One-Eyed Jack

In a ‘Once upon a time…’ spirit of remembering, my old childhood neighborhood was a place of familiar faces where boys on bicycles meandered up and down quiet streets lined with old trees and cracked sidewalks and where on most days you could count on Mrs Robert’s bulldog Gruffy dashing from the front porch to run barking alongside the boys on their bikes. Most families had a car, some even an extra one for the son or daughter in college. Back then, cars were big boxy affairs sporting large chromed bumpers and humped fenders that seemed to roll down the streets at a stately pace. In most neighborhoods high school boys at the time had not yet discovered the thrill of frightening the dogs and the elderly with their customized old Chevies and loud mufflers, squealing out from stop signs to leave a signature of black tire marks on the street. It was a different time.

As a boy in that 1950s sample of Americana I had a small brown dog named Jack, one of eleven puppies from Aunt Tilly’s nasty old bitch dog, Nelly. They lived down at the end of the street and I remember the day my aunt came over to say I could pick one of the puppies to bring home. Nelly almost bit a finger off when I reached down to pick up the puppy I had an eye on. Jack grew up to be a good and faithful dog but somehow had bad luck with cars. One day he failed to dodge one of those slow moving boxy cars with big bumpers and crawled out from under with his left eye dangling out of its socket. From that day on he was one-eyed Jack until he met another not so slow moving car and lost the challenge completely. Later on I got another dog, a boxer I named Sabre who lived on for some years after I left home. 

I lived without a dog for many years, figuring my location and particular lifestyle weren’t the best conditions for raising and keeping a dog. The dogs in that old childhood neighborhood of the 50s where I grew up were animals that ran free, going out, coming in as they liked. I don’t think we knew what a leash was. That kind of dog was impossible in a big city apartment. So I put aside the idea of a having dog. Until I changed my mind and came home with a pup I saw making eyes at me from a pet shop window. He grew up to be huge and chewed up most things he could get his mouth around. Took a while but I eventually caught on that Butch was not the dog for a small New York City apartment. I ended up giving him to friends who lived in the country. In his new home he became a happier dog, calm and with less inclination to chew toilet seats and sofa cushions. 

A passage of years and much older, one day I found myself living out in the country on narrow dirt lane with two acres of fenced land that looked like the setting of Tobacco Road and maybe the best place in the world to raise a dog.

Not long after getting settled in the cottage tucked among towering oaks and a bounty of wildlife, I went to a canine orphanage to find and adopt what these days is called a rescue dog. And there I met a cheerful mixed breed pup, a runaway they were calling Kelly. Four months old and clearly stressed from living behind bars in a constant din of barking dogs, her cheerful personality was a bit subdued but after a few minutes together I knew she was the one. Filling out forms enough to get me into North Korea or maybe Fort Knox, I took the dog home to the dusty hideaway I had begun to call Chez Dixie. Kelly would never do and so I renamed her Farina because of a honey coat that looks almost like that old-timey cereal of the same name, and also because it was the moniker of my favorite character in the old comedy shorts, Our Gang.

The day Farina came to Old Dixie Lane marked the beginning of another story, one that has redesigned my days and nights in ways never imagined.