THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 4, 1995 TAG: 9509040217
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
Waking at 4 o'clock in the morning, giving up after a few minutes trying to reclaim sleep, I switched on the bedside lamp to read.
At the bed's foot, stretched on a sheet to protect the quilt, slept the root-beer brown Lab, tuckered from swimming after a ball hurled by a covey of grandchildren.
From the 4-year-old to the 12-year-old, eight sun-brown youngsters platooned the dog, one after another flinging the ball from the beach into the face of oncoming, rolling, rearing, roaring white-crested combers crashing in thunder on the sands. He seemed as tireless as the continuing chain of children or the waves.
Generated by a storm beyond the horizon, waves shouldered their way toward the beach, gathering, swelling. The ball fell between the one attacking the shore and its fast-rushing successor rising in its might, a looming wall, beneath which he danced for the ball that had landed in the slight lap between the two waves.
Usually, fencing with the wave coming toward him, he managed to stay just out of its charging reach while he searched the white tumult for the ball in its maw.
Now and then the wave swept over him and his taut, slight figure could be seen riding it, gleaming bronze and limber, his outthrust dark head protruding arrow-like from the white comb.
The wave crashed on the sand in a churning, spreading white wake that the foam-flecked Lab quartered, racing here and there to spot the ball as if scouring a field.
Retrieving it as much as 100 feet down the shore, he ran to the children and dropped it at the feet of one, who threw it back into the heaving sea.
And now he slept, not a muscle moving, his legs, front and rear, extended to their utmost as if he were still running, as if he were caught and mounted forever in that pose.
Outside the open window, through which blew an ever-cooling breeze, his adversary called, rising, falling, rocking, an eternal susurrus of surf encircling the shore.
The dog, after half an hour, lifted his head, listening. He began to groom himself, licking one forepaw then the other, delicately, minutely, concluding by nosing and licking a riffle in the sheet.
He turned this way and that, shook his ears, stretched again, sneezing, and, heaving a sign, lay still, chin extended on my ankles, eyes on my face. I dared not stir a toe nor meet his gaze, else he seize any move as a release to spring up.
At a change in my expression, his tail beat a drum roll. At a tiny noise, he raised his head, ears cocked, big nose twitching as if to single out a seaweed in the surf, all senses conjoined sampling, savoring every air current.
The door opened. A 6-year-old climbed on the bed and laid his blond head beside the brown dog, who kissed him. ``Kin Boomer go out?'' the boy whispered. by CNB