Vested Interest

Leap of Faith

Our dog, Toby, has died. Don’t worry; this will not be one of those sad dead-dog stories. I shed enough tears for all of us, so I won’t put you through that torture.

When I posted to social media that Toby had passed, I was flooded with words of comfort—most of which included something about pets being like our children, our fur babies. They included images of rainbow bridges and frolicking happiness. While the messages were kind, they missed capturing who Toby was. He was an 11-pound cutie to most, but to me, Toby was a wise, elderly fellow disguised as a Yorkshire TerrierDachshund mix.

Once, when he accompanied me to a brief meeting at the Headley-Whitney Museum near Lexington, a woman, after watching him frolic on the long, flat lawn, asked me in the voice of Mrs. Thurston Howell III, “What do you know of your dog’s breeding?”

“Not much,” I said. “I wasn’t there.”

The people at L.I.F.E. House for Animals, a noneuthanizing shelter in Frankfort, said that Toby was a “dorkie.” “Oh, no,” the Mrs. Howell soundalike said. “I am sure Toby is a long-haired dachshund of the rarest kind.” I claimed Toby was named after Tobias Wolff, the author of This Boy’s Life among other books, but it’s the name he had when we rescued him. My youngest daughter, Sydney, discovered Toby. She came home from volunteering at L.I.F.E. House insisting we adopt “this special dog.” The problem was that he was a part of a set with his sister, Macy, with whom—we were told—he had spent his entire life. We went to see Toby but second-guessed our ability to take on two dogs. We spent the weekend mulling the idea before returning to L.I.F.E. House to adopt the pair, only to find that their previous owners had returned over the weekend to retrieve Macy, leaving Toby there alone. That was a decade ago.

I would say Toby adjusted quickly, but honestly, we

adapted to him. He was at the center of our family from Day 1, the first to pose for family photos. Toby loved his sweaters. He was ready for work, strategically positioning himself to watch over whoever was in the office on a particular day. In Silas House’s latest book, Lark Ascending, the title character is joined on his journey to Glendalough by Seamus the beagle, who was named after the Nobel Prizewinning poet Seamus Heaney. Not easy to reach, Glendalough represents a safe place in a glacial valley in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains. I believe that, like Seamus, Toby would have gone anywhere with us. As my cousin George Graham Vest, who is credited with coining the phrase “Dog is man’s best friend,” wrote, “He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow, and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master’s side.” In Bowling Green one weekend, Sydney, as a college freshman, went alone into a Dollar General with tinted doors. Toby watched her go into the store from the car, but when the doors closed and he could no longer see her, without hesitation, he dove out of the car window, leaping three to four feet to join her inside. Toby loved visiting nursing homes. He liked older people and children. My home and office are maybe a quarter-mile apart. Between the two are a dozen houses and Highway 420, a winding north-south road between U.S. 127 and Frankfort’s East-West Connector. It follows one of the many creeks that feed into the Kentucky River south of Frankfort. Toby and I used to walk to work all the time, or at least on days we didn’t need the car. He would stand STEPHEN M. VEST ready to put on his sweater and wait at the basement door so he wouldn’t be left behind. Publisher + Editor-in-Chief Our two-story house is situated over a two-car garage and half-basement. A 6-foot privacy fence surrounds the backyard. On days when we left Toby at home, which was infrequent, he would watch from the deck a few feet above the privacy fence as we drove away. We don’t know how, but at least a dozen times, when we’d gone to work without Toby, he joined us there within an hour. At least once, when he discovered we weren’t at work, he safely returned home.