'Depression is a relapsing and remitting illness' and occasionally it is more prone to bite at one's ankles than it is at other times. I was alone. Indeed I was to end up for a short time being more alone than I had ever been before leaving more than my ankles to be bitten at. People being around me were of absolutely no relevance. A chain rather than a comedy of errors on my part would be inadequate to explain how my ever faithful companion, my German Shepherd, sank a tooth into a meter reader man. He had interpreted this man to be a threat to me and I had failed to react either quickly enough or appropriately. How I hated people just then...as I set off to have my dog and my very best friend destroyed. He was the only one that I needed and the only one that needed me. I turned the car around and came home. Tied and muzzled my old friend lay next to my chair in the garage where I sat. I was certain that there would be consequences for us to face but uncertain as to what they might be. All I knew right then was that I had insufficient inner strength to have him put down and he had done nothing to deserve to die for. We hid together as I continued to type Changing Speed 2. We remain together. The consequences I was anticipating never materialised.
He had no chemical imbalance that I could tell. He being two testicles lighter for a number of years, his behaviour was more down to poor learning on his part or bad teaching on my part than testosterone. My testosterone had never created a desire within me to play with the postman's balls. Sadly for my dog the vet believed that the dog's testosterone was creating such a desire within him putting either one or both of the postman's balls under serious threat. In order for the postman's testicles to be made safe it was the vet's learned opinion that my dog would have to lose his. Life is a bitch. At least life has got very close to being a bitch for my dog who still longs to play with the postman's balls which until recently were still attached to the postman. The postman has however now become a postwoman, a title not recognised by my computer's spell check and not differentiated by my dog.
This dog loves me unconditionally as I love him. I got to thinking about both my dog and my father. It is not that they share characteristics. Indeed they are opposites. The dog carried on as if he had responsibility to protect me above everything else. This dog would carry out his responsibility fiercely if necessary whether inside or outside of the house. My father was violent when inside the house and determined to protect his opinionated rights against smaller people or disadvantaged animals. The dog didn't mind sharing his food with the cat and would have happily shared with me. When I was a child my dad would blame me for eating the biscuits that he would hide in his 'special drawer', down the side of 'his' chair, in his stomach. The dog could be violent without alcohol should he think that I was under threat. My dad would be violent with alcohol because it would make him feel bigger, as long as whoever was to be threatened was factually smaller.
His attitudes to us, his children, when he was drunk were not always predictable. Even so I would always know whether to make myself scarce or not from my earliest memories. I recall him coming home from one of his sessions at the pub. The chimes of an ice-cream van could be heard approaching. He almost ruffled my curly hair and told me to get myself an ice-cream. I was to keep the change. I could have bought twenty or more ice-creams with that ten shilling note. I chose to buy none and hid the note in my bedroom. Perhaps I should have felt some pangs of guilt the following day when I saw my father searching through his pockets. He said nothing about spending so much money the previous day in his drunken stupor and I said nothing to suggest that he hadn't.
Sadly for us he was not always in such a benevolent mood when he returned from his pub visits, at least not in the sense of financial generosity. I recall him coming home from another one of his day time sessions at the pub that somehow seemed to roll into the night time hours. I would have been seven years old. My mother was in the kitchen, quietly and subserviently cooking his dinner. He was in the living room. As I walked through from being with my mother into the living room, on the way to my bedroom upstairs where she had told me to go, he was stood upright holding the metal waste paper bin to his crutch. He was urinating. It was his right. This much I could see in his face. I tried to walk on through the room toward the stairs with all the casualness that I could gather as a young child trying to escape the potential dangers of such a situation but he was not about to allow that and called me back. I swear that his eyes were full of evil. He sneered at me in a way I will never be able to forget as he pushed his penis back into his trousers and gave the bin full to the brim of urine to me. I did as he instructed me to and took it to my mother trying harder than anything I had tried before not to spill a drop. I felt more threatened by her lack of reaction at that time than by his behaviour though I have learned to try and understand more of how she was thinking and feeling since then, with limited success. It was a different age back then. At least it was a different age in our house.
