A late summer afternoon steams over the raucous lakefront restaurant.  The bass player Dan and I are on break, giving the evening’s entertainment, four young toughs in cowboy hats and tank tops, a chance to thrash through a second hard sound check.  Checking my watch, I am thinking I’d best be tuning my guitar for our final set when a tall, slender women and a stately white and black-splashed Great Dane pick their way up the boat dock gangway, jammed with revelers.

The dog Lucy knows the drill.  She and Dawn, the lady at the leash, are regulars along the lake, though we’ve not seen either of them for some time.  Since March, Dawn been in a brutal battle with Stage III breast cancer.  Wan and thin from long weeks of treatment and merciless side effects, she moves slowly through the dancing crowd’s ebb and flow, her steps matching Lucy’s careful thread.

That’s when I notice the leash.

Ears up, tail still, Lucy is alert but not pulling.  Even so, the lead is taut, Dawn fisting it high and straight against her own body. Her right hand palms the nylon strap about eight inches above Lucy’s massive, chiseled head, making the dog part tow, part shield, part guide.

Dawn’s boyfriend Chris is close behind steering Lucy’s new understudy, a young shelter rescue named “Piper.”  Also a harlequin Dane, Piper is anxious, unsure.  She rushes ahead, then lags, distracted, fitfully checking Chris for cues. When Chris and Dawn settle on an empty table along the sea wall, Piper paces on the end of her lead, then resignedly joins Lucy stretched out in a patch of sunshine between table and railing.

The older dog’s calm seems to wash over Piper.  She lies down, that droop-eared head resting on her paws, only her eyes moving with every gesture her people make.  

Dawn, Chris, and their dogs are back on their boat and gone before Dan and I finish playing that afternoon.  Gear packed up and headed for home, I see them again in my mind’s eye, Dawn and Lucy walking up from the docks, Piper and Chris in their wake… and I am struck with the realization that for those who live closely with our dogs, a leash runs both ways.

The common use and sense of a leash is as a guide. It’s about control, a macro Cue Delivery System.  Piper was relatively new to Chris, new to bobbing boats and bars packed with strangers. On that day, she was still learning how to navigate all of that with confidence.  The leash was a touchstone buoy in a tsunami of Information Overload. 

“Walk this way,” the leash commanded.  “Closer…Now more slowly…OK, more quickly here…Pay attention!...Step left…DON’T sniff that lady!...Step right….No, the server doesn’t need licked even when she does put her face in yours…Heel!...Keep walking!...There’s Lucy…Stop!”

That’s the leash we all know about.  A restraint. Safeguard.  The Manners Police.  The tie that binds, and makes clear, the distinction between Management and The (Hopefully) Managed.

But sometimes a leash between friends can be so much more.

Throughout her treatment, Dawn had talked about the comfort Lucy had been. We can only imagine what it was like for that big gentle dog to try to make sense of her upbeat, athletic, self-assured buddy whom cancer and its drastic treatments had worn into a sick, weary, sometimes frightened Other Person who didn’t smell the same, move the same, even sound the same.

But Lucy never wavered.  If Dawn had to lie in bed or on the couch or, in the bad times, curl up on the bathroom floor, Lucy was never going to be far away. A  dog can just never know when Her Person is going to need to put a hand on a massive, worried, faithful Great Dane head.

“She’s been my guardian through all this,” Dawn wrote a friend at the time.   “She watches out for me and lays her head in my lap to comfort me.”

And on that sweltering September day, when Dawn so badly needed to get out on the water, out in the sunshine, away from the doctors and the needles, the pain and the nausea and the fear, Lucy was ready from her end of the leash.

“Walk this way,” she signaled up that broad nylon lead.  “Hold tight.  Stay close. We’re not in a hurry. They won’t bump you because they can’t bump me.

“Remember when you and Chris had to remind me of who I was, that I was safe, no matter the place, no matter the racket, because you were there? Because nothing bad could happen as long as we were together? 

“Now it’s my turn.” Lucy’s steadfast bulk almost pulsed up through that strap. “I know who you are.  I am strong today; soon, you will be strong again, too. But for now, just hold on tight. Trust me. Count on me.  We’ve got this.”

Three months, two weeks, and four days after Lucy managed Dawn’s day in the sunshine, a text message in answer to thousands of prayers finally arrived.

“Just had my follow up,” Dawn typed. “I’m essentially cancer free!”

Certainly somewhere, a stately white and black-splashed, truly great Dane was snugging her massive head into the lap of a Miracle.

“Told you,” Lucy seemed to say.  “Told you we had this.”