I was a Collie

After my best friend, Betsy M, dumped me (admittedly doing the bidding of her mother, who would not allow me in the house until I said I loved Jesus Christ) I decided, wisely but ridiculously, that my next best friend would be Jewish. This was wise because even if my next best friend dumped me, at least she wouldn't do so for such a ridiculous reason as my being Jewish, and thus was safer than otherwise, but it was ridiculous because it ignored the wisdom I already had at the tender age of nine, which was that I lived in a wider world than that, and the heart seeks what it will and does not obey rules. (I also did not wish to be selecting my friends, or living my life, by Mrs. M's rules; if your own heart cannot follow yours, why should your life be led by someone else's -- especially when you know them to be unfair?)

Nonetheless, Nancy F became my next best friend. She was sometimes cranky, sometimes didn't like me best, definitely had an argumentative streak... but she was Jewish, and her mother and I got along famously (and do I recall correctly that Nancy had a cute older brother?)

Nancy and I both loved dogs, and became dogs. In our play, which consisted largely of romping around our lawns, we were canine. We were highly competitive about breeds; we could not both be collies, or both be golden retrievers, so we took turns. Goldens were fabulously bright, silky and noble, but collies were all that and darned near godlike. My family had gone out to see "Lassie Come Home" (in revival) and I'd fallen in love with the shaggy transvestite (y'all do know Lassie, a girl, was always portrayed by a boy-dog, right? -- in this case a pup named Pal, who had played Lassie in six films and two episodes of the TV series, and had already died, at the respectable age of 18, before I was old enough to go to a movie). I think we went to see it as much because my mother had been briefly acquainted with Elsa Lanchester (whom she said she "slept with" but meant only that as a child she had shared a bed with the actress due to a dearth of furniture, not that she'd been sexually involved) as because I was so well enamored of dogs (I had a breed chart in my room and could name every dog on it). It didn't hurt anyone's feelings that Elizabeth Taylor was in that movie, but to me, as doubtless to most of the viewers, Lassie was the star. Collies rule and as grand as goldens may be (and they are), Nancy and I fought for the right to be a collie.

My mother was not worried about my being a dog (I don't think she knew) but she was worried about my reading "grown-up" books instead of children's literature. (I had devoured all of my father's college psychology texts at the age of eight and understood all of it, not just the words but the concepts -- I checked later, as an adult, to confirm -- except for one word, for which I thought I understood the concept but which understanding I could not confirm, for it was a word then to be found in no dictionary. The word was "masturbation" and a few years later I did manage to find it in a dictionary, but the definition was obtuse enough to be meaningless to a kid of, by then, 13: self-abuse. What the hell was self-abuse and what did abuse have to do with the interesting, albeit secret, activity I thought I understood the word to indicate?) She was loathe to censor me but thought it might be wise to temper the possible ill-effects of my choice of reading material by introducing me to tamer fare, and consequently bought me a few editions of The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew and Lassie, that last being the only one in which I had a real interest, although I obediently read (and learned from) them all. The Lassie book I am unable to find, though I have searched for it with (I think) the right keywords, for, alas, I don't remember its title; the plot, as I remember it, involved a friend of our child hero's (was it Timmy or Jeff? let's say Jeff, just to have a name) whom Lassie brutally attacks, to the horror of all concerned. Now the big question in everyone's mind is: do we need to put Lassie down? However, the big question in Jeff's mind is, instead, what made Lassie behave so atypically? The answer (at the end of the story): Jeff and his friend were approaching a thicket full of poison ivy, to which Jeff was immune but which would have inconvenienced the other child a great deal. Lassie, being smarter than most humans, knew all about such things and, far from meaning the boy harm, was jumping on him to protect him from the dangers of the toxic thicket. Happy ending for all, Lassie gets to live, the child doesn't develop an itchy rash and yours truly learns, for the first time, what "immune" means. (All I learned from Nancy Drew was the color and substance of amber and the concept of reincarnation.)

I was in the fifth grade when Nancy (not Drew; my new best friend, remember?) and I took turns being collies; by the time I entered the sixth grade, Nancy and I had drifted apart and I was a full-time collie. I barked in class when called on by the patient teacher, Miss May. (In these random and admittedly rambling memoirs I do not often cite folks' surnames unless they're famous -- if Pal had a surname I'd be citing it -- but Miss Elizabeth Patricia May was my favorite teacher, at least until I hit college, her incredible assets including, but not being limited to, her ambidexterity, her ability to hit -- and accurately direct -- a volleyball with her cranium, and her acceptance of such a silly, possibly disruptive thing as one of her students' barking in class. Appropos of nothing I also recall that Miss May forbade us to wear orange on St. Patrick's Day.) During recess, I bit a girl who pugnaciously approached me claiming to be a cat. In retrospect, I believe I may have been insane, although I knew quite well (and would admit to anyone who asked) that I was a little girl, not a dog. The truth is, being a little human wasn't working out so well for me at the time, and caninity seemed as good an escape as any.

Throughout the sixth grade, I spent time, even class time, drawing collies (ineptly) and reading the nonfictional and fictional books of Albert Payson Terhune. Lad was my hero, and I loved Treve, but I secretly hungered, too, to be Wolf.

In the spring of 1963, at the age of 11, I learned that my family would be moving from New Jersey to Maryland, and I would not be going to junior high school with the same children I'd know since the third grade, and at whom, for the past year, I had barked. I stood up in front of the class on the last day of the school year and announced that I had decided to be human again and that I would, therefore, at that moment, bark my last bark, which I then tearfully did. Amazingly, everyone had accepted me as a dog and now accepted my farewell bark. I never saw any of them again.

I have a picture of us (not on the computer, so I can't show you), all in the fifth grade, with our teacher, Mrs. Dennison (who, as far as I know, could not hit a volleyball with her head but was still a nice person and probably a good educator). (Nancy F was never in any of my classes; she is not in this photo.) We are almost exactly the same gang we would be a year later. In this picture, everyone looks, to me, at once like children and like people of my own advanced years, for they were my peers, and I cannot look at them and see them as otherwise. The only person in the picture who looks like a child is me. I was a year younger and a foot shorter than everyone, with a babyface to boot. I believe my eyes are closed and my mouth is open. My glasses are likely a bit cockeyed (as was, and am, I). I do not look like someone who barked (and at that time, I was only barking part-time, and off-campus). I can name most of the kids in the picture, and even those with whom I did not have memorable encounters (with some I did) betray to me, who both knew them and did not know them, at least their public personae. I remember who was silly, who was prim, who was kind, who was bright, who was popular, who was even more popular. Because they also look like adults to me, I can see them in jobs, with families. I cannot see that in myself, not the me in that picture. I identify completely with the picture, but I look to myself like someone who might wet the bed (probably because at that age, and for a couple years to come, my secret shame and the bane of my life was that I did). One thing not one child or adult in the picture resembles in any way, shape or form, is a collie.

That just shows you how little the camera knows!