by Tod Davies.
It was always foggy at my grandparents’ house.
This was in the outer avenues of San Francisco, up a steep hill from Ocean Beach. You could hear the foghorns there. In my memory, it is almost always gray. When the rare sun did come out, there was still the sharp cold of the wind.
Of my three aunts, one lived at home. She wasn’t much older than I was, and she was kind to me. My grandmother bullied her in a subtle way that would have been hard even for an adult to challenge. As a child, I saw clearly what was happening. But all I could do was ponder.
It was this aunt who cried the hardest when my grandmother died. I was at college by then. I remember going with my father to the mortuary to arrange the funeral. My aunt and my uncle—my father’s youngest brother—cried and cried while I tried to stifle my giggles at recognizing the mortician. He was my own age, last seen at a high school mixer where we’d snuck off to have a necking session in a stairway. That struck me as very funny. I could tell Richard—that was my old boyfriend’s name—was trying to maintain a sense of decorum himself. This task was made more difficult by my drunk uncle, who dragged himself across the carpet to Richard’s desk crying, “Mother! Mother!”
As I remember it, I had to excuse myself, go out to the restroom and laugh until I cried. Was I only crying from laughter? Who knows?
I do know that I loathed that uncle. Uncle Bud. In my mind, I still spit out his name. There was something wrong with Bud. He lived downstairs from my grandparents in their house, in the basement room. Which was totally appropriate. I always took great care not to be left alone with him. This wasn’t always possible when I was very small, and the memory of that is best left unshared.
My aunt was different. She lavished affection on me. She loved small children and animals. At my grandfather’s birthday, she put a Border collie puppy in a wicker laundry basket, topped it with a ribbon, and carried it out to where he sat. I was entranced. I couldn’t wait for him to open her gift.
“What the hell is that?” he barked. Which everyone, including me, tactfully ignored. But from then on the dog was my aunt’s. She named it Princess. It was a black and white, long furred, kindly beast, affectionate by nature, calm, obedient, everything one could want from a dog.
Princess and I took to each other immediately. In a way, we grew up together. I was very small when she was very small. She grew a little faster, but not so much that I couldn’t catch up and be, not just allowed out with her alone, but positively encouraged to do so.
For as Princess and I grew older, so did my aunt. She had to be away at school, then at work, and there was no one to walk the dog. My grandfather wanted nothing to do with it. As time went on, my grandmother was more and more housebound. I didn’t understand it then, but now that I am the same age as she was when she died, and suffer from an arthritis I most likely inherited from her, I have a clue. She was very heavy, and in those days joint replacements weren’t an option. So she aged much more quickly than we do in this generation.
There was my opportunity. Someone had to walk the dog.
By then I was ten years old, so Princess must have been four or five. A perfect age for a dog. My family had moved upward, out of the Irish working class neighborhood where a new younger brother meant we’d outgrown our bungalow house, into a huge, sprawling, three story dwelling that I almost singlehandedly talked my parents into. It was love at first sight for me, that house. Hardwood floors, a penthouse deck that looked out over the ocean, the fixtures and fittings of an earlier age. My poor parents grew to hate everything about it. It had a terrible kitchen, left over from a time when it was servants who cooked. The eight bedrooms and four bathrooms came in handy, especially when yet another brother was added to our family two years later, but they were hell to clean, and hell to keep up, and I now have a complete understanding of why, later, when I was in college, my mother and father leapt at the chance to buy a brand new house in the suburbs.
But I, who had no responsibility for it, and who claimed the penthouse room once four brothers had the three bedrooms on the lower floor, loved that house. I loved that neighborhood. We had a bike lane on the street outside. Behind us were the gardens of tall, slender, well-to-do blond people. And behind that was a wilderness that led to the ocean.
Best of all, when I was ten, before I inherited the penthouse room, and before I could roam the city at will without parental strictures, I was allowed—no, I was encouraged—to catch the 38 Geary bus and ride it to the end of San Francisco, to my grandparents’ house. Where it was my chore to walk the dog.
“Chore.”
To walk Princess. To walk her to the beach. To walk her—oh, glory—on the beach.
Funny that. I wasn’t allowed to go so many places and do so many things, supposedly because they were dangerous for young girls. But because there was no one else available to walk the dog, I could walk down a lonely street, past a rather louche amusement park—gone for many years now, replaced by a condominium development—and onto a beach not known at the time for its safety for young women.
If they had only known—my early practice avoiding my Uncle Bud always came in handy on my solitary forays into the city.
How I loved those walks. Princess was a good companion. We would start west on Balboa Street at a sedate pace. We then headed down a steep hill to Playland-At-The-Beach, pausing to look through its fence at the roller coaster. I remember hearing the foghorns from the north side of the Cliff House mix with the loud amplified roar of Laughing Sal, the amusement park’s mannequin. Then we’d head across the wide highway. Sometimes we’d sit on the stairs and just stare out at the waves before clambering down to walk across the sand to their edge. The happiest time. One of the happiest times.
I always loved that part of the city especially, ever after that. I loved the fog itself. Me and Princess, able, finally, to be alone, to smell the salt air, to feel my hair get damp from the fog, to risk whatever the danger was that I was always being warned against but which was never clearly explained. I was with a dog, the adults reasoned, so I was safe. It was expeditious that it be so, to them. I knew it was expeditious for them to ignore the real danger at home. But all the luck there was on my side. It was true. Alone with Princess I was safe.
To this day, I find myself incapable of feeling unsafe in the company of a dog. Which was not the least of the gifts that Princess gave to me. Something that would have surprised the adults—how blind they were—if they had only known.