Wretched the Dog 1973-1976

Box 3: Photo of Wretched the Dog ( Inscribed on the back "died young")

Because things were getting a bit heavy, I present "my" first dog, Wretched. Part Afghan hound; part swamp rat. A sprinter who could escape through the thinnest of margins be they spacial or temporal. His heading? Always the swamp.

As Dad wrote my sister Lansing:
"Wretched has been, well, wretched. He has dug two huge holes in the lawn right in front of the house. I have filled them in and reseeded them three times! Each time I fill it in and reseed it he digs it our again. I am going to put rubber boots on his paws...Wretched now swims three times a day, Each time he goes in the pool the dirt washes off him like an airplane on fire, great plumes of brown "smoke" follow him into the water"


In April of 1976 , while Dad was in Chicago, Wretched raced past us as we opened the car door and sprinted out into the street where he was hit by a car. I never cried the way I did carrying his dying body back to the car. The vet could do nothing for him.
That night my stepmother Sam took Amanda and me to Howard Johnson's for dinner. I could swear the teenagers at the next table were joking about hitting a dog with their car but Sam said that's not what she was hearing. Maybe I was going crazy. Maybe it was the clam platter.