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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
July 17, 2005
Published as Poetry
in a WIP dated October 29, 2002.
© 2002 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Junkyard Dog, 1969
© 1969 by Bud Grossmann
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Calling a Spade a Spade
Have you met Chester, our golden Lab?
He was found at the pound, so we can’t say for certain,
but we believe he’s now about nine years old. Still spry,
but getting lumpy. And gray, quite gray, all over, with
patches of hair coming off his haunches. Blind in one eye,
he’ll bite if you surprise him or play too rough. But he’s well-trained
(my dog! We attended dog school, he and I, Saturdays for several years)
and completely cooperative though not especially affectionate.
If I sit in the yard, on a patio chair under the mango tree
on a Saturday night, to drink a beer while listening to
The News From Lake Wobegon on the radio in the dark,
I can put Chester in a down-stay, as a hassock
beneath my bare feet, and he’ll be perfectly content.
He asks for no petting and volunteers no touch of his tongue.
I hope you aren’t expecting this to be metaphorical.
I merely mean it as a missive of mild mourning.
I love the guy, my Chester, but, well,
he is "only a dog,"
and I am bracing myself for the day when,
if all goes well, he’ll be simply too arthritic
to take me on our morning walk.
I am already bracing myself as well for that more distant day
when Chester will be so damn sick and frail
that I shall have to decide whether to
pretend to be
the farm boy I once almost was
and bang him in the head with a shovel
or
do whatever it is that city people do
when an old dog’s day is done,
which is, presumably,
to take out a credit card
and ask a lab-coated veterinarian
to serve as euthanasianist.
♦
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