My dog Zachy is partly deaf, like me. He’s 14, which is 72 in Bichon years, a website tells me. We’re the oldest of buddies and our lives run in these pleasing parallels, if at a slower pace than 10 years before: I can’t make out the dialogue on television if Linda is in the same room rattling the pages of the schoolwork she’s grading; Zachy the dog can’t hear me coming down the hall if his head is turned the other way. Sometimes I turn up the volume on the TV; sometimes Zachy nearly gets stepped on for failure to scurry out of the way.

 It was maybe five years ago that I was hurrying my drive home from work because I knew a cut from my band’s new CD was going to be spun on the local jazz station. I’d been gone for several days, and when I came in the door, Zachy was excited to see me and not aware the reason for my haste was something other than being anxious to see him. I petted him quickly and sat back in a chair next to the radio in the dining room. Zachy jumped in my lap and settled in for a nap with his head on my thigh, content. The jazz station was in the middle of a public service announcement, yadda yadda yadda.

I didn’t know what cut from our CD they’d play. But then it started. We did “Night and Day” by Cole Porter with a Latin beat. On live dates, the tune would start always with an unaccompanied improvised solo by me; for the CD, I wanted to keep it tight and not take up disk space. So I skipped the solo and just started with the unaccompanied melody. Those first notes, two eighths and a dotted half on concert G: “Night and Day,”… and then, “you are the one…”

Zachy is a companion dog and chief among the pursuits of his day are eating, sleeping, and seeing what I’m up to in various parts of the house. He will venture down to my basement practice studio, nudge open the door with his little nose, and see and hear me making that sound on the big yellow saxophone. It must seem very loud to him, and I suppose rather pointless. He may be right about the pointless part. So when he’s sure I’m not up to anything important, he will about face and scoot up the stairs.

That’s backstory. In this moment I’m telling you about, I’m in the antique dining room chair, beer opened, shoes off, dog on my lap. The DJ cues us up and talks us in.

Those first three notes: night and day. … And then the little miracle. Zachy’s head pops upright from his deep repose. His posture at the ready, his attention wrapped around the moving elements. That concert G on the tenor saxophone …

He recognized it. He knew the sound of his master’s voice, coming through that golden tube, that useless contraption with the conical bore, producing that music we all are made of. Loving me as a good dog must, he couldn’t help but listen. The tones were packed away in the part of the brain reserved for familiar sound. And in the next moment or two, I knew they would always be there, without regard to dynamics or tone color, volume or pitch. The ineffable, internalized sound of coming home. Or the sound of waiting, maybe not so patiently, of knowing everything, any time of night or day, would be just all right. Knowing without sound, without saying or being told, you are the one.

Richard Terrill is a former student and instructor at UW-Eau Claire. He is the winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry and the Associated Writing Programs Award for nonfiction. “His Masters Voice” is excerpted from “On Hearing/ On Listening” first appearing in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature. His forthcoming collection of essays is Essentially from Holy Cow! Press. Find a link at richardterrill.com.