A walk with my dog
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Sean of the South
Sean Dietrich
I am walking my blind dog in a public park. We are on one of those community tracks.
People exercise everywhere. Joggers. Walkers. Cyclists. One woman is power walking, wearing earbuds, having a violently animated phone conversation with an invisible person.
My dog, Marigold, and I have been walking a lot lately. It’s not easy, walking. We have very few “good walks” inasmuch as walking in a straight line is impossible when you can’t see. So mainly, we walk in zig-zags until both of us are dizzy and frustrated and one of us needs to sit down on a bench and use expletives.
When I near the tennis courts, I meet a woman with a little girl. They are on a bench, too. The girl sees my dog, and she is ecstatic.
“Look at the pretty dog!” the kid says.
So I introduce the child to Marigold. Immediately the child senses there is something different about this animal.
“What’s wrong with her?” the kid asks.
“She is blind,” I say.
The child squats until she is eye level with Marigold. “How did this happen?”
I’m not sure what I should say here. So I keep it brief.
“Someone wasn’t nice to her,” I say.
The kid is on the verge of tears. “What do you mean?”
This is where things get tricky. I don’t know how much of Marigold’s biography I should reveal. Because the truth is, Marigold was struck with a heavy object by a man in Mississippi who thought she made a poor hunting hound.
“She was abused,” I say.
The little girl’s face breaks open. The girl presses her nose against Marigold’s dead eyes. She feels the dog’s fractured skull with her hands.
“Oh, sweet baby,” the child says.
That’s when I notice the mottled scars on the child’s neck. They look like major burns. I say nothing about this, but the wounds are hard not to see.
“Can I play with her?” the kid asks.
So I let Marigold off the leash. The child and the dog are now loose in a grassy area, chasing each other.
The girl runs, haphazardly. Marigold uses her prodigious nose to find the girl. Marigold is a coonhound with a powerful sense of smell. Marigold could smell squirrel flatulence from three counties away.
“She’s my foster daughter,” the woman tells me privately. “I’ve raised four kids of my own already, but I’m trying to adopt her.”
The girl and dog are now rolling on the grass. Marigold is licking the child.
The woman goes on. “Her biological mom burned her with boiling water when she was a toddler. That’s why the scars. Her mom got mad one night, while she was making spaghetti, she poured boiling water down her neck.”
Now it was my turn to try not to cry.
“When she came to live with us, she was afraid of us, always trying to please us. She was afraid that I’d hurt her if she upset me. I think she finally trusts me.”
I overhear the child and the dog talking. The little girl is whispering into the dog’s ear. I hear her words.
“I’m sorry someone hurt you,” says the child. “It doesn’t mean that nobody loves you. Because I love you. So much.”
So anyway, we had a good walk.
