Roger and the Speed Trap

(My mom's old Pulsar)

Roger’s forlorn and ragged condition had at least one redeeming feature or at least on one day when my mom was traveling from Greensboro to Raleigh to visit her mom. The trip, sometime in the mid 80s, and my mom still had her red Nissan Pulsar which she eventually traded in the late 80s for a red Nissan 240SX. Back then, I-40 ended in Greensboro so the trip taken then was on I-85 to Durham where one would have to take US-70 which would take the traveler straight to Raleigh. The trip at the time was well over an hour and a half. First, I-85 was 2 lanes in both directions, but now it is 3 or 4 depending on where you are. Second, it didn’t take many slow drivers going in the left lane to clog traffic. The whole concept of “Slower Traffic Keep Right Except to Pass” meant nothing to NC drivers who often felt that as long as they payed their taxes, they could drive in any damn lane they wanted and as slow as they felt. A third reason the trip was slower back then was that US-70 was dotted with red lights. Lots and lots of red lights. However now that I-40 has been extended from Greensboro, through Raleigh and on to Wilmington, the Greensboro-Raleigh trip is just over an hour. And yes, the increased speed limits helps a whole lot too.

My mom was on Glenwood Ave almost near Crabtree Valley Mall which meant her trip was almost over. Something to note about Glenwood Ave. near the mall is the steepness of the hill especially for an area close to the coastal plains. A car in neutral can roll down this hill, a hill which has an 8% grade, and reach speeds well over 60mph. This wouldn’t be a big deal except for the fact that the speed limit is 45 in that stretch. That area is a notorious speed trap.

It was in this stretch where the crux of this story takes place. My mom and her lead foot were going well over 60 by her own admission. At the bottom of the hill, she saw a cop behind her about a quarter of a mile weaving in and out of traffic making his way towards her. My mom not only didn’t slow down, but she almost made a clean break. Before she was able to make it to the Beltline, the cop finally caught her and pulled her over.

“Ma’am, do you know how fast you were going?” the cop asked. My mom said no. “65” he replied. My mom feigned ignorance and surprise “Really, that fast?” At this stage, my mom was in trouble. It wasn’t until the officer looked inside my mom’s car and saw Roger floundering in the front seat that my mom’s fortune would change.

The car, whose AC had broken, was sweltering in the summer heat. On top of that, an almost hairless Roger panting heavily in the front seat must have brought sympathy and pity from the officer.

The officer said “Ma’am, most people slow down when they see a cop behind them, but you just kept going.” My mom responded “it was too late then to do anything.” The officer laughed and while looking at Roger said “Mam, I’m going to let you go so you can get your dog inside. He’s having a rough time out here. Please slow down.”

And that was how Roger got my mom out of a speeding ticket.

He was a lover and a fighter.

(GSD = german shepherd)


There was no doubt that Father was a ‘Lover’, after all his name derived from his sexual prowess in fathering god knows how many litters of puppies. Now I want to mention the aggressive side of Father. I’ve commented before about my apprehension of Father’s temperament. He was ‘semi-feral’ and furthermore, he was mean to me when he first came around our home. It turns out my misgivings about Father were not unfounded. I would later find out that Father knew how to fight and would readily scrap with any dog that challenged him. I’ve noted in this entry how Father tried to kill Abby in Abby’s first week at our home. This is just the tip of the iceberg concerning Father’s disposition to fight. What made Father’s belligerent tendencies around other dogs even scarier was the fact that Father was good at fighting. He pulled no punches and literally went for the jugular.

For example, a couple of stray dogs ventured to our house one afternoon curious to check-out the canine scene. When the pair saw Father who was on the other side of the fence from them, one of the dogs high-tailed it out of our yard. The schnauzer stuck around--dumb. Father jumped over the fence (the new fence had not been installed at this time) and faced off with the schnauzer. Not only did the dumb little shit not run away, but he squared off with Father and postured defiantly. This dog was about to have a bad day, almost as bad as a day can get for a living creature. Father didn’t bark or growl. He immediately sized up the dog, took his right front paw and knocked the schnauzer to the ground and in a near simultaneous move, clutched the interloper by the throat and lifted the animal off the ground. Father then began to shake his head back and forth vigorously. Now, did the schnauzer realize the dire situation and began screaming for its life. Father handled that thing like it was a rag doll. Had I not intervened, Father would have killed the trespasser, but I yelled at Father and by the time I opened the gate, Father dropped the dog, and the schnauzer ran away. We never saw him again.

Another fight I saw Father get in was with a German shepherd about 20 pounds heavier than Father. The dogs first met while Father was accompanying me on a run one afternoon. As we jogged by this dog’s house, he started barking and yelling at Father. Father was scared and rightly so. I had to protect Father from the bigger, aggressive, unfenced, and unleashed dog. We turned around and went back home. GSD 1 Father 0.

A couple of days later, the very same gsd came to our house. I guess he felt emboldened by Father’s fleeing and ostensible cowardice the other day and wanted to drive Father completely out of the neighborhood. This took a lot of nerve for the gsd to invade Father’s territory. The gsd walked up the hill where Father met him. This time, Father would not back down. I can’t fill in the details of the full encounter between those two, but the most vivid recollection I have is both of them on their hind legs with both of them baring their teeth. Even though Father gave away 20 pounds to his opponent, Father somehow gained a strategical advantage in this fight by locking down on the gsd’s throat with his jaws. Once again, Father was going for the kill, and once again, I had to intervene to save a neighbor’s dog that bucked up against Father in a losing battle. The gsd tucked its tale and ran away. A few days later, he had the nerve to return to our house, but this time all it took to ward off the trespasser was Father’s barking. The gsd didn’t even step foot on our land. We never saw him again.
There was a close call at the vet’s office one visit. In the waiting room, Father was sitting to my left while to my right a few feet away was an extremely high-strung Jack Russell Terrier. The little loud and yappy bastard constantly barked at Father for 5 minutes straight. The owners did nothing to curb his obnoxious taunting. I guess they thought it was cute. Meanwhile, Father was either too scared or weak to snap back at the dog. He may have been still recovering from the car sickness he suffered on the ride over. Father was also scared of the vet, so he couldn’t give his full attention to the little snot. Finally, Father was about to snap. He slowly lifted his head, turned to face the Jack Russell Terrier and let out a slow and low growl. Normally Father doesn’t give a warning to a dog he is about to kill, but these circumstances were unusual for him and he was out of his element. The JRT immediately shut the hell up and actually ran behind its owner. Finally, the owner spoke up and said to his dog ‘You better shut up or he’s going to kill you.’ Father would have killed him. I had no doubt.

Spank

(From the spot the photo was taken just past the mailbox was the route Abby took when she was chasing a squirrel as described in this passage.)


“This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” Was there ever a trite overused expression more annoying than that especially when said by your parents right before they were about to administer a spanking to you? In the times one of my parents said this to me, one of the first things to cross my mind was “Sure, let me have the switch, and I’ll beat your ass instead.” Of course this cliché was a hollow meaningless expression to me until I had to dole out discipline to Abby when she was a puppy. I should say now that I am single and have no children. Abby and Andy are the closest things to children I have. Yes, I know they are dogs, and in the end, children count for a whole lot more than a dog does, but nonetheless, I love the babies.

One day I was doing some yard work in the front. The front yard is not fenced in. The part of the yard I was working in was around 100 feet from the street, maybe more. Even though the yard was not enclosed and Abby was not leashed, I thought it would not be a problem for her to hang around me while I piddled around the front doing a few chores. While I was removing some steps in the front at the top of the hill, I caught Abby in the corner of my eye making a bee-line straight towards the street chasing a squirrel trying to make an escape from me and Abby. Immediately, I yelled at the top of my lungs “Abby, Abby, stop, stop.” She halted and made a U-turn but not until she had actually made it to the pavement. I kept yelling at her. She was so scared that she ran from me around the house and to the back yard. Before I made my way to her, my mom knew something wasn’t right with her. She could tell by Abby’s demeanor that something wasn’t right. Also, Abby had gone on the stoop by the patio. Whenever Abby sat on the stoop like that, something was wrong. It meant she was either scared or mad. For example, when she was young, I put her in the pool one time in an attempt to make her swim. My effort failed and only made her mad at me. She almost instaneously jumped out of the pool and ran straight to the stoop. I can’t begin to describe the ugly look she gave me that day, but suffice it to say that if looks could kill, I would have been dead that day. And so there she was on that stoop waiting for me to get her.
As I rounded the corner, my mom quickly asked me what was wrong. She could tell Abby was scared. I would explain to her what Abby had done. In the mean time, I had to whip Abby’s ass. My mom hated it when I did that which I found this odd. In my childhood days, she was quick to meet out punishments, deserved or not. On this day, she would not talk me out of spanking Abby. My spanks involved hitting Abby on the base of her tail or on her rump and was accompanied by a harsh reprimand. I hated doing it, but I could not have Abby running unfettered into the street. She had to know her boundaries. One thing I’ve noticed about disciplining a dog is that the most effective way to teach them is to catch them red-handed. The more closely associated the negative feedback was to the infraction the more likely the dog would learn from its bad behavior.

Some can say that I was at fault for letting Abby unleashed in an unenclosed area like that. True, I do take some blame for that. Had a car hit Abby that day, I would have felt awfully and had considerable guilt on my shoulders ever since. However, Abby made it through that unscathed, but I had to teach her about where it was acceptable for her to go. Abby learned her lesson. For a dozen years after, Abby spent many days playing in the front yard and without a leash on her. Never again would she run in the street. She had a few close calls, but she learned her lesson. I hated being the ‘bad guy’ but had I not spanked her on that day for her running in the street, she may have ended up killed by passing car. She wouldn’t hate me for my disciplining her. She didn’t hold grudges like that, fortunately for me.

"Why doesn't he walk away?"

(Circled in yellow is where the physics post-doc mentioned in this entry took his leap. In the red circle is the lab where the Japanese post-doc tried to go on a rampage.)


The conversation described in this entry took place at Dabney Hall, shown above. When I was in grad school at NCSU, Dabney Hall was where the chemistry research labs were located. Now, I think some of the research has relocated to the newer labs over at the Centennial Campus a few miles away. The Centennial Campus is an industry-academic alliance where the two groups form a synergy in a cooperative effort to advance research in the sciences and engineering.

The stories generated by that building could probably fill a book. I’ve already told the story of the explosion in my hood which happened a few weeks before I started using it. Another news worthy event was the suicide attempt by a Chinese physics post-doc while I was at NCSU. I was writing my thesis at the time which meant my lab work was finished, and I wasn’t in the building at the time the incident took place. Post-doc-ing can be very strenuous. These people are essentially indentured servants to their academic advisors; the advisors hold all the power and they know it often pushing their researchers to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. To say this postdoc was stressed is obvious, but I didn’t know the details of this man’s relationship with his academic advisor. The local news covered this story of this poor bastard who saw no way out of whatever troubled him. Sometimes postdocs don’t turn their rage inward like this guy but instead lash out and try to kill fellow research group members. It should be noted that the chemistry building is joined at the hip with the physics building. It was at the top floor of the physics building at the breezeway adjoining the chemistry building where the postdoc took this fateful leap. This was about a six floor jump. The first thing I thought when I heard this news was ‘why didn’t he go to the top floor of Dabney Hall, which is two stories taller than the physics building?” The postdoc survived the fall. Some of my students who were in one of the sections of organic labs I was teaching said the bone was sticking out of his leg, there was blood on the ground and the guy was yelling. Whatever problems this man had must have seemed trivial to what he was going to face from that moment on.

There was another story about a guy on the same floor as me but he was in the chemistry department. He was a Japanese post-doc. I didn’t like the guy. He seemed like an asshole. It turns out my hunch about him was dead-on accurate. One day he was stalking around the lab with a 5lb hammer in his hand looking for a graduate student who he accused of sabotaging his experiments, one of the worst things one can accuse a fellow scientist of. (The only other thing that is worse is plagiarism.) He didn’t find her that day, but he did encounter another post-doc. When asked what he was doing, the Japanese post-doc said he was going to kill the graduate student, who just happened to be the intervening post-doc’s fiancé. The Japanese guy was out of his gord. He went on to say that when he was done w/ the graduate student, he was going to kill the other post-doc. Even though this event didn’t make the news, the campus police did arrive and escort the man off campus. Fortunately no one was hurt. The academic advisor was out of town, but when he returned to campus later, the Japanese guy was not only relieved of his position, but he was deported as well, and the little bastard was never to be heard from again.

Dabney Hall wasn’t a place of joy, especially for a graduate student or of course a post-doc. Not all days were bad or miserable but not too many were happy either. I did like to talk a lot to anyone who would listen to me. Maybe I would have been a better graduate student, especially as far as success in chemistry is defined, if I had not talked as much and kept my head down and did my work. One of the conversations I remember in Dabney Hall was with a fellow graduate student in the Comins group. I particularly liked talking to foreign students. I am not a well traveled man, but speaking to someone at length about his/her country is a good way to learn about a different world and culture. In this particular conversation, I was telling Yu-mei about Father. I told her how he was a stray and how he came and went as he pleased. We didn’t tie him up on a leash nor could a fence keep him in. She seemed puzzled about Father’s behavior. “Why doesn’t he walk away?” she asked. I guess in her culture, the concept of loving a dog like it was a child was a little odd to her. I guess she also assumed that every dog yearns to be free, and if given the chance to make a break, the dog would do so. Father had all the chances in the world to walk away from us and never return. However, Father always came home. Some cynics will say that he only stayed for the free meals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Father loved being part of the group, our family. He loved playing with us out front and by the pool. He also loved going nighty with my mom, Abby and Andy at night. If all we were to him was a meal ticket, he would not have exuded so much joy and happiness when he was around us. Our relationship with Father was conditional. We had to give him more freedom and liberties than a typical pet. He had known another world and for him to fully transition to a ‘house-pet’ status was not possible. We gave him space and freedom, but he always came back.

Absconder

(That is the gap in the fence mentioned in this entry.)

Upon finding out that Abby could jump the backyard fence, my mom purchased a new fence that was not only higher but enclosed a greater area of the backyard than the old fence had. This new fence would not only be able to keep Abby contained but would give Abby much more room to play in the back. This would also keep Father inside as well. As noted before, the new fence was at least a foot higher than the old one. Initially, at least, only one of our three goals was reached with the new fence. Abby did have more room to play. It also gave her more room to go to the bathroom. She would prefer to go towards the back as far away from the house as possible so she would have some privacy when she did her business.

However, on the other two goals, the fence failed us. Father wasn’t able to leap the fence and nor was Abby, but Father was able to climb over the fence. And climb he did. When he grew older and was not as energetic, Father would crawl under the fence if he was too tired to climb over. I never bothered chastising Father for absconding from the backyard. I was impressed with his physical prowess and thought it was cute too. I also realized that Father’s semi-feral background made it difficult to contain him as if he were a typical house pet. Once an animal has had a taste of freedom such as Father, containing a dog in the confines a yard or a house can make the dog feel trapped and imprisoned. I realize allowing a dog to roam around unleashed is illegal and there could have been consequences if Father were to have hurt someone or someone’s pet, but it was a chance I took with a type of ‘conditional’ ownership I had with a pet like Father.

As noted before, Abby could not jump the fence, but for a while, a short while when my tiny angel really was physically tiny, Abby was able to squeeze through the fencepost and a wall to break free herself. When she did abscond from the backyard, she didn’t go far. She stayed in the side yard or front yard. I don’t know what she gained from the experience, but I’m sure boredom and curiosity were driving forces behind her escapades outside the backyard. The last time Abby took one of her babygirl trips out of the backyard, not only was she caught red-handed, but she was stuck outside of the fence and had to directly face her naughtiness. My mom told me that as she was driving up the driveway, she saw Abby out of the fence and running in the side yard. Abby, once she saw my mom’s car, hustled as fast as she could to the gap she escaped from and tried to get back in the backyard. For some reason, she was able to exit the gap but not able to go back through. My mom caught her and told her she was a bad girl. But don’t feel too bad for Abby. My mom’s disciplining Abby was toothless and weak. It drove me nuts considering how she disciplined me and my brother while we were growing up. She was quick to use a belt or switch, too quick often times. While raising Abby, though, I was the disciplinarian and not her. I hated that role, but sometimes a stern tone or even a spank was the only way to get through to Abby. I loved her a whole lot, but she could be so head-strong.

We addressed the issue by placing some cinder blocks in front of the gap. In a month or so, that gap would be a non-issue. Baby-girl kept growing and growing and eventually expanding and expanding. She was no longer a tiny angel in the literal sense, but in my mind, she was always my tiny little angel.

A Family Condition?

(Shown above is Petey and my great-grandfather.)

It has often been asked if behavior is inherited or learned. My only contribution to this debate is an anecdote about my grandfather and his burro. In this way, one can see that my eccentricity about pets was a predestined trait that was an unavoidable destiny of genetics. A project of mine lately has been to scan every single photo my family has. So far, I’ve scanned over 1300 pictures and yet have a way to go. One of the photos I came across was a picture of my grandfather’s pet burro. I could see that my grandfather was a little weird when it came to pets. Could that weirdness when it came to how I treat my pets be somehow an inherited trait?

In the early 50s, my grandfather had a notion to buy a burro. Sure, the man grew up on a farm when he was a boy, but by his own admission to me in his later years, he hated farming and as a boy, he shirked his farming chores at every chance he could. Fortunately for him, his dad allowed him to pursue his academic talents, and my grandfather obtained his BS in chemistry at Wake Forest (this was while Wake was actually in the town of Wake Forest, which is in northern Wake County. Later, the Reynolds family, as in RJ Reynolds, gave Wake Forest a large endowment on the condition to relocate to Winston-Salem.) And he received an MD from the University of Chicago. The man worked and lived in a small town. There was no reason as a matter of practicality for him to have a burro. Nevertheless, he bought one.

How he found this particular animal puzzles me to this day. The burro, Petey, was from Mexico. There was no internet back then, so finding an animal like that from a place so far away is a mystery to me. Petey was shipped to NC via train. My grandfather picked up Petey at the train depot in downtown Raleigh and brought it back home in his car. Back then, cars were gas guzzling behemoths so large that they practically had their own gravitational field. Petey rode in the trunk along w/ my aunt’s boyfriend, Chissel.

Petey had his own shed in the back and a fenced-in backyard for him to roam around. The only traces of Petey’s existence are that shed which we use for storage and a few old fence posts from that old fence from over 50 years ago. Parts of that old fence are still around but have been overgrown by vines and other plant-life.
I heard bits and pieces about Petey when I was growing up. Some people rode Petey around the back like he was a horse. My grandfather and my aunt’s boyfriend often rode him. Petey could get temperamental by baying and bucking when he had enough of someone sitting on his back. My grandmother, understandably concerned, didn’t like her husband riding Petey. When my mom and her sister would play in the pool, Petey would come down the hill to see what was going on. He wouldn’t play with them, but he did like hanging out. As far as taking care of Petey, those duties fell mostly on my grandmother’s dad, Daddy Carroll. By this time in his life, my great grand-father had retired and moved down from CT with his wife to be close to their daughter who now lived in NC. He did many odd-jobs and maintenance work at his daughter’s house, so taking care of Petey fell in his lap.

There was one story that I had only heard parts of as a kid. The older relatives told us kids how Petey harassed the maid, Georgia. Whenever she would go out and try to hang the clothes to dry in the backyard, Petey would run out of his shed and make a beeline towards Georgia. Georgia would run screaming and yelling into the house when Petey did this. What I didn’t figure out until I was older was that Petey had a boner when he was chasing Georgia. Fortunately, Petey never caught Georgia.

Petey died several years after he came to my grandparent’s house. He contracted pneumonia on a particularly cold stretch of winter and succumbed to the disease.

I never bought an exotic animal like my grandfather did, but my behavior to my dogs has been eccentric nonetheless. Maybe I was fighting an inexorable march of eccentricity when I was a kid, but once Abby and Andy came into my life, a floodgate of quirky and offbeat behavior came pouring out.

A Day at the Park

(Above is Withers Hall at North Carolina State University. Many undergraduate teaching labs are there as well as classrooms and offices.)

A big milestone in mine and Abby’s relationship took place on a late summer afternoon one Sunday. My cousin invited my mom to Jordan Lake to spend the afternoon with her and her family. Abby too was invited. My cousin, her daughter, husband and Nikki went camping at the campsites operated and maintained by the Jordan Lake State Park authorities. Jordan Lake is a reservoir in the Triangle area close to Durham created by the damming of the Haw River. The Haw River eventually empties into the Cape Fear River, one of NC’s biggest rivers, and flows past Fayetteville and Wilmington. I was also invited but was unable to go. I was busy teaching labs and Sunday was when I graded papers. Grading lab reports was a pain and what I liked the least about teaching labs. I found it best to grade all of the papers at once so that I would grade the papers in a consistent manner. You can bet your bottom dollar that if I took off one point for a rounding error on one paper but two points for the same error on another paper, those two students would find each other out and the ‘2point’ person would hurt me down to point out how unfair I was in my grading. So, I needed a large block of time, and in grad school, Sunday was the only day when I had that much time available to grade.

Back to the story. I thought they were supposed to return home, my mom and Abby, around 6 in the evening, so when 6pm came and went I started to worry when there was neither sighting of them nor a single call. Finally, around 8pm, my mom reached me on her niece’s cell phone. The reception was broken and crackly, but I could hear my mom say that she and Abby were fine, but that they were unable to leave the park and would not come home until the next morning. The park rangers have a strict policy of when the gates open and close. Once the gates are closed for the night, no one goes in; no one goes out. Everyone inside is on lock-down until the gates open the next morning.

I was in a near panic. My imagination went awry and all I could see was that my mom had lied to me and that instead Abby got lost. I further thought that my mom was making up a story to find time until they found my baby girl. I came very close to driving the 45 mile trip out there and getting my baby girl but I had a few beers that afternoon and didn’t want to chance a DUI. (Did I mention that the students seem smarter after I’ve had a few beers and the grading goes more smoothly?). All I could do was wait.

The next day, Monday, was a school day. I had labs to teach so I had to go to school. Normally, after teaching labs, I would go to the research labs (as opposed to the teaching labs) and do my own lab work. On this day, I changed my routine and went home to see how Abby was doing. My mom’s car was in the garage so that was of some relief to me, but I had to see my baby girl. I checked the living room and den, but they were not there. It turns out they were both layed out in my mom’s bed. When I came into the bedroom, they didn’t even notice me at first. That is how tired, worn out and deep asleep they both were.

I leaned over the bed and hugged Abby. She thwapped her tail on the bed and without lifting her head, licked my face and fell back asleep. Those two were tuckered out and it showed. I went back to school, relieved knowing that my baby girl was safe and secure.

Upon returning home later that day, my mom filled me in on what happened. Abby had a wonderful time. She played with Nikki, swam in the lake, got to eat people food at the cook out and spend the night with Nikki and my cousin’s family. My mom shared a tent with my cousin’s daughter, who was 13 at the time, Nikki and of course Abby. Abby had quite a good time. My mom, on the other hand, was miserable. She had no air conditioning and no pillow. There were deer all over the place, their eyes reflecting in the light. My mom has a hang-up about wild animals. In times when a bird has flown into her house, she immediately evacuates the house screaming the whole way out and would not return until the bird had been removed from the house. (I wish I had known about this phobia when I was a kid.) Her irrational fear of wild animals can petrify and immobilize her so that night must have been hell for her. My mom’s sleepiness was attributed to the fact that she slept three, maybe four hours tops. Abby’s sleepiness was due to the fact that she had been in over-drive the previous day and had worn herself out with all the fun and activities at the lake.

I had been fretted and saddened by the fleeting thought of what would happen if Abby was gone forever. Fortunately, that time wouldn’t come until over a dozen years later after she had lived a full, happy life. She wasn’t just a dog or a pet to me. She was my sunshine angel beauty queen.