[COPY] Chester the Dog Takes Me Walking

Man's best friend gives life lessons for free

Like most dogs, Chester suffers from incurable happiness. He has a short memory and is easily amused, traits that help him put up with me. He walks me daily.

We go to the same trail in the same park, repeating a ritual established a couple decades ago. Chester follows in the paw-steps of Lucy The Wonderdog and Walker the Bad Labrador. We’re no pioneers, we’re just keeping the flame. And we know what we like.

We walk in rain, heat, snow. We walk when I have heavy thinking to do, we walk when all I want to do is not think. We have a talent for solving the world’s existential problems, if only the world would listen.

Chester is joy, constant and abiding. Chester is rapture. He embodies the essence of happiness. He’s good with what he’s got. He doesn’t ask for more. He gives of himself completely and he does that every day.

Like Lucy before him, everything is new to Chester, all the time, no matter how often he has experienced it. He sees the park with new eyes every time we go. Everything delights him and, by extension, me. This does not change.

When Lucy died, I didn’t believe I could replicate the park experience with another dog, because this is how humans think. Our hope gene can go AWOL. Lucy at the park was an explorer, a sprinter and a connoisseur of everything that makes life worth trying: Freedom! Exhilaration! Fresh pee to smell! I knew Lucy was waning when one day at age 12, she refused to leave the car when we got to the park. Pain had imprisoned her legs. She died a few days later.

About four months after that, we replaced our 12-year-old golden retriever with an 8-week-old mini-goldendoodle. (I hate the fru-fru name, by the way.) He was OK, I guess, a little reticent at first, a little overwhelmed, perhaps, by these lunatic humans wanting to carry him around like a handbag.

My wife named him Chester, after the character in the tune by The Band. Crazy Chester.

Six months passed. Chester grew to 30 pounds. His spirit grew more. His thought process became simple: Everything is great, all the time. Free food, big bed (ours), long naps, table scraps. Lotsa laughs.

I started taking him to the park then, so he could walk me. Naturally, he was a natural.

Soon enough, he’d recognize the signs of an imminent park trip. (Chester’s not an especially bright boy, but his intuition lacks for nothing.) I’d finish whatever I was writing, slam shut the laptop and the dog that had been a sleeping sentry at my feet the previous two hours became a rocket ship blasting off to Mars.

If he could speak, you know, English, Chester would say this, upon hearing the closing of the computer:

I’mreadytogototheparkareyouready,too?,Ican’twaitpleaseopenthecardoorsoyouandrivemetotheparkIlovetheparkofcourseIloveyoutooandeveryoneImeetbutIespeciallylovetheparkareweleavingyet?

Chester in the park was and is the proverbial bat outta hell. No leash for this kid. It’d be like lassoing the moon. Better to cage a sunrise. A dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do. Which in Chester’s case is run like Usain Bolt, only faster.

He lets me know when he’s ready to let it rip. He’ll casually jog a hundred yards ahead of me, stop, turn to look at me — IwannarunnowandIwannarunreallyfastjusttryandcatchme — and run like a Chapman fastball right at my knees. He swerves at the last minute, skids about 10 feet, turns around and does it all over. A dead sprint, up and back 100 yards, five or six times, or whenever a fresh pee distracts him.

I have no explanation for this, but I know what it looks like. It looks like unchained, be-here-now happiness, of the sort only a dog can provide.

Chester is 4. He’s supposed to live to 15 or so. I try not to think about the day when he’ll decide to stay in the car at the park.

This is where Chester saves me, Where Lucy saved me. There is a wisdom in the immediacy with which they regard their lives. Now is what matters. This moment, this perfect time which repeats itself again and again, if only we’d allow it.

Chester: “Look at me, dad. I don’t have time to think about the future. I’m too busy having a blast right now! Won’t you join me?’’

I will. I do. This is Chester’s gift, one among many.

And so I shut the laptop. Just now. Chester leaps up from beneath my desk, bangs his head. (I told you he wasn’t MENSA material.) He’s ready to take me for a walk. The park looms again, for the first time.