The day my dog saw an alligator

Freddy was not my dog; I mean, I didn’t own him.  We had not arrived at any such contractual arrangement.  I can’t imagine that I could have made the terms attractive enough for him, and I don’t think the nature of our relationship would have benefitted in any case.  Rather, he sort of came with a house I lived in for a while.  He advised me, within the first day or two of my arrival, that I would be providing him meals from time to time when he was not able to procure them for himself.  He would be providing cultured company and alerts, should they be needed, upon the arrival of visitors to our midst.

Judging by his tail and ears, Freddy must have been a distant offshoot of the terrier clan.  Not big, not small, his curly tail rather circulated than wagged.  Mostly white with a few black and tan spots, he was trim and struck a fine figure, with an intelligent gaze and bearing.  In addition to his fine appearance, he proved to be an accomplished diplomat, always finding a way around conflict with his fellow canines.  He was equally at ease with people, self-sufficient and, unlike so many other dogs, never needy.

Everyone seems to think they have the smartest dog ever minted, even when that clearly is not the case.  I wonder if dogs are more realistic when assessing the intellect of their human companions.  I believe Freddy may have downplayed intellect as one of my redeeming characteristics when discussing me with his friends.  If so, it is only because I may have disappointed him from time to time.  For example, when he got excited about something, he often came to me to get my view and perspective.  Just as often, he left frustrated having been unable even to begin the discussion, myself, being as I am, so dim.  Yet he must have found a few redeeming qualities because he stayed and stayed.

Once, on a trip to the Everglades and the Florida Keys, he found occasion to see that I might be of some small use after all.  We had stopped at a little park on one of the minor keys (sorry for that one).  We walked back into some undergrowth until we found a little pond, less than 30 yards across with fairly steep banks all around.  Freddy was not native to those climes and had never seen an alligator, but there was one in the middle of the pond that most certainly had seen little dogs before and had grown quite fond of them.

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The day of the epic dog fight

I was living on a dairy farm near Chapel Hill, NC, when the animal protection folks came by and asked if I would mind keeping one of their dogs for a while–y’know, to keep it from being killed and all.  Under the circumstances they laid out, I couldn’t think of a reason why I couldn’t.  I took in the dog without knowing what an episode in my life was getting ready to unfold.

The dog turned out to be quite a specimen–affable but quite imposing.  He was definitely part American Pit Bull Terrier, something the nice lady had left artfully unstated.  The ears, the jaw line–it couldn’t have been anything else.  Instead of being a moderately sized dog of about 40 pounds, though, this one was a cross with something maybe in the Labrador Retriever line, something substantial that put some heft and size behind those jaws.  He was 80 pounds, easy, and it was 80 pounds of rippling muscle, too.

With all that, he was the nicest dog ever.  Loyal, grateful, and kind of dim like most Labs I have known.  He didn’t get a lot of his own ideas, but he was glad to get involved with anything I had in mind.  He was just smart enough to know he didn’t want to go back where he had come from and figured charm was his best insurance against that.

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The day the mason threw up and kept on working

One summer late in high school, I worked with a brick mason as his “tender.”  Being this particular mason’s tender was sort of like assisting a surgeon, except I was constantly filthy and had to mix bags and bags of mortar in addition to moving and stacking a ton of bricks in an average day.  That’s a skill you rarely find a use for in the typical operating theater, but the job was similar in that I had to anticipate what he would need and have it ready for him when he asked for it.  He had a surgeon’s temperament, too, and those first two weeks were kind of rough as I learned his patterns and preferences.

The “surgical assistant” analogy would not have applied with almost any other brick mason, but this guy was a noted artiste.  When other masons turned down a job as impossible, or tried to change the customer’s mind about what could be done, this guy would fix them with a clear, blue eye and say, “Well, I reckon I can do that.  Gonna cost you, though.”

This was the late 1960s, and this guy had been around for most of the century already.  He was only a little older than I am now, but to a high school kid, anything over 40 is too close to death for comfort.  When he worked on a low section of wall, you could tell it hurt him.  He’d have to kneel in the dirt, supporting some of his weight with his toes.  When he stood from from time to time to shake out the kinks, his heavy boots would maintain the shape they had taken while he’d been kneeling.  At these times he sometimes said, “Well, I reckon those toes will turn up for the last time here pretty soon.”

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The day I broke down on the floor of the dressing room after the state championship game

In Atlanta in the late 1960s, soccer was not exactly popular.  Neither were the people who played it.

I take that back.  The soccer players at North Springs, my old high school, did all right socially, but not solely because we played a particular sport as happened with the football and basketball players.  We labored in anonymity as far as our sport was concerned, playing in empty stadiums through the winter when we wouldn’t compete for space and players with the football team.  We surely would not have competed for fans in any case.

But soccer was trying to make its entrance into America in general and to Atlanta in particular, and I loved it.  The North American Soccer League started a professional league in 1967, and the Atlanta Chiefs had imported marquee players from all over the world.  Pelé had come to conduct a national tour with his Brazilian team Santos, and a lot of momentum seemed to be forming behind the growth of soccer at the time.

My high school started a soccer team during 1965-66, my freshman year.  We were first public high school in Georgia to do so.  Before that, soccer had been the province of the private schools, the Westminsters and Lovetts of the blessed Atlanta upper classes.  They beat us badly in our early days.  Within a year or two, however, we were started beating them on a regular basis.  More public schools were starting teams, so the Georgia High School Association began holding state championships in soccer.

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So true

I am out of the memoir mode for the moment.  I happened to see this quote from Mohandas Gandhi in A.Word.A.Day today:

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948).

Given the experience of my last few years, and the insight I have gained into some of the people around me, I have come to see the truth of this statement.  The truth of it has, in fact, become clear to me in rather painful ways.

Edit:  Happy birthday, Mohandas (Oct.2)


[googleMap name=”Porbandar, India” description=”Ganhi’s Birthplace” width=”500″ height=”400″ directions_to=”false”]Porbandar, India[/googleMap]

The day we painted George Wallace’s campaign billboard

In 1968, my junior year in high school, George Wallace took part in the presidential election as a third-party candidate.  He took several southern states in that election, and living in Atlanta at the time, one saw his campaign posters all over town.  This sort of inflamed my nascent political passions and those of my friends.

We were a pretty diverse group, but you wouldn’t know it to look at us–we certainly were not diverse in terms of race or class; likewise, we all were galvanized and focused on the same sort of politics and current events of that year–the year of the Tet Offensive and the anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the year of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Through the outward turmoil of that year, we were going through our own inward turmoil, knowing that we would graduate the following year with the draft taking more and more of our acquaintances as they graduated ahead of us.  As focused as we were on the Vietnam War, we also saw the civil rights movement ongoing all around us.  1968 was a year of protest of many kinds worldwide, and a year of strong reaction to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. As one striking example, Georgia elected segregationist Lester Maddox governor the year before.

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The day I baffled the bully

One of the many elementary schools I attended was populated with some real special characters.  This was an Atlanta elementary school, and I was there for sixth and seventh grades, right before going to high school the way we did in those days.

We had our “early maturing” types who developed secondary sex characteristics–and primary sex interests–way before the rest of us.  They would “party” and “make out,” whatever that actually meant, in the basements of unsupervised homes in the afternoons.  We also had our little boys and girls who just needed some time to catch up.  One kid in our class, however, had already had quite enough time to catch up, to forge ahead, actually, except he hadn’t, academically anyway.  He was about two years older than the rest of us, and a real dull tool.

He didn’t seem quite as developmentally disabled as his lack of progress in school would lead one to believe.  A good part of his problem seemed to come from his lack of cooperation with the educational process.  He knew what everybody wanted him to do.  He just didn’t feel like doing it most of the time.

Another of our number was a great George to his Lennie.  Well, I say, “great.”  He was not great in the sense of taking care of him as George did Lennie in Of Mice and Men, but great in the sense of at least hanging out with him.  The rest of us didn’t have much to do with him, really.  This George–I think his name was Jimmy, actually–was especially good at bending the big guy to his will.

One day Jimmy decided it would be fun to get the big guy whipped up and angry at me.  As the school day was ending, Jimmy apparently told him some lies about something I had supposedly said or done, and they were both waiting for me when I came out, along with a bunch of other kids who were there to watch the show.

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The day I punched Buck Blalock in the stomach

Seventh grade isn’t tough for everybody–just the geeks.  Of course, most seventh graders are geeks, at least intermittently.  I was one of the geeks more often than I would have liked, so I should know.

Seventh grade was tough as hell for me.  It was tougher for Buck Blalock.  He was a big, doughy kid in my class, way too mature and sensitive to live in the world with the rest of us on the island–the Lord of the Flies island we all inhabited back then.

He was “Piggy,” all right, and I might have been Ralph or Simon and been his friend, but it seems I didn’t have the nuts for it.  I had just moved back to Atlanta the year before, and I didn’t want to be “the new kid” forever.  A lot didn’t depend on what I wanted, though, and that became clearer and clearer as time went along.  Several of the boys were just as happy to keep me “the new kid” forever if they could manage it.

So, here I was, kinda big and doughy and sensitive myself, and the teachers must have thought Buck and I were a match made in Heaven.  They kept arranging for us to be partners in this and buddies in that.  Maybe that plan was working out fine for Buck, but I started looking down the road, and I didn’t see any promising forks.  It wasn’t that I disliked Buck and liked the other boys–Buck was fine, and some of the other boys were jerks of extravagant proportions.  It’s just that the choice, at least in my mind, became a matter of throwing in with Buck and being a social outcast for life, or putting up with the annoyances of trying to be “one of the guys.”  Even a seventh grader can do a simple deduction like that, and hey, some of the guys were all right.  Some of the girls, too, but I could see that wouldn’t be happening for any friend of Buck’s.

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The day I took two doves that all the others had missed

Just about the only pleasant activity I got to engage in with my Dad growing up was hunting.  One should keep in mind that this was the 1950s and 60s, and people had not developed some of the attitudes about hunting they have today.  The game was there for the taking in those days, too.  In this simpler time, hunting was an activity imbued with tradition, and it provided a good way for the men of the house to “get out from underfoot” and have some fun together.  We ate everything we killed, too, and those feasts were culinary high points to be treasured.

My Dad always was in a good mood on these occasions–something that could not be said on a general basis.  We usually went with a gang of guys from his work.  Sometimes we’d get up really early and drive to south Georgia in November to hunt quail.  Other times we’d just head out to some rural area around Atlanta for some September afternoon dove hunting.

I was typically the only boy along.  I was left to infer that this might be because my Dad wanted to spend time with me.  I also inferred that I was little enough trouble to have along.  Of course, even at an early age I also inferred that he didn’t want to spend time with only me, but OK, I could deal with that.  In an odd way, his reticence worked to my advantage.  While I never got to hear him say he liked spending time with me, I never had to hear him say he wasn’t interested in spending time with me alone.

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The day the crazy kid brought a knife into our yard

Sometimes people have the luck to be in just the right frame of mind when a crisis arises.  OK, bad luck brings the crisis, but the right frame of mind can keep a disaster from happening, from becoming more than a momentary disturbance on a soft summer day.

Our Atlanta neighborhood was a quiet one most of the time, and in those days, the early sixties, parents could send kids outside to play without much of a second thought.  I was in about the sixth or seventh grade, the only boy in a family of four, and the oldest.  On this day, my sisters and I were out under the oaks in front of the house, just passing the time with who-knows-what kind of aimless activity.  Down the street, we could see one of the neighbor boys coming our way with more purpose in his bearing than he usually showed.

We actually didn’t see this boy out all that much.  He had some sort of mental illness that made him behave oddly, setting fires in the storm sewers and acting erratically from time to time.  Mostly his parents kept him at home, but I guess they felt sorry for him sometimes, or just needed a rest from him.  Either way, they let him out to roam the neighborhood once in a while, and it was usually a noteworthy occurrence.

I remember one time, during a neighborhood rock fight, he ran across 75 feet of open ground carrying a huge rock in his hands.  He didn’t dodge the rocks we threw at him; if they hit him, they hit him; he didn’t even flinch.  As he got closer, I hunkered down in the ditch, hoping he wouldn’t see me.  Hunkering down turned out to be a big mistake.  He found me in the ditch and dropped the rock on my head.  That’s the kind of thing this kid would do.

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