I wrote a lot of short stories during the COVID lock-down and the months that followed. Most were first person accounts of a pandemic experience. Not my own experience, but that of the characters… Pandemic Puppy is one them…
Pandemic Puppy
Even before Covid, folks kept asking me when I was going to sell up and move someplace warm, or worse, into some kind of retirement community. No way. I’m not going anywhere. This is home. I paid off that 30-year mortgage more than ten years ago. I’m golden. I’ve got my nice, little house, in a nice little town. I can walk to the local stores, run by local people and anything I can’t find there, I probably don’t need.
Yeah, I do take my car out to go out for Chinese food. I used to go to that bookstore—a big chain store in a shopping center off the highway—but now I just buy books on the Internet like everyone else. Now, if there were a little store with real people behind the counter than I’d go there in a heartbeat, but… The town is too small to sustain more than one pizza place, two bars and a little grocery store. A bookstore—a bookstore that’s more than a few racks in the back of another store—not happening here. No market for it.
So now you know. I’m an old fart in small town America. I’m not saying where because I don’t want yuppies to come here as a safe haven and raise the property values until the locals have to go. Enough locals have already left because of the economy. Covid is killing towns that live on seasonal tourists.
Oh, there’s one other thing you should know about me before I go on with this story. I have never had a dog. Never even wanted one. Gave up on an almost beautiful woman when she kissed her little pooch on the lips. Yuck! I’m a cat man. I grew up with cats. My folks had them in their bakery to keep mice out and my mom always had one or two in the house because she loved them. Never kissed them on the lips, but she did love them. I had a cat when I first moved up here, but when he died, I just didn’t have a heart to get a new one. By then I’d retired and thought I’d travel. That never happened.
This is pretty much all you need to know about me to understand how it was, well, more than a little out of character when I couldn’t help grinning ear-to-ear when the family next door got a puppy back in the beginning of 2019. It was around Valentine’s day and the little boy and his puppy, playing and laughing on the other side of my fence was… it was wonderful. Whenever it snowed, as it does here pretty often, watching them play in the snow was better than any movie I could stream on the TV. Hell, I’d bet it was better than any medicine a doctor could give you for depression.
It was just plain joy to watch.
Then Covid hit this country. It didn’t make it out here until the end of April and no one was taking it seriously until May or June. It was just background noise for most of us. Stuff on the news about New York City or out in Washington State someplace, but it was here already. Just being subterranean. Getting into the bloodstream of the folks here before they realized that a parade or a picnic on July 4th could be a killer.
I was cautious. I’m old. I listened to the doctors on TV and, since I was already living a pretty quiet life, it wasn’t such a big change. My nephew invited me to go live with him and his family. It was a nutty idea. Much bigger chance getting Covid in house with teenagers. Anyway, when my nephew got it and wound up in the hospital, I really got serious. His wife got it too and so did both of their sons. The younger one got it really bad. They say his lungs may never be the same—and he was a sprinter on the track team. It’s a terrible thing for a kid like that.
It was right after the 4th and I was in my backyard watering the tomato plants. I heard the little boy, Teddy, sobbing. I don’t mean just crying. When I say sobbing, I mean sobbing, heaving and coughing. He was all of five-years old. I leaned over the fence. I’m not really good with kids. I just treat them like little adults. Some of them like it. Others look at me, like I have my head screwed on backwards.
“Teddy, what are you crying about?”
“Mr. Vets,” (That’s what he always called me because he couldn’t wrap his little lips around my full name, no shame on him, it’s one of those names with too many consonants and way too many syllables). “We gotta move and Valentine can’t come with us.”
His mother came out into the yard and wrapped the little boy in her arms.
“Mr. Vettivitsky, sorry but Teddy’s real upset.”
“You’re moving?”
“No choice. We can’t make the payments…” I thought she was going to start sobbing too, but she got herself together and continued. “Greg lost his job. We have to go and live with my in-laws in New Jersey. Greg’s mom just got out of the hospital—Covid of course— and his dad, he’s got Parkinson’s, I’ll be taking care of him and… well… we can’t bring the dog.”
I knew she’d been a home health aide, but she’d been going to nursing school. I could see in her face that her dream was dying, too.
“I’ll take Valentine.” I’m not sure what made me say that. Was it the heartbroken kid or his young mother with quashed dreams and horror show ahead of her with her husband’s family? “He can come and see Valentine when you get things back to normal.”
I knew I was lying about the visits for the boy’s sake and she knew it too.
“You hear that Teddy? Mr. Vettivisky is going to take care of Valentine. Things are going to be all right. See, not so bad.”
That’s how this cat man, with no longing for a dog, wound up with a ‘pandemic puppy’ and a new crew of dog walking friends. One is even an age-appropriate widow who does not kiss her dog on the lips.
