In Dog Years

One way to write the story of my life might be to break it up using the names of my dogs. This would spare my children the embarrassment of any truth telling.  A “dog year” is said to be the same as seven years in a human’s life. Keep that in mind. Remember, this is only an experiment and leaves out the far less interesting details of my personal life.

When I was five, we lived in one of the apartment buildings that sprang up in every town to provide housing for the generation that had fought in the Second World War. Many, like my mother and dad, were marrying and starting families, raising what would be called “Baby Boomers.” Dad had a job managing a construction crew. We got around in a decrepit old Packard coupe. The apartment was barebones.  I wanted a dog. My parents said no, we had no fence. In fact, living on the second floor, we had no yard either.

 Frank and Alice, the couple that lived downstairs, kept a raccoon on a leash in their carport. I loved all and any animals, so they gave me a piece of bread and urged me to feed it to the raccoon. The little devil tried to gnaw my thumb off.  Frank took a bit too much delight in this from my way of thinking. So, I was not disappointed when Frank was bitten by a snake while changing a flat tire the next week.  Contrary to my expressions of sympathy to the lovely Alice, I was disappointed that Frank came home from the doctor’s office and even went to work the next day. My curse on him had obviously failed. But I was only five at the time and have since honed my skills. A dog, I imagined, would make a better pet than a raccoon, and might possibly tear the racoon to pieces. I kept up my campaign for a dog.

Dad came home from work one day with a cardboard box. Inside was a puppy. “Skipper” was a beautiful little black-and-white rat terrier, full of energetic mischief. Much to my delight, he made a practice of racing under the communal clothes lines, pulling off the sheets and underwear of our neighbors (and ours, too), then dragging them all over the apartment complex parking lot, just for the pure joy of it. I can still see him dashing around with ghostly white sheets, shirts and underwear still attached to the line, clothes still hanging on, or festooned in clothespins. Some days, screaming young housewives were in pursuit. More fun and excitement in my book.

 Neighbors complained. There was little we could do. No fence. I was in school most days. My mother had a one-year- old to keep up with and Skipper periodically had to be let out. Anyway, by the time I put on my clothes, Skipper had already done his worst. Oh, I tried, but there was no use in it. Dad had grown up in the country where nobody kept their dog on a leash, and he was not about to put one on our free-spirted buddy.

One Saturday morning, we awakened to the sound of Skipper racing around the yard howling and screaming in pain. It was pitiful. Dad said that someone had likely poisoned Skipper because of his bad behavior. Dad named names in a shout-out to anyone who could hear.  If it meant kicking someone’s a__ to protect his honor, my Dad was up for it. If it meant putting down a sick or badly injured animal, well, it was a man’s duty.

Regular folks had never seen the inside of a veterinarian’s office in those days, so the thought of taking Skipper to the vet likely never crossed Dad’s mind. Truly out of sympathy, Dad smashed in Skipper’s head with a huge rock to “put him out of his misery.” (I learned a lesson on the spot that it would be best to always pretend that I was not sick or hurt. I did not want to be “put out of my misery.”)

To this day, I have trouble reconciling my father’s generally sympathetic feelings for all animals with what he did that day. He had been raised in the hard times of the Great Depression by a father who taught him to be a stern and decisive man. The dogs Dad grew up with were hunting dogs and lived in pens much of the time. When they were let out, it was to do the work of finding and pointing game birds -and retrieving the birds that were downed.  

It would be twenty years before I would own another dog. Married by then and with a little girl who wanted a pet, I kept my eye on the newspaper ads for dogs. We had just settled into a new home on Lake Louise in Americus, Georgia where I taught at the small state university. We had no fence -or neighbors.

While visiting my parents in Augusta, I saw an ad in the Augusta Herald announcing that a litter of poodle-cocker spaniel mixed-breed pups were being offered for fifty dollars each. The puppy -last in its litter to remain unsold- was fluffy enough to please any child, as well as the child in me.

 “Watson,” as we named him, was no ordinary mixed breed. His father was a five- pound teacup poodle, while his mom was a Charles Spaniel weighing in at about nine pounds. Such “Cockapoos” seem to have been the first of the “designer breeds” of dogs. With white curly hair and a tan saddle, he was perfect for my five- year- old daughter and we all bonded with him instantly. He grew until he tipped the scales at eleven pounds and his style and personality weighed in at a ton. We all loved him.

Watson liked to roughhouse and sleep in our laps. He also loved to jump into the lake occasionally-a real concern because there were alligators and cottonmouth moccasins in the lake. I even watched a Florida panther walk along the lake across our backyard one morning.

Gators, according to golfers and newscasters, love white things, including golf balls. Small dogs and children in summer swimsuits were victims in stories emanating from Florida. But, hey, anything is possible in Florida.

Of course, Watson needed a pal because we were at work all day. I paid thirty-five dollars for a beautiful honey-gold Cocker Spaniel puppy of undocumented heritage. Of course, he became “Sherlock.” On his first visit to the animal clinic, the vet presented me with a bill for fifty dollars, to which I offered a gasp and the complaint that I had paid less for the dog than for his visit. “You mean,” he replied, “you paid for this dog?” I thought back to Frank’s raccoon that had bitten my thumb twenty years earlier. Now armed with a college degree I was able to silently compose a pretty formidable curse to direct silently at the vet.

Well, it was true that Sherlock could not have learned a trick even if a T-bone steak was the reward. But he was a good and faithful dog, gorgeous to behold running along the lakeshore, his golden ears flapping as he protested being left behind when I paddled out in my canoe. One day, he leaped into the water and swam to me across 100 yards of open water. As he approached the canoe, a six-foot alligator swept across the surface, pulling Sherlock under. In a panic I began slapping the top of the water with my paddle while loudly coursing through my vocabulary of four- letter words.

This worked. Sherlock came gulping up to the surface and I pulled him in, heedless of the possibility that the gator might want a piece of me. Sherlock licked my face to express his gratitude, then shook himself, spraying a gallon or so of water over me and the canoe. I was relieved, and promptly paddled Sherlock to his home base where he leaped out. I was certain he had learned his lesson.

He hadn’t. Fifty yards out, he caught up with me and swam alongside, whimpering to get aboard. Again, I took a drenching as I pulled him aboard, nearly tipping the canoe over.  He shook himself and settled in for the ride.  

By this time, I noticed my expensive bamboo fly rod was broken off at the tip, and I was dragging a hundred feet of fly line and a bream no bigger than a sardine. I composed a small curse, one poetic in its simplicity. It involved roasting Sherlock over a make- believe fire.  Thereafter, I took Sherlock along. He was a good listener and seldom offered gratuitous advice. He had a habit of trying to bite the vet when he went in for shots. This of course endeared him to me.

Our beloved Watson developed a kidney problem and suffered excruciating pain, so we rushed him to the smart- mouthed vet, who told us our beloved Watson suffered from an incurable kidney disease. Doc suggested we allow him to “put Watson down.” I thought back to Skipper’s fate twenty years earlier and agreed to the vet’s suggestion.  Explaining why this was necessary to a five-year-old was one of the most difficult things I have ever done.  At long last, I forgave my father for putting Skipper “out of his misery.” I swore I would never buy another dog. I swore that Sherlock would be my last canine companion. I was lying to myself, of course.