The Blueberry of Angryness

I got bit by a neighbor’s dog over the weekend.

 I was walking out of the shed, and as my back was turned, Blueberry sprinted out from the dog door, gained an amazing vertical leap, and sunk a couple of fangs into my shoulder. This is the first time I have experienced a dog bite for almost forty years. The last time was on my Washington Post paper route over on Swinton Drive in Kings Park West, where a dog ran out from one of the few houses that did not receive the paper, jumped up and nipped me in the midsection, and then dashed back inside the house, where the woman would not answer the door to address my complaint!

Maybe, I let my guard down this time, as I did have a confident record of working as a meter reader for seven years, entering thousands of customer yards with dogs, and although there were a few close calls over that long span, I never got bit once.

It comes largely as an emotional shock, as I had been imagining for a long while, that as much as I am fond of most dogs and enjoy their company, that greater and noble dog-manity was loyally by my side.

It’s true that Blueberry, the dog that bit me, has a sketchy past and a questionable upbringing. But I have been communicating with him much over the past year or two, in the kindest voice and intentions that I could muster up. Now, I’m finding this incident to be disconcerting.

When incidents like these happen, I often turn to the Animal Medicine cards, to see if I can gain a bit of wisdom from there. In this particular case, it feels fitting to examine the card from the contrary position. I haven’t looked at it yet, but my stronger intuition is saying that maybe now is not a good time to turn my back on someone who I believe is aloyal friend, and then be deceived.

Let’s see now what it really says:

http://scottfoglesong.printandwebdesign.com/14-dog.pdf

A cool place

We had the best sledding hill in the world. It was right between the Smiths’ house and ours, in the snowy woods of Kings Park West. I always admired dad for investing in family homes on the edges of Virginia’s hilly wilderness.

Recently, I uncovered an old photo of Dad’s 49’er, stripped down to the bare metal. I wrote a brief story about it entitled, “Whitefield Street down to the bare bones”

Anyhow, back to the sledding hill: Some obstreperous teenagers built the path for it in the summer of ’70. They felled some ancient oak trees with their chainsaws to start a mini-bike path –which incidentally reminds me – I read that there are absolutely no acorns out east this year. I wonder if it’s a manifestation reflecting what the bankrupt eastern seaboard humans did, by not squirreling nuts away before their walled mart crushing frenzies.

Back to the marked trail: Smith and I still talk about those pathways every few years. On icier days, you had to dig your feet in deep before reaching the sharp hairpin corners, to keep from splashing into Rabbit Run’s icy waters, or cracking your head open like a young fragile eggshell mind in Jim Morrison’s American Prayer.

The upper part of the path branched behind Fonzie McKenzie’s property. He was from Lebanon and sometimes we bombed his house with crabapples. Once he called me on the rotary, just as I returned from one of our neighborhood bombing missions & like a rat, I squealed on another boy, seemingly getting off Scott-free myself.

A few years back, Smith bummled alone again through the old oak tree branching paths. As he sat, he began to well up, thinking about his old wet rosebud sled in those simplier days. When I think about my bad judgment of bombing the Lebanese family, I feel the same way. I feel lower than a clitellum.

Let’s tell jokes

Back in the mid-70’s, David and I were always wrassling around our Whitefield Street yard. We made up dozens of imaginary games and our actions sometimes contained tomfoolery. We built obstacle courses through the woods, climbed trees to hang punching bags and held competitive egg-juggling contests. Occasionally we would shoot arrows into the sky as high as possible, while singing the mighty Hercules song. Once we developed a curved arrow for shooting around corners. And the Kings Park West pellet gun wars left a handful of kids with enough metal inside to set off airport detectors.

David was born 4 years after me, so up until he joined the Marines, I usually had the upper hand in our wrassling matches. After seeing how I took down David one afternoon in our whiffleball side yard, our neighbor Al thought that he too, would take a turn to bully David down. Onliest problem was that I had been toughening David up for such an occasion. Although Al was three years older than David was, David soon turned the tide and had Al pinned bad in about twenty seconds. For disarming David, rather than admitting he was whipped, Al suddenly exclaimed, “I know what we should do, let’s tell jokes!”

David in my arm near the spot where he proved himself a solid Whitefield Rock

I thought that this was the perfect little kid thing to say and have often utilized that phrase and gone on to tell this story. In fact, since that day, some grand leaders have assumed Al’s jocular role and sometimes tell light jokes rather then admit they are being whipped by a young aspiring Marine.