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| brain magnet #23 : rascal. | 12.01.2003 | |
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 it’s the first of december. and the anniversary of something sad. it’s funny how you remember certain dates, like they’re reminders stuck with magnets on your brain. and you never forget them. thus, remembering them. there are a few magneted dates stuck in my head: *january 28th. the day, a few years back, that my grandmother stopped smelling like a bank teller, and started smelling like a combination of bile and that sticky stuff you put on the back of new wallpaper. *july 3rd. this memory was from one of our first fourth of july family gatherings after my mother passed away. apparently, my uncle norm had been listening to a lot of elton john. he had christened don’t let the sun go down on me as his “personal anthem.” so, beginning at this gathering—and continuing at several later ones—his arrival had to be announced with a dimming of the house lights, and the elton john song being played loudly on our stereo as he walked in the door. *august 12th. on one 8/12, my best friend a.j. came over to spend the night. we patiently waited for my father to go to sleep. when the coast was clear, a.j. reached into his backpack and pulled out a small bottle of generic vodka and a stud-finder. we didn’t do anything with the bottle of vodka, but we spent the rest of the night going around the house finding all the studs in the walls... and then making small penciled Xs to mark each one. then, *december 1st. the day we lost rascal. my grandmother, bless her wicked soul, was watching the family dog. my uncle norm had been a little depressed following an unsuccessful tonsillectomy, so my dad and i surprised him with tickets to an elton john concert in philadelphia. we asked my grandmother to watch rascal while we were away. my grandmother didn’t like rascal much. ever since he was a puppy, rascal never liked to lay at her feet like he laid at ours, and she had always taken that as an insult. grandmother claims it was age-discrimination, but i don’t think rascal ever hated anyone. i read somewhere that dogs have a “keen” sense of smell. and, since you could smell that weird bank teller smell within several hundred feet of my grandmother... being at the proximity that lying at her feet would demand would’ve probably been enough sensory overload to kill rascal. that's why i think he would stay at a safe distance from grandmother. anyway, of that fateful december first... my grandmother alleged the following: she had just finished baking, so she opened the front door a little. then, to keep rascal from running out of the house (which she says he would have done because he hates old people), she had tied his collar to an end-table with some twine. after sitting down to relax, she noticed that her old wallpaper was starting to crack on one of her living room walls. deciding to cover it up, she moved a mirror from her bedroom out to the living room. not having a stud-finder, and apparently not realizing that her thirty pound mirror wouldn’t hold without using one, she hammered a nail into the dry-wall. according to grandmother, when she tried to hang the mirror to the wall... the nail sunk into the wall, the mirror fell to the floor, severed the twine of rascal’s makeshift leash, nipped the end of his right hind leg, and the dog then proceeded to scamper out the open doorway before she could catch up to him. sounds made-up, right? i thought so, too. i cried a lot after that, so my dad made a few posters at work for me to hang around the neighborhood. they included a composite sketch of rascal and our home phone number so that people could call us if they found the dog. my dad said we could pray for one of the following: the dog wandering back home safely; the dog being returned home by someone who saw our signs; or, in the event the dog has passed on, that its body be found by a local taxidermist who would then stuff it, and ship it off to some less loved kid in a third world country who could use a stuffed animal to fall asleep next to at night. then, at least some kid could have a happy christmas at the expense of me losing my dog. and who knows... maybe that happened! ah, december first. looking forward to the second. |
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| 6:30 pm | xander said this. | |
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