The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley: Unbelievable Truth vs. Believable Lies
Sometimes people didn’t believe me when I talked about the stray dogs that my family adopted when we lived in Sewanee, Tennessee in the 1970s. They didn’t think that the stories about the growling one-eyed dog with the fierce underbite were true. They didn’t believe that we named a stray dog after a troublemaking kid in our neighborhood. They thought I was exaggerating the household chaos and carnage another dog got away with.
That’s the problem with the truth; sometimes it’s too unbelievable to believe. Back then we didn’t have cell phones to record everything, so we were either believed or not believed. We had cameras, but most families went through picture-taking phases and picture-taking droughts. My family’s time in Sewanee was a drought. A lot was going on. I was only 10 at the time and don’t remember everything. Maybe we were too busy to take pictures.
For decades afterwards, I had witnesses to corroborate my stories, but most of those friends and family members are gone now (or I just don’t know where they are), so I have to rely on my memory and the benefit of the doubt from readers when I talk about our three lost dogs of Abbo’s Alley.
The first lost dog was Johnny, the hound (see Childhood Ghost Story- The Prologue). Johnny was an emaciated hound dog that started following me home from Abbo’s Ally, the forest short cut that we took when we walked from our neighborhood to the other side of the college town (I don’t remember if Johnny just followed me or if I encouraged her). Since she seemed terrified of adult men and my dad was kind of big and loud, she wouldn’t go into our house for weeks once we ‘adopted’ her. For a while, we just fed her and she’d hang out in our yard overnight.
We named this emaciated hound after a kid named Johnny (previously mentioned in The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley: Rocks) after the dog ate Johnny’s lunch in the local park. Johnny was a kid, maybe a year older than I was, who got into trouble a lot, both at home and everywhere else. I guess he wasn’t the type to eat at the dinner table with his family, so one night Johnny’s older sister brought him a plate of decent-looking food and left it on a park bench while she acted like she was looking for him (I think she was more interested in flirting with the guys at the park).
As soon as she turned her back on the dinner (possibly to flirt with the guys at the park), the emaciated hound dog climbed up on the park bench and devoured Johnny’s meal. Johnny’s sister just named the dog Johnny right there so that she could tell her folks that Johnny ate the dinner. Johnny the kid ended up hating Johnny the dog and would throw rocks at her when he got the chance. Even though Johnny wasn’t officially my dog yet, everybody knew that she hung out in our yard (when she wasn’t stealing dinners in the park), so I got to decide if the name stuck.
Johnny (the human), if you’re still alive (doubtful if you kept throwing rocks at dogs), I’m sorry that your sister named my stray dog after you, and I’m sorry I agreed to the name. And I’m sorry that my stray dog ate your dinner. I should have replaced it for you, and I should have renamed the dog. I was in fifth grade and didn’t have manners. In my defense, you were kind of a jerk. You hit me with a rock unprovoked once, but still…
*****
Another dog was Muff, the black terrier mix. He was probably the dumbest, funniest, friendliest dog I’ve ever seen, a thick straggly black terrier mix of something big. He would walk through people, head-butt doors, climb on tables, knock down stuff, and eat anything he wasn’t supposed to with impunity. And nobody ever got mad at him. Even my dad with his unpredictable bad temper laughed whenever Muff destroyed something. He seemed indestructible. And then one day Muff just disappeared. We figure he got poisoned. I guess he couldn’t eat everything after all.
It’s not implausible that Muff got poisoned. It was common practice for homeowners in Sewanee to leave poison traps for the stray dogs that kept getting into the outdoor trash at night. Like I said in an earlier episode, Sewanee had a stray dog problem. And maybe a poison problem too.
Since I never saw Muff’s dead body, I don’t consider this a “dead dog’ story. If he was indeed poisoned, then I never saw him in his final moments. I didn’t cry over him as he gasped desperately for his final seconds of life. He just disappeared. He wasn’t very smart, though. He could have just gotten lost in the endless forests surrounding Sewanee and found another family to charm. Now that I think about it, I like that version better.
*****
Our final lost dog was Friday, the one-eyed lhasa apso. Supposedly, ‘lhasa apsa’ means ‘little lion.’ If you only had Friday as an example, ‘little turd’ might seem more appropriate. He was probably the most unlikeable dog we’d ever met. We only kept him because we felt sorry for him, but he warmed up to us… after a few years.
People had to see Friday to believe what I said about him. When I described him as a tiny cyclops with a vicious underbite, my friends imagined a dog with an eye in the center of his head, but the reality was worse. He had been beaten so badly (not by us) that he had lost an eye. In its place was an empty socket with a thick clump of hair dangling out of it. Friday was kind of sensitive about that thick clump. He didn’t like people playing with it or trying to get rid of it either.
The short version of Friday’s origin story is that my uncle found this straggly mini-hellion beaten up (I don’t remember if the eye was hanging out or already gone) on a street corner in a suburb of St. Louis on a Good Friday. My uncle wrapped up the abused dog, took him to the vet, and got him healed up at home, but his family already had a male dog in the house, a bossy dachshund named Sergeant. Once Friday healed, Friday and the Sarge had territory disputes and lined the house with pee borders. Since my family was taking care of dogs anyway, (Muff didn’t stay in the house all that much), we agreed to take Friday.
Sewanee didn’t have any leash laws at the time (or if it did, the laws were ignored), so Johnny and Muff ran loose during the day and usually would stay with us at night. Friday was too small to let run loose (we tried walking him on a leash through Abbo’s Alley, but he growled at everybody, people and dogs alike, and ruined everyone’s vibe. All the dogs wanted to fight him. So did a couple people.), so he stayed in the house all day. He probably thought the house was his and that the bigger dogs were intruders.
All three dogs deserve their own stories. I’ll probably give each one a blog post with the actual unbelievable but true stories. Johnny has already been mentioned here and was my favorite and has the most ‘unbelievable’ stories (not related to her name). Friday was the most interesting (with the happiest ending). Muff will be the most difficult; I don’t remember much, but everybody liked him except Friday.
Ironically, Friday was the only dog we kept when we moved away from Sewanee after three years. Johnny wouldn’t have handled the leash laws where we were moving (she would have kept digging her way out of our yard or something if we’d tried to keep her locked up), so another family in Sewanee kept her. At least, I hope they did. I felt kind of funny about that when we moved, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I was 12. And of course, we would have liked to have taken Muff, but he… he… he found another family to charm.
I occasionally think about getting a dog, but it’s probably not a good idea for me now. I have a bad back, so I wouldn’t be able to rough house with a medium or big dog like I used to. Little dogs are okay, but I’d probably trip over it or hurt my back bending down or something stupid, and any one of those situations would potentially cause a whole new set of problems. I like other people’s dogs, though. That brief time when my family had three former stray dogs in the house gave me a lot of stories to tell, but people often think I’m exaggerating.
Sometimes it’s easier just to tell plausible lies that everybody will believe.
Oh yeah, my house in Sewanee had a ghost too, but I never said anything about it at the time. Nobody would have believed me.
For more, see…
Dysfunctional Literacy 