Granville Ohio, where I live, has a strict leash law. I consider it one of the town’s most endearing qualities. Although tempered substantially now, I’ve had a paralyzing fear of large dogs, particularly German Shepherds since early childhood.
The dog I feared most wasn’t even real. It was invented by my grandmother, with whom I spent my mother’s work days until I started school. As loving as she was, my grandmother suffered no nonsense from her grandchildren. Years later, my parents told me I was exemplary in my childhood deportment, but only Mama, as I called her, and I knew how all that good behavior came about. If she so much as suspected I was up to mischief, she delivered this whispered warning: “Pssst! Don’t forget the German Police Dog behind the living room couch. He’ll come out and bite you if you are bad.”
This dire prophecy not only convinced me to stop whatever I was doing, but it instilled in me a deep dread of Germans, dogs, policemen, and the living room. Given the times, the early ‘40s, my fear of Germans was considerably better founded than the other three. I have no idea why shepherds were called “police” dogs, but the name definitely enhanced the fear.
The first manifestation of this four-part dread took place in the waiting room of my mother’s doctor. When she was called in to see the doctor, I was left with a stack of picture books under the watchful eye of the receptionist. Mother no sooner left the room than the outside door opened and a huge policeman in dress blues, including a large pistol on his belt, walked into the waiting room.
I screamed. Mother, the doctor, the nurses and the other patients poured out from the inner rooms.
“What’s the matter?” they all wanted to know.
“Nothing,” I said, crying as I stared at the floor. Suddenly, a large pair of polished black shoes strode into my field of vision.
“What is it, honey,” asked the policeman. I was frozen with fright. I clung to my mother, who took me to sit with the receptionist behind the counter until she was finished at the doctor’s.
On the way home, she insisted I tell her what came over me, but I wasn’t talking. Mama had also warned me against revealing the dog’s presence behind the couch. It did not take kindly to loose-lipped children.
The experience left me with remnants of a fear that lingers to this day. However, not so much that it hinders me from counting among my friends several big dogs. But this state of affairs did not easily come about.
Mother stopped working when my sister was born, and I started school, which was about a half mile from our house My father dropped me off in the morning, and I walked home after school. I was very careful to keep a sharp eye out for dogs that may be lying in wait for a defenseless little girl skipping home from school. If I were late getting home, my mother would set out on the route she knew I took. She would find me cowering behind a tree terrified of a dog that just happened to be in my projected path. One day she found me hiding behind a city mailbox half a block from our house. That did it.
She took me to my pediatrician, and much to my embarrassment told him the whole sorry story. She still did not know about the German Police Dog.
The doctor sat me down in his office while my mother waited outside. He smiled and said, “You know, dogs can sense when you are afraid of them. You have to stop being scared, because that puts you in more danger.”
So much for child psychology 1940s-style.
Years later, the story of the German Police Dog behind the sofa was one of my grandsons’ favorite stories of “the olden days.” When they were little, they marveled at how dumb I was, and today as teenagers, they tease me because my present sofa is tight against the wall.
“You’re still afraid a German Police Dog could be behind there if there were more space, aren’t you?” they ask me.
“Don’t poke fun,” I say.” A German Police Dog doesn’t have to live behind a couch. It could be anywhere in the house, and you better mind your manners. I can whistle it up at any time, and it will eat you for lunch!”
They pretend to be afraid, then shake their heads and howl with laughter at their silly grandmother.
I laugh, too, and suddenly I am surprised to feel a little shiver making its way down my spine.