summer memories

Dear friend Lenore has a wonderful column now online at the New York Sun regarding people's personal "summer memories"...including one of Yours Truly. Check it out at
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/as-salamanders-waddle/78628/

She had to edit, of course, so here's my submission regarding her "Everything I need to know I learned in summer" in its entirety:

How about a near death experience?
It was summertime, I was 7, and Clyde was eating a hot dog.
Clyde was the family English setter, a dog that had absolutely no business taking up residence in a little rowhouse in Baltimore City with a backyard about as long and wide as your typical comic strip (i.e. TINY). English setters live to RUN and so Clyde had turned our once quaint wee patch of urban green into Hiroshima after the bomb.
Anyway, about the hot dog.
Clyde was white with black spots and splotches, strategically placed on his furry face that, with the hot dog lodged in one side of his mouth, made him look like a canine Groucho Marx.
Being a budding journalist and writer, I instinctively spotted a photo opp, and dashed about seeking a camera with film in it to capture the Kodak moment.
When I could find none, I was left with nothing to do but to pat my pooch on the head and head in for the evening after a day's summer play.
Unfortunately, Clyde had other ideas.
Personally, I blame Lorne Greene, remember him? After Lorne got kicked off the Ponderosa, he found himself in sent to TV purgatory otherwise known as Alpo commercials.
"Ol' Rex here really knows a good meal when he sees it," Lorne would say, rubbing his gnarled hand over some German shepherd's head as the dog's face violated a heaping bowl of Alpo dog food.
Of course, we now know it is a BAD, BAD, BAD DOG idea to touch a dog, particularly around the head/mouth when it is EATING.
Clyde mistook my head pat as a attempt to steal away is ballpark frank and like a drunken, angry Yankee fan (granted that's all a redundancy), attacked me.
Clyde hit me with full force, knocking me against one of two metal poles where my mother would sometimes hang summer wash when she didn't feel like tackling the Manhatten Project which were the family washing and drying machines (that's another story).
I remember things went fuzzy, like looking through wax paper. Luckily for me, I was blessed with a big bulbous head which made a much more easily accessible target than did my throat, otherwise some other PR guy would be writing this response to your PROFNET.
Clyde gnawed my head for awhile until some neighbor interceded. When all was said and done, I received a free ambulance ride (I remember wondering why I didn't feel any pain...they told me in the ambo that I was in shock...and kept thinking to myself, "Thank God for shock, thank God for shock, I LIKE shock!) and 36 stitches in the back of my head (and these were the days before dissolvable stitches...docs sewed you up with good old fashioned CATGUT boyhowdy...which, I have to tell you, is a real JOY to have to have removed...NOT).
For sometime after, everytime I had a summertime haircut, my father would tell the barber, "Not too much off the back. The scars will show."
So, at the ripe old age of 7, I learned about spectre of DEATH and BETRAYAL. As a high school student, I would write an essay about this experience, wherein I attributed it as a major factor in what path my life would take in ensuing years. Up to the Clyde incident I was a pretty active kid and pretty much a B's and C's student. After Clyde, I stopped going outdoors nearly as much, began cultivating a rich inner life (and rich diet), becoming the fat kid-last-kid-picked-for-dodge-ball, an afterschool special starring Bert Convy and Gary Coleman. My grades went from B's and C's to mostly A's and my fate as a pseudointellectual writer instead of a construction worker were sealed.
So that's my summer memory.
Oh, as for Clyde? Story goes my Dad gave him away to man who trained hunting dogs. Personally, I think it was just a prison break. Clyde got out of his tiny suburban prison and likely spent his days running, running, running over hills and dales, like Snoopy was always urged to do, chasing rabbits...