The Days of Dead Dogs

Our neighbor’s dog chased a rabbit in their yard, leapt where he shouldn’t have, and broke his leg in a terrible way, and our neighbor had to put him down.

We have known this neighbor since we moved in. He was about 13. We’ve lived here forty-two years. We share a driveway. Our houses are so close that it wouldn’t be impossible to stretch a ladder between our two windows in case there was a flood or something.

Our neighbor’s hair is graying. That’s how long we’ve known him. The boy next door lost his dog. The dog was fourteen. Plenty old. It doesn’t change anything.

I yelled out to our neighbor from our back porch to tell him I was sorry and, how, having just lost Swirl, I know how hard it is. But I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about Swirl either. Except to somebody else with a dead dog. But he wasn’t ready to be a comrade. He just nodded and said thanks. Thanks for getting it about how a fully grown person could be in a deep state of grief about a dog, that’s what I heard in his comment. But that’s just me projecting and I know it.

Tomorrow (Sunday) is the day that our neighbor would be stewing up his beloved dog’s weekly dinners. He’d cook whatever his concoction was and then bring out the containers, one by one, to cool on the porch railing. His dog, a big brown dog, would stand in the yard barking and I loved that bark. It felt homey to me, neighborly. I’ll miss our neighbor’s dog.

I miss Swirl.

The beat goes on.