was named as an homage to his Prince dog, that he found dead decades earlier.  My dad was 45 years old when I was born, so it was like being raised by a grandfather.  I have half-siblings old enough to be my parents.  I have nephews and nieces older than me! The decades between Prince and Princess seemed to fade away and dad and I were always in the woods. We bred Princess and got a couple more pups.  I often wondered how different my life would have been if I would have remained allergic to dogs.  What if a person born to be a florist was allergic to flowers, or a guy born to be a carpenter was allergic to wood?
            Ten years ago, or so, I was tested for allergies, and my back was pricked with all those needles.  It itched right away.
            “I hope you don’t go outside,” the allergist said.
            “Why?” I asked.
            “You are allergic to every tree, bush, grass, or any plant pollen!  Your back must itch.”
            “Oh yeah,” I said, “And don’t forget cats.  My lungs get wheezy within minutes of being in a house with cats.”
            “Yes, and dogs too,” he said.
            “What?”
            “You are as allergic to dogs as you are cats!”
            “That must be a false positive,” I said.
            “No, you are definitely allergic to dogs.  But, the good news is you are no longer allergic to seafood of any kind, or eggs.  You outgrew those allergies.”  That was why I was getting tested.
            “I must have outgrown dog allergies too.”
            “Nope, I wouldn’t get a puppy if I were you.”  I didn’t bother to tell him I was living in a house with a half dozen rabbit running, brush busting beagles.
            I was thinking about that earlier, and remembering how much I prayed to get that first beagle.  I remember how the hound song changed my whole life. Especially the last summer dad was alive. I was a college freshman, and home for a few months before starting my sophomore year.  I was running Duke and Princess while he was in the living room, gooned out of his mind on narcotics as the cancer ravished his body.  I was while listening to those dogs and I decided to study things that were more philosophical and theological.  Science and math had always been my jam.  My high school even created an advanced physical sciences course, I was the only student.  I had exhausted every other science class available, there were none left for me to take.  I was left, unsupervised, in a lab to do experiments every day.  I was top heavy in math and science in my first year of college too, and loved it.  My work study job was in the chemistry laboratory
            “Dr. Clippard,” I said, “Our lab in class today is to determine the molarity of this sulfuric acid.”
            “Yes, I know.  I gave the assignment.”
            “Umm, I mixed this solution at work this morning.  I already know the answer.”
            “Oh, well then you shouldn’t be here long.”
            Duke and Princess brought that rabbit out of the pasture, down past the bottom fence row where dad had found Prince’s lifeless body, and went up to the top again, and I decided right then and there that I was no longer wanting to study the notions of how the world came into being, but the so what of creation.  We have this great world, how do we live in it?  Names carved in wood are ultimately as ephemeral as names chiseled in wood.  The lives that go with the names can have real impact—good or bad—on the people around them. The folks who are hikers, and see the woods as a place far away are ultimately as connected to those natural places as those of us who live in the middle of them.
            I would never pay someone to start a puppy, not that I am judging anyone else for doing it.  There is just something about that the first time a pup barks on rabbit scent.  It makes a bark that he has never bayed before.  It doesn’t sound like a playful bark with other pups, nor does it sound like an angry bay at an intruder or rival.  It is a dog’s rabbit voice, and it truly is like a switch going off in their little brains, and they are activated and will never be the same.  From that moment on, their primary focus is rabbits.  The pup has answered a calling.
            “We aren’t out of the woods yet,” is something people often say, as if the woods were a place to be avoided, or a bad place.  More and more, I find myself going into the woods, and not wanting to get out of them.
 
 
 
            “You know that, right?” my wife said, drawing me out of nostalgia at the restaurant, snapping me back to the present.
            “What?”
            “Wesley needs a guitar.”
            “I bought him two guitars over the years,” I said.
            “His electric guitar got stolen.”
            “Oh, I didn’t know that.”  I was stingy about buying him junk, but I always supported his musical talent, and he is very good.
            “Is he going to make enough money scooping poop to get a guitar?”
            “Tell him I will buy the guitar if he scoops the poop and also goes in the woods.”
            “What woods?”
            “The woods,” I said, “They are all fundamentally the same, on a primal level.  He needs to hear a rabbit voice, and learn what it means to answer a calling.”
            “You say some strange things when you come out of those trances.”
            “I will make him run dogs.  And listen to them. He won’t want to do that, but I will make him do it to pay off the debt.  He can catch dogs for me too if the pack splits and have dogs on two different rabbits.”  Wes used to like the woods, but as a teenager he turned into a suburbanite.
            “He will probably get lost!”
            “I will put a tracking collar on him too,” I said, “And you can pay for this supper!”
            
 
 

            
             
   
 
            

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            I feel as if I have told so many stories, over the years, about how great my mom was to me, and how supportive she was in everything I did.  I suppose I have told the stories about her support of my beagling the most, at least in print.  But she was my biggest fan in all things.  I thought that this month I would tell about my low points as a son.  I guess I will start with applying to college.  Back then, Penn State was an affordable college for a working class kid (don’t look at the tuition today).  By the time I went to college I knew my life had gone to the dogs.  Penn State has a bunch of branch campuses, and the closest one to my hometown was Dubois.  The mom grapevine had sufficiently convinced my mother that Penn State Dubois was the party Mecca of the universe, and she decided that I should not go there.  Hell, I was willing to go as a commuter, and the money I would have saved in dormitory costs would have more than paid for a junky jalpoy  to get me there! Ah, but the stories of the parties in Dubois made mama worry.  So she had me apply to main campus, of all places!
            One visit had me terrified.  Not the parties, the size of the place was intimidating.  I think it was 40,000 students then!  So, after much begging, I convinced the university to let me go to my second choice, which was the Altoona campus.
            “You were accepted at main campus!” The officials wailed, “Why do you not want to come here?  Most kids would do anything to start here?”
            “I really wanted to go to Dubois,” I said.  This really boggled their minds, as Dubois was a very small campus, right next to the high school in town.  Altoona was pretty big for a branch campus, and that is where I went, to start.  University Park, the main campus, was so big that I felt intimidated by the number of students. The campus was bigger than my town  It was a dreadful thought, going to Altoona, being away from home, and not running dogs.  Dubois would have suited me fine, I could run dogs, take classes, and get along just fine with the students who also hailed from rural, north central Pennsylvania.
            On move in day, I remember being less than happy.  Granted, my best friend, Joe, was going to Altoona too, but I was probably one of the few kids that could have been happy commuting and not really having the “college experience” of moving out.  All the kids said, “I love you” to mom and dad and parents went home.  A few weeks later I was home for Labor Day, and dad said, “All those other kids told their moms that they loved them and you did not.”
            I did not grow up in a house where people said “I love you” that much.  Sure, we all knew it, and felt it, but it wasn’t vocalized. Not unless it was serious stuff—like surgery or a terrible accident and you were going into the emergency room!  I say it to my wife and stepson all the time now, but that was not the way things were in my house.  Looking back, I remember all those new college students with tears, saying goodbye with love.  What were my thoughts?  I was thinking, “Great, I am in Altoona, a city, and my dogs are hours away,”
            I got home a few weekends that first semester, and I hunted rabbits hard.  Dad was dying from cancer, though we didn’t know it,  He had beaten cancer years before, and it had returned, but the doctors were treating him for back problems, unaware that the disease had advanced with a vengeance.  Dad kept working, wincing with pain, and even rabbit hunted with me.  I kept thinking it would be so much easier if I was in Dubois.  Oh, by the way, comparing Dubois to Altoona, in terms of parties, is like comparing traditional brace dogs to SPO dogs.  And comparing Altoona to main campus is like comparing UBGF SPO to LPH!
            I only went two years to Altoona, and had to transfer to main campus to complete my degree. Dad had died, and mom was working a lot of hours, but would come to get me for a few hunting trips.  I was in an apartment with 5 other roommates and it was a college apartment!  Kegs.  Messes.  All that stuff.  Not a pleasant thing for moms to see. I would run dogs in the places where dad and I always did, almost hearing his voice.  Well, one dog. We had some good hunting dogs, and mom sold all but my old Duke dog.  She was making minimum wage at a convenience store after dad died.  I understand it now, especially since she got so much money for Princess, dad’s dog. Her pups sold well too.  I was out hunting hare over Christmas break, and old Duke was slowing down.  I stayed out until almost dark, waiting until I could shoot a hare in our limited Pennsylvania season.  I could have gone home sooner, but I was bitter about the young dogs being sold.  Hindsight being what it is is, I know it was for the best and those dogs had a much better life running rabbits all year than waiting for me to get home on sporadic weekends.
            None of this is to say I was angry, or mean.  I was just in flux—a full time student not knowing where I was headed.  I graduated college and went straight to seminary, which made everyone in the family….confused.  I guess I was always a bit rebellious, at times a hothead, and definitely not always gregarious or good at small talk.  But I was thinking about the big questions—life, death, eternity, the meaning of life, and all those things that are part and parcel of life in ministry.  What do I remember about graduation?  Not wanting to go.  It is a pretty impersonal affair at a school that big, and I was happy to let them mail my diplomas.  Mom and grandma wanted to attend.  I was sullen, and silent.  My mind was focused on the fact that I had earned a couple degrees that were not real good for the job market until I went to seminary and finished.  I regret not being happy.  I had some relatives that had gone to college, but I don’t know that any with the last name of Ford had done it.  Shoot, to be honest, a lot of the Fords in my family are smarter than me—mechanics, electricians, carpenters.  I was the nerdy kid with a good memory and not much skill.  
            “Good thing you’re strong,” dad would say, “You got two options—unskilled labor, which is not going to be around much longer—or those book smarts.  Skilled craftsmanship is not your thing!”  I have relatives that can restore cars, build houses, and build roads.  I once replaced a faucet handle without flooding the house, and I thought I was really being a handyman.  Mom was happy at graduation, and I should have been too.
            I was a student pastor in seminary and had a beagle.  The one old beagle I had back home had died, and I got a new one.  It stayed at a church member’s farm.  Rural place, outside of town.  By then, mom got a secretarial job in a construction company.  I still remember the last time I saw her.  I went to see her in Texas for Easter.  The church I was serving told me to go, and gave me the Sunday off!  No church does that, but they knew I wanted to see my mom, and I was a student.  Mom and I went to the sunrise service, not many there.  She died the following August.  Her body was shipped back to Pennsylvania. I ran my dog at the farm for three solid days before I went to the funeral.
           I wish I would have officiated the funeral.  I thought I would get too emotional.  The pastor put zero effort into the service.  Never learned a thing about my mom.  It was nothing but bare bones liturgy.  Prayers and scripture. He had to think hard to remember her name for the few times he had to mention her.  That night, I went to my childhood home and in the quiet darkness offered the service that I should have done.  No one was there, but me, in the stillness of my backyard.  I will never be too emotional to officiate a funeral again.  I learned a trick that night.  When I get too emotional to talk, I bite the inside of my cheek until it bleeds, driving away the tears.  I’ve used that same technique at funerals to bury childhood friends, fellow beaglers, beloved church members, and mentors.  It looks like a pregnant pause, an oratorical tool, but it is the internalization of grief to carry on—blood and saliva mixed.  Oh, and I have never done a shoddy funeral, not even for a stranger.  I learn a little something, as best as I can.  I personalize them all.
            Ah, I have written a lot of stories about my mom that show how wonderful she was, and how much I loved her.  And How much she loved me.  Why did I write this one?  Just to show that things in families can be bad at times, but love still reigns.  And when it seems like nothing good can ever happen, it does.  Like that Easter in Texas.  My mom asked me what my Easter sermon would have been.  I told her the gist of it, and explained that I would deliver it the next Sunday, when I returned to that little church in Ohio, next to that seminary.
            “Where did you get those thoughts?” She asked.
            “Running this beagle I have there, and thinking,” I answered.
            “Are you mad I had to sell all but the one beagle?” She asked.
            “Of course not,” I said, “I love you.”
            “Keep listening to those beagles,” she said.