The real dog days

This is my weekly column that ran in the Sunday, April 26, 2009 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. It is based in part on an essay that I wrote for KAXE last year.

The real dog days
By Aaron J. Brown

They’ll tell you the dog days come in August when it’s hot, but I think April deserves the title. The snow just melted, reminding people all over the northern states that they own dogs and that those dogs have been going outside all winter to do something. What, you ask? You know. Now, we all know. Anyway, something about combing the yard with the “scooper” has me feeling wistful about the dog days of yore.

The current dog in my life is named Molly, but we usually call her MoDog. She’s a cairn terrier, a breed bred to kill varmints in Scottish cairns – rocky formations that do not exist in our back yard. Without any cairns to patrol MoDog divides her attention equally between barking at anything that moves anywhere in her conscious vision and sleeping on the couch.

If you ask me to name the greatest moment with Molly I really couldn’t give you just one. There was the time she got her collar caught on the wire basket that held all her toys. She bolted across the living room in a panic, spraying squeaky toys everywhere while trying to escape the metal menace attached to her neck. One time, back when we lived in town, I came home on my lunch break to find her sleeping on a sunny spot on the kitchen table. MoDog is always there when you want to hug a warm mammal in a totally platonic way. MoDog pretends to resent our three young boys for all the attention they get and fur they pull, but every morning she is the first to check on them in their bedroom and she wags her tail when they smile at her.

Yes, MoDog has a heart of gold and the list of special moments with her grows every day. But on this day, in deference to the belief that MoDog’s greatest times may yet be ahead of her, I instead consider the past. I point to what was once a greatest dog moment for my sisters and I growing up on an Iron Range salvage yard during the Reagan Administration. It was the moment our first dog appeared by accident and it lasted until a few days later when we realized our new dog was cheating on us.

One day a happy, black and white specked dog showed up at the back door of our green and white trailer house. We would learn later (from a book I think) that she was some kind of Australian Retriever, bred to herd sheep. I secretly hoped that this meant that this dog had actually been to Australia, something that brought an exotic flair to a place that always smelled like used oil. This dog was hungry. Can we feed her, mom? Can we keep her, dad? Murmur, murmur, something about that dog looking familiar. Murmur, murmur, I guess you can feed it but don’t get attached.

Dottie was our first dog. How can three kids ranging from ages four to seven NOT get attached to the most awesome dog on the planet. I mean, she was from Australia! For several days we ran around the yard with Dottie, fed Dottie, frolicked and fed her some more. Then, suddenly, Dottie disappeared. My sisters and I were very concerned. Where could Dottie be? But we would later learn that our first dog had never been ours at all. She belonged to a family living up the road a couple miles. She had a different name. She was never really our dog.

We were devastated, for sure, but the benefit of time has allowed me to look back at those days when Dottie was ours, when this playful, bouncing, Australian dog had come from nowhere to be our friend. Those were good days. Good dog days.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Contact him or read more at his blog MinnesotaBrown.com. His book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” is out now.