Marylou DiPietro

I’m not sure why I kept this sad-faced porcelain puppy on my shelf for over sixty years. 

“It was your grandmother’s,” my mother said, as she handed me the dog who stared at me with unbearable longing.  I always did the things I hoped would make my mother happy, so I took the dog and walked away.

Now, for the first time, I wonder how my grandmother came to have the dog. And why, after her passing, my mother thought I should have it. 

My grandmother was a no-nonsense (although not humorless) Irish immigrant who, after her mother died giving birth to her ninth child, raised her eight siblings. 

I cannot imagine my grandmother spending money on something frivolous to decorate her apartment, which reminded me of the drab, black-and-white apartment in the tv show the “Honeymooners.”  The sadness in the puppy’s eyes makes me wonder, though, if, in a moment of weakness, she dug into her purse for money meant for groceries to buy the dog, whose deep, dark eyes could have been her own.            

Or was it a gift from the wealthy family whom she worked for as a domestic? My mother said the family was very fond of my grandmother and, on occasion, had given her gifts. Maybe they thought the dog, who looked both lovable and lonely, would help make the place where my grandmother ended up living feel more like the home she had dreamed -- as she crossed the Atlantic in steerage – would one day be hers.

Or maybe my grandfather bought it for her as a peace offering after one of his countless drinking sprees. Perhaps he thought that, even though the dog had the eyes of an abandoned child, the fact that he bought it with money he easily could have spent at the bar, would cheer her up.

Or maybe my mother bought it as a gift the day she got her first paycheck, to celebrate the end of her being a burden on her parents.

Written in ink on the bottom of the puppy’s paw is the number 215. It makes me think of the long line of stone-faced immigrants getting off the ship into lives they could not imagine.

Perhaps, giving me the dog was my mother’s attempt at letting go of the suffocating sadness that was being passed down from generation to generation.

It seems fitting that, now that I am the age my grandmother was when she died of “natural causes,” I take the dog down off the shelf and think about what will become of him after I’m gone. 

I decided that I will not pass it on to my own daughter. Instead, I will let someone – some stranger who sees a different story in the puppy’s eyes - find him whenever I decide to let him go, and that stranger will bring him home.