Nick

Nick — ©2025 Patrick T. Power

If you look closely at the photograph, you can see that Nick is chained to the back porch post. That's because our back yard wasn't secured by a fence with a gate. We were renting a house on Mosley Avenue (I always thought it was Mosley Street) at the time, and while there were fences dividing our property from our neighbours, there wasn't one which totally enclosed the back yard.

Nick came into our lives in a rather odd fashion. I came home from work one day to find that a woman had stopped her car in front of our house and asked our kids, who were playing in the yard, if they would watch her dog for a while while she went to the store. Since I wasn't there, I don't really know how it all went down, but they agreed, I guess, and the woman never returned.

Nick was a sweet creature. He was good with our kids and the neighbourhood kids. He didn't seem to have a mean bone in his body. He did, however, have a serious problem with strangers who approached the house. He would go completely nuts. Of course, it didn't help that—in order to keep him from running around the neighbourhood, and possibly getting run over by a car—we had kept him chained up. At first to the porch, and later to a stake in the ground and with a longer chain. It no doubt made him even more territorial.

Once, he nipped at a boy delivering the advertiser newspaper, and another time, he pulled himself free from the stake and went after the woman delivering mail. She advised us that she wouldn't deliver our mail if she saw that our front door was open or that Nick was in the yard. Naturally, we complied, but not long after that, we got a letter from the Post Office telling us that we had to get rid of Nick (I believe the actual word was "destroy") or face a lawsuit. Feeling as though we had no real option, I took Nick to the veterinarian to have him put down.

I don't recall that we considered taking him to a shelter or if one even existed. I do recall that we considered taking him far out into the country and letting him go, but also feared what that might mean—both for him and anyone who might confront him. There had to have been options we didn't consider at the time, and it remains one of the greatest regrets of my life that I couldn't save his.

According to my notation, I wrote the following lines on 16 May 1992 (with more planned that never came to be), but my memory tells me that it was earlier than that:

The neighbour's dog has come for you
she sniffs the backyard stair
and walks away without a clue
as I sweep away your hair.

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