One of the best gifts I’ve ever received wasn’t really a Christmas gift. It was a belated gift the family from my father a few months after the big day in early 1983.
My brother and I grew up with a collie. Dad loved that breed and bought one when I was baby. He and my mother had just purchased the property that was his favorite among the dozens of properties he lived on through the years.
Shortly after we moved to Neosho, Dad bought the family’s first pet, a young collie we named Jody. I’ve seen photos of Jody, but I don’t remember him. I do know that the old man loved that dog, and he always said it was a great watch dog.
Unfortunately, we lived off the highway and Jody got hit by a car. Dad telling that story is one of the few times I saw him sad. We didn’t have another pet for several years after that.
By 1983, we’d moved to Joplin from Anderson. My parents had recently reconciled after a short divorce, and we had a small home not far from downtown Joplin and just two blocks from the grade school we attended.
One day, when we came home “skipping from school,” as Dad liked to describe it, he asked my brother and I to sit down and close our eyes, saying he had a late Christmas present for us.
Moments after we shut our eyes, Dad left for a moment, returning to the room with the sound of soft whining the only clue to what the surprise was. “You can open your eyes now, boys.”
We opened our eyes to a puppy. It was a sweet little collie, a little scared, yet happy, with its tail wagging. We were both excited, petting and hugging the dog. Not surprisingly, we named the puppy Jody.
Jody was our pet for years. He always greeted us when we got off the bus from school. My mom often said that even though it was the family’s dog, Jody was “Ernie’s dog.” Where I went, he went. When I was outside shooting baskets, he sat off to the side watching. When I rode my bike down the long dirt road we lived on, he tagged along.
Jody became the ultimate guard dog, to the point of being a bit overzealous, a trait my father blamed on our neighbor’s son in Joplin. Apparently, he’d been torturing Jody from the other side of the fence for months until my dad put an end to it.
If Jody didn’t know somebody who came near our property, he let them know about it. He did cross the line one time, biting a girl who made the mistake of taunting him as she rode by on her bike. That cost the old man several hundred dollars.
For us, though, Jody was the perfect dog. When he wasn’t in his plush dog house or sitting next to one us, he was sleeping on the front porch, right in front of the door. At any sign of danger, he alerted us. He was the reason my parents were comfortable letting us stay home alone as young as 11 years old.
Jody came with us from Lebanon to Burlingame. He went with Dad to Melvern when my parents divorced in 1993, so I still got to see him every weekend. That lasted until my freshman year of college, when I was almost 19 and Jody 12.
We lost Jody in 1995, never to be found. Because he wasn’t the type of dog to wander off and we searched the property for him meticulously, we suspect that some shady neighbors were the culprits.
Needless to say, it was a big loss. In fact, all these years later, I’ve never had another dog. I just can’t imagine having another Jody. But I’ve always been grateful for a “Christmas” gift that was with me from first grade through my freshman year of college.
Part VIII: Christmas with Virgil, Karen and a heart attack
Part VII: Dad and the Christmas classics
Part VI: Average grades mean you walk to school
Part III: Mortal Kombat and burritos