REMEMBERING KATIE GRAY
When I went across the street to visit, I usually found Katie Gray sitting on the back porch with the sprinkler running on the thick carpet grass under the pecan tree. The conversation always began in praise of animals. We admired Tulip and patted her until she was laughing and wriggling between us.
“Oh you sweet puppy, you sweet puppy,” Katie was cackling like a fool. “You have to talk babytalk to them,” she told me confidentially. “They like that.” It appeared Tulip did, too.
“You know I had an old dog. Wait a minute.”
Katie went in the house and reappeared with a plastic framed photograph of a very fat dachshund.
“That’s Sammy.”
Sam had been a dreadful little spoiled dog, but also sly and cute, and it took Katie the better part of an hour to tell me all there was to know about him. That conversation crashed after its cheerful beginning, once it found its course, on the desolation of little Sam’s death. Katie spoke of the illness of his old age, and his death, as she spoke of other deaths in her family. When Sam had died, it had been like the death of her sister, or her mother, or her husband.
“I was sorry I took him to the vet. That old man just tortured him. When I went to pick him up, as sick as he was he just leaped right out of that nurse’s hands and into my arms. So I took him home and made him as comfortable as I could and let him die. That little girl Karen that lived over yonder out back,” and she gestured toward the back of her house, “helped me bury him and we all cried.”
We sat for a while looking at the twilight in silence. Katie said "What I like about a lot of young people today is that they're kind to animals.”
“I don't trust people who don't love animals," I said.
“I don't either. I think some older people are mean to animals, ” she said. “Not real old ones like me, but the ones in between you and me. And I’m not so sure about the real young ones either. But the ones your age, you know, the ones in your generation, love animals like the people in my generation did."
"They say every other generation gets along. You're more like your grandparents than your parents.”
"I believe that's right." Next
