THE FIRST PET

Right after we moved into our first little house with that fenced-in back yard, we realized that the only thing we lacked was a dog. Every child needs a dog, right? So it was off to the Humane Shelter to pick one out.

The children were really too young to choose one, (Ashley was 3½, Jim was 1½), so we picked out a reddish brown shepherd mix female. I’m sure the children must have named it; surely we wouldn’t have named our dog “Snoopy,” but that was the name someone picked out. So we took Snoopy home to raise.

All went well with her. Once she got big enough, she could stay outside except on the coldest nights. And she was well behaved enough that we didn’t have to keep her penned up all the time. Most of the dogs in the neighborhood ran free; I don’t think we even had leash laws back then.

Then Snoopy went into heat. Every dog from miles around came to visit, but it was Fang, the boxer mix a few doors up, who won out. They spent the night together (one of the sisters, I can’t remember which one, said it was like she was a prostitute). Sometime during the next morning I came outside and Fang and Snoopy were “stuck together.” Snoopy was whimpering, and I panicked, ran inside, and called the genius. “What do I do?” I wailed. The genius said, “Call the fire department!” (Why neither one of us thought to call the vet I don’t know). But call the fire department I did. They were very nice and said to try turning the hose on them!! When I went back outside to try this tactic, they were apart. So I don’t know what would have been the result of that.

I do know the result of the other – in due time we had eleven puppies, eight of which survived. What a mess that was with all of that going on in the garage and me just barely home from the hospital having a new baby, Brenda, myself. At least Snoopy and I could empathize with each other.

We were able to find homes for all the puppies, but meanwhile, Snoopy’s personality changed. She had become very protective of us and our property. The first inkling we had was when we received a telephone call one night from a neighbor up the street who complained that Snoopy had bitten him on the leg while he was jogging by our house. From that time on we kept her in the fence in the back yard, and no one but our children were allowed inside. We had a pretty good sized crawl space under the house and that’s where Snoopy stayed in really hot or cold weather. So it was a pretty good arrangement.

One day, however, two neighborhood boys were playing on the carport and one of them, Harry, told the other one, Al, that Snoopy was shut up and it was ok to climb over the fence. So over the fence Al went. As soon as Snoopy got wind that something was up, she shot out from under the house and before Al could get back over the fence, bit him in the abdomen. I was gone at the time, but when I returned and learned what had happened, I called Al’s father and talked to him. Of course, Snoopy was caught up on his shots, so Al’s father was not in the least perturbed. His take on the event was that Al shouldn’t have crawled over the fence anyway when no one was at home. (That attitude is surely different from today.)

Not long ago the genius and I were seated in our favorite restaurant that Al now happens to own and he came up to the table to ask if everything was all right. Out of the blue I asked him if he had a scar on his stomach, and I thought the genius would fall right out of his chair. (He had forgotten about the incident.) Al knew right away what I was talking about and he laughed and said, “You must be the owners of that dog that bit me.” There were no hard feelings at all.

As it turned out, he DOES still have a scar. But, thank goodness, he didn’t show it to us.