Dog and I Read Free Page B

of the 1840s. Apart from a large and unwieldy family Bible that held a few birth records, wedding registries, and haphazard notes, not much was known about those early years and, truth be told, no one had much cared before this relative’s sudden interest in genealogy.
    When he could not find the birth records he was seeking in the Anglican church of the town of Renfrew, he switched over to the other Protestant churches and, finally, to the Catholic church. And here he uncovered an astonishing family secret.
    My grandmother, listed in the old family Bible as Bea Dowd—my sister, Ann, had even been given the middle name “Beatrice” in honour of her—had been born Catholic, baptized “Bridget O’Dowd” and, somewhere along the line, dropped both her name and her church before she married Tom McCormick, a Protestant from a farm near the little Ottawa Valley village of Antrim.
    In the Valley in those days, Protestants and Catholics were often bitter enemies—my father often telling us how the Catholic kids and the Protestant kids of Eganville would gather on their church sides of the Bonnechere River that split the town and hurl rocks at each other.
    No wonder she had recoiled so much at my naming the dog “Bridget.” The name was never heard again. We called her “Cindy”—and eventually she even came to it.
    IN A WAY we grew up together. Since I was eleven when I got her, we were teenagers together, and there’s no doubt, looking back, that she reached maturity far sooner than I did.
    She was middle-aged when I headed off to school in a city several hours to the north and, from then on, I would be home only infrequently. She, of course, was home constantly. My mother, who had fed her since that first day I carried the three-dollar puppy home in my sweater pocket, took on the care of the dog. She fed her, let her in and out, and even put up a plywood barrier into the back room so that Cindy could be in and warm in winter, but come the good weather she was out day and night.
    My mother believed, as so many of her generation did, that dogs were meant to be kept outside as much as possible. She had a good doghouse built by a local handyman and put in some burlap sacks for comfort. She hooked up a chain to a clothesline so that Cindy could get some exercise. The dog, however, was now much older, going on ten, and hardly needed what was once necessary.
    The problem was not my mother and not the dog. The problem was the owner, and it is a common story among humans and dogs. The kid who once could hardly think of anything but hanging out with his dog became a teenager and wanted to hang out with a different crowd. He failed at school. He dropped out of sports. He fell for a local girl and forgot completely about the old dog. The girl’s father was a teacher and, out of necessity, the boy recovered at school, if only barely, and then moved away to go to a higher school. He was too busy for an old dog—even one who would still go crazy the second she saw him and moan and groan and almost hum if only he could spare a few moments of his frightfully busy and important life to scratch her belly.
    I know there is nothing particularly new in this because I have heard it from others. It doesn’t, however, make it any more acceptable.
    A friend of mine, a lovely writer named Bob Levin, once put into words the regret and guilt felt by those who have a lifelong companion they forget to make time for. Bob’s dog was also a mutt, named Rock, and he wrote about his feelings in a powerful piece that appeared in the Toronto Star late in 2005. His feelings of remorse, and his sense that he had to deal with them, came back to him when, of all things, he was watching a television newscast of the flooding that hit New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The dogs on the rooftops and out on the tree limbs reminded him of Rock in the way that they simply stared at those people far