Coming home this evening I thought I hit a dog with my car. Memories of the Whitley Dairy driver backing over poor Mollie the Collie when I was 10 haunted me. “HE KILLED HER DEAD,” I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed on the front porch of our ranch home facing dangerous highway Indiana 5. And when my dad came home from work in the evening, I sobbed again.
No dogs ever lived up to the impossibly high standard of collie dogs we had as children (despite two of them being killed on the highway. If there’s a dog heaven, Old Shep Will Be There (and Mollie and Frisky, too). Because of their untimely deaths and various other dog-related childhood traumas especially SeeSee, a neighbor's antagonistic chihuahua, I became a cat person.
In today’s story, we will call this dog Yappy.
Yappy chases my car every day. Yappy’s size is to my beat-up 10-year-old Honda what a mosquito is to an elephant, irritating but easy to swat away. Every day Yappy runs out and often dashes under the car and gives that ferocious yip-yip-yip. I don’t want to hurt Yappy so I drive very, very slowly. (And that's a stress for me to actually go s l o w e r. My former District Manager could pontificate on my "grandma" style of driving.)
Tonight I thought I hit him -- Yappy the dog not the District Manager -- and while I don’t adore dogs, I certainly didn’t want him hurt or worse. I looked back and all around and did not see Yappy on the road or in his yard. After I got in our garage a few houses away, I decided that I should go back – a steep walk up a hill – and make sure Yappy was okay.
As I walked up the hill and got closer and closer to Yappy’s house, my heart sunk.
Usually the little black sentry was at full attention waiting for his next victim in his front yard.
I couldn’t see him anywhere.
Just when I reached the crest of the hill, Yappy tore out from under his front porch and made a mad dash for my rear end. While he did not catch me, he really wanted to take a bite out of my behind. I had quite a nice run down the hill. Good deeds rarely go unpunished. Quoth the raven.
