DOG DAYS

When anyone asks me what I've been doing, I usually say, "Walking the dogs." They take that to mean, "Nothing." WRONG!!!

Okay, maybe walking my rat terrier Mickey is close to nothing. We don't do much except mosey around following sniff-trails and peeing on significant landmarks. It's really pretty boring, unless he flushes a rabbit over at the school, so I mostly use our walks as an occasion to listen to books on tape. Sometimes I get so engrossed I forget where I am and have to figure out how to get back to 4901 Andrews from a creaky old mansion on the California coast on a dark and windswept night.

Walking my neighbor's dog Molly is another matter. If you don't remember, Molly is a Lhasa Apso with an attitude. Her attitude is, "I am Tibetan royalty, and you are my devoted lackey." We take about a 30 minute walk every day since, as you may recall, her owner--oops, "honored companion"--is wheelchair bound at home.

Our unvarying route is to go one-half block west, then take a right into a long alley that runs to the next street and go on from there. At the point where we make this turn into the alley, we are joined by a black-and-white border collie named Lady. Lady pretty much has the run of the neighborhood and, being a working dog by ancestry, she is alert for little services she can perform. She has taken on the duty of escorting us through this alley with the pomp and circumstance due a regal personage such as Molly. Rather like the trumpeter who precedes the royal entourage and alerts the loyal subjects.

So there we go on our grand way down the alley. You should know that two out of three houses bordering the alley contain dogs, and that they are usually out in their backyards. Lady rushes ahead barking at the high wooden fences that prevent these dogs from seeing us. She alerts them that we are passing, and they respond in a frenzy. The roar of the crowd rolls down the alley like a great wave as we make our grand way. While Lady rushes from side to side, Molly glides straight ahead at a regal pace, barely acknowledging her subjects with a slight swish of her plumed tail. Like the Queen Mum barely nodding to the commoners from her carriage.

Shortly before Christmas we were going down the alley, accompanied by the usual chorus. BARK! BARK! ARF! YIP! YAP! GRRR! RUFF! RUFF! QUACK! YIP-YIP-YAP!

Wait a minute! QUACK?

I whipped off my earphones and listened. Nothing. I looked up in the sky. No V-flight of ducks headed to the park. Was it a glitch in the book-on-tape? I smacked my Walkman a couple of times just in case, and went on. But I brooded about it the rest of the way home. Had I imagined it? Was I, at last, quacking up?

The next day, same route, same dogs. No quack. This was not good. I HAD imagined it.

Then next day, QUACK! QUACK! I couldn't tell where it was coming from, but it seemed to be one of the last couple of houses before the end of the alley. It was true, someone had a duck!

After that, it got to be a normal occurence, and one day I triangulated the sound and squinted through a crack in the fence and saw a huge black duck swaggering around the back yard. It looked like a cartoonist had drawn Daffy Duck and plopped him down in this back yard.

Why do they have a duck? I ponder this as we take our walk. They are, for this neighborhood, a fairly wealthy family and I guess entitled to their eccentricities. At first I thought Mr. Daffy was intended from Christmas dinner, but the next day he was still there, quacking away. Ditto, New Year's Day. So Molly, Lady, and I have accepted his presence and look forward to his acknowledgment as we pass and are disappointed when he withholds it. Hail to thee, our web-footed friend.