It's Day By Day

Note to reader

I lived this story. I wept as I wrote it a number of years ago, and even now I cannot read it without the tears welling in my eyes. The editor who published it a number of years ago said it was “How a boy—with the help of a loving dad and a loyal dog—learned about war, work, and the costs of freedom.”

At an early age I had a fascination for cameras. I used a couple of dollars of my cotton-picker money to order a little Donald Duck camera from The Johnson Smith Company. Incredibly, it took good pictures. I still have all the pictures I took with it, with the negatives! Among them are some precious shots of my dog, the hero of my story. The photo illustrations are from my Donald Duck camera, except the artists rendering at the beginning.

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My Daddy was wounded in the Argonne, so he already knew about war. Now, with four motherless sons beside a mountain of troubles he had anyway, here loomed the hardships of a bigger one.

He looked to the promises of the American West. Some said the farmers out there had cotton patches hard to see across, producing up to four bales to the acre. A vast country, they said, with plenty of elbow room. Why, out there, he reasoned, a man might break some of his fetters.

The Japanese bombs of far-away Pearl had fallen on every American. Like chain leashes they fell on our necks and anchored each of us to unpleasantries or led us away to worse. Remember Pearl Harbor stickers were yet on windows when Daddy gathered us four boys and left Oklahoma in an overloaded worn-out sedan.

Nine years old and youngest, I faced with every American those savage years. Everyone suffered in some way; for us it was living in board shacks, flea-infested sheep stalls, tool sheds and adobe cockroach hovels, besides the cotton patches, fruit orchards and expansive garlic fields.

Our more respected occupational title would have been Migrant Workers; local citizens frequently castigated us as “fruit tramps”. All of these negatives were more than my proud, steel-structured father could equate. Like every other American, I needed a counterbalance. I was too young to realize it, but Daddy knew.

So one memorable day in my life while Hitler was wasting Europe and the Japanese were enslaving the people of the Pacific where my oldest brother now served below the water line of an embattled aircraft carrier, a friend came over leading a lively puppy on a cotton-cord leash and said I could have him. I fell for him immediately. Oddly then, though no mystery now, Daddy agreed to it–with the understanding that, “He’ll be your dog, so you gotta look after ‘im”.

I asked my friend if he had named him yet, and he said, “Yeah, I call ‘im Possum”, whereupon the pup cast me a pitiful glance. So I renamed him Tip for the sprig of white on the tip of his tail.

We became fast friends from the start, and he quickly became an indispensable part of our belongings. Strangely, our separate lives and individual hurts somehow found strength in this bit of canine. Yes, he was my dog, but he was our common interest. We all missed my brother a lot, especially Daddy who knew the risks of combat. As a family, we would each pet tip’s gentle head from time to time and anticipate a grand reunion after the war.

The war months and years rolled and Tip grew, but our difficult and often close-quartered lifestyle burdened him with something he would never outgrow: That little cotton cord leash grew with him to become his chain. It took a chain to curb his insatiable appetite for chasing cars. The school grounds were forbidden to him. The only answer to his insistence on following me there was a chain. The complaints of close neighbors invariably resulted in a chain. If dogs can hate, I saw it in Tip for that terrible chain, although much of his lifetime would be tethered to one.

Increasingly, moves wearied my aging father. A farmer at heart, he was tied to the pull of other men’s harvests. No doubt the homing instinct rose with his years, and he longed for the Oklahoma hills to where he would finally return. But when the time would come for us to move to new harvests, the question never came up whether Tip was to accompany us. Car, train, bus, no matter how we traveled, Daddy made sure Tip was properly cared for. He became proficient at building transport cages.

Full grown, Tip was medium size, resembling a small Coyote, with the sleekness and speed of a Greyhound. Regardless of heavy feedings, his ribcage showed. His breath was atrocious, his bark was deafening, but he could run like the wind. I was an ambitious boy and he was a lively dog. Our mutual friendship intertwined until we were inseparable.

True to the times, he was a fighter. In fact, that was the only thing about him in which he chose to totally ignore me. I suppose he reckoned a good scrap as simply great sport. He positively loved it. His unexpected tactic of sudden withdrawal and quick re-engagement always took his opponent by surprise and got him the victory every time. I honestly don’t recall that he was ever defeated,even by some much larger dogs. I worried that he might be injured seriously by indulging in such hazardous sport, especially so frequently, so I chained him as often as it seemed necessary. But it never waned his fighting spirit for his victory medal to be only those dreaded links of iron.

Sickness and casualties were common in the lifestyle we led. Boils, flu, cuts and bruises were daily fare. Tip suffered severe injury once by a car as he bolted across the highway to engage a large canine opponent who trotted along proudly as if Tough was his name. I have no doubt Tip could have licked the dog, but not the car.

I told Daddy about it when he came home from the field. He always seemed instinctively wise about ailments in people or animals. He diagnosed his own bronchial condition as a reaction from cotton dust, but I now suspect it was from breathing poison gas on another field. He examined Tip and said he was badly battered, but he would probably be all right. Sure enough, Tip was his old self in a few days. But sick as he was, I had to curb his thirst for adventure by chaining him until he recovered.

The war finally ended and a devastated world turned again toward peace and order. Weary lives were released to won freedom, families reunited. We were all relieved when my brother returned safely from the Pacific, but Daddy seemed especially eased.

In the springtime we moved to Maricopa, Arizona where Daddy contracted with a cotton grower to hoe what seemed to me at the time to be half the state of Arizona. It was a wide, flat country with blue mountains in the distance. Our “house” was a small tool shed made of corrugated iron which barely held our few belongings. We lived, ate and slept outside under the stars. Fetters no longer held us; we all ran freely, laughed a lot, earned our wages and wagged tails. That’s where Tip found fulfillment with a shaggy haired female with whom he left six pups. Yes, we lived life to the fullest out there, having learned indelibly that the good things of life can be fleeting.

In March of 1947 one of my brothers married, and they decided on Fort Worth, Texas, as the place to rear their family. The rest of us were to follow when school was out, so Tip was sent with them to avoid Daddy having to build another transport cage. The last time I saw Tip was through the back window of a 1937 Ford sedan as it pulled away. Leashed to the doorpost, he looked at me solemnly as the car turned onto the highway and disappeared from view.

Two months later I read the sad contents of a letter from my brother; Tip, unhappy with his city chain, caused such disturbance they had to release him. He ran freely for two weeks then disappeared. That had been a month ago and he was still missing. They were sorry, but felt certain we would not see him again.

Somehow I realized then that Tip’s chain would not have been necessary for a farm dog in Oklahoma. Tip was another casualty. Now he was gone forever, and I sorely missed him. I rode my bicycle to a quiet place in the park and wept over the loss of a very dear friend.

When I gave Daddy the news, as I now recall, it seems a little more of the frustration of those four violent years eased out of him. He just looked quietly out the window for a minute then said, “They did right lettin’ him go, Son. Out here it was yours and his chain, but without you along it warn’t nothin’ but cold iron. Tip died a free dog. Nobody oughta settle for less.”

I suppose that was the lesson those flaming years forged into my generation: Some chains are necessary, but there are chains that must be steadfastly resisted at all costs.

Tip was running freely on instinct when he fell victim to the dangers of the big city. The ravages of time finally overcame Daddy, but not without resistance; he died at the age of ninety-one, and nearly to the end he was on his feet and on his own.

Dear to my heart will ever be the discipline of those Arizona cotton fields and Tip and my Daddy and America. Nobody oughta settle for less, chain or no chain.
–DA

Years ago my upholstery shop also served as a home repair center and jammed storage room, the perfect haven for spiders, almost the only menu of the mud daubers who discovered the trove and moved in. I couldn’t bring myself to fumigate them, mainly because I was among them, so the whole bunch took full advantage of the impossibility of keeping them out.

This weakness involved me in a comedy. I worked while mud daubers whizzed by my ears, over my head, close under my nose and between my legs. They collided with me, dropping their mud balls or spiders on my clean upholstery. Meanwhile, two or three might be perched on an upturned chair, another sitting on my shoulder, another riding my arm, another my stomach, all of them twisting their button heads this way and that, watching me work. They seemed to be trying to understand this alien intruder who chose their quarters for such odd goings on. Changing shifts occasionally, they continued their miniature investigation until all seemed satisfied that my presence was permissible.

Meanwhile, the shocking news reached the dense spider population. Terrified, they cowered back into corners, built webs in obscure places, or left outright. The brave hangers-on who previously ambled nonchalantly across open spaces, now took exposes in a flash. Overcome with curiosity, I decided to research the subject. Our set of Encyclopedia Americana got caught in the overflow from our tight-quartered mobile home and joined me in the shop. My fingers ran along the spines, K… L…”M” for mud daubers. Grasping the volume, I… but it was stuck tight. A flashlight revealed that a huge mud dauber nest had it welded to the rear of the bookcase! It loosened stubbornly and I turned to my subject: “Any one of a number of nonsocial wasps of the genus Scelipheron of the family Sphecidae. The females work up ­mud with their saliva, forming a clay with which they build tubular cells which they attach, sometimes on top of one another, to the woodwork of buildings or to stone. When a tube is completed, they paralyze small spiders or insects with their stings and fill the tube with them. laying their eggs in the spiders so that the larvae will have fresh food. The males apparently die soon after mating.” (1961 ed.)

Interesting. I could have researched further, but since by now I was so personally involved with them, I wasn’t sure I wanted an entomologists cold explanations. Early death of the males meant my friends were all widowed mothers. Knowing who was building where, I doled out names for each . The one in the bookcase became Mildred. While doing paperwork at my makeshift desk, I sat squarely in her path to the window. “Buzzzzzz” right under my nose.” Whizzzzzz” past my ear; “peck” into the side of my head, dropping her mud ball on my paperwork. Honestly, it seemed she was distracting me every minute. Deciding to time her, I looked at my watch as she flitted by me and out the window for another mud ball. I looked again when she whizzed by my ear. Exactly sixty seconds. Again I checked her. Sixty seconds. Thinking it coincidental, I checked her several times that day, but each time at exactly fifty-nine seconds I could simply look up and, with absolute precision, she’d be there! I checked some of the others too, and though their trip lengths were individually different, each was equally precise to the second. Oh, how I envied such discipline!

Our crowded quarters meant courtesy was the order of the day. If I met Hazel or Maxine in the line of duty, a moment of hesitation came before courteously moving around each other. Often I would open the door to leave, only to meet Hazel face to face with no more than a few inches between our noses. Usually we would have the standard sidewalk mix-up, both of us moving left or right at the same time. We finally settled on a system where Hazel would hover, I would stop, then she would fly slowly and carefully around my head. She left no doubt in my mind that her unstartled movement as she passed my ear said “Thank you!”

A closed window created frenzied terror for other insects. They couldn’t cope with a see-but-can’t-go situation, so they would thrash themselves all day long on the glass and end up as carcasses on the ledge. But not Mildred; lighting gingerly on the glass, she would immediately head for the nearest hole. This led to my discovery that these shrewd little females could, apparently by sheer intuition, shortly find the most obscure hole in a closed room, even if it was the only hole!

Christine surely brought concern to her peers. By some freak of nature she failed to posses initial know-how for building a nest. Not that she didn’t have courage to try. Picking a grand spot for it in an obscure corner, she then proceeded to smear mud all over everything. She strung it up the wall, built silly nodular topsy-turvies, flattened some out like pancakes thrown against the wall, she even tried to build a bazaar little nest on the end of a string I left dangling from the wall! Evidently the rumors fairly buzzed about her. I think they took her aside and instructed her in the fine art of mud molding, because she finally got it together in late August and built a fine little pod, poked a few spiders in it, laid an egg, and left. I couldn’t fault her on such ineptness; that’s about how I started my upholstery business..

On to Cleo. If Christine was inept, Cleo was downright strange. Her flight was weird, nervous, even sounded different. High pitched, it matched her other eccentric behaviors. Once established, mud daubers always fly an indelible route, no matter how odd it might be, but Cleo’s was purely ridiculous, just no reason for it. She would whiz through the window with her mud ball (skimming my hair, kicking it up in her wake), fly to the middle of the shop, hover, settle to the floor like a tiny helicopter, then set out on foot! Although she had ample room to fly the distance, she ran at breakneck speed about ten feet across the floor and vanished under a chest of drawers. This antic never failed to put a smile on my face. During the dash she leaned sharply forward, her tiny legs pumping like pistons, wings held high in dignity as though she was a proper lady holding her skirts tidily aloft while she engaged in a somewhat undignified sport. Reappearing, she would immediately take flight, spiral upward, then dart out the window. This illogical absurdity went on all summer.

But there’s more on Cleo. Some sort of comical fly waited on a ledge for her to appear, then he launched himself like a shot, tailing her across the room about two inches directly behind her. When she hovered to the floor he landed on a shelf and politely waited for her exit. Again he tailed her, landed on the window ledge and waited for her return. It happened at great speed, for Cleo was no slowpoke. In fact, I had to be quick to observe it, usually held to only a glance; but when I was quick enough, there flew the little booger, zipping along behind as though water skiing on an invisible hair. Why? Beats me. I’ll bet an entomologist would say he was an egg thief or something. Maybe. But I like to think he was simply enthralled with her beauty, the most glorious creature he’d ever seen, and he simply couldn’t help himself. But it was a short-lived affair; he failed to show up one day. I figure he broke his neck chasing her.

By mid-October we had all seen a busy summer. A sad time as well, for mud daubers live only a few months. I was sitting at my desk when Mildred landed on the desk just inches in front of me. Quite naturally, as though she were a person, with chin-in-hand I began a line of small talk.
“How are you today, Mildred?”
“Weather’s getting colder, isn’t it?”
“You’re looking tired, Mildred; better slow down.”

During my discourse, her little head would turn toward me, then she would turn it the other way as though looking longingly out the window, toward me again, now back to the window, then back to me, as though listening to every word. Suddenly she settled her full body to the desk, breast to tail, stretched all of her legs straight out, and gently laid her head forward until her mouth rested on the desk. How very strange! There she lay totally relaxed while I rattled on. At first I thought it a little ill mannered, her going off to sleep while I was talking, but I decided not to disturb her, knowing that in those few moments we were savoring both fellowship and kinship, both enjoying a wonder of our native planet–the breath of life pulsing in each of us. But hers grew short. Then, as though sensing the end of our warm encounter, she quickly drew herself upright and flew out the window.

A few days later I found her little body on the floor by my desk. I picked her up and turned her over in my palm. What a beautiful, fantastically designed tiny creature! Yet she had seemed so personally close to my own existence.

In self-surprise, I realized that I loved these little friendly, obscure creatures. Suddenly I remembered Mildred’s apartment house. She had bequeathed to my trust her progeny, perpetuating our friendship! Excited, I collected all the nests I could find in hazardous places in the shop and stacked them together on a high shelf, forming an enormous condominium complex.

The following spring, out burst my little friends in fresh life, chasing spiders and filling my day with friendship and entertainment, all over again.

You know, I would be remiss if I failed to point out the spiritual lesson in this true story. Acts 1:8 says, “…and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Some believe God Himself will mysteriously get this done in His own good time and Providence, forgetting that these words were His command to His church to get it done by going in the power of His Holy Spirit. If we name the name of Christ, we have a Divine commission He expects us to keep, even as we sit idle waiting for Him to do it. He waits for us to obey, as we wait for Him to do our job for us, instead of inviting Him into our lives to get it done through us.

The lesson is this: Inadequate as we all are in our own strength, God expects us to take Him into our separate, distinctive personalities and do the singular task of telling every willing soul on earth the glorious truth of Divine salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. No one is exempt. We may feel inept, like Christine, and smear our little ball of mud in crazy ways, or be like Cleo who wastes much time crawling when she could fly the distance. We might be like Hazel or Maxine, whose courtesy to a fault prevents them from forging ahead into the unknown, or like so many who sit on the pastor’s arm, or shoulder, or stomach, listening to and observing interminably as to who he is and what he’s about, but never putting what he says to use. Yes, and like Mildred, who glued the Book to the shelf, never finding out what’s in it.

But God made each of us separately, and He will judge us the same way. We used to sing an old Gospel song entitled, “Right In The Corner Where You Are.” May we all ask ourselves that question: What am I doing in my own little corner?
–DA