Now that school was out, I was spending a lot more time outdoors. One of my favorite things to do was tramping around the neighboring woods with my dog, Ladybug. I had the BB gun that I had received for Christmas the previous year, and we would go out with a paper bag to find cans to set up and shoot. That was the sad thing back in Michigan in those days, there was never a shortage of tin or aluminum cans on the side of the road. Proposal A in the 1976 general election had passed, and with a ten-cent deposit now required on cans and bottles, it got a lot easier to clean up the state. Fewer people just tossed their empties out the windows of their cars like they had before.
We spent great summer days together. I would ride my terrible bicycle, and Ladybug would run along the road with me. I hated my bike, though. Absolutely despised it. I had saved up for two years on my meager allowance to buy the coveted 10-speed bicycle with the curl handlebars that virtually all of my friends rode, while I still had my yellow Huffy single-speed bike with the banana seat. My stepfather Steve kept my money for me, so I didn’t have a chance to spend it. And finally, after two years, he said that my bike was here. I went out to the shed, to find a bike like this:
It wasn’t a 10-speed. It wasn’t a 5-speed. It wasn’t even a 3-speed bike. It was a single-speed antique-looking laughingstock of a bike, and he had spent two years of my allowance on it. I was furious. Spoiled? No. It was my money and I never would have agreed to buy anything remotely resembling this bike. But, it was the only bike I was going to get for the foreseeable future, so I took the loss and moved on. Well, that’s not really true. I’ve never moved on without rectifying a situation. I vowed that I would get a 10-speed one day.
One warm summer day, I was fishing in the little pond in the front yard. It was stocked with bluegills, and they would bite at anything. All I had to do was put a piece of corn on a hook, and drop my line with a bobber. A car was coming down the dirt road, and Ladybug’s ears perked up. She went running at the car, And it drove right over her. She was part basset hound and part dachshund, so she was low to the ground anyway. But the differential caught her as the car passed over, and she went tumbling 15 feet down the road, and lay still. I screamed her name and ran toward her, expecting to see her dead. She wasn’t but she was bloody and just barely breathing. I picked her up and got her out of the road, tears streaming down my face, and brought her up to the house Even the tips of her long, floppy ears looked like they’d been dipped in blood. My dad was home, and he brought out a towel to wrap her up in. She didn’t seem to have any broken bones, and I took her to the open shed next to the house. Dad said we didn’t have money to take her to a vet, so we’d just have to see what happened.
I stayed outside with Ladybug, and listened to her breathe. It started to get dark, but I wouldn’t leave her side. My dad brought my sleeping bag and pillow out to the shed and said I could stay with her until the end. He was not hopeful. I sat there with her, into the night, praying just as hard as I could for God to save her. I had finally found someone I could take care of, and someone who cared about me, staying with me day and night, and now I was about to lose her. I cleaned her up as best I could, and the injuries looked like they were only on the outside. But she still wasn’t waking up.
I fell asleep around 11:00, and when I woke up the next morning, Ladybug was awake and licked my face! She got up, gingerly at first, and then started running around like nothing had happened! My partner in crime was all right! I don’t think I had ever been that happy in my whole life to that point. Suddenly, the kind of bike I rode didn’t matter a whole lot. There were many more important things to worry about.
