Mister B, our 16-year-old dachshund, went missing yesterday afternoon. Here’s the important part: we found him and all is well.
Polly let the dogs out front around 2 p.m. to greet Donna as she pulled into the driveway after a shopping run, and he didn’t come back in with the other dogs. No one noticed him missing for another hour, at which point Donna and Polly went out to beat the bushes while I turned the house over and searched the yard, thinking the worst, that he might have crawled under something to die. Donna found him at 4 p.m. in the shiggy between our house and the neighbor’s to the north, apparently making his way home and acting quite proud of himself for striking out on his own.
Our three dachshunds have 24-hour access to our fenced back yard. Since the younger ones, Fritzi and Lulu, are likely to run out into the street if they see a neighbor or another dog walking by, we don’t often let them go out front, which is unfenced. We make an exception for Mr. B, who likes to pee by the little bush in the photo, about three yards from our front door. One of us is with him when he visits his bush, and he never wanders far from it.
We suspect he didn’t wander yesterday, at least not at first. In all the excitement of Donna and Polly carrying groceries in from the driveway as Lulu & Fritzi ran circles around them, no one noticed he hadn’t come back in with everyone else. I think he waited by the front door for a while, and only then went exploring.
The houses in our neighborhood are on large lots with open space between them, a greenway for local wildlife. We don’t know how far the old guy wandered, but we’re pretty sure he was on his way home when Donna found him, because it was coming up on his dinnertime. From when he was younger and went for daily walks around the neighborhood with me, he does know his way home, thank goodness. And thank goodness he got loose in the afternoon, when the coyotes, bobcats, and javelina who live in the greenway are sleeping.
He might well have wandered off when he was younger, but he’s been a strict homebody in his old age and we’re surprised by his behavior yesterday. We’ll certainly keep a closer eye on him from now on, even though we were already in the habit of counting dog noses several times a day. Dementia, like elderly humans who wander away from assisted living facilities? Maybe. He’s certainly old enough. But as noted above, he seemed pretty proud of himself after yesterday’s walkabout, and was frisky for hours afterward. Oh, and while Donna, Polly, and I frantically searched for him, Lulu and Fritzi were frantic too, running from one end of the house to the other and out into the back yard, barking their heads off, and mobbing him when he got back.
Naturally, all three of us are blaming ourselves for letting him get loose. We’re lucky nothing bad happened.
I’m not sure yet whether it’s a reaction to one of the meds I’m taking or just plain old arthritis, but my shoulders, wrists, and hands have been aching for a month. My wrists and hands are particularly bad, and I haven’t been wearing my favorite and oldest watch, fearing I wouldn’t be able to force my swollen hand through the bracelet. But hey, TGIF, so I gave it a shot this morning and what do you know, it slipped right on.
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I went through USAF pilot training in 1974 and spent the next three years in the training command, teaching new students to fly in the T-37 jet trainer. The men who taught me to fly were mostly older pilots back from combat tours in Vietnam. Almost all of them wore giant Yankee Air Pirate watches, the proverbial big Seikos, picked up during their time in Southeast Asia. I admired those watches and vowed to myself that if I ever got a real airplane to fly, not just a trainer, I’d get one myself. In the meantime, I wore the plain-Jane pilot watch the Air Force had issued me in 1974.
My assignment to fly the F-15 Eagle came in March 1978. I marched straight to the BX and picked out the Seiko you see above. I wore it through fighter lead-in training at Holloman AFB, F-15 RTU and advanced training at Luke AFB and Langley AFB, two three-year operational tours at Soesterberg AB in the Netherlands and Elmendorf AFB in Alaska, and for my first year flying Eagles at Kadena AB in Japan. It’s logged more than 1,400 hours of fighter time and has repeatedly pulled 7 to 9 Gs. One year into the Kadena assignment, in 1990, Donna and I took a trip to Hong Kong, where she bought me a Swiss Breitling. It too has some fighter time, though not nearly as much as the Seiko.
I retired from the USAF in 1997 with two watches, the Seiko and the Breitling (the USAF-issue pilot watch having gone missing somewhere along the way). Sometime in the early 2000s I foolishly jumped into the pool with the Seiko. Water got into the works and it quit running. We had it rebuilt in 2021, and it’s the pride of what is by now a 24-watch collection.
The second photo is a young me (back to camera) having a post-debriefing chat with Major Jeff Cliver, my operations officer at Soesterberg AB in the Netherlands, sometime in 1980 or 81. The Seiko was only a couple of years old then, and you can see it on my wrist.