SIMON LE DOG

SIMON LE DOG


As long as I can remember, Jonathan has wanted a dog. We always had cats before and after Jonathan was born. I don’t know how young he was when he started campaigning for a dog, but I know his Dad told him he had to wait until he was 6 years old—I guess thinking that Jonathan would forget about it in the intervening years. The year Jonathan was 6, we had a nice birthday party, tons of presents and at the end Jonathan said “Where’s the dog?”

Shortly after that, the dog owned by one of his carpool buddies delivered a litter of mongrel puppies. We were apparently put on the waiting list for a puppy by you-know-who. Several weeks later, Simon came home with us. (It was later determined that Simon was a girl, but the name stuck.) Simon was an outside dog and she loved it that way. Jonathan was an outside-type kid and they (Simon and Jonathan) got lots of exercise chasing each other around the pasture in the front of our house. This was also where I found Simon several months later when I drove in the long driveway after working all day. She was surrounded by male dogs of all description—large, small, purebred, mutts, collared, uncollared. Simon was in heat!!

I must have arrived during a lull in the action because everyone was lying on the ground in a circle around Simon when I arrived home. But this was just the calm before the storm, or perhaps I’d missed the first and second act, and this was intermission. At any rate, it didn’t last long. There arose from the front yard an upswelling of sounds such as I’d never heard before. Yowling and growling, moaning and barking, yipping and yelping, high squeals and low growls—it was a madhouse. I ran out to retrieve Simon from the front yard, carrying one of Jonathan’s plastic baseball bats in case I had to fight my way in. Simon was still lying on the ground in the middle of the yard, with her admirers still circled around, but now jostling for “position.” With trepidation I marched up to Simon and grabbed her by her collar and we escaped to our screened-in back porch, leaving her retinue behind to sort out who was “top dog” for themselves.

Well, silly me. Within 10 nanoseconds the whole company, including the chorus, had moved the mainstage to our back porch. Now they were up close with the yowling, except real hostility was about to break out, as their frustration mounted with Simon now unattainable.

Many miserable hours later, Jonathan’s Dad arrived home (it was all his fault; he’s the one who said “when you’re six”) so he was given the task of getting Simon in the car, past all the love-struck males, and delivered to the emergency vet clinic where, a few days later, we went to pick her up, all ”fixed.” Imagine my embarrassment, though, when I took her back to the vet to have her stitches out, and met one of my neighbors in the waiting room. He was there to get stitches taken out of his male dog who had been bitten in a dog fight which happened, according to the neighbor, when “some jerks left their bitch in heat outside.” I just sympathized and prayed we’d be called soon for our turn with the vet.