More on Chance, the dog and the Summer of Nick Von Bell

I thought quite a bit about Chance the dog and his owner from my last post.  I hope actually that Chance is still running wild with lots of open spaces and things to explore in heaven. Or maybe he has come back as a dog whisperer who works with aggressive dogs. I hope to God, truly, that his owner is now clean and sober.  Maybe that was the event that tipped her over into sobriety and recovery.  And I hope that little boy doesn't remember that day at all.  May it be so.  

On another note entirely, I have been remembering an even more ancient set of events than the one I shared last time.  During the summer between 6th and 7th grade, I decided that I would invent a make up boyfriend.  I was 12 at the time, right?  Some of you who are my Facebook friends who I went to school with may remember this and be relieved that I don't continue to believe this story.  Anyway, his name was Nick Von Bell.  I kid you not.  He was from Paris and during the summer, he took me to Paris and we just had the most wonderful time.  I must have met his family and we toured the city and I learned French and all kinds of things.  

  So when school started up in September I actually decided to tell people this story.  I remember the kind of blank stares I got from the girls I told this story to. It was like, "Okay, Linda.  Thanks for sharing."  I kept up with he story for quite a bit of the first part of 7th grade.  I finally just let it go and never did go back to the girls I told the story to tell them I had made it up.  I guess I thought they just forgot about it and had concluded I was nuts.  Which at some level I had to have been to think it was a good idea to make up something so absurdly not possible.  But let's remember, Kennedy had just recently been elected, we were still being subjected to the duck and cover drills to help us survive a nuclear holocaust, the cold war was very cold and the Cuban Missile Crisis just around the corner.  It was like Camelot meets Dr. Strangelove in the wider world.  Why not make up a story about a boyfriend and going to Paris? Of course, there was that tiny other backdrop to this fantasy in my "real" world.  That was the worsening of my mother's alcoholism that set the stage for much of the way my life has played out since, the good, the bad, the absurd and the sublime.  Back then, it was the bad.  Anyone who knows about alcoholic families back then, before we all started talking about Everything, knows that drill.  So Nick Von Bell and Paris.  Not a bad deal, when you stop to think of it.