Tomorrow marks one year since Tolstoy passed away. I am constantly amazed at how much I still miss the guy. When food hits the ground, I still immediately think, “Oh, Tol is going to love that.” When we get home from a trip, I still hesitate coming up the stairs, wondering how pissed he is going to be that we have been gone.

When he passed away, we had Toli cremated. A few weeks later, a little box arrived bearing his remains. Up until today, that box sat on a shelf in our hall closet. At first, I don’t think either of us had the emotional capacity to deal with actually opening it. Then we were too busy, then it was Christmas. Suddenly, it had been almost a year, and Ryder started asking very pointed questions.

Michele had told Ryder that they came and took Tolstoy away, leaving it wide open from there. Ryder was as affected as any of us by Tol’s death, often carrying a picture of Tolstoy to the window and saying, “Come back! Come back!” Lately, he’s been telling us that he wants to fix Toli’s body, and wondering where it was.

We’ve been wanting to spread Tolstoy’s remains at some of his favorite spots: the Presidio, the disc golf course in Golden Gate Park, Chrissy Field, Ocean Beach, Kite Hill… But we didn’t want it to be something we did without Ryder. He obviously needed closure as well.

I floated the dilemma Joel’s way after our last round at Harding together, and his response was brilliant. Tell Ryder that they took Tolstoy’s body away, and sent back a box of fairy dust. And now that we had the fairy dust, we were going to sprinkle it over all of Tolstoy’s favorite places, so he could be there always.

Brilliant! I floated it by Michele, who took a couple of days to think on it, and we decided that it would be perfect. Once we had the chance to casually insert it into a conversation with Ryder, we got his complete buy-in. He wanted to go spread Toli’s fairy dust, of course! 

In fact, Ryder thought we should make sure to save some of Toli’s fairy dust so we could take it up to Tahoe, because Tolstoy loved it so much up there. Again, brilliant!

Now, when Toli died we had been hesitant to do anything radical, like have him stuffed, or bury him in the back yard so that we could dig up his bones later. But we did ask the guy from the crematorium if he could save some bones for us. He said it was difficult because they grind everything up and fire it a couple of times, but he’d see what he could do.

Today was the first time I’d seen Tolstoy since they took him away. “Fairy dust” may have been a bit of a misnomer, given how little actual dust was in that box once we opened it. We all went to the Presidio and took one of the walks Tolstoy did over 1,500 times. Scattering some fairy dust here, some remains of bones there.

Ryder loved it. He had no preconceived notions of what fairy dust would look like, and was thrilled to finally have some of his own to bandy about. We threw it in root holes of trees, dug little shallow holes and sprinkled some in, and left odd bone remnants in weird places to torment other animals. Along the way, we managed to cull out a pretty good collection of whole bones – probably meditarsals. Maybe next year we’ll do an art project of Tol, about Tol.

For now, we’ve lots more fairy dust to spread, and numerous stops to make.