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The Christmas of 1956, in the midst of Anna's and my sophomore years at UNC and about six months after we had married and moved to a second floor apartment at the Weavers on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, recently vacated by Anna's German professor who had recommended it to us, I decided to buy Anna a dog.
A few days before Christmas, I went to a pet store in Goldsboro and picked out a black miniature French poodle. On Christmas Eve, I sneaked him into Aunt Lissie’s apartment, in the back area of mother and daddy's house in Princeton. Anna's present triggered love at first sight for her as it had for me the first time I saw him but, I'm pretty sure, appalled everyone else: mother, daddy, Aunt Lissie, Anna's parents, not to mention the Weavers.
We named our new love "Jacques", because he was, after all, a French poodle. The three of us lived at the Weavers until Anna and I graduated from UNC in June of 1958, a year early as a result of going to school year-round.
We returned to my parent's home for the summer months, Anna pregnant, and I working with daddy to make a little money for our odyssey to Pasadena, California where I had been accepted at Fuller Theological Seminary.
On a sunny, but chilly, early September morning in 1958 Anna and I, with about $200, young, enthusiastic, full of hope for the future, probably stupid, took off in our old, black, two-door Chevrolet showing about 65,000 miles on the odometer, and she (pregnant), Jacques (in the back seat), and I headed out for the west coast.
Our first child, Eddie, was born in Pasadena during the dark hours before dawn on February 23rd, 1959. We couldn't afford a crib so we used one of the drawers from the dresser in our apartment next door to the seminary, pulling it out in the daytime and setting it, with Eddie inside, on the table. Later when we somehow came up with a crib, Jacques would share it with Eddie much of the time, including Saturday nights when we would watch Lawrence Welk with our widowed landlady, on the primitive black-and-white TV that my cousin Joe Bailey had given us when we lived in Chapel Hill.
After two semesters, I was convinced I was ready for the pulpit; that it was time to get out of the classroom and start spreading the gospel in a pulpit. In late May, my sister Chloe, who now prefers to be known as Nancy, took the train to California, and she and I drove a packed car with Anna, who hadn't yet learned to drive, in the front seat with us, and Eddie and Jacques stuffed in the back with all our belongings, packed so high it was difficult to see out the back window.
During the summer and fall of 1959 we again lived with my parents; Anna, Jacques, and I sleeping in my old bedroom with its own fireplace which I would keep going as late as possible at night and then fire up again the next morning to ward off the bone chilling cold that had once, when Chloe and I were children, frozen our goldfish during the night.
In the winter of 1959, my having failed to secure a pulpit, we returned to UNC to study for our teaching certificates, moving into a small house on 22 Justice Street in Chapel Hill, named in honor of the all-time UNC tailback, Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice, who would live until October 30, 2003. We enrolled Eddie in Betty Butler's daycare center, located in her house, surrounded by a big fenced-in yard, in the adjacent town of Carrboro. Jacques would patiently wait for us at 22 Justice Street while we attended class.
At some point, we gave Jacques the nickname: "Charlie Brown", maybe because it sounded cute, maybe because Jacques was too hard to say.
Our second son was born on January 3rd, 1962 at the UNC Hospital near Kenan Stadium., not far from the wooded parking area where Anna and I used to go for privacy when we lived in dorms during our Freshman year.
Anna and I loved Jacques, both the poodle and the name, so much we decided to call our new born "Jacques", with the middle name "Laurence", not "Lawrence", for one of our favorite actors, Laurence Harvey. We were feeling a bit rebellious toward Anna's mother, who we knew wanted us to name the new family member "Jack", after Anna's father, which I've wished many times since that we had done. Anyway, we made peace with the idea by rationalizing that Jacques is, after all, Jack. I'm not sure we ever told Anna's parents about the "Jacques" part, calling our son "Jack" whenever we were with them and eventually with everybody else, "Jack" like "Charlie Brown" proving much easier to say.
In the late afternoon of a late October day in 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I distinctly remember being at the Psychometric Lab at UNC, where I was working as a research assistant as Anna and I pursued graduate studies in education, and getting a call from Anna: Charlie Brown had been run over and killed by the mail truck. We were devastated and tearfully buried him in the backyard.
We decided we had to replace him as quickly as possible to ease our broken hearts, a decision that was hastened when the fleas came out of the carpet, and not finding Charlie Brown, nearly consumed us. We found a woman in Chapel Hill with poodles for sale. The only one left had a rather non-poodle snout but we got him anyway.
By the time I wrote this in early 2009, I had totally forgotten his name. Then one day I saw a course description on the history of ancient Egypt that included a chapter on Tutankhamen, one of the pharaohs. Immediately the words Akhenaton Amenhotep flashed in my mind. Of course . . ., our second dog was named Amenhotep, Ahmen for short, after Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV), also an Egyptian pharaoh, because our dog's prominent nose reminded us of a famous golden pharaoh monument: an exotic animal with a man's head.
As I remember, Ahmen lived with us in Chapel Hill, NC, State College, PA, at the rental house in Arlington, MA (the one next to our babysitter Patty’s house), the house on Hemlock Street also in Arlington, which we later painted purple, and in the big house at 998 Mass. Ave. in downtown Arlington. Sometime after we had settled into the Mass. Ave. house, Ahmen disappeared, never to return, "sent missing", we think, by an irate neighbor in the apartment complex next door.
After that we got Ace, a large standard poodle, who became very attached to and later was adopted by Rich.
At some point we bought a Norwegian elkhound from a pet shop just across the Arlington line in Cambridge. Shortly after we got her home, she became sick and we learned that she had a serious illness; distemper, as I remember. But by then Anna, the children, and I had already bonded with her and there was no way we could bring ourselves to return her to the pet store. Somehow she recovered. Eddie named her Baggins after Bilbo Baggins, the protagonist of The Hobbit, one of Eddie's favorite books. |
