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Maybe all these people watch the same shitty TV shows, eat the same shit food, use the same laundry soaps, underarm deodorant, and razor blades, but they’ve got blue roofs.

This was what dancing lessons from God were all about, blue roofs.

Through North Dakota and across the border to the Trans-Canadian Highway.

Some people from Swarthmore were doing summer theater in Helena, Montana. We had thought about stopping off there on our way out. It was nothing definite. Now it turned into a fight.

I don’t know why I was so dead set against it or even if I was. We had made it into Canada without any problems. Going back through U.S. customs would be a bitch. Helena was several hundred miles out of our way. I wanted to get into the Canadian Rockies.

But all that, according to Virginia, was beside the point. She was probably right. According to her, somewhere back in the Dakotas or maybe even in Iowa or Minnesota or maybe from the very start I had decided to diddle her out of visiting her friends.

“I should have gotten out in North Dakota and hitched to Helena.”

The fact was I liked having Virginia alone. It wasn’t so much having a good time. It was more wanting something to happen and thinking it was more likely to happen if we were alone.

ZEKE. Beautiful, noble Zeke never complained about driving in a hot car day after day, ten hours at a stretch and sometimes more. He was a good traveling dog as well as a good everything else dog. He was nine months old then, seventy pounds of grace and dignity and still growing. The only problem was that he still liked to sit in my lap when I drove. He was getting a shade big for that.

Virginia and I never gave each other gifts. Christmases and birthdays went by pretty much like any other day. Zeke was the exception. Just after I had quit my job as chief of police, just before the Christmas of ’69, Virginia dropped a want ad in my lap. “Lab-Gordon setter cross puppies for sale…”

“If you want to do it, it’s your Christmas present,” she said.

I wanted to do it very much. I had been thinking and talking a lot about how much I wanted a dog, and Lab-Gordon setter was my dream combination.

We called the people up and the next day went to check out the litter. The owners lived on a small farm sitting incongruously in the middle of a tacky development with tiny lots. They must have been the last holdouts against the developers. A funky old farmhouse and barn, a corral, horses, and fields smack in the middle of cheesy plastic.

There were four pups left, three males and a female. I wanted a male. I didn’t want the hassle of puppies and was hungry for male company. The biggest, healthiest-looking male was a complete extrovert, almost offensively so. Frat-rat blowhard, not much substance. His white markings were pure white. The smallest male obviously idolized him, and was obviously low on independence and imagination. Then there was Zeke, almost as big as his big brother. He traveled farther away from the group, seemed to be a generally more serious sort of dog. Whenever he did join the group he was the leader. His sister seemed to love him more than she loved his brothers.

I played with the litter for an hour or so, until it became more and more obvious that Zeke and I were meant to be.

“I can’t say much about what lies ahead, pup, but as long as I eat, you eat. That’s a human’s word of honor for what it’s worth.”

Beautiful, noble Zeke. Looking out for Zeke’s interests, making sure he got all the right shots, ate regularly, got enough exercise, learned about cars, was properly trained and brought up, gave my life an immediate purpose and meaning I was much in need of. But above and beyond all that, Zeke and I had glorious gleeful times together. We’d spend days just walking and exploring, howl along with fire sirens together, have endless mock growling, wrestling, yelling, biting battles. I never hit Zeke. The most I ever had to do by way of punishment was narrow my eyes slightly and say his name. He’d roll over contritely, begging forgiveness.