Art Attack Central

Fixing stuff, myself included…

Christmas 2001

When I was a little kid, late on Christmas afternoon we’d leave all our presents behind, except for the new scarves, hats and mittens (“don’t forget your mittens,” Laurie Anderson), and we’d walk up and over the hill to my best friend Trish’s house to celebrate the birthday of Jesus. We’d sing happy birthday and eat birthday cake as the sun sank over the small lake behind the house.

Isn’t that kinda boring for a little kid adventure?

You’re right, and that was certainly not the best part of Christmas from a little kid’s point of view, unless you happened to be a very religious little kid, which I was not, and I didn’t know any religious little kids. However, I had to go to Sunday school every Sunday throughout my childhood and adolescence; sometimes I went to the drugstore down the street from the church and played the slot machine instead. This flagrant disregard for the rules has plagued me all my life; the tiny guy in my head has always told me not to follow the rules to closely. Not following the rules led Trish and me to heat the dead dog. No, not beat a dead horse. Heat a dead dog.

Heat a dead dog?

Initially we started off with smaller animals and with a different approach. The first animal we attempted to bring back from the dead was a crow. We found him behind the hedge directly beneath the large picture window which looked out over the South River. Obviously the poor misguided fellow had tried to fly into the house, “kerplunk” and down you go. Our first thought was of a funeral; we found a shoe box and lined it with black velvet, then we gently placed the crow in the coffin, but the crow was still warm and the only obvious injury was a somewhat wobbly neck. It was at this point we realized that with a little effort we might somehow revive the crow. The effort was small indeed; we placed an aspirin in his beak, closed his beak around it and placed what had now become his hospital bed in the shade under a fir tree. We checked his condition for three days before we returned to our original plan for a funeral.

But, what about the dog?

The crow incident happened in the spring; it was the winter of the same year that we found the dog. That year was colder than usual in the Chesapeake Bay area, and the entire South River was frozen solid. After school we played and skated on the edges of the river. We found the dog late one afternoon, frozen solid like the river and lying against a cement seawall. Trish already had a dog named Mike and I had always wanted a dog, but my father wouldn’t let me have one, because he’d been bitten by a dog with rabies as a child. Well this golden retriever I thought would be perfect; once she was thawed out my dad wouldn’t be able to resist her good looks, One significant problem was that she was heavy, and thus difficult for 2 small girls to lift over the seawall. We met at the seawall religiously (perhaps I was a religious kid after all) for 4 days, and tried in vain to heft the dog now known as Goldy up and over the wall. On the fifth day we enlisted the help of our friend Joanny; she brought her wagon just in case we were successful. Perhaps it was the availability of her wagon, or the extra help in the hefting that finally allowed us to get Goldy over the wall. Into the wagon she went and then the thee of us headed up the hill to Trish’s house. The destination was predetermined by the fact that Trish’s house had a large heat register in the floor. Goldy had been happily thawing out for about an hour, when Trish’s mother got home from work. She was kind considering the circumstances. She called the SPCA, and she told us they would be much better able to take care of Goldy once she thawed out.

“Designated driver, on the information highway.”