My Old, Old, Old, Old Dog (Written March 2009)

We got the old dog back in 1992 from the Humane Association, the same year my son made the 10-Year-Old Little League All-Star Team.

It wasn't my idea. I was against the idea. Not that I disliked dogs, but we had some cats and my wife was often annoyed by the barking of a neighbor's canines. I had lived with dogs all my years growing up and knew their ways and needs. She had never had a pet as a child and only our Iguana, hamsters, gerbils and cats up to the point she said we should get a dog. She had already announced this decision to the kids and I was voted down along with the standard agreement that she and they would feed, care and walk the animal. You know how long that agreement lasted - about as long as peace treaties in the Middle East or a politicians campaign promise. The dog may have been my wife's, but I was the dog's. Oh, it didn't just happen overnight. It was an insidious, but unstoppable process. It began with the request I walk him, because he was too rambunctious and strong for anyone else to control, she feared he might get loose and run into traffic. Thus it began and soon he was mine and I was his.

I walked him twice everyday (sometimes three times) for eleven years and he was a good dog. He never went to the bathroom on his walks so didn't force me to carry plastic bags of his leavings. This was good, but had an occasional downside. If he felt the urge for either bodily function, he would turn and hightail it for our home and yard. This was hard on me, keeping up and hanging on and expecting a heart seizure at any moment.

Labs are old at eight and after eleven years he slowed down and walks were hard on him and grew shorter and shorter, and when he sighed at the mere thought I gave him rides twice a day in the car. I'd take him around the countryside and he would watch the scenery and nod to the other pooches we passed with a "look at me" wink.

He is too old for even that now. He can't climb up into the car anymore with his bad hips and poor feet. He hobbles across our floors and we must aid him out to do his business. We live in a home with no ground level entries. There are always steps to get up and down and sometimes he manages, but most times he doesn't. We help him do that, sometimes with a towel beneath his belly to support him, sometimes just holding his sides because he has loss enough weight we can lift him now.

I don't know how much longer he will be with us. He was always the good dog and he obviously wants to stay. He sleeps a lot. He doesn't complain. He dreams a lot about running, I think, for his feet go during naps. He is happy for our attention. He trusts us.

I'm getting old myself. Sometimes my legs ache when I go up and down those same stairs as he. And just as he trusts us and depends on us to hold him up and guide him in his weakness, I trust in God and depend on Him to hold me up and guide me in my weakness. I thank God that he brought such a wonderful animal into our lives. The Wolfer may be old and decrepit, but is a puppy at heart.

(The music on the slide show is "Old Dogs", written and performed by Bill Stains, copyright 2007 by Red House Records.)

Click on the title of this post to see where we got this old dog.

We Interrupt this Series for a Sudden Interruption... (Written April 7, 2009)

Let me say, this has been a trying couple of weeks around a couple of days of relaxation. My wife and I spent last Wednesday through Friday at the Inn on Canal Square in Lewes, Delaware, the fine inn where Retired on Delaware works.  We

 certainly needed the time away just to unwind and have some peace.

The day before we left was not a good one, nor was the morning before we left.

On Tuesday we had our dog, Tucker, put to sleep.

He was a yellow lab who reached the grand old age of 18, although it wasn't so grand for him. He no longer could stand up, let alone walk. We had to carry him outside several times a day and he needed someone to stay with him through the night.  My son and I took turns with these tasks, but a couple of weeks ago, while taking him in and out, I torn something in my upper leg and could no longer lift him.  I am still having a great deal of pain and can't really bend down and lift anything.  My oldest daughter, who works for the SPCA, talked to the vet there and he felt it was best for the dog to bring him in and put him down.  besides his inability to stand, he had some tumors and I could see he had cataracts in his eyes.

It was difficult to do.  All five us had our moments of crying.  My two daughters and my wife took him to the SPCA, where he was attended to. The Delaware Pet Crematorium director met them there and took the body.  

We got him back this past Monday in a nice little casket with his ashes and a tuft of his fur. He is gone, but we still keep looking for him in the room or listen for his bark.

On Wednesday a week ago, the morning we left for Lewes, I went to edit a post and when I clicked view, a strange site came up, a kind of product search engine.  Someone had taken my domain name. Now, I had registered the name a year ago and my subscription did run out on March 29, the very day I found this other party grabbed the name. I had no notification that my subscription was ending or renewal notice. Not much I can do, I guess.

I thought I had no choice but to rebuild my site, which I did. Then I discovered I could retain my old site as is by just changing it to nitewrit.blogspot.com.  By that time I had sent an email to my followers asking them to change to the new site called nightwritinglem.blogspot.net.

I now think I will use nightwritinglem as my 2008 postings and do my 2009 postings on nitewrit.blogspot.com.  I have a link between the two.  I hope you will bear with me on this and continue to read my posts.  My regret is directories, both on line and in print, will now be directing people to this other site and not mine, but it is what it is.

This has been a bad year for me on the Web. Last year someone breached security and took over my email to send out spam and I lost my original email address. Then my PC crashed and I had to transfer everything to a new Mac. Now this.  Perhaps Satan is trying to shut me up.

But like an old Timex, pain or stolen web sites will not stop me from keeping on ticking. I'm just sorry I must put you thought this trauma with me.

Tribute to Tucker (Written April 10, 2009)

Thank you who have expressed your sympathy to us on the loss of Tucker.  Tucker did not not start life off under good circumstance.  I don't know the reason, but as a puppy he ended up in the Delaware Humane Association shelter.  Perhaps he had been born with show dog hopes and because he had some red in this nose instead of all black, he wasn't considered good enough and was discarded. I really don't know. But we saw him there and adopted him.

He was a very smart dog, very friendly and loyal, and tolerant of our cats. It was sad to see him deteriorate in old age and hard to make that final decision, very hard. But I think we gave him a very great life. he lived very long for a lab, that must say something. 

Hobo Joe (Written June 8, 2010)

Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— (Isaiah 58:7a)


It has been quite hot lately, high temperatures, too early August like and summer hasn't even officially arrived. Well, remember earlier this year we bemoaning the lack of a little heat as we became buried in several feet of white chill snow.


During this blizzard season there came a wanderer. We have no idea where he came from, he just showed up one day during this fierce winter and found some shelter about our house.


Perhaps he had just strayed from a neighbor's place and by the morrow he would return to his home. But on the morrow he was still there, and the morrow after that and he just stayed. So we put some food out on the back steps and he found his way there each morning and night through the next several months.


When the warmer days of spring came and the snow melted into memory, he would come and sun himself up in the yard near where the old oak had been taken down the other year. In the space where the trunk had been ground away some grass has sprouted and also a new little oak is growing. Generation's past generating generations anew. And this became his spot, just under the new oak.


I guess one assumes it's just another feral stray living  a wild life. We began calling him Hobo Joe. But he didn't act too afraid of us. He knew when the food would arrive by now and he would be there waiting and meow at us. 


On May Twenty I went out to move one car so my son could get out the drive to go to work and we discovered someone had egged our cars. They had hit his side door and on my car, the lower center of the windshield.  A random act of youthful pranksters, perhaps, but  I reported in to the police nonetheless. Better to get it on the record in case it reoccurs. I was also curious if there had been a rash of egg throwing, which apparently there was not.


It did occur again. On May 31 we found another egg had been thrown, but it had hit the drive between cars. All these egg tosses had come from the same general point, up near the corner of my neighbor's house. Again, I called the police.

My wife then told me someone had thrown bottles into the back yard. She offers an opinion that boys are trying to hit Hobo Joe.  (Picture of beer bottle in our yard on right)


My wife went out the other day and sat on the front stoop and Hobo Joe came to her and let her stroke him. Then this weekend, she did the same and my daughter and son arrived at that time. My daughter works for the SPCA as a VetTech and she scruffed the hobo.


Hobo Joe was obviously once someone's pet. He had been neutered and he is affectionate. My other daughter, who is also a VetTech for the Humane Society, says he is five to seven years old. 


We can't know his story, but his ordeal is over. He now has a home again.

 Hobo Joe

 His new bed.

Wave to Uncle Ron (Written January 29, 2011)

Retired in Delaware found himself visited by the Black Dog of Depression the other day. That can be almost as bad as being hounded by the Hounds of the Baskervilles I understand. Such beasts have tracked down The Little Woman many times in her life. It isn't a pleasant thing.

Ron seems to be recruiting cats to hiss and claw away the Black Dog, so here is another cat trying to cheer him up.

This little guy, Kerouac (yes, named for the "Beat" writer), a few months ago was on the road himself. Do not know his history, but my son and his co-workers found this tiny kitten huddled beneath the carts outside their store.

He had apparently been hiding out there a couple days. My son brought him home and here he is.

 If he wasn't here, he would have probably died, either from starvation, because he was skinny and famished when we took him in, or run over by the many cars in the parking lot of that mall.

He is the cutest little rascal, who nows likes to sleep in the crook of my arm when he isn't finding something new to play with.

Last year about this same time in similar conditions, that is much, much snow, this other cat showed up here. He was the opposite of Kerouac, being very large and black. Where he came from we do not know either and we assumed for a long time he was feral, but it turned out he wasn't. We were putting out food for him through two blizzards and the entire winter, finally luring him close that May. Now he is not out in that stuff this year, but cozy and warm and happy to snooze in a bed too small.

He had headed to this bed when we took him in and I guess he considers it his and compared to sleeping beneath a house in freezing weather, who cares if it is a bit snug.

The cat in the new Profile Picture is Mark. Mark came here (just for overnight) five years ago when he was a kitten. My middle daughter brought him home. He had been found wandering the road in front of St. Marks High School by a shelter worker, who rescued him and brought him to the shelter. My daughter, also a shelter worker, brought him home because there was no room for him at the inn. "Just overnight," she said. Mark made a beeline for my chest as I lay watching TV and nuzzled up against my chin. So much for this just overnight nonsense.

Cats always know who the big softie is.

Oh, Whitey Gone to Rest (Written August 23,2011)

Whitey was one of our earliest. The name was hardly witty or original, for as you can see she was totally white and statuesque. Some people who saw this photo thought this was of a ceramic cat, not a real one, but it was very real. She was a pretty girl.

How old was Whitey? None of us know. The earliest picture I have of her is dated 2000, but she wasn't a kitten when we got her. She was two or three at best, maybe somewhat older. She had to have been at least 13 now. My middle daughter believes she was closer to 16.

Her early life was not easy. Somewhere in those beginning years she ended up out on the streets, on her own and not doing well. When she was rescued she was pretty beat up with a hole on the back of her neck from being attacked. She was so damaged, as it was, that she was considered non-adoptable and was about to be shipped off to be euthanized.

But The Little Woman couldn't let that happen. She told her fellow shelter workers that she would take Whitey and did. As I say, my oldest picture is 2000, so we have had her eleven years now.

As you can see, her old wounds and scars were healed and she cleaned up real purrty.

My son basically took her then as his own. For some reason she always got grief from the other cats, with the exception of a few. Reno and Christy Cat got along with her. Hobo Joe when he came also did. But most of the time she shared our son's room.

She died last night. He sat with her through the end, kept her cleaned up the last couple of days as she sank and was there holding her when she passed.

She is lying behind me in repose, as if merely asleep. Rescued from an early grave when in grave condition, she lived a good life in a loving home for the last 11 years of her life. And now she is where good cats go when they leave us.

Whitey ? - August 22, 2011 RIP

Purrs and Tears (Written September 2, 2011)

She was a sweetheart. She loved my oldest daughter the most and came to her when ever called. She was not large, not long anyway. She was a bit pudgy. She was very soft. And she was a purrer. You just looked toward her and she purred.

She was in a litter of a feral cat who bore her kittens in a storage space under our house. Five little fur balls that we took in a decade ago. Amber, Asta, John, Ridge and Thorn. They were the "Bold and the Beautiful"  Bunch, three named for characters on that show. John was named after John Lennon by my son.

Now only Asta and Thorn remain for Amber died today.

She had begun to act differently last week, wanting to be in the bathroom. Cats often seek out a place to die. At first I thought she was remembering her kittens. She was the only one of our cats who ever gave birth to a litter. We thought all the males had been neutered, but one must have either escaped the snip or something. Those are her kits pictured on the right. They were all adopted out.

She was a good mother. She watched over her little ones faithfully, staying with them in our bathroom until they were weaned and old enough to be put up for new homes.

It was kind of sad to see her look for her children for some time after they were gone. But it was necessary.

So maybe she was remembering during these her last days, I don't know.

She began crying intermittently and the other day I noticed she couldn't quite jump up as she used to. Now she wanted to drink a lot. She was different. She wanted to drink from the spigot in the kitchen sink and I would lift her up to the sink and turn on the water.

My oldest daughter took her to the shelter vet this morning. They found Amber had cancer, a large mass in her chest and so they put her to sleep today.

Perhaps tonight she is with her brothers, John and Ridge. If cats go to heaven, then the Angels will her purr  and perhaps someday in the future I will hear her again myself.

Real Nightmares

The Cowboy Kid, smiling at the dangers of the trail, ready for that bronco of a bicycle to buck him off into the marsh, ready to stand firm in the middle of stampeding railroad trains. He stood up to the challenges of the wilderness he existed in. He had faced down a growling, angry dog (well, actually he fled in abject terror, but why besmirch his adventurous image now). He had my trusty companions by his side, Peppy and Topper. He had the daydreams of being a blossoming Frank Buck.

But what of the nightmares.

Like the mist that rose in early morning across the marsh, nightmarish images can appear on the brightest days. They can blight a snowy road with a spray of blood or turn a summer flower into a siren of doom. And the most nightmarish aspect of all is they are real, they can't be changed and they claim squatter's rights in a back room of your mind.

Yes, The Kid lived back behind a swamp in the middle of what was nowhere at that time. It was an insulated world in many ways, but it did have a great connecting link to civilization. They lived

beside the great Lincoln Highway.

The Lincoln Highway, Route 30, also called in these parts, the Lancaster Pike. The Kid's family was tied to the breadth of the country by that road, which began in Times Square, New York City and ended in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, California.

The Lincoln Highway has been probably as dominate a landmark throughout The Kid's life as the Brandywine Creek. It seems to him it'd been

around forever, but it was just twenty-some

years old when he was born. It started out being named the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway and was the brainchild of the man who also gave us the Indianapolis 500 Speedway and Miami

Beach, Florida. Carl Fisher [pictured on left] looked out one day in 1912 and realized with the growth of automobiles there was a need for a

good road. He decided to build one coast to coast with the help of money from the automobile makers. Henry Ford didn't see the point and without Ford's money it seemed a doomed dream, until Henry Joy, head of the Packard Motor Car Company suggested naming it after Abraham Lincoln. This struck a patriotic chord and eventually funds were raised and the highway completed.

And The Kid's first nightmare image appeared on it in the first winter after he moved to the swamp. He rode a school bus to school. It was late afternoon on the trip home. There was snow across the fields, a drifting here and there even across the well-traveled Lincoln Highway. The sun was bright, it glistened on the white of the fields and also off the lanes of the road. The bus slowed, as traffic in both directions had and moved slowly pass the cause that lay on the center lines on the side to which he sat. A dog had been hit, it hindquarters crushed, its blood and other parts smearing the white. It struggled to get up, but couldn't, never would.

The bus passed, moved on. The Kid did not know, will never know, if anyone stopped to tend the dog or to put it out of its misery. There was no carcass the next day, only the stain, so someone took it away somewhere. Beyond that The Kid could not know its fate anymore than he was ever able to erase that scene from his vision or thoughts. Perhaps it was an omen.

Although I have been speaking of his isolation during this period, The Kid wasn't on a desert island somewhere. The house and land belonged to the owners of the hauling company his dad

worked for and their terminal was a quarter mile or so up the highway toward the east. The terminal was across the highway and set back. Opposite its entrance drive on marsh side was a small apartment building.  Most tenants worked for the hauling company. His father and mother socialized with two families who lived there. Joe Bender and his wife remained long time friends of his parents. They had a daughter, Dot, but she was older than The Kid. (She was in a later time and place to become his babysitter and even later, she and her husband became friends of The Kid and his wife. Those are stories for later times.)

The other family was the Humes. They had a son, Tom (he was the model for Thomas in "Ground Dog Day"), but he was even older than Dot. He wasn't particularly interested in being a playmate to a 7 year old. So when The Kid's parents visited with the Benders or the Humes, Dot or Tom spent time amusing him, but beyond that they were as invisible as anyone else in his day-to-day world.

Further up the highway lived eighty or ninety boys, none of whom were his age. It would have mattered little if there were. This was the Church Farm School (now known as CFS: The School at Church Farm). It was a boarding school started in 1918 by the Reverend Dr. Charles W. Shreiner of the Episcopal Church. It took in boys of lower economic circumstances and gave

them a college prep and religious education. The students helped pay the cost of this by working the farm belonging to the school. As far as I know, this is still the case on the 1,600 acres of farm, school buildings and dorms.

But those boys were as insulated and isolated as was The Kid. They lived in their self-contained world and he never saw them. That school could have been a hundred miles away in another state for all it touched upon his life.

Between the Church Farm School and the apartments was a factory, White Motor Company.

Based out of Cleveland, Ohio, the company made a variety of mechanical tools and vehicles. It manufactured sewing machines, roller skates, lathes and bicycles.

As you can see from their logo on the left, they also were once automobile makers.

The company existed from 1900 to 1981 as the White Motor Company. This particular plant between the Church Farm School and the swamp made trucks, perhaps their most famous product.

Running alongside the truck factory just before the Church Farm School was a row of small houses. The first was next to the highway, then they ran back along the driveway of the factory, sitting up on a high ridge. The outer edge of this ridge toward the truck plant was covered in gravel.

The Kid can't recall how he came to meet them, but living in one of those little homes was a family with children his age. Perhaps the events which occurred later that summer have erased some memories from his mind, because he cannot remember the family name or the name of any individual member. There were four children, three boys and a girl. The girl was the youngest. She may have been four years old. All the children were close in age and the oldest was seven or eight. The Kid didn't know them until halfway through June of the year he came.

The reason for this was their father had been killed in the war (World War II). Since those little homes were company houses,  either he worked for White Motors before his death or the mother was working there then. The boys were students at the Milton Hershey Industrial School. Yes, the same Milton Hershey of Chocolate Bar fame. Milton and his wife, Catherine [pictured on the left and she looks as if she ate a lot of Milton's chocolate], established a boarding school in 1909 for orphaned boys. It provided care and education from pre-kindergarten through Twelfth Grade for boys in need (today this includes girls). Besides an education, Hershey provided for their clothes, board, nourishment, health care and career counseling.

When The Kid moved to the swamp over Christmas vacation at the end of 1947, the boys were back in Hershey, Pennsylvania by the time he settled in. But he did meet them somehow in the summer of 1948. Sometimes they would come down to his place and sometimes he would go to their home. He remembers an instance at their place that summer.

He did not know who built it, but there was an underground structure atop that ridge amidst the houses. The boys used to use it as a fort or a hideout in their games. Once as they ran about in a game of war atop the high embankment, The Kid slipped on the loose edge and fell face first down the gravel side to the drive below. He didn't feel hurt, but when he pushed himself up he felt a twinge in one hand. When he looked down that hand was covered in blood. The Kid had a strange reaction to hi wound. He felt embarrassment. He didn't want anyone to see it, so after climbing back up the embankment, he stuck his bleeding hand into a pants pocket and hid in the underground hideaway.

One of the boys found him and took him into their house, but their mother ordered him to take the hand out of his pocket. She then washed it and dabbed it with iodine or mercurochrome. Which ever it was, it stung something fierce. After the cut healed he was left with another inch-long scar, this time running along the creases of his palm. (This was not to be his last battle scar of childhood.)

Summers fly by for children. It came time for the boys to leave again for their other life in Hershey. The boys came down to his place for one more day of play and they brought their little sister along. Late in the day, they left to go home, walking down the long lane, then up the shoulder along the Lincoln Highway to their house a quarter mile away.

The Kid and his mom were outside when they left. The two of them heard the screech and squeal together and his mom began to run down the lane. The Kid followed behind, but before reaching the highway, she stopped him and told him to stay where he was. She then walked up the road where The Kid could see traffic was coming to a stop.

Walking home, the oldest boy had noticed wild flowers growing on the bank across the pike. He wanted to pick a bouquet to give their mother. He had been leading their sister along, now he gave her hand over to one of his brothers and told the boy to hold on to her because she wanted to go pick the flowers, too. The older boy crossed. His sister struggled, but her brother held her tight, until she bit his hand and he let go.

She ran out into the traffic lanes and was struck and killed.

The Kid didn't know what happened to the family after that summer. He didn't see them the next year so assumed they moved away. How sad to lose your husband and then your daughter. How awful to lose your sister that way. (Strangely, this scene was to repeat itself a couple years later.)  How did those boys deal with the guilt they must have felt because the guilt The Kid felt in her death was heavy enough. They were going from his home, from visiting him, when it happened. He wished his last memory of them wasn't the sound of car brakes skidding on a highway. He wishes today he could remember their names.

The portrait of The Kid at the top of this post was a detail from the one here. It is from the same year he first moved to Glenloch (1947), but was taken next to his grandparents house in town during a visit.

There was an itinerant photographer who came through town. He supplied the hat, bandana and pony. This guy must have got around [note this was marked as 479 on the stirrup]. Almost fifty years later, when The Old Goat was working for the bank, this subject came up. So many of them around his age had similar pictures, they decided to have a "Pony Picture" day. All brought in their old photo and there was a display put up. Lots of little kids in the same hat, same kerchief on the same pony were hanging on the wall. That hat must have been plopped on so many heads it's a wonder they all hadn't shared heads full of lice. Maybe the guy cleaned the thing every time.