From: Jasper
Date: 5/9/03
Time: 9:10:59 PM
Remote User:
Charlie,
This is way too weird, especially the age thing and the south …
I was seven years old. My brother George was eight. We were visiting my father’s parents’ farm in South Carolina. They lived in a big house next to the main road. Across the street was a two-pump gas station and general store. My brother and I were playing in the front yard. We got board and started looking for new territories to explore. But our parents wouldn’t let us out of the front yard. We figured that was going to happen so we already had our next request ready. My brother said that we weren’t going far. We just wanted to go across the street to play with the dog.
My grandparents and my father looked at us as though we had said a naughty word. They were shocked. So were we – at their reaction. It seemed like a reasonable request to us. By my mother’s expression we could see that it seemed like a reasonable request to her. She was usually the one who wouldn’t let us do anything cool.
My grandfather asked us to describe the dog. There wasn’t much to describe. It was a mutt, a little hairy thing with a couple of big brown spots. My father asked us what the dog was doing. He wasn’t doing anything special, just walking around the pumps. My grandmother looked at my father then at George and me and told us that there was no dog across the street. George swore that there was. I backed him up, thinking that the adults were assuming that he lied to get out of the yard.
George and I stomped out of the house with our lower lips stuck out. The dog was gone.
Later my father told us what the deal was. He had seen the dog in the gas station, too when he was our age. When he mentioned the dog to his father, his father had looked at him the way they looked at us. Yes, a dog like the one we described did stay across the street where the gas station was. He died there when my grandfather was our age. --Jasper