A Northern Boy's Tales of the Deep South, part 1

Guardian Angel

In a recent post at No Accent Yet, Tiff shared the hilarious tale of her “harrowing” experience with a spider in her car. Unlike Tiff, I’m generally okay with spiders; I just don’t want them crawling on me…or worse.

Tiff’s tale brought up a memory for me of something involving a spider that occurred when I was living in deep southwest Georgia, and then, as a consequence, other memories of funny stuff flooded in. And so, I am inspired to share them here. But not all at once.

As far as I can recall, and as far as I am aware, I have never been in a real life-and-death situation. Okay, well, maybe once. Sure, some may say that, since I often fly commercially, I am putting my life in someone else’s hands… How does that joke go? “When I die, I want to go quietly in my sleep, just like Grampa did; not screaming and crying like his passengers on his bus.”

No. Never really life-and-death. But at least I know that, during her lifetime, Angel, my Dalmatian, was ready to defend me to the best of her abilities.

I had lived in Bumph Huck, Georgia, for just over a year and a half, paying rent beyond what I could afford simply because it was the only place I found that would take a large dog. When I started looking for another place, a co-worker of mine named Bob, a very timid, cowardly man (I am not exaggerating) approached me and said that there was a piece of property owned by his family, which they had rented out in the past. It wasn’t the prettiest structure, but it was on a nice piece of property out in the woods next to a creek. I asked him how much rent he would be asking.

He lowered his head and stammered, “Well, we’ve asked as much as a hundred and fifty dollars.”

My knees nearly buckled as, surely, I was dreaming! “A HUNDRED FIFTY?!”

This was 1996.

Bob cowered a little. “We could ask for less…it’s okay.”

“LESS?” I couldn’t help but shout. “I’ll take it for one-fifty!”

“But you haven’t even seen the place!”

“Bob, right now I’d be glad to live in a cardboard box for one-fifty a month!”

The place was exactly as he had described. Tucked away in the woods behind a pecan orchard, it was a slightly glorified hunter's shack, built of cinder-blocks, and perched atop a sloping bank, with a large, picture-window view to a wide creek below. There was a massive concrete deck wrapped around two sides of it, and the rectangular building was covered with a heavy-beam, lodge-type roof. With the exception of the drab, unpainted cinder-blocks, the house and land were actually quite beautiful!

On Labor Day weekend, with the help of a friend and a co-worker, I moved in. As all moving days are, it had been a long day. Before I could even begin to unpack, the sun sank below the horizon, so I made sure I took care of the important tasks first – I set up my TV and reclining chair in the far corner, opposite the entry door and the kitchen. There was a fireplace on the end where I had set my chair, but Bob had apologetically forbade me using it because the chimney was cracked (the whole house was on a 40-year slide down the hill, so there were fundamental cracks in the concrete). On either side of the fireplace were built-in firewood bins with hinged wooden covers, great for setting things on, like asses and glasses.

The very next day I set to unpacking and setting things out. In the afternoon I took a break to make myself a sandwich and to lunch in my recliner in front of the TV. Angel, the poor soul I had already moved three times before she was three years old, was homesick for the last place, and was constantly expectant that we were going “home” every time I stood up, and would bolt for the car. As I sat and ate, she stood about four feet in front of me and stared at me. When I finished eating and set the plate on the table beside me, she stood and stared at me.

And then I stared at her. All I saw in her eyes was expectation. And then her eyes shifted from mine to the area just to my right.

And she growled.

Angel was a gentle soul; unless we were playing tug with one of her toys, I never heard her growl a serious growl…well, at least until we moved in with the future Mrs. Farrago and her dogs, but that’s another story.

It started very quietly, but it grew louder as her gaze intensified. For a brief moment I thought she was growling at me, since I’d heard it said that you should never stare into a dog’s eyes, which I had been doing. But then I realized she was definitely looking at something to my right and… b e h i n d m e . . .

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Angel was serious. I turned my head slowly, absolutely clueless as to what she could possibly be looking at. My eyes scanned the wall until they came to rest on something in the corner which hadn't been there before, on top of the wooden bin lid...about three feet away from me. A snake.

S N A K E ! !

The human body is capable of things we can’t possibly envision ourselves doing. How do I know this? I was seated in a soft, comfy reclining chair. I was reclined in this reclining chair. I had leaned forward and my torso was twisted to look at something behind me. The next thing I knew, I was standing behind Angel. I’m certain I flew there. When the quivering full-body shudder stopped I screamed “HOLY SHIT!” …and commenced another quivering full-body shudder.

While I raced frantically around my humble abode to find something with which to kill the snake, Angel stood calmly, quietly, protectively, and watched the snake. I found a baseball bat. I ran to the corner and then I realized that striking at the snake would mean getting to within 34 inches of a LIVE SNAKE! What kind of snake is it? I DON’T KNOW! Is it poisonous? I DON’T KNOW! If I missed it with the bat (I know my own record in baseball all too well!) could it – would it strike at me?

The bat wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t really want to kill the snake anyway, I just didn’t want it to kill me! I ran around for a while more and then I grabbed a can of Raid insect repellent. I didn’t suspect I could kill the snake with Raid, but I could make it really uncomfortable. I sprayed the snake, which then made a mad dash from whence it came, into a separation between the wall of the woodbin and the wall of the house. I sprayed that crack and all of the interior of that woodbin until the can was nearly empty!

After the holiday, when I went back to work, I told my frightening story to some of my co-workers, a few of whom had spent their entire lives in Bumph Huck, Georgia. And, as one might expect, they just laughed at me.

“It was a rat snake,” one giggled at me.

“It was a king snake,” chortled another.

Even if it had actually been a rattlesnake, I think the locals would have laughed at me just the same, just because I had the double-whammy affliction of being a city-boy northerner. And then, privately, they would have experienced their own quivering full-body shudders!

The snake never came back.

An Angel Passes

It is a macabre, cruel power we humans have given ourselves over the lesser beasts in our midst. I mean, specifically, our pets.

I wrote last year of the impending demise of my beloved dog, Angel. I made the decision last weekend to finally put an end to her struggles and indignity…this weekend.

I won’t lay out any more details of her troubles; she was an old dog and had old dog problems. What struck me through the week was the pervasive acknowledgement that these were her last days. It was like a person in the room, an invisible, unpleasant, unmentionable character who waited patiently for the appointed time to take Angel away from me.

Frequent bouts of tears and doubt, and an evil prescience about her future battered me while she blindly went about the business of being a dog, blissfully unaware that she was doing these things for the last time.

But don’t we all? We never know how many beats our hearts have left, or when the car rolls off the assembly line that will be shipped, delivered, purchased and driven into ours. But it was the knowing how much time Angel had left, the scheduling of her final heartbeat, the complicity I felt doing it “behind her back” that wrecked my thoughts and interfered with my work.

And the tears it caused, tears she didn’t understand were for her, let alone understand at all. The mourning process started a week before the vet came to the house. It was mostly at night, bed time, when she always would look at me with those doleful eyes, pleading silently with me not to go upstairs, to stay with her downstairs or to take her up with me. But maybe the week of agony was best.

Not long ago Mrs. Farrago and I had two Dalmatians. Cosmo was hers since he was a puppy. Angel was mine since she was a puppy, and moved with me into Mrs. Farrago’s house back in 1998. Cosmo, two years older than Angel, developed his own set of age-related problems and, in late August of 2004, Mrs. Farrago decided the time had come for him to be done with it. We had consulted weeks earlier with a traveling vet, and on a Saturday we called her. She was available to come the following day, in the early evening to put Cosmo down.

This gave us little more than a day to make our peace with it, to say, hug and kiss our good-byes to him. And he was gone. He wasn’t really my dog, having lived more than half his life before I ever met him. But on that, his last day, I bawled my eyes out as if I had known him since the day he was born. And the next few days were especially difficult.

Angel had been mine since her eighth week of life. She had no concept of life without me; despite my frequent travels, I always returned home. Her appointment set, I was able to ease into the grief a little more, each day becoming a little easier to come to terms with my decision, each day making me, if only slightly, able to grasp the reality that I would soon see her take her last breath.

It didn’t make the very moment any easier to take, as the life left her eyes and her body went slack, but I had, to a degree, prepared myself for the moment. Cosmo helped me get through it, too.

That she go peacefully and calmly were all I could ask for her last minutes, and that’s how she went.

I will remember her and miss her forever.



Angel For Now
October 31, 1993 - April 21, 2007