By BILLY MURPHY
Laugh Lines

I just saw the movie “My Dog Skip,” and without giving away the plot that just might happen to include tire tread marks and/or a little furry terrier (Just kidding... no, really) it was a really great movie.

It reminded me of our old dog whose name I cannot put in print because even though at the time it was cute and naive, now it would be considered dirty and politically incorrect.

Though my dog story is nothing like that of “My Dog Skip,” (no, really) it had a great relationship between a stern father and an often misunderstood son. I can relate to that. In the movie there is a scene where the father, who has lost a leg in the Spanish Civil War, and son are walking through the woods and they hear a gun shot. The father says, “Hunters!,” and tells his son to take a knee and get low. Hearing barely their breathing the son asks, “Is this what war was like?”

The expression alone of Kevin Bacon, playing the father, should earn him an academy award nomination next year. In his face you could see the terror he himself endured in war, and his equal desire to protect his son from even the knowledge of such terror. In that moment, I wondered why I never asked my father about his war experiences.

I felt sad that I had never asked before he died a few years ago what it was like to be in Germany, on the ground during World War II. In some ways I felt glad that in not asking I spared him the terror of remembering being so far away from home and family, being so scared of dying and mostly not being able to share those feelings with anyone around you. That had to be the true bravery.

Anyway, concerning my dog story which should be called “Fatal Traction,” my dad one day when I was about 12 got into the family car, our “Rambler American,” slapped it into reverse and proceeded to back over the family pet, the aforementioned, but not-named pooch. The dog started yelping as it lay on the ground paralyzed.

My dad, hating to see an animal suffer, took the situation in hand... literally. He (a carpenter by trade after the war) reached into the trunk of the car and pulled out a ballpeen hammer. He swung all four pounds of it and put our dog out of her misery.

None of us kids were awake yet and my father was late for work. So, he laid the pet across the road in the ditch. His plan was to tell us when he got home from work. Only, sometime during the day, while everyone was gone, she woke up! The ballpeen hammer must have acted as an anesthetic, allowing the dog to recover painlessly (no, really) from 1,000 pounds of rolling, trampling steel.

Again, we kids had no idea concerning the events of the morning. My dad arrived home, worrying all day about how he was going to explain his homicide of our hound! Only, as he drove up, the doggie came out to greet him just as she had done all the years before.

He was shocked. And the mutt? She was fine; a little fearful of cars and a lot more fearful of hammers, but fine. And my dad in living all day with his secret, not sharing those feelings with anyone around him, that had to be true bravery.

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