
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 25, 1995                   TAG: 9510250019
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

EL VIEJO FEELS THE PAIN OF THE DOG

When our dog Millie had surgery and had to wear this huge plastic cone around her neck to keep her from licking the incision, I began to write like Papa Hemingway again:

The old man felt another autumn in his soul and when he looked at the dog lurching about with the unnatural thing on her head, he remembered the bulls killed on many afternoons long ago.

Death in the afternoon at the matador's hand, he thought, is clean and final. But this lurching steals an animal's dignity.

The weather was good. The sharpened sun struck the Earth at lovely angles. Yet, the old man felt the rains of November in his heart. He knew that the snows would come. And he thought of the mountain where the great cat was found, as frozen as the sugarless popsicles the woman kept in the freezer.

``Aiyee,'' he said to the woman, ``dost thou see how la perrita pobre thrashes about in that strange contrivance of the surgeons? Surely, it would be healing should she lick the slash in her side. When I was a nino, the old men said that the lick of a dog on a wound was beneficial. But much has changed since then, mujer.''

The woman busied herself with the taco filling for their supper and tried to ignore the old man. But she found she must speak.

``Viejo,'' she said, with the sorrows of almost half a century of marriage plain in her voice, ``thou knowest I do not like to hear of the barbarities of thy youth. Does it not occur to thee that dogs licking the wounds of men is a thing of much obscenity?''

``I tell things as they were and are and I tell what the weather was like,'' the old man said. ``He who would pretty up his childhood is an abomination to me. I speak and write only the truth, mujer, whether it offends or not. To that end I will say that mujeres in my day often poured el turpentine on wounds of various kinds.''

``Pray, stop thy mouth, viejo," the woman said. ``Lest thee summon demons best unremembered.''

``Si,'' he said, "and do not these demons not come to an old man's mind in the night when the autumn winds cause the poplar leaves to dance and die? And it is true, mi vida, that when I was a nino, tobacco chewed thoughtfully by old men was thought to be a cure for wounds.''

The woman gasped and ran from the kitchen.

``Los mujeres today,'' the old man said to the wounded dog, ``are not as fearless as they were when I was a nino.''

by CNB