CHAPTER 10
Nellie was my mother’s dog. Mom had raised her since a pup and by the time I came along Nellie was getting long of tooth. She became a companion to me, traipsing about with me in the yard and sleeping up on my bed at night.
I don’t know what kind of dog she was, a mix surely. She was gentle, but not overly active. Her run was a slow trot and she didn’t do a lot of running. She was shaggy, with a round body and fairly short legs.
Nellie wasn’t the only animal in my life at 424 Washington. I
have already mentioned the chickens my Grandparents raised in the rear of the back yard. My Grandfather also owned a string of hound dogs. He had four or five of these and they lived in doghouses lined up alongside the west side of the house. My favorite was Old Red (photo left: me in Old Red’s house)
These dogs were not for playing fetch or anything. They were kept chained to their boxes most of the time. They were for fox hunting, a popular activity of the farmers in Chester County at the time and a favorite of my grandfather Brown. He would load the hounds in his old Ford on occasional weekends and take them to a hunt.
Nellie died a few months after my father sailed away with the Navy. My mother found an old suitcase and laid her out inside. She festooned it with some kind of plants and we had a little ceremony in the back yard before my grandfather buried her in the garden. This was my first experience with death. I learned that living creatures died. Dead things did not move and got put in the ground so no one ever saw them again.
I used Nellie as the model for a story I wrote many years later called “Passing”. In this I moved the location from Downingtown out to the lonely house in the swamp at Glenloch. The young character experiencing the reality of death and questioning God was also switched from a young boy to a young girl.
Jenny kept her vigil at the window.
The sky deepened in tone. Across the moonlight on the hill moved a shadow. This shade prodded toward the house. Jenny stiffened. A brown and white dog shambled into the yard. Its muzzle was low, nearly scraping the grass. The dog was covered with faded shaggy fur making it appear plump, but you could see its thinness in the boniness of its wobbling legs. It came to the back porch and passed the house beneath the kitchen window. At the patch of light the window threw across the lawn the dog paused and looked toward Jenny. Brief recognition glistened in its black eyes. It wagged its tail and then the eyes misted over with film. It lowered its head and passed.
Jenny watched the tail disappear beyond a shed. She left the window and threw her arms around her mother’s hips.
Excerpt from “Passing (Written 1961)
Published 2003 in
Soon to Be Famous
Analytic Writers
Wilmington, Delaware
Tracey Landmann, Editor (left)
Death came into my young life again in January 1946. My father
came home on emergency leave because his mother was dying of cancer. She died on January 19. I don’t remember my dad coming home at that time. I barely remember Grandmother Florence Blanche Townsley Meredith. She was a big woman and that is about all I recall. I never knew my Grandfather Meredith because he died in 1937. According to the date on her tombstone, she was 53 when she died. According to the obituary in the Coatesville Record of January 19, 1946 she was 55. If the newspaper is correct she was 27 when she married Benjamin, eight years his senior rather than six. That is her holding me.
One Easter, I received a present of a white rabbit. I named it
Snowball. I say it because I don’t know what sex Snowball was. It was around this same time my Grandfather gave me a puppy. He came home one night and told me to look in his jacket pocket. I did and two eyes were staring out at me. The puppy was very tiny. It was a Toy Fox Terrier, a little White dog with a black face and a couple large black spots on its body. Its tail was bobbed to a short stump like many such sports dogs.
Since the puppy was extremely frisky, I named it Peppy. I had Peppy until after I graduated high school. When Peppy reached adulthood she had a funny habit. At that time the comic strip “Li'l Abner” by Al Capp had introduced these strange critters called Shmoos. Shmoos looked a little like walking bowling pins with whiskers. They were all white. I had several Shmoo squeeze toys, each about four or five inches long. When Peppy went through heat she believed these were her puppies. She would carry each in her mouth to her dog bed and then guard them. If you came near she would snarl. After a few days she realized they weren’t really puppies and go back to her normal playful self.
Peppy had her own doggy bed, but most of the time she would curl up beside me in bed to sleep, just as Nellie had. She was young and full of energy. She liked to play fetch with a little rubber ball or chase about the yard. (The photograph right is me holding Peppy in 1951.)
My grandfather often brought me gifts, not always with the approval of my grandmother. I’m not sure she was happy when he pulled Peppy out of his jacket pocket. Her usual objection was my grandfather didn’t get me age appropriate gifts and she was right. It isn’t he gave me anything wrong for a child to possess; only he gave to me at too young an age.
For instance, he gave me a
baseball bat. Every young boy of the ‘Forties and ‘Fifties needed a baseball bat. It was expected boys would play the game. It was the National Pastime for Pete’s sake. However, he gave me, at four years old, an Official Stan Musial Louisville Slugger. The bat was 34 inches long and weighted 36 ounces. At four I could barely lift it. I still have that bat. It’s badly beat up now with a crack near where the barrel narrows. The wood is rough with pockmarks because at some point I took to hitting stones with it. Stan Musial’s signature has long faded away just as he has.
It was not only gifts inappropriate for my age Grandmother objected to. My grandfather sometimes said things in front of me she didn’t like either. One May morning in 1946 Grandfather Brown was reading the paper at the kitchen table as usual. There was a story about a car engineer named Louis Reard who just introduced a new model in Paris, France. It wasn’t a car. It was a bathing suit and Reard called it The Bikini. (Reard’s first Bikini is pictured on left being modeled by nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, the only woman he could find willing to pose in it, 1946.)
My grandfather looked over the top of the paper and said, “You
know what the next new women’s bathing suit’s gonna be?”
Grandmother cocked an eyebrow. I just shook my head no.
“Two Band-Aids and a cork,” he said and laughed.
Grandmother didn’t laugh. Her face got red. “How can you say such a thing front of the boy,” she said.
I had no idea why my grandfather laughed or why grandmother got so angry with him. I didn’t understand that joke for another ten years.
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