[August 5, 2026] I didn’t give him much notice until he chased me home one day. My Mom had given me the proper warning, “watch out for that mangy dog.” Rabies was real, although looking back, I don’t think he had the disease. I loved dogs then, and I love them more today, perhaps because I’m less busy, or simply because the years have taught me how much company a quiet animal can keep.
He was smallish and genuinely ugly. Hair had come off in irregular patches, leaving stretches of dull, pinkish skin. He was mostly “skin and bones,” as Mom would say, and he drifted through our neighborhood on the west side of town like a gray ghost no one had claimed. I was young and dumb in the purest sense of both words. I knew almost nothing, least of all about mangy-looking dogs that might carry disease. Best just avoid them when you can.
Avoiding a dog that regularly worked your part of a small town was not always possible. I wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but I wasn’t friendly either. He might have been a “she-dog,” though that seemed unlikely; the females I knew always looked pregnant. In the wilder corners of my imagination I decided he must have been abandoned by some heartless family; too old now, no longer useful. “Dog” bothered no one. That fact alone felt sad.
I nicknamed him “Dog.” Unoriginal? Completely. But the name fit the same way my granddaddy simply called his tomcat “Tom.” It wasn’t pejorative and it wasn’t particularly kind. It was simply accurate. Besides, anything without a name is more likely to seem as if it never existed. Dog did exist. And after a while, he answered to the name.
The first time I spoke it out loud I was halfway down the alley behind the liquor store, a half-eaten biscuit in my pocket. He was limping along the fence line, head low.
“Dog,” I said, not expecting much.
He stopped. One ear, what was left of it, twitched. He looked at me the way an old soldier looks at a stranger who somehow knows his rank. Then he came closer, cautious, still ready to bolt. I broke the biscuit in two and set one half on the ground between us. He waited until I backed up three steps before he took it. That became the pattern.
Over the next weeks the distance between us shrank. I learned he would not come into our yard if our screen door was open, as if he understood the difference between public ground and private. He never barked. He never growled. On hot afternoons he would simply appear in the shade of the oak tree across from our porch and lie there, watching the street with the patience of something that had already outlived most of its expectations.
Mom noticed, of course. “You’re feeding that thing,” she said one day, not quite accusing. “Just scraps.” She studied him for a long moment. “He’s not long for this world.”
I already knew that. The patches of bare skin were spreading. His ribs showed slowly each week. Yet he kept showing up, and I kept saving the ends of sandwiches and the last of the cornbread.
One late-summer evening a car full of older boys came through the neighborhood throwing bottles. One of them bounced near Dog and shattered. He didn’t run. He simply stood, trembling a little, and looked toward the porch where I sat. I walked out, put my hand on the bony ridge of his back for the first time, and stayed there until the car was gone. His skin was hot and dry under my palm. He leaned into my touch.
After that he began waiting for me at the corner when I walked home from school. We never went far together (he didn’t have the strength) but we covered the same neighborhood blocks every afternoon in companionable silence. I talked to him. I told Dog about the fight I’d almost gotten into at recess, about the teacher who smelled of peppermint, about how Dad’s old 12-gauge shotgun still learned against the closet wall. He listened the way only dogs can: without judgment and without interruption.
The last time I saw him the leaves were beginning to turn. He was lying in his usual place under the Oak, but he didn’t rise when I called. I sat down beside him in the dirt. His breathing was shallow. I stroked the few patches of fur that remained and told him he was a good dog, maybe the first time anyone had ever said the words to him. He closed his eyes. Sometime between one breath and the next, he left.
We buried him that evening out in the woods, in the soft ground near the fence where he used to walk. I put a flat rock over the spot so I would know where he was. No name. Just the rock.
Years later I still think of him when I see a stray moving carefully along a roadside. Most people look away. I usually stop. Because once, a long time ago, a mangy dog on the west side of town taught a boy that sometimes the ones who look like they have nothing left to give are the ones who give the most, simply by staying close until the end.
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An old dog called “dog.” How appropriate for a kid. I’d have thought you’d have name him “Spot” or something like that. Good story sir. The lessons learned – at least for me – are not the reason I read your blog, but oftentimes just to enjoy a story with an ending that puts me into a good mood. In a way, Dog’s passing did so in some way. He went to sleep and didn’t wake up. I guess that if he needed someone that you, even as a kid, was a good companion in his last days. That is something you can look forward to because you did something good. Too many times, we have to live with stupid and perhaps evil things we have done, and we cannot ever outrun them. Do good when you can. You did good.
Yep, and a special tbanks to General Satterfield for this sad but grateful story of an old mangy dog. Yes, lessons were learned here, but more importantly, love was learned.
COOL. LOVE DOG PIX