My Autistic Boy And Other Adventures In Fatherhood

I love running with Buddy. He’s a great partner, and no matter how much my ‘glass ankles’ hurt when I run, or if I’m having a harder one than usual, or whatever else the malady-of-the-moment is…he’s to my left, kinda smiling in that Golden Retriever way…and if I look at him, he always starts to wag his tail when we run.

I know he’s a dog and likes to just be outside, so when he sees a squirrel or a rabbit, his ears go up and he kinda starts to run in a prancing way, I even..in my most laborious way…attempt to speed up for him, so he gets a bit of fast gallop out of it. And I always think of him when I start running a race…that if he did better in the crowd, he’d run with me. I know he’s with me in spirit.

All that said about the damn dog….

So usually, at 4:30-5am-ish, we are the only ones out on the road…well, minus the rabbits and squirrels and newpaper delivery guys out to kill me….but during the fall, the high school cross country teams are sometimes out.

These kids run in a pack, they talk, they glide in fact, they run about a five minute mile (the slow ones do) and they all weigh about 12 lbs. They tend to pass me on my left or right…and while doing so scare the bejesus out of me (I have the headphones going…) and give me an ‘oh sorry, dude’…hoping they don’t have to give me CPR I’m sure.

This morning, it happens with a gaggle of girl runners…and Buddy tries to run with them at their pace. As soon as they start to pass, he tries to speed up…and then speed up some more….and some more….finally, I look at him, he looks at me….and I hear him whine. He is whining loud enough to be heard over my headphones.

He’s selling me out to go run with those girls.

Periodically through the run, he’d kinda think he saw them (no, dumb dog, that’s a lamp post way off in the distance) and whine and look at me.

No appreciation. I thought about not giving him a treat when we got home. Well, then, I thought - he’s smart, they’d coo him and maybe even pet his belly…that’s better than being sweat on by an overweight almost 40 year old, running haphazardly to your right… isn’t it?

He got two treats instead.