Long Dog Walk

8th of October in 2010

Dear Cassi,

Funny thing, I came in the door from an extended dog walk at around eleven-forty the other night to find Paul awake. I asked him if he had walked Gus that morning because the big dog hadn't wanted to come back in the house even after the lengthy walk. I had been out with Gus for more than an hour. Gus has never been much for getting walked and when he's out with Paul he decides when the two of them are coming home. Paul takes getting walked by a Doberman with bad spirits, but so long as he insists on being the one walked and not the one doing the walking Gus will be inclined to walk him.

I have to say the Gus has accepted the idea that he is a dog when I walk him. He tends to stay at my heel now that he knows that I won't let him get ahead of me. It just goes to show you that the dog understands how things are and will get away with things if you let him. Blame can be put beyond the old dog because of how he has been treated all this time. When I wash him his coat his heavy with the dust of neglect, and the patches of raw black skin have crusted over with the fungus that has been eating at him from the time we got him. I can't recall how many times I've had to ask if Gus has had his itch spray of flea treatment, but needless to say the dog is poorly looked after.

Just before work I check on Gus if he is sleeping in the garage, invariably I find that no one has put a blanket over him. Often when I cover him up he makes a sound that I can only call the dog version of purring. It's the same sound he makes when I scratch his ears though Paul has concluded that it's an angry growl. My biological siblings have never been any good at understanding dogs.

Not that I can say his sister is any better. Once she came into the garage and saw Gus sitting on the blue towel I had put over him the night before and she said “aw, Augie's got a blanky!” As if she couldn’t understand that a big black dog with short fur needs to be covered. I'd like to see how she feels sleeping in the cold without a blanket. I grant we can't give him a blanket when he's outside because during the day he just tries to play with it. Yeah, Gus isn’t all that smart; really, I think it has something to do with the fact that he was kept without much in the way of human contact for the first seven months of his life. “Even the best dog will grow vicious if tied.” or so I'm told.

Gus wasn't vicious when we first got him, but he was hard to handle and had a tendency to nip at you. It was more an act of playing than anything else. He still nips at me when he gets impatient, but he doesn’t mean any harm. The last time he did that I was talking to Paul's friend who lives up the way about a quarter mile. This fellow is a small antsy man who can never stop blathering on about one thing or another. He is a good man and all, he makes his way to church every day, but he can talk and talk about the same thing, telling you the fact over and over, for hours on end.

Much like my meeting with Paul’s friend, dog walks have become something of an adventure in recent time. The other day I ran into a teacher's aide I had in kindergarten. I hadn't seen her for some twenty years or more and still she recognized me without question. I walked with her for maybe forty minutes and she asked me all about my life. I had no happy stories to tell her, but she listened and kept asking.

It comes to me now that I know nothing of the old woman other than that she work at my primary school and is terrified of dogs. What I would ask about her if given the chance I couldn't say. She must be a grandmother by now, if she wasn't at the time, I never knew her in the first place. It's a shame how you can have that relationship with someone and not know them. As people we pass into the darkness of each other’s lives so easily.

Hold yourself to the light

Richard Leland Neal