Ghost dog

Last night I was visited by a ghost.

This happens about annually or so. He usually appears somewhere in the middle of a stream of nightmares, but he is a familiar face and not a particularly scary one. He is Charlie Brown, childhood dog.

Brown Dog, my dad called him. Chuck. Named of course after neurotic, round headed kid of infamy, Charlie Brown was your standard stray-dog melange of Collie, German shepherd, and probably Laborador-- those labs get around. I have no idea how my parents picked him up, probably some friends of theirs had a box of puppies, you know how it goes despite the best efforts of the S.P.C.A.

He was big-ish, kind of goofy, and basically harmless. I think he might have bit someone once, either it was Alicia, the babysitter I hated who made us go to bed way too early, or maybe it was the paper boy, I can't really recall. Brown Dog mostly lived in our backyard, which kind of a bummer for dogs. It was basically a rectangle of cool deck with a pool in the middle, around which Charlie paced, barking, while the kids splashed about.

In my dreams he appears, looking at me dolefully through the old sliding glass door of my childhood home. Except that it's now, and he's maybe been out there for 20 years or so, waiting for some attention. I look up and there is Chuck, gray-muzzled the way he was in the end, sad-eyed, waiting for me to notice him, and come on out to see him one more time. What have I been doing for twenty years that is so important that I have failed to see him sitting there? Why haven't I have time to just walk outside and put my arms around his neck? How many days has he sat there on the patio watching me on the inside, and hoping I would remember him?

I'm not sure why his soul is so restless, but I want him to know that I haven't forgotten.