Born to Bark Read Free

if it was a good story, I would try to read it dramatically, changing my voice according to what I thought the people in the book might sound like. My grandparents ormy parents would occasionally walk into the room while I was doing one of my melodramatic readings for the dog and smile or stop for a few minutes to watch and listen, but they never interrupted me or commented.

    I not only read those books for myself, but often read them aloud to Skipper
.
    It was a good time in my life, until Skipper disappeared. I now know that Skippy had contracted
canine distemper
, a viral disease that is almost always fatal. There is no treatment for it, although now there are effective vaccines to prevent it. Even if there had been a treatment for distemper, however, my family had so little money then that sometimes adequate food for the humans could not be assured. My parents would rather have died than to have sought financial help if that meant that peoplewould look upon us as being poor and unable to make it on our own. So if our dog became sick, home remedies were all that we could afford to offer, and if they didn’t work, the dog was simply lost.
    Distemper is a virulent disease and the symptoms are ugly, with vomiting, diarrhea, discharge from the nose, red eyes, shivering, convulsions, and breathing difficulties. When a dog contracts it, the disease escalates rapidly and death often comes quickly. My parents had decided that this would be too gruesome and traumatic for me to see, since they remembered how hard it had been for me to deal with the loss of Rex. They thought that they were doing something kind when they secretly moved Skipper to the basement, next to the coal furnace where he would be warm but out of sight. They then told me that someone had accidentally left the door open and Skipper had run out and was now lost.
    Today, I know that my parents were trying to ease my pain, but at the psychological level it was the worst thing that they could have said to a child. Death, especially by disease, is not something that carries with it feelings of shame, failure, or desertion. Individuals do not choose to die, and their passing away does not make a statement about those who they leave behind. Abandonment is something else. The idea that my dog had run away when I thought that he loved me and I cared for him so dearly meant that I had personally failed that dog. It meant that I had not communicatedto him how important he was—that I was to blame for his deciding that he did not want to live with me any longer.
    When my parents put me to bed that night, I was crying. As soon as they put out the light I dressed myself again and left the house. I was going to find Skipper and let him know that I loved him. I was going to bring him home where we could be together again, and I would never do anything to make my dearest friend unhappy. The police found me wandering the streets calling forSkippy at around 3 A.M. When I was finally brought back home my parents were nearly hysterical with worry.
    By the next night my parents had spoken to someone who apparently explained to them what might be going on in my head. So my father and my mother tried to tell me that Skippy had gotten very sick and died. They tried to reassure me that it was not my fault and he had not run away. They told me that the only reason they had lied to me was that they didn’t want me to see my dog looking so awfully sick. I didn’t believe them but thought that they were now lying to try to make me feel better, rather than letting me face the horrible truth that I had inadequately understood and loved my dog, and he had left me for those reasons. Truth is a powerful weapon, but only if it is the first shot fired. I had built armor against it by then, and my pain and doubt about Skipper would not be washed away by later explanations.
    My mother seemed to know that something further had to be done to lift me out of my grief. So she took the day off from work