Tag Archives: Thanksgiving

Memories of 1960s Television Part 1

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When we lived in Arizona in the first half of the 1960s we didn’t have a TV until 1963 and there were only three networks: KOLD (CBS), KVOA (NBC) and KGUN (ABC). Living in a canyon made the “rabbit ears” antennas useless, so the Community Access Television Antenna (CATV) on top of the Mule Mountains west of town provided channels via cable into Bisbee homes. Yep, we had cable before most of the country!

Television was largely background noise to me back then; I watched a few programs only periodically. I could tell you what show was on what channel at what time from reading TV Guide, but I had far more important things to do—hiking in the mountains behind our house, riding my bike or skateboarding on the concrete walks at my elementary school. My knowledge was broad but lacked depth.

After school I sometimes watched Marshall KGUN, a live audience show like Bozo’s Circus, along with cartoons. The Marshall would select a kid from the audience who was celebrating his birthday (I don’t remember any girls) and dole out a fake birthday spanking for each year “and one to grow on!” I’m sure today someone would complain about child abuse but that was a time-honored tradition growing up.

The Funny Company, a quasi-educational cartoon series, ran during the Marshall K-GUN show. The club members were stereotyped kids: the leader; the computer genius; the shy girl; the outgoing girl; the giggly fat girl. Other characters included Terry Dactyl (a comedic prehistoric bird), Spot the dog, and the wise old Dr. Goodheart who narrated the educational films.  The Weisenheimer was the clubhouse computer; the Weisenheimer Jr. was the portable version. Never mind that computers in the 1960s took up entire rooms and laptops wouldn’t exist for another 20 years.

The Funny Company was also culturally questionable. Two of the adult club members were the Native American Super Chief (voiced by a train horn) and his translator, Broken Feather. The adult villains were Hungarian-accented Belly Laguna and the Germans, Professor Ludwig Von Upp (who looked more like Joseph Stalin) and his equally menacing henchman Hans Von Henchman (get it?). Here’s a really snarky commentary on The Funny Company, 63 years after the show ended.

Getting up for school was sometimes a struggle but weekends were special. I would get up at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday and watch the test pattern, “Indian 39,” while I waited for the cartoons to begin. The background music was always an exotic jungle tune, which I finally identified as Les Baxter’s “Quiet Village”, after we bought Reader’s Digest’s South Sea Island Magic LP set. Top Cat was up first, then Underdog, Fireball XL-5, The Roy Rogers Show (with Dale Evans, their horses Trigger and Buttermilk, Bullet the dog, and sidekick Pat Brady with his Jeep Nellybelle), Sky King, and The Bugs Bunny Show.

General Mills’ advertising agency created Underdog to sell cereal. Back then advertisers and our mothers weren’t afraid of sugar. We had our choice of Sugar Smacks, Sugar Frosted Flakes and Sugar Corn Pops (“Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops *bang* bang* Sugar Pops are tops!”) None of that “honey” camouflage. We had sugar and we liked it, dammit!  (Fun fact: Mickey Dolenz is the little kid in the commercial!)

Does anyone remember the somewhat idiotic The Beatles cartoon from 1965? It started with a horde of screaming young women chasing the Fab Four to “Can’t Buy Me Love”, followed by a lame story and a Beatles song inserted in the middle, a la The Monkees. For some obscure reason Ringo was portrayed as rather thick, whom John mocked mercilessly:
John: Did you say Cupid or stupid?
Ringo: Cupid, with a K.

Warner Brothers cartoons were funny as a kid; they were a lot funnier when I grew up and could understand the adult humor that had gone over my head. I learned a lot of classical music from those cartoons:
Rossini’s Overture to the Barber of Seville: “The Rabbit of Seville”
Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries (“Kill the wabbit!”) and Tannhauser Overture (“Return My Love”): “What’s Opera, Doc”
Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture: “Inki and the Minah Bird”
Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2: “Rhapsody Rabbit” (also the Tom and Jerry cartoon “Cat Concerto”)

I didn’t truly appreciate The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle until much later. Rocky, the smart one and Bullwinkle, the loveable but completely clueless comic relief, starring in serialized tales with biting satire of modern politics and Cold War humor. Soviet nogoodniks Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale continually tried (and failed) to “keel Moose and Squirrel.” (That their boss, Fearless Leader, was a Nazi now seems rather incongruous.)

Other segments of the show::
“Peabody’s Improbable History” Mr. Peabody, and his boy Sherman recount historic moments, somewhat inaccurately, travelling into the past via the Wayback machine, beating Bill and Ted by about 30 years.
 “Aesop & Son” retold well-known fables; the “moral of the story” ended with a bad pun.
“Fractured Fairy Tales” completely upended beloved stories from our childhoods.
“Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties” skewered old silent-film melodramas. Dudley pursued the villain Snidely Whiplash and rescued the damsel in distress (usually tied to the railroad tracks) and hoped to win the heart of Nell Fenwick, the Inspector’s daughter, but she was more smitten with Dudley’s horse.

One of the Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes proved to be rather prescient. Twice a year my alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (UIUC), sponsored an “all-nighter” featuring activities around campus. The Union had a television running in the basement pub, and I caught the Rocky and Bullwinkle episode in which the football team was getting goo-gobs of money from Wossamatta U. The university builds “an indoor baseball diamond, a 97-room house for Coach Knute and a pink marble fieldhouse shaped like the Taj Mahal.”  A professor meekly asks, “How about a new test tube for the physics lab?” and the college president says, “Ah, ah, ah, we gotta draw the line somewhere.” Ironically, the UIUC athletic department had allegedly just spent $900,000 for astroturf and outdoor lighting for night practices.

Sunday afternoons often started with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Zoologist Marlin Perkins and his co-host Jim Fowler introduced us to exotic animals from around the world—lions, tigers, snakes and chimpanzees, oh my!  Too bad we didn’t get to hear Marlin Perkins saying, “Here’s a lion about to devour a poacher.”

Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, sponsored by the old-people tonics Geritol and Serutan, featured ordinary people singing, dancing, or playing instruments, and occasionally weird stuff like someone doing barnyard animal sounds!  One episode featured two tween girls Irish dancing to a clarinet version of The Irish Washerwoman. I imagined my secret crush, whose name shall not be mentioned, dancing with her twin sister under the tree just outside their house, dressed in dark blue plaid dresses they sometimes wore during fourth grade. This was before I knew having a crush on a blonde, white girl might have gotten me strung up, this being the early 1960s.

Early evening was Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color; “the world is a carousel of color” (although it wasn’t quite the same in black and white). The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, starring Patrick McGoohan, was my favorite story, particularly the theme song:

“On the southern coast of England.
There’s a legend people tell
Of days long ago
When the Great Scarecrow
Would rise from the jaws of Hell
And laugh (Ahahahahaha!)
With a fiendish yell!”

 A few short years later, but an eternity at my age, Patrick McGoohan would be the defiant “Number 6” in The Prisoner.

Thanksgiving 1963. I got up early that year to watch Captain Kangaroo while waiting for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. After the show ended, The Captain and Mr. Green Jeans set a table for Thanksgiving dinner while “We Gather Together” played in the background. It was a simple, heartfelt moment, the memory of which choked me up every year well into adulthood. It was even more poignant because President Kennedy had been assassinated less than a week earlier.

Decembers brought Christmas specials with Andy Williams, with Claudine Longet (known for The Claudine Longet Invitational) and the Osmonds, Bing Crosby and other assorted, well-known guests. I liked watching Bob Hope’s annual Christmas shows from Vietnam despite my stepfather calling me a “communist” for thinking the war was one of the dumber things the US had done.

By now we’re all used to ABC running The Ten Commandments around Easter, dragging it out for at least 4 hours. Lillies of the Field (1963) with Sidney Poitier is my Easter tradition. If you’ve never seen it, you should. Homer Smith, ex-GI and now traveling handyman meets a group of German nuns in the Arizona desert. That he is black makes no difference to Mother Maria who believes God has sent her “a big strong man” to build them a “shapel” (chapel), a task to which he eventually (and reluctantly) agrees.

Aside from Mr. Ashton, owner of an earth-moving company, calling him “boy,” there is almost no racism. Homer tosses the quip back at Ashton but then offers to work for him two days a week. Later, one of the Mexicans he befriends calls him “gringo.” His response: “Gringo? I don’t know if that’s a step up or a step down from some other things I’ve been called.”

Lillies of the Fields ends with Homer, having completed the chapel, quietly going off into the sunset while the nuns sing “Amen,” a gospel song he taught them. If it doesn’t touch your heart, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Next up: My memories of 1960s television’s darker side

(“Scarecrow” composed by Terry Gilkyson, sung by The Wellingtons. 1963)
Featured Image: Canstock Photo (RIP)

Midwest Seasons

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We have a saying here: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.” Midwestern seasons can be unpredictable, ranging from tranquil to brutal. Here’s my guide.

Winter

Midwestern winters…SUCK. There’s no other way to put it. It’s not the cold; it’s the unending grey that stretches from early November through March and sometimes beyond. We start the long, slow crawl to more sunlight on December 22, but the darkness just sucks the life out of everything. Christmas is bittersweet; the day after Christmas is the hangover from the night before. New Year’s Eve is the last hurrah of the year. I still hate trying to stay up past midnight, watching one of the local newscasters trying to slip her co-anchor the tongue as “Sweet Home Chicago” plays during the fireworks at Navy Pier.

Groundhog Day Blizzard 2011

I keep telling myself, “I just have to make it through January and February.” The Superbowl means spring is about six weeks away, if we’re lucky.

Spring
Just when I think about hanging myself rather than enduring one more week of winter, the sun suddenly comes out and spring arrives, right on schedule! The trees seem to go from delicate buds to full bloom overnight and the grass is once again green. The pungent scent of fresh (not frozen) dog turds wafts through the air on our morning walk. Praise the Lord and pass the potting soil! It’s time to take the covers off the patio furniture and the air conditioner, hook up the garden hose, and think about how I’m definitely going to power wash the deck this year along with all those other warm weather tasks. I’ll be lucky to check a quarter of them off the list. Life is good again, eh?

Budding trees

Not so fast. This is the Midwest, remember. March is supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. But Mother Nature is a bitch; it’s more likely Scar and his friends will show up for the next couple of months and remind us we are idiots for maintaining any sense of optimism. The Cubs postponed their 2018 Opening Day game because of snow, while the White Sox, a much hardier bunch, played and beat Kansas City 14-7

We can go from turning on the furnace to turning on the AC in the same week, sometimes in the same day. We sat on the deck on St. Patrick’s Day in 2012 when the thermometer hit 81° and froze our butts off the following March.  This year we got five inches of snow on Palm Sunday and 70° less than two days later, setting a record. Two more inches of snow fell on April 27. I’ve seen snow in Michigan on Mother’s Day and Peg had snow Memorial Day weekend when she was living in Minneapolis

Palm Sunday Snow, 2019

Spring 2019 has been particularly brutal. The lousy weather has dragged on well into May with cooler than normal temperatures and endless rain and may continue into June. It was sunnier the last two weeks of March than all of April and May. The rain has jacked up mold levels, assaulting my lungs and adding to the misery.

There are momentary respites. The crabapple trees at the neighborhood park blossom for a few weeks. Lombard’s Lilacia Park  lilac trees bloom sometime in May. Chicago kicks off the approaching summer when meteorologist and WGN’s Weather God Tom Skilling flips the switch on Buckingham Fountain.

Crabapple blossoms

Every year I tell myself, “Well, this winter wasn’t so bad.” And nine months later I’ll wish we were living someplace warm and cheap.

Summer

Our one week of spring gives way to summer. The urchins are out of school; Baxter no longer goes berserk at 7am when he hears the school bus. I wish the first day of summer was somewhere in July instead of June 21 when the Summer Solstice marks the beginning of that long, slow slide into darkness. But the change is gradual enough that it’s hard to notice, until mid-August when the sun sets before 8:20.

The weather can be hot and dry, hot and steamy or any combination. Those first few muggy days remind me of being out of school for the summer, listening to the mostly unintelligible words of the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)” or the Beatles’ “Get Back” while riding around thinking about one of my classmates I just saw washing the family car. She wore shorts and those sleeveless blouses that through which one might glimpse the side of her bra.

We don’t have to suffer brutal heat like Phoenix where it’s so hot construction crews have to pour concrete after midnight. Chicago issues heat advisories when the heat and humidity become dangerous and the city opens cooling centers for the poor folk with no air conditioning, minimizing the risk of death. That approach developed after the devastating heat wave of July 1995, when triple-digit temperatures combined with an inadequate electrical grid resulted in more than 700 deaths, mostly among the elderly people who were isolated from the rest of their community. 215 died on July 15 alone.  The Cook County Medical Examiner’s office had to rent refrigerated trucks to store the surplus bodies.

Summer is mostly tolerable, except for the occasional deluge or tornado. July 1 means football pre-season starts in a month; college football in two. Baxter and I walk either early in the morning or late in the evening. Or we just say, “screw it” and go to Dairy Queen. (Last year we ran into an old guy in the DQ parking lot with a parrot on his arm and a cone in his hand, singing “Let’s all go to the lobby” on his way back to his truck.)

Autumn

This is easily my favorite time of year and it’s not just because I have an autumn birthday. What’s not to like? Labor Day signals summer’s official end. The kids go back to school and the adults put away that summer belligerence for another year. College football season starts, and I can look forward to another year of watching the Michigan State Spartans win instead of the Fighting Illini losing. Pro football starts as well, but it isn’t as exciting. Baseball will come to an end and the WGN 9 o’clock news won’t be postponed for a Cubs game.

There’s also nothing like the first time the wind shifts, and a Canadian high pressure system pushes the humidity back to the swamps in the South. The leaves start to turn (sometimes as soon as August) and eventually I’ll have to play “Find the Dog Turds” when Baxter decides to do it under the crabapple tree at the local park. Soon we’ll be knee-deep in pumpkin spice everything, from that overpriced coffee from Washington State to Culver’s Pumpkin Shakes.

Autumn leaves, August 2018

The weather is fickle. We can go from crisp, sunny mornings to cold and drizzle. It snowed October 30, 1997, three months after I moved back to Illinois. It wasn’t much but enough to win a cynical bet I made with Peg.  An EF4 tornado hit Washington, Illinois, on November 17, 2013. I’ve seen 70° two weeks before Christmas, followed by 15” of snow in January.

The cluster of holidays makes the early nightfall far easier to take. Halloween sits on the fence between Indian summer and the first snow. Thanksgiving is a great holiday because there’s a lot of food and no gifts to buy, at least until Black Friday kicks off the annual shopping frenzy. I start looking for stuff online before the Cyber Monday insanity and breath a sigh of relief when the last gift has been wrapped. The family once again ignores my suggestion to go on a Caribbean cruise for Christmas.

A new year begins. A new cycle begins.

Coming up: A report from the field.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Of all the holidays, a few of which are aggravating, Thanksgiving is the best. There’s no frantic shopping for gifts and nothing to wrap. I don’t have to stay up until midnight for Christmas Eve Mass or to ring in the New Year. (It’s midnight in New York, so let’s just call it a day and go home, eh?) There’s no blazing heat, no mosquitos and I don’t have to worry about Baxter freaking out over firecrackers. The goals are getting together with family, stuffing ourselves, and waiting for the conversation to deteriorate into the absurd. Politics and religion are off limits; bodily functions and barely credible stories are expected.

Peg and I have developed a routine after 20 years together. I hate the last-minute scramble for staples, so I compiled a shopping list that starts in October and runs through December. We start with non-perishables and frozen stuff: canned pumpkin, evaporated milk and cream of mushroom soup; the oft-maligned cranberry jelly, the kind that comes with rings; gelatin for the Thanksgiving eggnog mold and Jell-O for the Christmas black cherry mold; canned and frozen green beans, frozen corn, deep dish pie shells and those French-fried onions. For those of you who missed it, Dorcas Reilly, the woman who invented green bean casserole died October 15, 2018 at the ripe old age of 92.  Generations are forever in her debt.

Peg gets the perishables a week before the holiday, which includes cranberries, an orange, eggnog, onions, carrots, celery, sweet potatoes, rutabaga, biscuits in a can, and the turkey. I like flakey rolls and buttermilk biscuits for variety.

Peg’s sister Michele does the stuffing and the best mashed potatoes I’ve ever had. She used to do the rutabaga but it’s labor-intensive and Peg has more time now that she is, uh, “retired.” (We won’t talk about how a certain man of the cloth is a lying sack of shit.)

Thanksgiving is working out well this year. I’m working on Thursday while the nephews do dinner with their respective in-laws, so we’re celebrating on Friday. Peg has time to leisurely make pumpkin bread, bake and mash the sweet potatoes and make fresh cranberry relish, and I’m not underfoot. This year the turkey thawed out in record time, so we cooked it on Sunday and portioned it into freezer bags for people to take home. That’s a lot easier than doing it after an exhausting day of cooking and cleaning.

Thanksgiving morning follows a familiar pattern. I get up, make a batch of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in a can and turn on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. That is until last year when it became a non-stop ad for NBC programming and stars. So this year we’re going to record WGN’s coverage of “Chicago’s Grand Holiday Tradition,”  the Uncle Dan’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, sponsored in the past by Marshall Fields, Brach’s Confections, McDonald’s and Target.

Peg starts to harangue me about getting the turkey into the oven around 11:30 or so. “It’s not going to be done on time and I’m going to be really pissed!”

“How many years have I done this and how many times has it not been ready? Several and never.”

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

There’s still a lot to do, like prep the green bean casserole which goes into the oven as soon as the turkey comes out. We’ll haul out the plates and silverware, get out the champagne glasses and good napkins, and make sure the Finicky One (you know who you are!) has several forks so as not to cross-contaminate her food. Just before everyone starts to arrive, Peg makes a holiday punch with cranberry and pomegranate juice, frozen raspberries and something fizzy, which everyone is free to enjoy with or without alcohol.

The family arrives at our house mid-afternoon and gathers around the kitchen for punch and snacks. It’s all fun and games until the turkey comes out of the oven. Peg gets testy and everyone has learned: get out of the kitchen and no one gets hurt. Not that I’m a paragon of patience. I once chased my ex-mother-in-law out of the kitchen with a meat cleaver.

The casserole goes into the oven while the turkey rests, like it has nothing better to do while we work. I start filling cookie sheets with rolls while Peg makes gravy. We’re fine as long as I stay out of the way. Casserole out, rolls in for 15 minutes and we’re done.

Food goes to the table and everyone sits down. We say the traditional Catholic grace, the words to which I still haven’t learned. “Bless us O Lord…” mumble “…these gifts…” mumble “…thy bounty…” mumble “…In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost (or is it Spirit?) Amen.”

Then we start passing food around the table.

“No, clockwise! You’re messing up the flow!”

“Guys, don’t start eating just because you filled your plate! Keep passing.”

“Where’s the butter?”

“It’s right in front of you!”

“Can you pass Dave another roll? No, don’t you DARE throw it!” *Challenge accepted*

“Do NOT let that champagne cork go flying!” (Moi?)

Then we go around the table telling everyone what we are thankful for, though the guys’ priority is food. In the past there’s been an awkward silence, but Bob now volunteers to go first, having grown up and learned the importance of tradition. There are variations on the theme of family, spouses and gainful employment.  We’ll toast the memories of Peg and Michele’s mother and father, Gloria and Mike.

Michele’s daughters-in-law are wonderful young women and the girls she never had. A few years back she talked about how thankful she was for them and started crying. We were all sitting there reverently until her son Christopher started giggling. He might have been nervous over the show of genuine affection. Or maybe he was just being a dick. Well, that killed the Hallmark moment. I started snickering, and the rest of table erupted.

“Nice going, Chris!” more giggling

Table talk is predictable. The women will chat about whatever while the guys stuff their faces and look at the clock, anticipating the next football game. Sometimes Chris will launch into a long-winded tale with just a hint of truth embedded somewhere.  Smart phones are off limits until after we’ve eaten.

Dinner ends and most of us help clear the table (again, you know who you are!). Leftovers go into storage bags, then out on the deck to cool. Peg begins her cleanup and we all stay clear. “I have a system for doing this and you’re just getting in the way. If you want to be helpful, go sit down!” Needing no further encouragement, the menfolk head for the couch to watch part of the game before becoming comatose. The women sit around the table and talk. Baxter and I have had enough togetherness for awhile and retreat upstairs for a short nap.

The years have provided us with memories of holiday dinners past, some more endearing than others:

  • I played Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song” in the middle of dinner and we re-enacted the dinner scene from Beetlejuice.
  • A much younger Bob laughed so hard he puked into his plate, ending Thanksgiving dinner.
  • I forgot to put sugar into the pumpkin pie mix. I couldn’t understand why the pies were greyish brown instead of that deep golden color. I took a bite and said, “It’s not so bad.” Everyone else called bullshit and remind me of it every year.
  • I flambéd the eggnog mold with Bacardi 151. (“Oh my God, you’re going to burn the house down!”)

So, enjoy the holiday. Be thankful for what you have.  Cherish the moments with family because they won’t be around forever.

And skip Black Friday. No deal is THAT good.

© Can Stock Photo / terifrancis

Baxter

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She dropped them off at the shelter; Baxter, the five-year-old Shih-Tzu, and the puppy. It was a difficult decision—they were her family—but she couldn’t care for them anymore. She was going into hospice and her time was drawing near.

Peg, and I had been looking for another dog ever since we’d lost Goldie, our petulant Pekingese. We’d gotten her and Gus, a 13-year-old Shih-Tzu with several health problems, from a foster family for the same shelter. They were life-long companions and the shelter didn’t want them separated. Gus was with us for two years; Goldie died five years later at the ripe old age of 18. We mourned their passing but eventually decided it was time to welcome another shelter dog into our home.

Peg periodically browsed the shelter’s website for dogs and found Boo-Boo, a mischievous-looking little dog. We thought this was a sign because Boo-Boo was our favorite nickname for Goldie, but we discovered he’d already been promised to someone. So, one afternoon we went to the shelter and spent time with several dogs. It was almost heartbreaking; they were all eager to find someone to love them. Most were bigger dogs or came as a set of two or three, more than we could handle.

We left and returned a week or so later. Peg went with one of the staff to check out another dog she’d found on the website. The woman at the desk said to me, “We have a pair that just came in. The woman who cared for them just entered hospice. Why don’t I introduce you?”

I met Baxter and his puppy companion in the enclosure—a jail cell with two diminutive convicts. The shelter people were more concerned about Baxter’s chances of adoption. “Everyone wants a puppy. Few people want an old dog.”  Old? He was only five! That’s middle age in dog years and he had far more energy than I did.

She suggested I take him for a walk, so I put a leash on his collar and we went outside. Baxter wandered along the sidewalk in front of the shelter, an inmate on parole. He sniffed at the shrubs, surveyed the parking lot and turned back.  By that time Peg had joined us. I knelt down and looked into his eyes. He appeared confused, wondering why he’d been left here with strangers.  I imagined him saying, “Please take me home with you.”

I looked at her and said, without hesitation, “He’s the one.”

In retrospect, I think he said, “What took you so long? Let’s get out of here.”

Baxter’s biography said he was “active,” “crate-trained” and “loves to play with balls,” so we went shopping. Peg insisted on buying a crate, which I thought was silly since neither Gus nor Goldie stayed in one. We also got a nice pad, a few soft blankets, food and water bowls, three miniature tennis balls and a couple of squeaky toys.

A few days later we signed all the paperwork, made a generous donation to the shelter, and walked Baxter out to the car. On the way home he sat very silently in Peg’s lap, leading us to surmise his bio had been embellished. Well, that was the LAST time he would sit quietly in a car, let alone on someone’s lap. Now he bounces around like a Superball when we’re on the road.

Baxter wandered about the house after we arrived. He ignored the crate in the family room, sniffed around the kitchen, then made his way upstairs to the bedrooms. He devoured his dinner right away; the shelter feeds the dogs twice a day and takes it away after 30 minutes, so you snooze, you lose. We went for a walk and then sat on the couch until bedtime, getting to know our new family member.

Peg insisted on having him sleep in the crate in our room, so we hauled it upstairs. I still thought this idiotic since our other dogs always slept with us. Baxter walked into the crate, turned around and then stared at me, imploring.

“He’s fine. He’s used to being crated,” Peg said.

“Yeah, well how would you like to sleep in one?”

She relented and open the crate door. Baxter immediately ran out, jumped the 30 inches to the top of our bed, curled up and went to sleep. The crate now houses his toys when he’s not flinging them around the family room.

He is my faithful companion and my muse, and we have our routines. I tried to have morning coffee and then take him for a walk, but he has trained me. Walk first; coffee later. You know how this works! He then stands guard on the bed in our guest room, staring out the window and barking at trespassers on the sidewalk: other dogs; people walking; kids riding their bicycles, delivery people and the mail carriers.

We sometimes go for a cappuccino around 2 o’clock. I swear he can tell time; he becomes impatient if I’m not ready. I switch to mocha in the winter, sharing the whipped cream with him. On Sunday mornings we go to McDonald’s for breakfast. (Walk first, remember??? Damn, it’s so hard to find good help.) At bedtime he reminds me I need a protein snack to stabilize my blood sugar. And, of course, he’s available for quality control.

Baxter is just as persistent when he’s in the mood for dessert. He’ll jump on the couch, paw my leg and grumble under his breath if I don’t respond.  His ears pick up and that little puppy smile crosses his face if I suggest going to Culver’s for a sundae.

Baxter is like a perpetual toddler. He delights in little things like car rides, treats, dinner and naps. His occasional snits blow over in a few minutes. Best of all, he doesn’t ask for car keys or money.

I travel a lot for my job and I usually leave a T-shirt on the couch while I’m gone. One day he dropped one of his toys in my suitcase while I was packing and now it’s a ritual. Bat, Spider, Crab, Taz and Mouse have all spent time on hotel nightstands. I take pictures with my phone and send them to Peg, but he isn’t at all interested. He is ecstatic when I return home. He does his little happy dance while looking at Peg. He’s back, he’s back! Let the rejoicing begin!  Lately he’s been bringing one of his minions to the airport to greet my arrival.

I had a dog when I was nine, but no one taught me how to care for him. My mother didn’t like dogs and my stepfather saw dogs as just part of the all-American home. In retrospect, I/we neglected that dog. Baxter’s entry into my life allowed me to atone.

At this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for our time together. We’re both getting older and slowing down – well, I’m slowing down. I try not to think about the inevitable parting, but who knows? At my age, we might just both ride into the sunset together.