Wally's World

Chapter One There Were Always DogsIt takes about sixty-three days to make a litter of puppies, but sixty-three years later the people who loved those puppies remember the dogs they became.I know I remember Lady, the fawn-colored boxer who came to live at the Boulton bungalow on Sprucedale Circle when I was just three years old. People say, "How can you possibly remember something that far back?" But I can, and it is not something that comes from looking at old pictures. I remember my pink crib and my spring-loaded rocking horse and the texture of the gray rug on which I took my first step. So I could never forget a free spirit like Lady. Those were the days before I learned to think and plot, so there was nothing to interfere with me talking to Lady, which I did on a regular basis.The gray brick house on Sprucedale backed onto a ravine that fell sharply at the edge of the backyard picket fence into a ravine woodlot. Lady was forever running off into the mystical forest and returning to tell me of her adventures. She met other dogs, and she chased rabbits and smelled all sorts of stinky stuff.Her muzzle was soft as velvet, and her button eyes sparkled. A hel-lion on paws, Lady loved nothing more than crashing through the screen door and escaping to the hills and gullies of the ravine while my beleaguered mother stood screaming in her apron.My mother had served as an air force secretary to a brigadier general during World War II, but she was taxed to tend me, let alone a renegade boxer. I was adopted when I was two weeks old, after as much planning as the invasion of Normandynone of it terribly practical. No one remembered to get a baby carriage.It was the 1950s, and a physicist named Murray Gell-Mann demonstrated that certain subatomic particles have a property he called "strangeness." Strangeness, a fundamental component of human life I think I knew that instinctively while watching my mother standing on the back stoop hollering after Lady.In those days it seemed anything could happen. Arthur Miller'sThe Crucible, about the witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, played off U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's probing for Communists embedded in Hollywood and the government. Nineteen assorted townsfolk and two dogs were executed on Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village. Thousands of lives were ruined before investigative reporter Edward R. Murrow publicly eviscerated the drunk and sweaty McCarthy.Strangeness led to big things, like James Watson and Francis Crick showing that the DNA molecule was a double helix, a ge ne tic "code" unique to each personand each dog. Things like the DNA double helix made big brains tremble with excitement, while others proclaimed the beginning of the end for baseball when an umpire, Bill Klein, was voted into the Hall of Fame. J. D. Salinger captured adolescent angst inThe Catcher in the Rye, while a "noise" called rock and roll first made the pop charts with "Crazy Man, Crazy" by Bill Haley and the Comets. Malcolm Little became Malcolm "X." The war that followed the war to-end-all-wars was over, and possibilities were endless.In the 1950s, adoptive parents could choose the baby they were going to getcolor of hair and eyes, that sort of thing. There was no question that white people would get a white baby. That was just the way things were. As soon as I was old enough to understand, I knew I was a "chosen one." My father, a dentist, told me that one day he and his wife went to the Baby Store. They rolled a shopping cart up and down the aisles full of babies. He saw a handsome boy and was getting ready to put him in the cart, but his wife insisted on looking at the girls. Harrumph. He went along with her. They found a lovely baby girl with red hair and cheeks as pink as peaches. Then they found a sweetheart with long blBoulton, Marsha is the author of 'Wally's World' with ISBN 9780312379599 and ISBN 0312379595.