Property

During the pioneering days of the Technological Revolution, my father was one of Michigan Bell's three most highly trained data technicians in an elite program called Datek. Shortly after retiring from MaBell in the late ‘80’s, his years of experience prompted Ross Perot (prior to Perot's odd political career) to hire him to help oversee EDS (Electronic Data Systems) installations in the greater Detroit area.

Throughout these twenty years of high-tech pioneering, Dad had the most low-tech weekend hobby one could imagine—pioneering in the old sense of the word. Dad had “cabin fever.” Not the kind that makes you want out of the house—the kind that makes you long for a cabin and the life of a lumber jack.

In 1968, at the prime age of thirty-eight, Dad bought a large tract of undeveloped timbered land in northern Macomb County (which was rural at the time). From that day on, the property was Dad’s hobby. We did not use the word “property” in its usual sense. Over time, it became the official name of our homestead before it was our home. Jane Eyre had Thornfield; Scarlet had Tara; Little Joe had the Ponderosa; and we had… The Property—has a nice ring to it. Don’t you agree?

Our friends would ask us if we wanted to do something on a Saturday, and we’d say, “Sorry, we can’t. We have to help Dad at The Property.” Often they decided to join us. Through the years we blazed trails, made a clearing, built a barn from logs, bridged the creek, dug a 30-feet-deep cistern well, and then built our house on the hill.

All of these projects are stories in themselves, but my point in mentioning them here is that most Saturdays during our teen years were summed up in the eight words: “We have to help Dad at The Property.” My older brothers and I felt like Shem, Ham, and Japheth, Noah’s three sons who helped him build the ark all those years. As was true with those boys, time spent with Dad paid off in the end. We learned the value of hard work, earned play, and the skills that make them fruitful and fun. And from the start, we, too, learned to love The Property. We liked it so much we named our dog “Property.” That’s a fact.

Here’s how it happened: After a typical, fifteen-hour Saturday (6:00AM to 9:00PM) of work on our house-in-progress, we’d call it a day and drive to the end of the winding two-track that connected our deep woods to civilization. Dad would stop at the gravel road, and one of us would walk-shut the long, log gate that blocked the entrance. I never told the others, but after they went off to college, walking the gate shut alone at night was creepy. The woods were dark and haunted with hoot owls. I always kept the dome light on by leaving my car door slightly open.

On one such cold and moonless night, I got out and hefted the gate shut, arm vaulted over it, and then froze in my tracks. Something big was rustling in the brush beside the car. In the dim light I saw a low shadow jump inside my open door. There in the driver’s seat, Dad jumped back in shock, slamming against his closed door…. then he laughed and waved me forward. Opening wide my door, I saw a tired Springer Spaniel pup sitting in my place. I smiled, but my heart was still keeping time to the eerie moment before.

You see, just a year or so before that night, our old Springer Spaniel, Duke, had died (well, sort of… Dad shot him. That sounds worse than it was. Duke was very old and often dozed off in our driveway. One night he was accidentally run over as we were loading the car for vacation—his hind legs were broken.* Other than the initial cry of pain, he barely whimpered in the remaining hour of his life. Dad wrapped him in a blanket, and drove him out to The Property. He courageously dug a grave beside the barn, and rested Duke comfortably in it (still wrapped for warmth). My brother Paul was there, and that’s how I know the next moment was courageous. There was long pause before the silence of the dark woods was shattered by the shot.

And now it was, on a cold, dark night, a few hundred yards from Duke’s grave, that this gangly puppy climbed into our car with eyes begging to belong. A long-lost stray, no doubt, the last of a litter that didn’t sell. With little thought, we took the puppy home.

The next morning, my five-year-old brother Jim could hardly believe his sleepy eyes. It was Jim who named the dog. “I know!” he announced, “Since we found him on The Property, let’s call him Property.” This followed the logic of calling our childhood parakeet “Alex" (after Alexander Graham Bell)* because we found him on the ladder rung of Dad’s old Bell Telephone truck. (Actually this was more like naming the bird "Truck," but we all agreed and Property it was.) We called him "Prop" for short except when we called him home. Then we sang out “Prah…ahhhh.. per teee..!” in that three-note Ricola drone.

While I was away my sophomore year of college, Prop made the move with my family from the crowded suburbs to the basement of our semi-finished house on The Property. Once we lived on the land, we simply called it home, and the name Property referred only to our dog. Through those years, when I returned home on college breaks, it was Prop who was the first to greet me in the middle of the night. He’d sit poised at the back door, till I stepped in whispering, “Hey, Prop. How you doin’ boy?” And he’d just look up at me, unable to comprehend time, unaware that we hadn’t seen each other for many months, as if to say, “That was sure a long walk. Take me with you next time.” [This is a photo of Prop and Dad around 1983.]

Later when I was a young teacher far from home, I taught Shakespeare and Drama and directed many school plays. When my students learned that back in Michigan I had a dog named Prop, they thought is was a “drama teacher thing”—you know, like a “prop” used in a play—and I must admit that would be a cool dog name for a stagehand’s pooch, but our Prop was dubbed for the land from which he sprang, and all the years of his life, we repeated his bewildering name to guests as if it were "Spot" and needed no explanation.
.
*See my brother Dave's account of Duke and Alex in his response to Dream Pony back in December 2005 . If the link on the word "land" works, that is the tract of land on Sass Road now, but at the time none of the homes and development were there. TK Copyright, Patterns of Ink, 2006