39 years ago today, I got my first dog, Friday
The drive between our family’s home and the doctor’s office in Claysville was 13 miles, but it seemed light years away on Friday, April 25, 1986. I spent the entire time screaming and crying at my mom. It was an urgent trip. Less than two weeks before, I had come home from an adventure with my dad, covered from head to toe in poison ivy. Two ER trips and many doctor’s visits later, I’d also been given too much medication and had developed a second problem. Yes, I was a very sick 9-year-old boy, and the only thing that was going to make it better was a puppy.
The pleas for a dog didn’t start before the last week of April 1986, but they sure became more intense. We had five cats, but we didn’t have a dog. I thought every boy was supposed to grow up with a dog and could not understand why my mom was so much against it. As an adult, I can understand why; dogs are a lot of work. My mom also claimed she preferred cats. She was sure a puppy was going to be awful and cause all kinds of problems. But then, she’d never met the dog that was about to come into her life.
By the time we were home, Mom was spent. I’d worn her out with all the screaming. She had just walked into the kitchen and put her purse on the table when the kitchen phone rang. It was our neighbor, Dick Mounts, who owned the half of the original farm that my parents’ had purchased six years earlier. She answered, and I was close enough to hear every word.
Running with the dog
“Nancy, did you get a dog?” Dick asked.
Mom grew silent. Her pupils narrowed as she pursed her lips. Then she started to laugh. “Dick! Matthew is driving me crazy! What do you mean, ‘Did we get a dog?’ We’ve told him no, you know that.”
“Well, OK, there’s a puppy that was out by the road, and so I picked her up and put her in the pool she—”
Dick didn’t get to finish the word “shed” before I bolted out the door. You could say I wasn’t Mr. Congeniality. It was April 25, the perfect date. Not too hot, not too cold, so all I needed was a light jacket. I must have run up that hill at breakneck speed. I rounded the crest, jumped through the post and rail fence, and swung open the door of the pool shed as hard as I could. It hit something next to it with a thump. Then, our eyes me. Standing in an empty sky-blue bathtub, a little German Shepherd/Collie mix looked right at me and whimpered. I scooped her up in my arms.
I didn’t even look to see where Dick was. By that time, my mom had hung up the phone, and he was heading outside to meet us. But I was already on my way down the hill. Mom and my brother were standing by the kitchen door watching me, and Dick was behind me. The little pup was just too much for my 70-pound frame. I tripped more than once, almost falling a couple of times, and kept scooping her up and carrying her down the hill.
Doggone neighbors
My mom was not happy, but my 7-year-old brother sure was. We had a pup. Then, mom bent down to see her, and the little dog started licking her fingers. Dick was in the background.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” he said more than once.
As it turned out, the dog had been dropped off along Skylark Drive, where we lived. Skylark is a private drive off Malone Ridge Road in Washington, Pennsylvania, and a family less than ½ mile away had a dog who’d had pups. They didn’t want the pups, so they started dropping them off at people’s houses. One of them ended up at Dick’s place. She wouldn’t be the last. Two more of her littermates showed up a few days later. But mom wasn’t having any of that. She kept them in the garage for the afternoon until the family who was responsible for them came and got those pups.
But not the little girl I’d carried down the hill. She wouldn’t be the last, either. About seven months later, my mom took our dog to be spayed. Unfortunately, she was already pregnant with eight puppies that would be born in a doghouse my dad built on our porch during a frigid January night in 1987.
While my mom and Dick were trying to talk, my brother and I kept screaming, asking if we could keep her. There were very few times my mom changed her mind, but this was one of them.
“Oh, Matthew,” my mom started, “Fine, but you have to take care of her!”
Call the dog
Of course, I promised I would, but I also didn’t have to keep my promise long. Soon, she became everyone’s dog. Mom took care of her more than anyone else. To her, she was “Mama’s biggest girl” But that wasn’t her name.
“What are you going to name her?” Dick asked.
John and I didn’t know. We started throwing out names, but we didn’t like the names the other was choosing. We were getting kind of silly about it, and finally, Dick spoke up again. “What about ‘Friday,’”?
My brother and I both lit up and had the same reaction. “FRIDAY!” We both screamed as Dick started to laugh.
“No, no, I was kidding!” he said, but he and my mom were enjoying the moment and laughing by then. There was no question about it. She was Friday. She was born “on a Friday,” of course, in March 1986. I was 21 the day she died: Saturday, July 21, 1998. During her lifetime, the day we know as “Friday” became “the Day of the Dog” whenever mom and I would refer to it. We rarely called a weekday a “Friday” because, well, that was Friday’s name. But there have been very few times when a Friday has fallen on April 25. Since 1986, it has happened only six times, and only once more in her lifetime in 1997.
Next year will be 40 years since Friday’s Gotcha Day, when April 25 will fall on a Saturday. It would be more traditional, but it doesn’t seem quite right. So, on Friday, April 25, 2025, I’m saying a little tribute to my puppy 39 years after the first Day of the Dog.
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