To preface: my human son used to bring home pets. Many pets. Unusual pets. At times, challenging pets. Stinky was just such a pet. Stinky was a little blond (in both the physical and stereotypical sense), freckled, floppy-eared hound puppy. He was fathered by our little crooked-nosed stub-tailed beagle, Chico (aka Chickie-Poo) and inherited his daddy’s amazingly stubborn gene. Stinky was the result of Chickie’s dalliance with Ginger and, except for his gender, was pretty much a clone of his mommy…who was not particularly bright. (Okay, she was really, really NOT bright.) And we named him Stinky because, well, he was a bit pungent. Always smelled faintly of puppy pee.
One hot summer afternoon we decided to drive about an hour to check out an exposition by the Hudson-Essex-Terraplane club. My former in-laws had driven their Essex from California to the Midwest for the show, and this was an opportunity for a visit while they were in the general area.. So…my good friend and I packed up my human kid, her kids, maybe another stray neighborhood kid (not sure, as we were like a little commune at times kid-wise), and…yep!…Stinky. And off we went.
The show was great, featuring a fascinating array of antique vehicles. The visit was enjoyable. The return trip, however, went a bit less smoothly. I was driving my little Datsun F10 wagon with the back seat folded down so the kiddos and the puppy could stretch out in the back. (Seat belt laws were not a “thing” back in those days.) Zooming down the expressway just past the central interchange, I felt Stinky trying to nudge his way to the front, specifically onto the gear shift. I bopped his nose slightly, reprimanded him, and sent him back with a warning to the kids to keep him on the leash so as not to cause an accident. Very shortly thereafter I heard a yip and assumed my son must have disciplined Stinky for some minor infraction…until I looked at my rearview mirror and saw the puppy skidding across two lanes of the expressway behind us. Apparently he had leaned out the window, and his floppy ears took flight!
Yikes!!! What to do??? I could see in the mirror that all lanes of traffic were screeching to a halt (lots of traffic as it was rush hour on a Friday), and Stinky had scudded to a stop under one of the vehicles. So, thinking quick — or maybe not thinking, I pulled onto the left berm by the guardrail and began to back up to attempt to retrieve him. At this point my friend (who was in the passenger seat on the side of the car that would be threated by traffic if they started up again) was freaking out and yelling at me for this brilliant maneuver. But I was on a mission so we were going backward as fast as possible until we reached the line of stopped traffic. Lo and behold, they all started to move again. Where, oh where, was the dog?
We started moving forward again, carefully merging into traffic, puzzled by Stinky’s sudden disappearance. Then one of the kids yelled, “Over there!”; and, sure enough, there was Stinky, being held by a driver to our right. We beeped the horn and gestured — “Our dog!”, and we followed the other driver off a ramp to the right to retrieve the errant mutt.
Stinky just stared. Vacantly (although that was not a particularly new phenomenon). Non-responsively. “Hey, Stinky!” Not so much as a blink. “Yo, Stinky!” Not a flinch. Staring. Vacantly. All the way back to my friend’s house where we got out of the car and she checked him over and saw that he appeared to be bleeding from the posterior. Panicked, I ran into her house to phone the vet. As the phone was ringing, my son came in and announced that Stinky was interacting and playing with my friend’s dog. Stinky had apparently been in shock until his Pomeranian buddy wanted to play. Whew!! The blood on his bottom, it turns out, was road rash from skidding across two lanes of traffic at 50 mph. Again, whew!!
The next day, Saturday, when we were at the motorcycle races in a town between home and the location of the Hudson-Essex-Terraplane Club show (my human son raced dirt bikes; my monkey kids never did), I was sharing the events of the dog falling/jumping out the window with the wife of the referee who began to laugh. “Oh, my gosh!” she exclaimed. “We heard that on the news! They reported traffic was backed up for five miles at the central interchange, but when the police got there, they couldn’t find the dog!”
And that, my friends, is the first of the Stinky stories!