When I was very young, I lived with my parents in an apartment on Inglewood Avenue in the city of Inglewood. We had moved back to Inglewood from Buena Park because the three of us missed our extended family members. We had a large dog with a beautiful, white coat of fur. Her name was Elsa. When my parents and I moved to our new house on Felton Avenue, we left Elsa with our neighbors to take care of temporarily. Unfortunately, they left their gate open and Elsa ran into the street. She was struck and killed by a car. My parents and I arrived in time to see her and say goodbye as she lay in the middle of Inglewood Avenue. I remember she was bleeding from the mouth. She survived the trip to the veterinarian, but the vet was forced to euthanize her. I still remember playing in our small yard when I heard my mother crying loudly after receiving the phone call from the vet.
Later in my life, my parents and I acquired another dog. I don’t remember how she joined our little family, but I do remember we named her Spot. She looked just like Nick Nolte’s dog in the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills: She was white with large, black spots covering half her body (or black with white spots, if you prefer). The entire left half of her face was covered with a raven-colored spot.
Spot was a very smart dog: She could expertly catch a tennis ball, no matter how far or how quickly you threw it. She was also a rather willful and rebellious dog. When it started to rain, if we didn’t let her inside the house right away, she would find a way to open the screen door in front: We would find her lying in the small space between the open screen door and the closed front door. It was as if she were telling us: “If you won’t let me inside the house, then I will get as close as possible.” When spot began a glorious love affair with the next-door neighbors’ male dog, she would find a way to climb our fence at any time of the day to visit him (in true Romeo and Juliet style).
The one time of year when we were reminded of Spot’s uniqueness was July Fourth. When my father and I would detonate the firecrackers that he managed to (illegally) purchase from his co-worker at the Phone Company, Spot would not run away from the explosion: Instead, she would stand on all fours and face the blast, with one front foot off the ground like a military horse on parade. Her reaction caused my father to theorize that Spot must have had hunting dogs in her lineage. (All we know was what Spot’s veterinarian told us: she was probably a Shepherd Mix.)
Spot had a way of getting involved with each year's July Fourth celebration in a unique and dangerous way: when my father would light a “Safe and Sane” firework (the kind that shot sparks into the air rather than exploding), she would run up and grab it in her mouth like a bone. Imagine this: A black and white dog running in circles around a suburban back yard with a cone-shaped object in her mouth, and multi-colored sparks shooting sideways from the cone. This is the image that first comes to mind when I think of July Fourth. I remember Spot running around the yard with a firework shooting fire out the side of her mouth: She looked like some kind of dragon-dog hybrid. Yes, she would singe her whiskers, but they would grow back. Yes, she would nearly set the back-yard grass on fire, but these are exhilarating memories for me.
I think Spot enjoyed July Fourth immensely. Later, we would keep her inside during the July Fourth holiday (for her own safety). Later, the love affair between Spot and the daddy dog next door resulted in a litter of seven puppies (all of them adorned with spots of various colors, including black, brown, and white). We gave away all of them except one to our friends and neighbors. We kept the only boy: a large, brown-and-black puppy that my parents and I named after the title character of a popular film about a man who beats the odds. Spot lived a long and happy life with her only son, Rocky. When it was time to catch a tennis ball that Mom, Dad, or I threw to the end of the back yard, Spot always gave her son a run for his money.
After acquiring a fondness for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, I came up with a posthumous nickname for Spot: I call her the Hound of the Fireworks.
