Cinder Was a Great Dog

Cinder, pictured here, was a great dog. 

We found “Cinder” caged alongside various yapping dogs. She appeared shy . . . a quiet, sad-eyed black canine (still a puppy) looking for someone to adopt her from a Greenville, S.C., shelter in early 1972. She was part Labrador Retriever and part “something else,” probably a mix of Lab and small hound of some kind.      

  

“I think her face will haunt me if we don’t take her,” I told my wife, Carol, after we looked at other young dogs.   

  

I named her “Cinder” because she was black, except for a small white spot on her chest. A cinder is “a small piece of partly burned coal or wood that has stopped giving off flames but still has combustible matter in it.” That named fit because we learned Cinder was recovering from canine distemper, a viral illness that usually affects dogs with high fever, reddened eyes, and discharge from nose and eyes. “An infected dog will become lethargic and tired, and often anorexic,” sources say. Distemper can affect a dog’s spine and nervous system. Cinder never was able to raise her tail very high or wag it well. 

   

Distemper caused her teeth to appear a bit brown, but our vet vouched they were OK, just discolored on the outside. I tried to get Cinder to run and play, but she cowered and seemed as weak as a kitten. But several weeks later, she raced around and appeared healthy.  

  

Before we married, my wife, Carol, and I worked as first-year teachers for Greenville, S.C., public schools. She served in elementary school, and I taught art at Woodmont High. Uncle Sam called, and I completed basic training during hot summer months at Ft. Jackson, S.C. We married in August 1970 and I spent a year in Vietnam, working first at Long Binh for the U.S. Army’s inventory control center as a draftsman and later for “The Army Reporter” newspaper as an illustrator (81E MOS). 

  

Carol wanted a dog after I left the army in Feb. 1972, so we found Cinder. Some folk say a couple shares a dog before they get a child. We adopted Cinder, and Carol soon announced she was pregnant. Cinder loved lying on our black Naugahyde couch. Not noticing, I once half-sat on her, before she yelped. She later pawed a hole in that settee after circling to prepare herself a place to sleep.  

  

I worked at Faith Printing until a client of that business offered me a job as art director for his Christian book publishing business, Logos International (no longer in business) in Plainfield, N.J. Carol and I staged a garage sale at our tiny rented house, shipped furniture to N.J.,  loaded Cinder (who had grown to about 30 lbs.) into our 1969 Nova, and headed north in July 1972. Carol had to change doctors during her pregnancy, but we were young and adventuresome. 

  

The owner of Logos bought an old 2-story apartment house for us to rent and share with another couple (the Balsigers and their two young daughters). David Balsiger, hired as a Logos writer-editor, and his wife, Janie, moved from California to N.J. just before we moved from S.C. When we arrived, the Balsigers had settled into the second floor apartment. The house lacked air-conditioning at that time, and our windows had no screens. Our landlord (the owner of Logos) planned to supply screens as soon as he could. Houses in that neighborhood were close. Our driveway, to the right of our house, jutted up to our neighbor’s drive. The two passageways were divided by a sliver of yard and a waist-high wire fence. 

  

Our master bedroom, in the rear of the house, featured a window that stood, at the sill, about six feet above the backyard lawn. July in N.J. in 1972 was hot and humid, and despite lack of a screen for that bedroom window, we raised the window’s bottom portion as high as possible. We had put up “curtains” made of a gauzy, see-through, lace-like material. Cinder slept in our bedroom each night. After occupying the house several days, we were lying awake around 10 p.m. when I heard Cinder growl, which was unlike her. 

  

“Be quiet, Cinder,” I said. 

  

She growled again, walked to the open window, placed front paws on the sill and peered out. I rose slowly from the bed and nudged Cinder aside, parted the thin curtains and gazed into the backyard. A distant streetlight allowed me to see most of the narrow-but-deep rear landscape that I scanned from side to side. Then I looked down. There, crouched three feet below our window was a burly, gray-haired man wearing a gray jacket. 

  

“Yeo-o-w!” I yelled, and slammed shut the window. I guess I told Carol there was a man out there. I hardly remember what was said. She donned a robe, snatched up Cinder under one arm, and high-tailed it up the stairs to the Balsigers, who had heard me yell and the window slam. (I’ve wondered, “Why would an ‘obviously pregnant’ woman lug a 30-lb. dog up a staircase? I probably needed that dog down there with me.)

  

I called the police: “What’s that?” I said. “You can’t do anything about a man in our yard unless he’s still in the yard? He’s gray-haired with a spiky hairstyle. He was underneath our bedroom window. My wife’s very upset and she’s pregnant!” 

  

The next day, we learned from neighbors that our “night visitor” was probably our next-door neighbor, an alleged “Peeping Tom.” They said, “We hated to tell you about him.” The accused lived in the house on the other side of those two gravel driveways I earlier described. After work the next day, I knocked on the accused’s door, and he answered. Behind him, about a room away, I saw his two teenage daughters and wife peering in our direction. “Mr. ___,” I said, “I know you were over at our house last night. God loves you and I care about you, but don’t ever set your foot on our property again.” 

He denied he was the guy, but I believed our neighbors. As far as I know, he never again snooped around our landlord’s property during the year we lived there. During that year, when Mr. ___ came out to get into his car and Cinder was anywhere near our back door, the hair on her back would rise up, and sometimes we heard a low growl.

  

Cinder wasn’t always “wonder dog,” in a good sense. During autumn, I planted tulip bulbs, but Cinder dug up those bulbs, playfully flipping them into the air. When my mother and our friend, Janet, journeyed together from the South to visit us, Mother petted Cinder, but Janet, who was not a “pet person,” shunned her. We made a Sunday train trip into New York City. Home alone, Cinder chewed three pairs of new shoes Janet had bought for her trip. Cinder touched none of my mother’s shoes. 

  

For months before our daughter was born, Carol’s feet swelled badly. She rested daily on our couch while Cinder licked those painful appendages. Carol gave birth to Janelle in Feb. 1973, and her feet returned to normal size. When Carol came home from the hospital and reclined on the couch, Cinder looked at Carol’s un-swollen feet and never licked them again.  

  

In July 1973, we moved back to Greenville, S.C., and I returned to Woodmont High to teach art. Janelle, learning to walk, steadied herself by holding onto Cinder. They’d walk along together, and Cinder would look back to see if Janelle was OK; at least that’s the way it seemed to us. Janelle tried (once, that we know of) to eat some of Cinder’s dry dog food. We saw the evidence: Janelle’s cheeks were pooched way out.

  

Five years after Janelle was born, our second and last child, Suzanne, arrived. Cinder became part of Suzanne’s life, too. Cinder was 13 years old when arthritis prompted X-rays. Our vet viewed those pictures with me. He said her hips had deteriorated and he felt it was best to put her to sleep. Janelle drove with me to take Cinder’s body to my grandmother’s farm. We buried Cinder, amid tears, close to the barn where I played as a child. The field had been plowed hundreds of times, and the ground was soft and easy to dig . . . but leaving Cinder’s remains there was hard. Agnes Sligh Turnbull said, “Dogs’ lives are too short. Their only fault, really.”