 |
|
Page: 
|
|
So I walk down to the end of my driveway and I ask Bill if he realizes that his dog, Baby, is peeing on my petunias. And Bill looks at me as if I’m the dopiest man who ever put on a pair of shorts and he says, “You can’t grow flowers here,” and he points to the wilting sprouts and the dog with the never-ending stream. “This is where Baby goes pee pee!” he says. “Baby has been going pee pee here since you were a pup! You can’t change that. Go plant your flowers somewhere else.” And then he shakes his head and chuckles to himself, as if I, at my age, really should have known that. And then he and his now-empty dog waddle down the sidewalk and into their own yard. I moved the petunias.
One day, Marian, told me that Bill wasn’t feeling well and that she was going to take him to the doctor, and three days later he was dead. She wasn’t the same afterwards. She’d sit on a lawn chair in the shade for hours, and Baby would sit on her lap and she’d stroke his old fur all day long. And I’d chat with her but her heart was never in it.
Marian sat on her lawn chair on summer days for some years afterward, and she stared down the street as if waiting for someone to arrive in a big black Buick. She sat with one hand cupped in her lap, palm inward, and with her other gnarled hand, a hand made beautiful by the years of housework, she stroked a dog that wasn’t there. An air dog.
|
And I really liked the old coot. He and his wife, Marian, would sit on their front lawn in aluminum lawn chairs and look at their neighborhood and wait for people to ask for advice, which never happened. And he’d have a can of cold beer and always an unfiltered Camel on his lip, and the Yankee game on the transistor radio, and he’d talk to the players and cuss the umpires while she sat with Baby on her lap. She’d pet that dog all afternoon, and the dog hardly ever moved. It looked stuffed.
And then Baby died. He was a very old dog, and they had squeezed more years out of him than I had ever though possible, but it’s always a horrible thing when a dog dies, especially one that really was the baby.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
| The views expressed in this article are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of MasterPlumbers.com |
