Mornings With Barney by Dick Wolfsie (e book reader .TXT) 📕

Then I asked Mary Ellen and Brett to give me a few minutes alone with Barney. I just hugged him and hugged him.

For most of the evening, I lay on the guest bed with him next to me. Finally, around midnight, I fell asleep. Morning for me was only four hours away.

It’s human nature that when you fall asleep, burdened by some horrible event, there is that fleeting hope that when you awaken the next morning, it will have all been a dream—that somehow a new day will bring a fresh perspective, and with it, the ability to rewind the tape and do some fancy editing. Not so, and just hours later, I got up, wrapped Barney in a blanket, and placed him in his doggie bed. Then I headed for work. That’s right, for work.

I was scheduled to do my regular TV remote at the State Fair, a segment with Howard Helmer, officially known as the world’s fastest omelet maker. At that point, I had no choice but to do the show. There was no viable way to cancel a live segment at the last minute.

Howard was a great guest who had achieved recordbreaking notoriety in his career by preparing 427 of his egg dishes in under thirty minutes. “Very wet ones,” he’d often admit. Howard and I had been doing television together for twenty-five years, starting back at my early TV days in Columbus. Howard’s snappy comments during his demos made him the ultimate talk-show guest. After completing an omelet, he’d present his masterpiece to the crowd and declare its approximate menu value: “$2.95,” he’d say, to a smattering of applause. Then he’d place a sprig of parsley next to his creation: “$6.95,” he’d deadpan. Big laugh. Even from me, and I had heard it thirty times.

I met my photographer, Carl Finchum, at the fairgrounds and we exchanged our customary good mornings. Carl was not a 5 a.m. kind of person, so I suspected that he would not pick up on what I assumed was a transparent change in my demeanor. I was a morning person, a quality that annoyed my wife and many other people. Most of my guests assumed my generosity of spirit at dawn was a charade. It wasn’t. I liked mornings. Except this one.

My plan was not to share the previous night’s events with anyone, convinced that verbalizing my grief would result in a total breakdown. It had taken me a good three hours the night before to compose myself, and now I was about twenty minutes from persuading tens of thousands of people watching the show that you could make a presentable spinach and cheddar cheese omelet in less than sixty seconds. This would have to be an Oscar-winning performance.

Suddenly Howard appeared with his entourage, a flock of volunteers from the Indiana Poultry Association who were also committed to Howard’s egg-promoting mission. Howard and I exchanged hugs. Turns out he was good at reading embraces.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just a bad night.”

“Are you sure? You seem . . . different.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Where’s Barney?”

“Oh, he was up late last night at the fair. I let him sleep in.”

And so, I had told my first whopper. More to come. I had a whole weekend ahead of me: book signings, a speech, dinner with friends. I had no idea how I would spin the events.

I also realized I had to make the necessary arrangements. Despite my awareness of Barney’s age and illness, I had given no thought—zero—to where his final resting place would be. Cremation was a possibility and available through most veterinarians, but I had never been comfortable with this choice for either man or beast, so I nixed that option.

There was a pet cemetery in town, but somehow that was terribly wrong. I wanted Barney near me, like he had been for almost thirteen years. And Barney was a people-dog, not a dog-dog. Other dogs were never a real kick for Barney. At dog parks and on trails, he gravitated toward humans, hardly giving the other dogs a sniff. Dogs didn’t have pockets with treats. It was always an easy choice: people over pooches. And so, I didn’t want to stick him in between a lot of strangers almost an hour from my house. Home was where the hound would be, I decided. That was my decision and both Mary Ellen and Brett agreed.

Burying an animal in your backyard is forbidden by Indiana code, but I was never a big fan of rules. A few friends said something about the law being health related, but the woods behind our house had the carcass of a dead deer, and when I had reported that to the city months earlier, they didn’t seem to care enough to do anything about it. What a stupid law. I chose to ignore it.

Marking the final site was the easiest part of the final arrangements and it had, believe it or not, been determined years earlier. I had done a segment at a local funeral home in 1995 where they offered laser-engraved tombstones that not only had the person’s name, but the deceased’s image, as well.

Originally the show was booked with the idea that the artist would make a stone for Barney’s ultimate gravesite, a real eventuality, but it struck me at the time to be so far in the future. We made it very clear on the segment that this funeral home did not cater to pet owners and this was just a demonstration. That didn’t stop thirty people from calling about their pets. People hear what they want to hear.

Barney’s image was engraved onto the 20 × 20-inch piece of marble as tens of thousands watched the process. It was a little spooky, but again, another opportunity to insert Barney into the show content. Now I had a gravestone when Barney died. I’d kept it hidden in the basement because the daily sight of