The Dog, the Ditch, and the Last Day of School

Today would have been my mother's 82nd birthday. She's been gone for over forty years, but birthdays have a way of pulling memories up from the bottom — not always the big ones, just the ones that were life. The ordinary, chaotic, occasionally bleeding kind. This is one of those.

I was fifteen and barely dressed — Daisy Duke shorts, some kind of top, no gear because gear was for people who thought ahead — when the German shepherd came over the fence.

Not through it. Over it. Ten feet of cyclone fence and that dog cleared it like it was nothing, like he'd been planning this exact moment, like I was the specific reason he'd been put on this earth.

We had a motorcycle. A Kawasaki something — small, underpowered, and belonging to nobody in particular the way things in a house full of kids just belong to the house. It was fine for cruising the grove out behind our house by the creek but was not, it turned out, fine for outrunning a determined shepherd with a grudge.

I made most of the turns. Not the last one.

The creek was right there. I'm no Evel Knievel, and that bike wasn't getting either of us across, so I went down. The dog got three fangs into my thigh before I could get clear. Three. If he'd gotten a fourth, I'd have lost a chunk the size of a fist.

Hospital. Stitches. Burn from the bike, scrapes from the ground, three neat puncture wounds in my leg.

And then the next morning I went to school. Because it was the last day. Because you don't miss getting your yearbook signed for a dog.

Some things matter more than pain. I learned that early.

Happy Birthday, Mama.