Crook

By Alan Cattier

This is the story of a dog and a stick. Or should I say a stick and a dog, since the stick predated the dog by twenty-five years. It was 1998 and I was in Waycross, Georgia. I was planning a canoe outing in the Okefenokee Swamp, and I had stopped in to visit with a former student, Fletcher Comer, who was now a teacher at a local high school. He had said that he’d wanted to see me, and he had been an excellent student and a friend as I began my teaching career.

So I arrived at his apartment, we visited, and he told me he had something for me. He went to his bedroom and came out with a walking stick. He had hand carved it and inscribed it with some verse from the Old Testament. It was a beautiful walking stick, straight and solid, adorned with a serpentine of flowers carved into its length. At the top of the stick, in bold capital letters, was the word “CROOK.”

At the moment he presented it to me, I remember admiring the gift and the spirit it represented but also being a bit puzzled. CROOK? What was that about? Why that word? And all Fletcher said to me at the time was that he named all his walking sticks. 

That gift, that moment, has traveled with me since as curious if not a bit awkward. It was a time to accept the incredible creativity and generosity of this student become teacher, but it didn’t feel like an occasion where I could ask him plainly, “Why Crook?” Curiously, I could never answer that question, nor resolve it to my satisfaction, so it lingered, an unsolved mystery, traveling with me through time as Fletcher and I dropped out of touch and my life moved away from Georgia.

It is now 2023. I have had a challenging five years. I had suddenly and unexpectedly lost my wife, the love of my life, to a heart ailment. I had lost the ability to walk due to degenerative hip disease. I am living in northern Vermont, trying to put my life back together post rehabilative and restorative surgeries and I get a phone call from my brother Jacques, who has just picked up his Black Labrador, Midnight, from a boarding and training refresher in Mebane, NC, at Wildrose Carolinas with Steven Lucius and Chris Torain. He tells me he has met a dog, a dog he thinks would be well suited to me, a dog named Crook.

It is hard to describe that moment when he uttered Crook’s name. It felt like Star Trek warp speed or Doc Brown pulling away in the Delorean of “Back to the Future.” It was as if the accumulated wondering of all those years had reemerged and travelled the twenty-five year expanse of time and arrived at his words: Crook. It felt like an epiphany. 

The energy of the collision of Crook the stick and Crook the Labrador had a momentum all of its own. It pulled me towards him and towards the Wildrose family in ways that I was not expecting or prepared for. My brother told me that Crook was a teenager, a couple of months older than two years, who lived at the kennel. I am sure some of you know him, maybe even worked with him. He had a singular feature that distinguished him—a cropped tail that initially earned him his name.

I drove from Vermont to North Carolina and met him last February. On Valentine’s Day. It was overwhelming. At the time, I was still unsure of my ability to tend to this bundle of energy that clearly lived to retrieve. I was intimidated. I was scared. And I left Mebane, unsure of what I should do.

I went to Atlanta to visit some friends. We talked about Crook the stick and Crook the dog and they encouraged me to take the stick, to lead the dog, to live my life with this moment of providence as a sign to begin our time together. And so we have formed, in Northern Vermont, a most extraordinary bond, one where I gratefully reflect on the people who brought us together and those that trained and raised Crook the first two years of his life, and made it possible for us to flourish. 

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A friend of mine who is a poet recently reminded me that a crook is a shepherd’s walking stick, something I had known but had strangely never connected to the gift. I have even more recently spoken to Fletcher, who told me that he had named the stick after a lifelong friend of his whom he had meant to honor. On telling him the story I have now told you, he wrote, “I love when I become aware of the strange subtle often mysterious ways my world is connected!” Mysterious ways, indeed—a Labrador that lives to retrieve has retrieved so much more for me, bringing me a sense of wonder and connectedness in his beautiful furry self. And his is not a short tail, at all. For me, it’s the tale of the universe…

hexagenia@mac.com