"I Ain't Got No Dog No More"

You pick up stories along the journey…and I have collected plenty. For six years I had the honor of being the president of Frontier Community College in Fairfield, Illinois. While there, I had a great staff including a gentleman who worked in our maintenance department named Andy Pottorff. He once shared a great story about his childhood that I like to recall now and then.

Seems that when Andy’s mom died, while going through her personal belongings, he found a letter to her from her brother. Mom was in her twenties when she got the letter from five-year-old sibling Billy Wayne. Writing to his much older sister in 1944, Billy Wayne told in precise words how things were going in his life back home in Wayne County.

“I have had the measles for seven days and cannot go to school. Mama got me a banny rooster today and I am feeling much better. Grandma told me yesterday that my dog had been sucking out eggs layed (sp) by the hens. Today she gave my dog some medicine to make him stop. The medicine kilt him.

I ain’t got no dog no more.”

In other words, things were looking up for Billy Wayne---out of the blue, he had scored a banny rooster---and he was feeling better from his bout with measles. But then, his dog developed a taste for yolk and grandma “gave him some medicine” to help stop Rover’s thievery. Grandma’s action accidentally kilt him. The medicine, in retrospect, was probably a small caliber gun.

I ain’t got no dog no more.

Billy Wayne is now in his 70s and lives in Carmi, Illinois. Andy took him the letter for safekeeping.

I see the letter as a metaphor for life. Things were going great for Billy Wayne…or so he thought. He was on the mend, had measles in his rearview mirror, and actually had scored a new pet. Then, out of the blue, his dog’s behavior was bad enough for there to be an intervention by a pistol-packing grandma. Billy Wayne’s optimism one day turned quickly the next.

The lesson is to never get too high or too low with our fortunes. Never are we flying so high that we can’t quickly plunge to the depths in only a few hours.

One day a dog and a rooster-----the next, no dog, no more.