To the uncaring

I don’t remember the last time I saw Shelly, but I have many other memories of her, both good and bad. She was half beagle half golden retriever, and her golden brown coat glowed promising an innocence that did not align with her personality. It was beyond mischief, but a desperate and savage will to survive. I remember hearing that she was the runt of a pack of six or seven, which made sense because she was constantly trying to prove herself amongst the ranks of our family. She would try to push around my brother and I, but we were able to outdo her when we worked together. There’s a distinct memory of my little sister crying in the corner while the dog was trying to bully her out of her territory. She was like that with territory, even when she was trained she would hold in her urine until she got home to remind us that she lived here too, and my father reprimanded her to remind her that he knows that already.

There were sweet memories too though. There was a time my whole family, minus my mother, was out and about walking Shelly around the neighborhood. In that particular route that we walked, there was a grand home with a giant red gate. A, “beware dog,” sign stood at the top right corner of the gate, and Shelly would constantly bark with a dog that from its sound alone I could tell was twice the size of her. I would soon find out that he was also twice as strong and fast as her.

My father, in my younger days, would always tell my siblings and I to walk in front of him. I was in the front, but my brother was walking the dog. The red gate was open a crack, and when the barking ensued, instead of the usual crashing against the metal, the large beast ran out and attacked me. I still have a faint, almost insignificant scar on my knee to this day. It wasn’t pain that I remember, the wound wasn’t at all serious, but fear. I don’t blame the dog; Pit Bulls tend to get a bad reputation because of their aggressive disposition. But in the face of an animal of what seemed like large proportions to my seven-year-old body, Shelly (my father suspects it was more out of stupidity than courage) charged in and protected me. My father was hesitant about what to do, but when tide of the battle was beginning to change in favor of the Pit Bull, my father kicked the dog in the head. The owner came out at this point, and my father began to lose his temper on the man. The man argued back with pride and stubbornness, but when he saw my leg, he became submissive to the requests of my father. I didn’t know why at the time, and it was in a conversation later that day that I first learned about the American legal system through my father’s angry rant about how the man didn’t want to get sued.

But this isn't the cliché tale of a bad dog that earned acceptance from their city folk; it’s quite the opposite. I think the term for it used these days is a, “toxic relationship.” We didn’t know how to take care of her, and she didn’t know how to take care of us, and the time spent together destroyed both sides. It wasn’t a lack of loyalty that she had, but an inability to adapt to city life. We fed her well, and my father pointed this out because of how her coat glistened a healthy, bright color. My father began to suspect that she was mentally handicapped when he took her out on a walk one day and she threw up an entire cornhusk, un-chewed and almost perfect to eat if you ignored the pale yellow, acidic fluid it was caked in. He didn’t know how she got that, and we hadn’t had corn like that in a long time. It was a mystery. We weren’t wealthy, and couldn’t quite afford to take her into a vet or anything like that, but she seemed to be fine. There were many other shenanigans and incidents and such that piled up and made all of us unhappy, including her.

We decided to give her away to some farm folk. I didn’t want to see her be given away, and I was not there for the sendoff. The subsequent days without her were the days we remembered the sweet things the most. My father told us a story around that time. He told us about the time he had the apartment unit to himself for a weekend once while my mother and us youths went to go visit her parents. He was eating a pizza and petting the dog, who was obviously hoping for a drop of grease or anything she could get. My father threw a piece of pepperoni into the hallway while she skyrocketed into the abyss. She came back and forth smiling and pleased by both the game and the treats associated with it as he kept throwing them. When he ran out of pepperoni, he tried to use a tomato, and she left with a giant smile, and came back with a disgruntled glare.

When he came to the punch line, we all laughed, then sighed, then slumped back into a lowly mood. I remember my brother being angry about my father’s hypocrisy in scolding him for feeding the dog human food when he did it. My father tried to reassure him it was only one time and compared it to us eating sweets only once in a while, but my brother stormed off.

There was little talk of going to visit her, and I think there was an unspoken, shared feeling of wanting to avoid guilt. There are few things as unconditional as a dog’s ability to forgive and unconditionally love, even in the face of what felt like betrayal. It wasn’t really, it was the opposite, but it felt like that.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve thought about all of this. I would guess she’s either dead or very old now. Her mother strangled herself to death on a leash over a fence, and that tale of dark humor only makes me worry about her more. With all of this worry and guilt about things I cannot control, I wonder about other city folk instilled with guilt for not wanting to keep these creatures of ineffable emotion in their own home. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough or maybe I could’ve changed things. I try to convince myself to deflect the guilt by looking at myself as a middleman, a guide so to speak from Shelly to the unnamed farm folk of my subconscious memory. Regret slips on and off, heavy on my mind as each good deed falls into an endless pit, unable to rectify the giving and taking.