The Pecan Park Eagle

All she needs is a pink scarf.

Everything we do, or fail to do, bears consequence. And it is a thing that happens to each of us daily. We just rarely know it because, most of the time, our choices blur into the sameness of ordinary decisions about where to have lunch, and with whom, or when to run errands like a simple drive from home to the post office.

Today I chose to leave home for a run to the post office at 11:30 AM. By leaving at that precise time, I set myself up for an encounter that was to make it no ordinary day.

Because I had parked on the street in front of our house, it was easier for me to vacate our subdivision by making a clockwise u-turn on the street behind us and back to the major street that leads to the Katy Freeway, one block away. As I was making the last turn onto my exit route, I heard a horn behind me. It was my son Neal. He was just coming back from a trip to see his auto mechanic about a problem with his gear shift. We exchanged brief hellos. I told him I’d see him after I made my postal run and then started the slow drive up the street to the freeway.

Then it happened. The cutest little Chihuahua I’ve ever seen came bounding up the street toward me. She was wearing a pink scarf around her neck and apparently was someone’s pet that had gotten away. She could have been an abandoned animal, but I didn’t want to think about that cruel possibility. I started to stop, and then to go back, but our exit street is not exactly easy to maneuver as a u-turn because of the two-way traffic.

Besides, I looked back in the rear view mirror and saw my son Neal stop. He had noticed the little dog too. I saw the little dog standing on her hind legs, bouncing up and down, and I knew that she and Neal were speaking. Then I saw Neal slowly turn the corner with the little dog in pursuit of him and I felt OK about things. Surely Neal would get the dog and we would begin a search for her owner by the time I returned from the post office.

Then, on the way home from the post office via the Katy Freeway, I saw the little Chihuahua again. She was laying on the ground, dead in the inside lane of east bound traffic near Eldridge. Her little eyes were still open, but they had been  stilled from any further life by the crushing weight of a car or truck. She was still wearing her little pink scarf, a scarf that now blew in the wind as if to say, “Please don’t forget me!”

When I got home and told Neal what I had seen, he was as grief-stricken as I. Right after I lost sight of Neal and the puppy earlier, Neal right away had car trouble that distracted him just long enough for the little dog to get away on his random search for some place safe as home.

Sadly, it was a search that only took away the sunlight of love and life forever from one of God’s smallest, totally innocent creatures.

I am reminded of two lines I wrote in a poem years ago, in a poem called “Today” …

“I cannot capture what is yet to be with my promises. ~ I cannot regain what might have been with my regrets.”

I cannot, Little One, promise you that I will definitely be too alert to ever let this happen again; and neither can I make good on my powerful wish that I could go back in time to 11:33 AM today and do a u-turn to pick you up off the street and save your life in time. I can just tell you that I will never again be  the same as a consequence of what I did, and didn’t do, today, to actively save your life.

I will never forget you, Little Miss Pink Scarf. Never. And some good will come of today. I just don’t know yet what it will be.

Tags: the little chihuahua in the pink scarf

This entry was posted on February 10, 2012 at 2:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.