by Sandra Lowen

Created on: August 07, 2010

EARLY MORNING DOG WALKING

I never got to walk Phantom; he never would have tolerated it. Maybe when he was a miniscule ball of mongrel fluff, with a long skinny head and enormous feet. “He’s going to grow to fit them,” the vet told us, and did he ever! Within a few months, about the time he had fertilized the last cubic foot of our backyard and was ready for the leash, he had muscles that rivaled Charles Atlas’ biceps and probably double the strength. “He’ll pull you into the street,” Daddy said, and so the task of walking Phantom fell to him.

Daddy wasn’t a pet-loving kind of guy. The product of a lot of hard luck and missed opportunities, he had become about as loving and giving as a black hole in space. “I didn’t want kids,” he would say—we hoped jokingly- “and now I’ve got to take care of a dog?” He’d grumble into his cordovan shoes and brown homburg that he never went outside without, and pick up the leash. “I didn’t ask for this!” he’d mutter to the pinking dawn.

Nobody had asked for Phantom, but he’d come to us just the same. We’d gotten a letter from my brother Lance, who was stationed with the Navy in the Philippines somewhere. “I’m sending you something special,” was all he’d said. I’d hoped it was a Koala bear, ooh, or maybe a parrot. I wasn’t sure exactly what part of the world those animals came from, but it was warm in the Philippines, and I couldn’t imagine a parrot hanging out in Iceland, so surely there was one there that he could send us. Daddy had said maybe he was sending home his laundry, hah-hah. Finally the package had arrived, and Daddy had signed for it. It didn’t start whining until he got it into the house, or probably he would have chased the deliveryman down and made him take it back. It was Lance’s dog, a tiny pup he’d fallen in love with and wanted to keep forever, only he got shipped right back out, this time to Puerto Rico, and after that he treated Phantom as if he were our dog, not his.

So Daddy got to walk him. Up one side of Fourth Street they would go, Daddy anxious for Phantom to ‘make’ so that Daddy could run him home and get into his work clothes, Phantom pretending to be terribly constipated and not letting so much as a dribble pass until he really couldn’t hold it any more. Daddy would drag him home at a clip,

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