Fur Child Day at the Office

The glass-top desk in my dad’s engineering plant stretched on forever. Scrolls of intricately-inked vellum strewed across its surface like autumn leaves on a frozen pond. These designs were dad’s messages in a bottle to a future driven by vertical lift-offs and landings. Someone could’ve run the world from this desk. As an eight-year-old, I knew that my dad did.

I hopped on his swivel chair, kicked my sneakered feet off the glossy cement floor and spun. Under my own power, I never achieved centrifugal force. Just as I wound down, dad leapt behind me, giggled and spun the chair. Hard. Again. And again. He spun me until tubes of fluorescent light, walls, desks, and vellum scrolls blurred, then dissolved. I closed my eyes and saw myself as the first boy on Mars. Dad could make it happen. Anything was possible in dad’s office.

Forty-eight years later, I sat with dad at his retirement party — and 90th birthday. Dad wore a golden crown of mylar, tipped to one side, and a half-soused smile. He sipped pinot noir, reached across the table and took my hands in his.

“I loved having you at the office,” dad said randomly.

My eyes bugged. “Really? I thought I was a nuisance!”

“Are you kidding!,” dad countered. “I did my best work when you were with me.”

* * * * *

My wife’s and my decision to remain childless was the right one for us. Still, I sometimes moon the would-be memories of taking our fantasy child to my speech pathology “office.” Together, we might’ve finger-painted the brain’s plump lobes or charted each cranial nerve’s path with colored yarn. I’d spin slowly in my office’s swivel chair and daydream about how my child could charm a thread of sibilants and diphthongs from the most withdrawn soul. I’d smile — then cry.

Not for too long. Because I had a four-legged fur daughter waiting for me at home. She was the one who answered my struggles with the language processing model of aphasia by pressing her butt into my flank. To my huffs and furrowed brows over some preposterous administrative edict, she’d curl her paw around my shoulder. When the winds of doubt tore my treatment plans apart, she’d toss a half-eaten terrycloth dragon into my lap. Without play, no work gets done!

Our Lilly, the Boston terrier, never saw the inside of my office. Only therapy animals were allowed on VA hospital grounds and then only under rigid restrictions. I so wanted to sneak her by the guards when I put in extra weekend hours, but thought better of it. Instead, I found consolation in after-hours counsel with my fur baby.

In August, 2020, my beloved colleagues threw me an outdoor retirement party. We gathered under a stand of a weeping eucalyptus, dad’s favorite tree species. Sunk into a rickety chaise, I listened as each co-worker and friend told me how my admission of mistakes gave them permission to fail — and learn.

My wife and Lilly were there. When the presentation started, Lilly trotted over, plopped down at my side, and leaned into my calf. She tilted her head back and looked into my eyes. I reached down and rubbed her chest.

“Sweet baby,” I sighed. “Thank you for bringing the best out of me.”