It takes about forty-five minutes to build a respectable grave for a medium-sized mongrel dog in stony, root-bound ground on a hot summer Sunday in a small town in Maine.

I dont know how long it takes to tell the lesson that was that dogs life convincingly, because I havent done it yet and Im not even sure I have the tools to do so. I left my best shovel on a job last week, so I had to dig that grave with a lesser implement with a resharpened point. Ill try not to use any worn words or dull assertions here today; my readers and my dog both deserve my best.

Weve been here before, you, me and the dog. The Lincoln County News of May the twentieth, 1999 featured a Pet Of the Week column about an apparently unadoptable, one-eyed male half-collie languishing at the animal shelter in Edgecomb. A day or two later he rode home with me.

By the tenth of June, less than three weeks after his arrival in our household, he was the subject of an essay I titled Everybodys Got A Hungry Heart. On September second, I related further of his and my relationship in Two Hearts Are Better Than One.

I closed out the year on December twenty-third with He A Fierce-Looking Dog At An Annual Clearance Sale Bought. Two points may now be made: One, I favor long titles stolen from better writers, and Two, somethin got a hold a my heart.

I suffer under a demanding editor. Her requirements are exacting, her tolerance minimal. At our marathon monthly conferences she pounds her style book on the oiled walnut of her massive antique Roadmaster of a desk and rails, Dogs and Children, Cooper, dogs and children sell newspapers!

My wife has prohibited me from revealing the disturbing peculiarities of our version of family values, so Ive been light on toddler and teen anecdotes, but Im trying extra hard to fulfill my dog quota, even if I did have to lay my best friend under the sod to bring you this one.

Then again, Old Ed (as the new kid and I affectionately call her) warned me over sixty columns ago that Id want to keep my pieces under a thousand words if I hoped to continue to see them printed, and you see how well that lesson took. Even a dog story has to have a reason beyond cute, a point greater than man loves dog or dog loves man.

My contract specifies that each essay shall either make some distinction between the way things are and the way they ought to be, or failing that, that some insight shall be gained in the telling, a larger purpose found from assembling the details. So we now proceed with Canis familiaris Todd, late of Alna, Maine.

Nobody knows how long he was on the street before the dogcatcher snagged him. One might only guess at what abuse or neglect defined his former life, what accident or willful act smashed his eye and led to the bloody, tumorous condition in which he arrived at the shelter.

Certainly most such facilities would have dispatched him straight away. Instead (and they and we ought to be proud of this) the operators of the Lincoln County Animal Shelter fixed and fed him and fought to find him a home.

This is the land of the supermodel, though, where kids buy clothes adorned with the names of corporations, elections turn on sartorial and tonsorial distinctions, and only the fine and fit and fancy deliver our weather and pseudo-news.

A hundred pekes and poodles and idiotic boxers and inbred spavined spaniels and brainless pretties must have been led into the sunshine of a new beginning while old Toddy went slowly stir-crazy for ten months, his sewed-up socket, his defect, condemning him.

It took him less than forty-eight hours to snap the synaptic switch connecting life rebegun and liberty restored with the lout who hauled him home and took him to work and fed him sandwiches and donuts. Probably anyone so situated would have found himself thus adored, but it was my happy fortune to be the man, otherwise unremarkable, to whom this animal fastened his future. Advancing his story as an object lesson is the last gift I can give him, since I was unable to arrest the decline of kidney function which stopped forever his wild and surly lurch through our combined journey.

The first week I owned him he bid fair to rip out the throat of a visitor to our jobsite. All the man wanted to do was chat and pass the time. Maybe. Todd saw something darker and went for him. Less than a year later that very individual attempted the undoing of our community in a ludicrous bid to get a town meeting to deorganize the town in an effort to foist our tax burden on the unorganized territories. By that time, most of the residents of Alna (except for the four who voted to fold) would have probably bitten that loathsome man themselves if they could have stomached the taste of his traitorous flesh, but I tell you here my dog knew that bad character as soon as he smelled or half-saw it and his judgment was ever and always true about the nature of the humans he met.

He did snarl some and he bit my wife and my daughter. You try livin with em, see if you dont sometimes feel the same. The only time he bit me was when I was interfering with his attempted ingestion of a guinea pig before he understood that we dont eat our cavies or our chickens.

Give the new guy a break. He did not play ball, would not chase Frisbees or sticks, hated water sports, never licked me, seldom jumped on me and distinguished between himself and our three other dogs in the following manner: they were just dogs; he was my dog. And of course there was always the glorious mystery of that sewn-up eye, its indent, its recess just the sizou should read the fall issue of Harpers magazine, the theme of which is education; some of it is funny, some boring, much of it provocative. Its centerpiece is a panel discussion moderated by editor Lew Lapham On the design and redesign of American education.

Participant Kristin Kearns Jordan, director of the Bronx Preparatory Charter School, says this: ...its the increasingly standardized values that trouble me the most. Feisty people are the people who have made this country special.

And that, I think, may be all you need to know about people and institutions and cultures and countries and dogs: avoid, abhor, and battle standardization, corporation, acceptance, acquiescence, coercion, cooption, the obvious, the easy, the self-evident, the self-serving; if they want their balls fetched, let em run after em themselves.

Ive written about as many columns about our local folksinger Irene Brookings as I have about my lost dog. Shes feisty. Ive written about Herman Lovejoy (crazy, he says, but feisty, for sure), about Austin Trask, about musicians and artists and authors each different but all feisty, all with some growl, few of them a whole lot to look at in the conventional sense, most dropouts from school or work or conventions which suit the majority most of the time.

Theres something going on here, Mr. Jones; a common thread runs through these half-raveled tales I tell. If Todd had been a singer-songwriter, he would have been a canine Warren Zevon, all snarl and prickle and difficult exterior concealing a sweet heart determined to wrest love from sordid circumstance.

Now Old Shep has gone, where the good doggies go, sings old Irene on that new CD Id still like to sell you. He was a yellow dog and I buried him in yellow dirt and hell grow a yellow rhododendron over his grave as soon as this drought breaks.

Ive been back to Edgecomb, Ive looked in Brunswick, Ive driven to Augusta, but all they have to show me is dogs. I dont need any more dogs.

Im in the market for another damaged soul, another victim of what life and hard times and bad luck all too often produce, but whose clear crystal self has a few free electrons at the corners of its lattice waiting to lock into the new open spaces in the life of a middle-aged carpenter who doesnt know any better than to build his relationships out of odd lots and spare parts. Ill know him when I meet him.

Ive lived with my wife for more than thirty years and some of it has been damn nasty. My children have tested me and I have disappointed them. My business partner frequently annoys me. That dog I mentioned crapped on the library floor from time to time.

Oh, but the places weve gone, the things weve seen. Bob Dylan will release his forty-third album next month; buy it. He wrote todays title, too, and he might as well take us home: Strange how people who suffer together have closer connections than people who are most content. People and writers and readers whove walked this dog story all the way to its end. And editors who left open the door we walked in through. And Todd.