Obviously blogging has not been high on my to do list in the past several months. There is no good reason for this, but I have been doing a lot of writing - songwriting - on my new guitar (named J.C.) and lots of other random projects. Somehow a little stupid webseries I started with another guest vocalist, DON LIVE!, has found an audience of some sort, and it's essentially nothing.
I have been painting, a good deal, as well. The inspiration is there, but it's been a bit... unfocused. I have been inspired a great deal by the very clear creative energies of a tremendously gifted Australian, and recently she read some things I wrote a long while back and encouraged me to do something with them. So, after reading my good friend John Clemo's blog today, I realize that there is no better place for these things than my woefully out of date blog. The next few entries, then, will be comprised mainly of anecdotal short stories from as long ago as 1998. Here goes, with a little number I wrote sometime around Christmas 1998. Opinions and thoughts are welcome, by the way.
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EVERY DOG HAS THEIR DAY, or rather their unfortunately limited number of days. When you grow up in a relatively stable home, there are a lot of things you take for granted, simply because they have always been and will always be. When I was a boy, living on a farm in the middle of Kansas, every boy had a dog. Every family had their canine mascot that served as a playmate for their kids who lived too far away from other people’s kids to be able to simply go down the street for a visit. My family had many dogs, but there was only one that still sometimes makes me painfully sad when I remember. The alpha male of our pack, which varied in size from two to as many as six if I remember right. One advantage to living on a farm is that I was able to take in pretty much every stray that happened by or was dropped off. The dogs were strictly outdoors – rarely if ever was one allowed into the house – but they would always show up when a little boy stepped out the door of the house and called “Blue”.
Blue was the name of our alpha dog. A stereotypical name, but of course I remember him as a totally unique animal. He’d been named Blue because he had one brown eye, and one eye which was half blue and half brown. He was a mutt, mostly Australian Shepherd. He was a big gray dog with patches of other colors on his face, and a mane of white and black. It all seems rather clinical when I remember it… I have to struggle to get a clear picture. Mainly, I remember the feeling of knowing Blue was there. When I would step out the door at night, in the dark, and know I could just say his name and wherever he was he’d appear and escort me across the big yard to my grandparent’s house. When friends and I were playing and it got too rough he would separate us… always with a touch more roughness toward my friends than to me.
None of the other dogs were allowed to get too friendly with me. One Easter, his last and my eleventh, I was playing outside with some friends who’d come over, and with the new dog my dad had picked up. When this new upstart spent too much time with me, Blue would make sure he got the message that he needed a “time-out”. Eventually Blue was fed up and in a misdirected nip at the other dog, he caught my left index finger as well. God, it hurt. I remember it bleeding and the nail being punctured right through. I cried and wailed, and then I remembered seeing an afterschool special in which a boy’s dog had to be put to sleep because he’d bitten someone. Then, I got more hysterical making sure that everyone knew that I forgave Blue and nothing should be done about it. I loved Blue like a brother. Blue was born the same year I had been, he’d started out as the runt of a litter from my mother’s dog Trixie, who didn’t live long enough for me to remember her. We’d been raised together, Blue and I.
It was 1986 and I was in sixth grade at Burns Elementary, hating school as I always did. I realize now that had I been in a normal school system in a larger city I probably wouldn’t have hated it nearly as much, but things being they way they were I missed a lot of school because I was “sick”. It was after an actual five day bout of the flu in early April that I was about to return to school after a few days of absence. I woke up in the morning knowing I was going to have to return to the terrible pit, and went into the kitchen to greet the “lovely” morning. My mother was sitting there with my sister, and she sat me down at the table. My parents never did the sit-down-and-have-a-talk thing, so I knew something was up. I never would have guessed what.
“We’re going to keep you out of school another day,” my mom said. I wasn’t unhappy to hear that, though thoroughly surprised. “This is really hard to tell you,” now Mom’s face started to twist a bit … by the time she half finished her next sentence she was choking through tears. I’d never seen her cry before. “Your dad and grandpa… they found Blue… Blue’s died.”
At this point I can’t begin to describe the feeling of shock and pain my twelve year old body went through. I couldn’t stop crying. Hell, thinking of it now, a lifetime later, I still very nearly cry. My mother had important things to do that day, so rather than leaving me at home she made the wise move of taking me to my brother’s in nearby El Dorado. Understand that all the men in my family had a deep attachment to Blue. It was probably three hours later by the time we’d left home and made it to Walt’s, and I’d managed to stop uncontrollably crying. Walt had only just found out himself, but to his credit his focus was on making his little brother happy for the time he could. He decided to take me to an arcade, and as we pulled out of his apartment complex I began my earliest memory of emotional avoidance – talking frantically and passionately about Transformers. Just as I launched into my diatribe about how it was ridiculous to give robots faces when obviously … “I’m gonna miss him, too,” Walt interrupted.
I started to cry again, and I don’t remember when I stopped. We buried Blue that evening, and I put a toy sword my dad had made me on the grave to mark it forever. To this day when I go home I hold that spot hallowed in some way– though the sword is long gone.
I went back to school the next day, and I barely made it through. My mother had called my best friend’s mom and told her what had happened so she could tell Dusty. That way, I suppose, my mom thought he’d be less likely to accidentally say anything wrong and could watch out for me a little. Dusty, whom I still consider my best friend to this day regardless of distance or any circumstance, was the only thing that made my school career bearable for most of the time until I’d graduated high school. Dusty also had a dog with another very original name – Puddles, or Pud for short. Best friends that we were, I don’t know when Puddles passed on, but I wish I would’ve. I know what it must’ve been to lose her.
It was five years later before I again lost anyone close to me – a high school friend killed in a one-car accident on an icy country road. It wasn’t until now, or at least two months ago, that I lost anyone else in my family. By the odds, that makes my life very charmed. A quarter century with so few casualties. Blue’s death, though, is the major single memory I have of my childhood.
