I really need to explore the reason for the depth of feeling I have toward Teddi. There is only one other dog (and one cat, too) with whom I have fallen in love. Head over heels. That dog’s name was Schatzi. I borrowed the name from a dog my mom had when I was a teenager. Her dog was a Dachshund. Not much of dog if you ask me. My Schatzi, though, now that was a dog.
She was a blonde Belgian Shepard (Malinois). She was smart, she was athletic, she was perfect. She was the first dog that I properly trained, but much to my chagrin she refused to be fenced. That dog could scale my six-foot slat fence at will. She would somehow gain leverage from the top 2×4 cross brace that ran along the vertical slats and push herself over. What a dog! I finally gave up and left the gate open because she was damaging the fence.
Before I moved to town, I lived outside Plymouth on Fairgrounds Road. One time I watched her from my living room window as she crouched down in the field across the road from my house. Suddenly she leapt up and snatched a low flying bird right out of the air. I bet she jumped up four feet high in the air, grabbed that bird and brought it down into the scrub by the railway. Later when I went to the spot there was nothing left but feathers. She loved to eat birds.
The neighbor who owned the property behind me gifted the land to his son, a Vietnam veteran with severe PTSD. He was a bright fellow, but unstable and a hard drinker. I used to visit him in his tiny shack that he built with his own hands. More the size of shed. Man did that place stink. He had a potbellied wood stove in the center of the one and only room. We would sit and smoke a joint and drink one of the beers I occasionally brought to him. I would buy him a twelve pack and walk the dirt road back to his place. His ten-foot square weathered palace. It sat perched on the edge of a small ravine down which he threw the empty cans of beer or soup or tuna. It was a veritable mountain of discarded tin filling the gash in the land. The other side of his house abutted a granite outcrop from which he ran some PVC pipe to give him gravity fed fresh water from a spring higher up the hill.
I would walk up to his front door over which hung a handmade sign that said, “Tortilla Flat,” named after his favorite book by John Steinbeck and call out to him. Sure wish I could remember that fellow’s name. I only remember that his family was one of the leading local families in the Plymouth, NH area. I only found that out when I testified on his behalf in a court case against a notorious asshole business owner who charged him with trespassing. The business owner making the charge did not like the other family and refused to give my head-case neighbor a break. I was in the New Hampshire legislature at the time and the judge dismissed the case, but not before calling me to the bench to give me some friendly advice: stay out of their feud in the future if you know what’s good for you.
Because of his family’s prominence and his Vietnam service, the local police left him alone mostly, sometimes taking his drunken self from downtown Plymouth and dropping him off at the little dirt road by my driveway so that he could stagger home up the hill to Tortilla Flat.
One night, about midnight in the dead of winter, he knocked on my door. It was about -5° and windy. We had a couple of feet of snow at the time. He asked if he could come in and warm up. He had icicles in his beard, and he was shaking involuntarily from the cold. I grabbed a kitchen chair and placed it by the wood stove. He sat there until he thawed, the warmer he got the more he stank. He never said a word until he was warm. Then he said, “Thank you,” stood up and headed home.
During the spring he came over to the house, knocked on the door, and told me that he didn’t want to bother me, but, “White dog ate my chickens?” I bought him six more to replace the ones that Schatzi killed. He wasn’t bothered by it. Frequently after the incident I would see him and he would say, “White dog sure has good taste.”
A couple of years later I moved into town and lived in the house with the fenced in yard. I was running the radio station then, WPNH. They used to joke that it meant White People punishing New Hampshire. One day I was conducting a staff meeting and my office manager, Tish Richelson, came to pull me out of the meeting to tell me that Schatzi had been killed, hit by a car. I thanked her and I walked back into the conference room to resume my meeting. I never got a word out of my mouth. I just became overwhelmed with emotion and started to cry. I was a wreck, and I went home. I can feel the melancholy today, forty years later, as I write this.
Today I slow walked Teddi for about three miles, constantly watching to see if she favors her left leg. Keeping her leashed stops her from walking too fast. All I could think about is: the end is near. I have to repeat Seneca in my head, “Don’t suffer before you need to.” When she dies another part of me will die too.
I’ll save the story about my cat, Gato, for another day.
