On the Trail
By Gloria Glasser
Indelibly Duke

It is said that you can’t choose your relatives. But you can choose your dogs.

As a lonely child in a dogs-forbidden household, I cried myself to sleep at night hoping Lassie would miraculously rescue me. After all, the big, beautiful, beloved collie specialized in providing happy resolutions for lost children and doling out some sage doggie comeuppance to thoughtless adults.

Then I chanced to see Lassie out of character in a television appearance on a talk show with her trainer. For starters, she was played by a he, and he was cool, aloof, a bit stubborn, responsive only to his trainer’s sharp commands and proffered tidbits.

My heroine was a phony, a do-gooder only when the cameras were rolling—and more in love with bite-size morsels of cooked lamb chops and veal cuts surreptitiously slipped her/his way than with the adorable, trusting Timmy.

Now there was an early life lesson for an impressionable child yearning for some canine companionship. So I modified my ambition from an impossible dream of owning a majestic collie possessed of rare intelligence and grace. Instead, I settled for walking a neighbor’s rascal of a mutt named Duke for 25 cents per circuit of our gritty city street.

Duke was a carefree character filled with an un-neutered male’s bold wanderlust. He never really needed to be taken for a walk since he’d learned early how to tunnel out of his dog pen and tour the world with his older neighborhood cohorts named Rusty, Pudgy and Major. But he’d inherited from his owner, a kind, patrician lady named Frances, a genteel nobility that suffered with tender patience the attentions of a child determined to formally walk him.

Actually, Duke would sometimes escape Frances’ yard and meet up with me on cold winter mornings (often with his motley posse in tow) and the whole crew would walk me the 11 blocks to school. Where the dog buddies went from there, how Duke found his way back to his pen, was a mystery to me, but he was reliably waiting for his afternoon walk when I visited after school.

After a while I began refusing money for the dog-walking. Duke was one of those mongrels with a loopy grin and "always glad t’see ya!" aspect. Despite his macho roaming ways and utter lack of training, he was kind, sweet and gentle. He was also the one being that made me feel loved and less alone in a world of self-absorbed adults and fickle friends. Walking him was an act of connectedness, not a business transaction.

Duke and his neighborhood buddies flourished in an era of considerable leniency, when family pets were trusted to roam about on their own then come home, and were rarely "fixed." This of course tended to produce a lot of unplanned puppies, but folks were pretty responsible about adopting them out of a sense of obligation, or finding good homes for their pets’ offspring.

We heard tales about a "dog-catcher" but he was widely portrayed as an inept buffoon constantly outsmarted by his prey. Luckily, the roving Rovers never developed any type of pack mentality, and so wandered down crowded avenues, through playgrounds and across schoolyards without a hint of menace in their bearing.

Eventually Duke’s wandering ways got him into trouble with a neighbor who did not appreciate dogs rampaging on his lovely front lawn. Grown elderly and sickly, Frances lost interest in curbing Duke’s carefree ways. As I child I was powerless to do anything but try to make his flimsy, rotting dog pen more secure with dirt and sticks. With a child’s seriousness I lectured him on staying put. Duke grinned and indulged me for a little while, then by the time I reached my front door I’d catch a golden glimpse of him slipping around the corner.

He left for good when I was nine, taken to the pound by the irate neighbor, unclaimed, destroyed. I have had two dogs in the intervening years that have reminded me of Duke, each with reddish-gold fur like his, each possessed of the same enormous joie de vivre and unmistakable grinning mouths. One was rescued from a freeway by a Good Samaritan, the other from a busy city street by an Animal Control officer. When I tell folks I adopted the latter dog from the pound, they exclaim, "Good for you!" And I try not to cry, thinking back to Duke, waiting for nobody to show up.