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THE MIDNIGHT SKULKER 38
Schaumburg, Illinois
Thursday, March 29, 1974
10:11 a.m. Central Standard Time
March, so it has been said, ‘comes in like a lion and goes out as a lamb’.
The late winter storm of the last days of February and early March certainly came blowing into the mid-west with the ferocity of a lion and on this day, appearing more as the lamb, the thinning remnants of winter still clung to naked tree limbs even as barely seen buds pushed through layers of winter bark.
Ellie and Sammy having been picked up on Wednesday morning were on their way to San Diego with their grandparents and should be arriving at Walter and Myra’s new home sometime Friday afternoon.
Marsha upstairs directing the movers, at the kitchen table -- that would be loaded onto the truck at any time --nursing the remains of a cup of coffee, Mitchell sat looking at his back yard which, as of tomorrow morning, would belong to Mister and Mrs. Limberger.
Memories of the past seven years at this home rippling through his mind as pages of a calendar, which, in fact, they were pages of a calendar.
The playground that came from Sears in three large cardboard boxes, with four huge heavy duty plastic bags containing hundreds of nuts of all thickness and sizes and hundreds of bolts in all thicknesses and sizes and, so it seemed, thousands of steel washers of varying sizes. The playground contained two swings, a jungle gym a slide and a teeter-tauter along with fifteen pages of instructions that, for a guy that has a hard time following written instructions, putting the playground together became Mitchell Lipensky’ equivalent of splitting the atom.
There were the countless barbeques and the hundreds of badminton games and the mowing and the ‘horsing around’… and the growth of his four children.
Then there was ‘Mercy’.
Peoria, Illinois
July 20, 1960
Bong! Bong! Bong!
Sleeping in a corner of and, with the help of a folding gate, kept within the kitchen at night, better than an alarm clock…
Bong! Bong! Bong! Mercy’s tail striking the metal cabinet door making a hollow Bong! Bong! Bong! that reverberated throughout the small house signaling the fact that near three-and-a-half-year-old Michael had awoken, had gone into the living room and turned the television on.
It also told Mitchell that he’d better get into the kitchen, if it wasn’t too late already—and it usually was—to get Mercy outside.
Looking in the living room, “Hi, Mikey,” Mitchell said sweetly as he headed to the kitchen. Opening the gate, “Hi, Mercy,” he said in the exact same, sweet tone of voice. Then, “Down, Mercy!” he said in a tone not quite as sweetly as, stepping into the kitchen he found that, oh, yeah, it was too late… by a few times and, if for nothing more than to get the licking, jumping, bundle of early morning energy out of his hair while cleaning the pile’a’poop and the three—well, to be fair, because one-and-a-half puddles’a’pee were on the newspaper that was spread near the back door—before cleaning the pile’a’poop and the one-and-a-half puddles’a’pee off the linoleum-covered floor, opening the screen door, Mitchell attached the six-month-old Dalmatian to the lead.
As there was no fence to separate this narrow, rectangular shaped lot and the side yard of the O’Connor’s, the neighbors to the rear, Mitchell clipped Mercy’s collar onto a lead that was attached to a pulley that ran along a seven-foot-high, fifteen-foot-long line that was fastened on one end by an eye-bolt that was screwed into the wood frame of the back door and, running at a sharp angle, to the trunk of a tree on the other end.
Given two pure bred Dalmatian puppies from Cricket’s litter of eleven shortly after moving into their new home as a gift from Walter and Myra for the birth of their granddaughter, keeping the female, Marsha and Mitchell were told to sell the other and keep whatever money the pup brought, which in itself was a nice gesture because the male sold after only two days for $125.
However, having a child in his “terrible threes,” a newborn and two puppies to care for—even if for only two days while Mitchell was at work—was just a bit too much for Marsha and, what under other circumstances would have been considered a nice gesture, as most often happened between Marsha and her in-laws, this nice gesture soured rather quickly.
Though she did love animals and dogs in particular, because of the baby, at first Marsha hadn’t been too excited about having even one puppy… not too excited at all.
Besides, as she’d said on more than one occasion, “If your parents wanted to give us a gift of a puppy and money, if that’s what they wanted to do, then why didn’t they sell the other dog themselves and just give us the money?”
But—excluding Walter, because she didn’t think he was all that devious—Marsha really didn’t know if her mother-in-law did it the way she did it knowing it would cause a problem, or if Myra, or Myra and Walter together, did it stupidly, without thinking.
Nonetheless, Mercy was then one of and loved by all the family.
Schaumburg, Illinois
Thursday, March 29, 1974
Believing that the ashes of a beloved pet should be spread where the pet was the happiest, the ashes of Mercy were scattered in this yard.
And the dog pen:
Having two dogs; one on the huge side and one on the moderately large side, poop would certainly be a problem, so Mercy and Sabra had been trained to ‘make’ in a pen.
Constructed in the north-west corner of the four foot high chain link fenced yard, the pen was made of one six foot section of chain link giving Sabra and Mercy a five by six foot toilet.
And this worked very well throughout spring, summer and fall. In winter, however, the poop would freeze and then it would snow, and then the poop would freeze and then it would snow, and so on and so on, so that by thawing time there would be a five by six melting pile of shit. And as near fourteen year old Mercy hadn’t mercifully been ‘put down’ until early in December of 1973 a part of Mercy had been left behind for Mitchell to scoop into heavy duty plastic bags before the semi-solid stuff became a melting river of shit.
“Mister Lipensky.”
His reverie broken, brought back to here, brought back to now, “Yes,” looking at Hank.
“We’re loading the kitchen now.”
To be continued.
©November 20, 2011 / Mark M. Lichterman
