When Dude came out of The Arcade on the back lane that
led to Arsenal
Street, she turned to see Tippy still following
her. Heading up the street toward the
Sears store, my mother-in-law knew she
was delaying the inevitable, but she also wanted to lose the dog. Dude stopped
abruptly in front of the Avon theater and noted the display poster for "Roman Holiday" with Audrey Hepburn
and Gregory Peck. A matinee ticket was a
luxury my mother-in-law seldom afforded herself, but Gregory Peck was too
tempting in the face of a purchase she didn’t want to make. And so, with the
excuse in mind of getting rid of the dog,
she told him to go home for the hundredth time that day and entered the
cool interior of the Avon. After a
while, Tippy headed home, his head hanging almost to the sidewalk. Just as he was sniffing his way up Academy Street, Mrs. Dave’s
mother was winning the grand prize. She
had stumbled into the waning hours of a month long publicity blitz that
culminated in the door prize raffle of ... you guessed it ... a brand new
Frigidaire refrigerator!
Dude seldom complained about the dog again, according to
my wife. And on the few occasions when
she did, the girl my wife will always be went into the kitchen and loudly
opened and slammed the door of the Frigidaire a few times. That gesture was to become a family tradition
of emphasizing a point.
Mrs. Dave said that through her teenage
years Tippy was the only worldly being she could tell everything to, because he
always listened and sagely said nothing.
I have over the years repeatedly tried and failed to match the dog's
astute silence when anyone needs to talk to me, but am seldom able to last even
five minutes without offering a comment.
The dog's talent was not practiced, it was innate.
Tippy managed to kill himself in the late
'60's. The Frigidaire gave up the ghost
in the 1970's. My mother-in-law, a
wonderful lady I more appreciate as I get older, stubbornly held on a good deal
longer and made it just into the 1990's.
Had
the dog lived as long as Dude, he would have enjoyed a comfortable old age with
a comfortable old lady. But maybe it was
the Year of the Woodstock Nation or the
dawning of the Age of Aquarius that
caused Tippy to attempt one last excursion in 1969. Deep in his senile confusion, he tried to follow a young female purebred
home on a wintry January afternoon and
fell into the Black River that runs through Watertown. He went in
old and blind and befuddled and barely alive.
He came out frozen like a huge
ice cube and decidedly dead. I condoned the dog's final fling and said he was only following his
instincts. But my wife said I should take a lesson from Tippy's
demise. She slammed the refrigerator door when she said it.
Copyright 2010, David Griffin
The
Windswept Press
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