dash o' cross...

When I was younger, and quite naïve, maybe about 7-10 yrs old, we had a black puppy (a Dachshund crossed with a Foxy, as I recall) which we called Cindy. Cindy was lovely, we got her as soon as she was weaned. She played with us, and licked our hands and faces and loved to run with us, but she had one besetting sin, and because of this we could not take her out the front of the house unless she was on a leash. She wouldn’t keep off the road. Dad and Mum started a training regime, in which the older children helped participate too. She was intelligent & it worked, so that at last one day, she got to such a stage in her training and maturity, that she would sit on the side of the road, on the footpath side of the almost flat, slightly curved, concrete gutter and not even put a foot out on the road, let alone go across it - unless she was given permission to. For less than a week, we could let her out the front, even on the footpath, if we were out the front of the house. How glad we were for Cindy.

But, before a week had gone by, Mum heard a car going by out the front of the house, and a skid of tyres, ending in a thump. When we went out the front, there was Cindy lying on the front footpath with blood leaking out of her head, not quite dead, but on the way… and a car parked nearby, with a distraught lady looking over the dog. I assumed that Cindy must have unlearned all her training. I remember being so confused, disoriented, and slightly cross,  when I found out that in fact, Cindy had not put a foot onto the road.

The lady in anxious fear and trepidation had seen the dog on the side of the road as she was about to drive by, and knowing what puppies were often like, had assumed that this dog was about to run across the road, and thus make her responsible for hitting someone’s lovely little puppy. But she didn’t know how fast it was going to run, so she had steered for the one place that she knew the dog would NOT be. On the footpath, where Cindy then sat. So that is where she had aimed, mounted the footpath, & hit Cindy.