Memoirs - Remembering Bonnie

By Yvonne H

I was a lonely child. I could not have told you I was lonely as I did not know how to name or describe the blank and empty palette that stretched before me on waking every day for as long as I could remember. What I accepted - in the way that children simply accept the way things are because that is all they know- was that it was up to me to figure out how to fill hours and amuse myself while my father was at work and my mother busied herself with the daily tasks of housekeeping, meal planning, cooking and ensuring her children were adequately clothed and fed within the modest budget she had to work with.

The age gap between me and my three older siblings meant that my life rarely intersected theirs. My brother Ray was 6 years older; my sister, Corinne, was 13 years older and my brother, Rex, was 15 years older. Each had their own age-appropriate concerns, friends and activities that kept their baby sister out of sight and out of mind as they went about their daily lives.

Years later, after I had fled my childhood and moved across the country to Washingto DC, my mother would remark in an off-handed way that I was “a surprise but wome couldn’t get abortions back then.” Perhaps that explains the throbbing undercurrent of sadness I felt and could not shake wherever I went. Perhaps I knew subconsciously from the time I was born that I was not welcomed into this world with a joyful embrace. Perhaps I sensed that my arrival, for my mother, portended a prolonged conscription to a life she had been on the brink of escaping: more months ahead of sleepless nights and taken-for-granted maternal duties of infant feedings, diaper changes, dirty laundry and the inevitable tedium and loneliness that accompanied child rearing and housekeeping in the 1950’s and early 1960s.

When I was 3 or 4 years old my father accepted a job as the superintendent of the Willits and Newcomb citrus ranch in Coachella, California. My oldest brother, Rex, had started his freshman year of college at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa and my parents, Ray, Corinne and I moved from our Riverside, California neighborhood home on Jane Street to a small isolated ranch home off a dusty side road next to Hwy. 111 in Thermal, California.

There were no neighbors or children nearby to play with so I entertained myself by wandering around our yard, swinging on the swing set my father had set up for me in the side yard, observing fire ants and catching baby frogs an toads and taking them into the shower with me at night to give them a good soaking.

When the citrus ranch failed due to a disease that killed off the citrus trees, my father took a new job as Director of Agricultural Research at the University of California, Riverside. His new job came with a house we could live in on the far end of campus; another isolated house with no neighbors or children nearby to play with.

I was 8 years old and my parents got my first dog to keep me company: a black and white collie who, together with my black and white cat Duke, became my constant companions. In the absence of children I could play with, Bonnie became my best friend and solace in times of loneliness.

Together, the three of us roamed the UC Riverside campus grounds when I was home from school, unsupervised and for hours at a time. I would lead the way, with Bonnie trotting obediently behind me and Duke trailing behind Bonnie, in parade fashion. We befriended the kindly and tolerant campus gardener who tended the grounds around our home. Sometimes Bonnie would assert her dominance over Duke by grabbing him with her teeth by the scruff of his neck and dragging him, docile and helpless, along the sidewalk outside our back door, until she grew bored.

Together we discovered an outcropping of large boulders on the hill that loomed above and behind our home; an above-ground “cave” of sorts where I brought my favorite books to read with Duke and Bonnie keeping me company while I imagined myself to be a queen ruling over the city below.

Bonnie was a smart dog who understood the rules of hide and seek. I would hide behind a tree or in some bushes when her attention was diverted, and then call her to come find me. Immediately she would run to look for me and jump for joy when she found me in my hiding place.

Sometimes I would amuse myself by turning on our backyard sprinklers and watch Bonnie leap about like a ballerina, basking in the coolness of the water and snapping at the water droplets.

I discovered some small red pepper bushes growing in our back yard, and they provided another source of idle amusement: I would feed a few peppers to Bonnie and then watch her sneeze and desperately try to cool her mouth by rubbing her nose on the lawn.

Once Bonnie showed up at our back door behaving oddly. She collapsed and could not walk. She was foaming at the mouth and was thrashing about. My father determined that she had strychnine poisoning, likely from eating poisoned food that someone had set out to trap rodents. He rushed her to the vet to have her stomach pumped and after that she was fine, to my great relief.

Some months later Bonnie went missing and did not come home. My father went searching for her and eventually returned to say that he had found her lying dead alongside the highway below our home. He guessed that she had been following Ray across the highway as Ray crossed it to meet a friend of his.

And just like that, my canine best friend, my companion and solace in times of loneliness was gone, never to be held or hugged again. I didn’t get to see her or say goodbye. I never got to ask her forgiveness for feeding her those tiny red peppers that burned her mouth and made her sneeze.

I remember my mother scolding Ray for his carelessness — holding him accountable for forgetting to lock the gate behind him when he left home, allowing Bonnie to escape. He was always Mother’s convenient scapegoat, the lightning rod for her wrath when things went wrong. What I don’t remember is being hugged or held or comforted or consoled over Bonnie’s death.

My father, ever the stoic, used to say “que sera, sera” — “whatever will be, will be” — in times of sorrow or upset. He and my mother went on with their lives in their practical way — much like the people in W. W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” — oblivious to the devastation I felt over the loss of my constant companion and best friend.

Not long afterwards, my parents surprised me with a new puppy — a miniature collie and Australian shepherd mix that they named Shelly. I still missed Bonnie terribly but I got the unspoken message that it was time to forget Bonnie, to move on and let Shelly fill the hole in my heart that Bonnie left behind She didn’t, and she never could