My first dog was a Dalmatian named Bucky after a kid who played catcher on a semi-pro team with my dad. In my mind I conflate the dog and the young man. I see him flipping off his mask to chase a ball fouled high behind home plate, loosing flapping spotted ears. I am 3 or 4 years old and my mother is telling me not to grasp the chain-link backstop lest a tipped pitch smash my fingers. (I still heed that lesson at the ballpark.)
As for the real dog, I don't remember much. Perhaps he was deaf. He appears to have been purebred. There are photographs of us together, toddler and puppy, and I associate a kind of sour-milk smell to his soft belly. We lived in base housing when I had him, and as unbelievable as it may sound to folks today, I walked a few blocks to kindergarten alone, slipping through a seam in a fence (this was Cold War security) to get to school.
One day I came home not by the sidewalk but through the backyards, and a neighbor's boxer chased me. It scared me but didn't scar me and in retrospect I cannot imagine the dog had serious intent, for my legs were very short. I remember being hot and blubbery when I told my grandmother about my narrow escape but she had no sympathy for my sobs, so I went out back and sat on the concrete steps and stroked Bucky for a long time that afternoon. We might have discussed running away together, but in the end he convinced me it was better to stay where meals were regularly delivered.
We had to give him up when my father was transferred; a family friend took him. I have no memory of protesting the decision, and so even today I feel guilty when I think about Bucky. But my parents were not cruel, and we were not without a dog for long. Once we settled in North Carolina we acquired a cocker spaniel that we called Copper though his papers testified to something fancier.
Copper was a bounder, and he'd disappear for days without anyone worrying too much about him (now, as Celia Storey says, we all know our dogs' friends). He always came back, his coat snagged with burrs, until one day he didn't. We drove all over the countryside looking for him, calling his name, but Copper had disappeared. Perhaps he had, as my mother suggested, found himself a better deal. At least that's what I hope happened.
Our next dog was a purebred German shepherd we called Lady, a magnificent animal with a perfect mask and beautiful black saddle. We had moved to a bigger house, with a bigger yard and--perhaps in reaction to Copper's disappearance--Lady slept in her own kennel, a neatly fenced 30- by 30-foot square in our immense (I was old enough to mow it) backyard. I let her out every afternoon when I got home from school and she would run laps around our little rural subdivision, her legs stretching glamorously as she settled into a joyous lope. She would accompany me when I dove into the cool woods, threading down thin dirt paths to secret creeks or to the train tracks I could follow to school.
I was heartbroken when my father was transferred again, this time to California, and we drove her down to Georgia to live with the coon hounds under my mother's parents front porch. I felt odd about it, it seemed we were sending a czarina to live among serfs, but my grandparents reported that she loved her new companions and regularly followed the pack as they wended their way through the tobacco fields. My grandfather even made a hunting dog of sorts out of her.
In California my father acquired a dachshund that was definitely his dog. Duchess lived with us for 15 years through several moves, and the only time I recall my father crying was the day he came home from the vet with the news that it was cancer, not rich table scraps, that had caused her belly to bloat. Duchess was the first dog that left us rather than the other way around, and I mourn her and my father in ways that aren't too different.
Then I was grown and too unsettled for a dog. I rescued a couple--I took a Great Dane (Puppy, I called him) home from a killing shelter and hid him out in my one-bedroom apartment for a few days before driving him across state lines to deposit him with a friend in Dallas. When the shelter found out they informed me I had violated the law and threatened actions that never came.
I also fostered an Irish setter--a beautiful red-haired maniac who liked to ride in cars. Once she leapt into the backseat of a convertible a girl I knew drove and refused to get out until we backed out of the driveway and circled the block. She was a high-maintenance dog, but it was still difficult for me to give her up when a permanent home was found for her. Her eccentricities had come to make a certain sense, and I admired the way she stuck to her principles.
And the statute of limitations has just about run on the story of how I scooped up a puppy named Alphonse from the midst of a party thrown by a congressman's mistress because people were feeding him beer and threatening to shotgun marijuana smoke into his little face. I kept him for a couple of weeks before I relented and gave him back to her, after she promised to keep him safe from the rowdies who'd abuse his innocence.
Then there was Coal, who welcomed me as a leggy, sharply elbowed adolescent Labrador, into the home he'd made with Karen and Tsingtao, a more reserved chow mix. We all got along; I moved in and a few months later we acquired a five-week old puppy who we could corral on the front porch with bricks. I named him Bork after the legal scholar who wasn't confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.
Tsing's heart failed in 1995, but Coal lasted until 2006 and Bork until 2008. Sherpa was a rescue we acquired in 1996, a skittish, silly thing we learned to love despite her quirks. She bridged the gap between the boys and the scruffy girls we found a couple of weeks after Bork died, Paris and Dublin. Then Sherpa went, but not before having obtained a kind of regal dotage in which she was paraded around the neighborhood in a red Radio Flyer wagon while we walked Paris and Dublin.
Then came Audi, who someone dumped near our street and ended up with us because a neighbor thought she looked like Dublin.
None of our girls are puppies anymore, and that hurts sometimes. They know so much, but not that, and so we simply live; lagging just behind the moment like Clyde Stubblefield's drumming on "Cold Sweat." We take so much from them. I just hope we do them justice.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 08/30/2016