When I was a kid my Grandfather- who- once he adopted a dog, could make it so that for that dog nothing in the world existed except for the two of them. I mean, it’s not like his dogs weren’t friendly- you could just sort of tell that they looked through people but they always looked at my Grandfather.

So my Grandfather would tell these great stories about his Dogs and there is one I’ve been thinking about a lot recently because you can’t turn on the TV or pick up a paper and see that the economy has tanked.

My Grandfather told me that his family once owned a German Sheppard, it was smart- spooky smart. It could get into the house through open windows, it would show up at my Grandfather’s school or my Great Grandfather’s workplace and just be sitting there at the door.

Waiting.

He told me the dog could crawl along the floor and that it did a lot of other moves that I guess you’d see in trained attack dogs or police dogs but this dog wasn’t aggressive at all.

I asked him where they got this dog and he would say ‘ Oh around’ or he would just tell me he didn’t want to talk about it.

But once my Grandfather and his Sister were doing some serious downing  of their  Christmas booze so I knew if if I was ever going to learn about this dog now was the time.

 I asked about the dog- who they named Tippy for some weird reason- I’ve seen pictures of this dog. Cujo would have been more fitting.

Where did they get it?

My Grandfather said:

” It belonged to this family, you know it was during the depression and the man, well, times were bad. Just bad. He was in a bad, bad way. They were losing everything. So he killed his wife and his kids and then he shot himself. The dog was their dog.”

And then I remember my Grandfather’s sister told me, ” it wasn’t unheard of, for things like that to happen back then.”

So now days I’m thinking now more about the  Dead Kid’s Dog, that story from a long time ago- and I hope that story stays back there in the past and that I don’t turn on the news or pick up a paper and read…