Corgi and Wolf

I was seven.
High noon on a sweltering July day.
I sat
barefoot,
legs languidly dangling,
on the balcony's edge of the family's two story garage.
Clad only in crinkly, synthetic, baby blue bathing trunks,
chin ponderously propped on my overlapping hands,
which, in turn
lay sticky on a white-washed, wooden crossbeam,
I listlessly stared,
across the steep, inclined road,
at our neighbors',
the Myerson's,
twin Welsh corgis.

Cloaked
in a light orange-brown coat, white paws and underbelly,
with
beady eyes open, darting,
tiny triangle ears cocked radar attentive,
tongues lolling from half-open mouths,
fox-like heads poised
on the raised curb of a crescent shaped driveway,
the bantam dynamos lay in keen anticipation of the chase.
They did not have to wait long.

Before I even heard the approaching car,
the two bounced up and circled each other in a dog chase-the-tail distemper.
When,
at last,
I saw
the mint green, tinted windowed, 1954 Desoto lumber down the hill,
the yapping, running, jumping and nipping
sausages,
had sped to either side of the rolling behemoth,
mere centimeters from the whirring, black and white tires.
If this death-defying act were viewed for the first time,
there would no doubt be
a lump high in the throat of the horrified observer,
for
there could be no doubt
a gruesome canine calamity was at hand.

As it was,
I,
by now,
had become a jaded spectator to this corgi daredevil performance.
So numberless had been the occasions I witnessed it,
all that was left for me was to pick a number,
and in my head
count:
"one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi..."
until
the two,
in sync,
(always miraculously in sync),
peeled away from the startled and yawing car.
Basking in a vainglorious smugness,
the rolypolys pygmy-loped
amid sporadic staccato triumphant yips
back to their curb perch.

I however,
fell into a petulant resentment,
for the two, rather inconsiderately, veered off
in the middle of "seven Mississippi..."
when I had compulsively gambled on my lucky number nine.
Glaring at the two blithely oblivious miscreants,
a memory bubbled unforeseen into my percolating contemplation.

At the bottom of Moon Hill Road
on the north end of the Feeny's undulating lawn,
an ancient stone wall stood.
A worn foot path
(beaten down by years of children taking a short-cut to school)
had dislodged a passageway,
and it was here,
two summers previous,
at age five,
in the wall's stone-scattered opening
my mind's eye now alighted.

Four feet ahead,
in a windblown meadow of this-and-that-way field grass,
a long, tall chicken-wire fence neglectfully lurched.
Behind the flimsy, makeshift barrier,
arose the most stupendous creature
I had ever seen.

Soaring from my Lilliputian perspective
to the dizzying height of at least ten feet,
with shaggy dirt-gray hair tousled over
a long, black-tipped snout,
unthinking eyes,
floppy ears,
unending spindly legs
and a thin, well-nigh equine frame,
was,
an Irish Wolfhound.

We gaped at each other,
I with astonishment,
it with a goofy geniality.
The good-natured dragon,
unable to contain its excitement,
belched out a half-swallowed yelp.

As I jumped out of my skin,
the creature's double materialized surreptitiously from the thicket behind.
The identical twins,
standing side by side,
clone perfect in their ability to mirror each other,
gazed at me
with an affable, imbecilic obtuseness.
My breath,
shallow, constricted,
syncopated
my thumping heart and humming ear-drums.
I grew faint,
and if not for an inadvertent, high-pitched yelp of my own,
I might have blacked out.

As luck would have it,
my cry
so startled the shaggy, beanstalk mammoths,
that,
in a herky-jerky ballet,
like two emaciated, gargantuan, and stringed marionettes
they jumped six inches,
turned into each other
and
traipsed away soundless,
into the dense, overgrown bramble.

A fusillade of shrill, incessant barks interrupted my reverie.
The Corgis were at it again.
Once more,
breathtakingly near whirring front wheels,
the two escorted
an annoyed, accelerating auto
down
the
steep
incline.
The sweat of memory intermingled with the sweat of the present
as I thought of the number nine,
and
doggedly muttered under my breath:
"one Mississippi...
      two Mississippi...
            three Mississippi..."