Sometimes, in the summer, my mind slips from its serious consideration of crime, violence, and other features of the coming elections, and meanders in the direction of Wistful Vista.
Now, those of you who are old enough to remember vintage trivia questions will recall that Fibber McGee and Molly of sitcom fame lived at 79 Wistful Vista, an address tucked away in the radio somewhere between the plains where the Lone Ranger fought the good fight and the big city where his great-nephew did the same as the Green Hornet. But that tidy home with its untidy closet is not the Wistful Vista visited of my contemplation.
A woman I knew was absolutely dedicated to nostalgia for an era she mostly missed. Born in the 1940s, she yearned for the music of the 1920s, the movies of the 1930s, and the radio comedies which bloomed before she was born. Fibber McGee and Molly did not leave the airways until well into the 1950s, so maybe she DID get to listen to them first time around. I any case, she missed them in a world where movies were now in color and women wore trousers to work. (This is the lady who signed a petition at her workplace demanding that women NOT wear this inelegant article of clothing on the job. This was, er, in the 1970s. She sighed “I always was in the forefront of going backward.”)
She lived alone in a largish house after her parents died. (She, um, insisted on buying it from them instead of inheriting it. And despite some heroic attempts, she never married. We may discuss her financial and romantic lives at some later date.) So she decided she needed a poodle puppy. Her parents, after a number of years with, I think, Shelties, had always had poodles. She set out to find one.
But she was thrifty. She did not want some poodle puppy with an expensive pedigree. The vet whom she had come to know while caring for her mother’s last poodle, Wimsey, warned her not to go below three figures for any reason, but she always knew better. She hunted down every cheap purveyor of poodles she could learn about. (And, because she was a person of moral fiber, declined a very inexpensive puppy she found in a basement with fifty or so others, and immediately went home to call the authorities, who later raided that basement. She was cheap, but she had her standards.) And at last she found him: a poodle puppy which could be all hers for five dollars.
The vet looked over her find and shook his head. The treasure, whom she promptly named Wistful Vista, was bald, swollen to double the proper size, and suffering from puppy strangle. He warned her this was NOT going to be a long-term relationship, but said he would do his best. Little Wistful was cured of the mange and the puppy strangle, and eventually grew hair everywhere he should have had hair EXCEPT his muzzle. And he fell madly in love with his thrifty owner, who loved him right back.
However, although her parents had raised many a poodle puppy to responsible doghood, she did not have them to give her advice. She yearned to bring Wistful to meet me, she said, but he had never QUITE mastered being housebroken. AND she lived a long way away; he never liked to ride in the car without sitting in her lap while she drove. AND, contradicting the truism that “bargain dogs never bite” (or something like that) he liked to invite people to play by biting them. Hard. She was constantly finding his teeth in quite the wrong place whenever she sat down. (I always wanted to ask if Wistful was the only one who did that, but I had too many manners. Now I shall never know. But, as I said, we will discuss her romantic life at some future date.)
But I always think of Wistful come summer, for his owner was far too thrifty (and her house too oddly constructed) ever to invest in central air conditioning. She had a single window unit air conditioner, which she put in her bedroom window and let run all day long, without ever going into the bedroom, or letting Wistful do so, in daylight. At night, she and Wistful would retire there, at which point she turned the unit off. (If you sleep with the air conditioning on, you die of pneumonia. She could prove this: her mother died in a hospital in summer, and THEY kept the air conditioning running 24 hours a day, in spite of her warnings. Proof positive.)
I never heard how SHE beat the heat, but she knew Wistful needed assistance in a Midwestern summer. She thus soaked towels in cold water, wrung them out, and folded these on all the places where he liked to sit. The evaporation of the water would keep the towel, and her poodle puppy, nice and cool. I have never tried this, so I don’t say it didn’t work. I WILL say it was unusual.
She and Wistful, just to spite the vet, lived happily for years until she died, completely without warning, on a day she had planned to go to a little place she knew that sold groceries with expired selling dates at a discount. I was unable to attend the estate sale (where, I am told, mold warnings were posted on the entrances) but I do know Wistful was inherited by one of her staff (she was thrifty, remember: all her servants were part-time) who was the only person Wistful bit just once. The man smacked Wistful a good one, and Wistful thus learned the man did not WANT to play the game, and never bit him again. His owner was puzzled by this, but never tried it herself.
I do not know if Wistful still bites and barks among us, or if he is elsewhere, waiting to pounce upward at his One and Only. But on warm days in the summer, I think about him curling up on damp lukewarm towels, and wonder until the whole world turns wistful.
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