MY FRIEND JIM

MY FRIEND JIM

When I was a young boy, and in my early teens, my parents wouldn’t let me have a dog. So I did the next best thing and I adopted someone else’s dog. The dogs name was Jim and his owner paid no attention to him, so I took over the job. Jim was an outside dog who was street smart so he had the run of the neighborhood and when he wanted company he always looked me up. When I got up in the morning for my paper route, there he would be in the yard waiting for me and when my dad came home at night he would quietly disappear, knowing he wasn’t welcome, although that changed, the longer he hung around.

None of my brothers or sisters ever paid much attention to Jim. I guess I was the dog lover in the family. Jim was a mutt and something of a cross between a German Sheppard and a Husky. He was stout and strong and even on the coldest winter nights he would curl up in a ball under our back-steps outside and sleep sometimes. I put some straw under there for him and as long as I wasn’t feeding him food from the house or letting him in the house, Dad dropped his opposition to him. I never fed him much but he stayed in good shape so his owner must have been putting food out for him, The man just didn’t seem to care where he was or maybe because he saw me with his dog so much, he was just happy someone else was paying attention to him.

I had a morning paper route so every morning at six I had to get up and go seven blocks uptown to the paper office and get my papers and then deliver them. It took me about an hour and a half and Jim always went with me. Many of my customers had dogs too, so Jim would help himself to their dog’s food while he was there, if it was outside. If their dog bothered me, Jim took them to task and he was a formidable fighter. In the winter when my hands got cold Jim would always let me warm them up in his fur and his tail was always wagging when he saw me.

Jim was well known around the neighborhood-- in fact around the town. I eventually switched to an evening paper route so I would go to the paper office after school and Jim was always there waiting for me. Fran, the man who ran the office, said he appeared every day about a half hour before I did and would lie on the sidewalk and wait for me. Jim seemed to know what time it was, but he didn’t know what day it was, so on Sundays he went up to the office too but seeing no one there he would go back home. He had to cross a busy highway to get there, but he always watched for traffic. Then I got a job and had to quit delivering papers and Jim would wander over to see me if I was outside, but he seemed to come less and less because I was never home.

Then one night while we were eating supper we heard a gunshot and went outside to investigate. There was Jim, lying on the sidewalk dead. There was a new cop on the police force and seeing Jim loose, he thought he was a stray so he shot him. While I knelt crying over Jim, my Dad lashed out at that cop and he was lucky to not been arrested for what he said to him. But I remember one sentence to this day, that dad told that cop, “You just killed the best friend that boy ever had.”