Bumpers was a beagle. Until his friend’s thirteenth birthday, he was thought to be a very ordinary beagle. There is nothing wrong with being an ordinary beagle. Most beagles are just that: ordinary. They smile, play, run, jump (not that high), smile, beg for food, sleep, eat, sleep, eat some more, smile, and sleep some extra more – just like any other dog can smile, play, run, jump (maybe a little higher), beg, eat, sleep, eat some more, smile, and sleep some extra more. Very ordinary. Very normal. Very much like a plain beagle should be. What made Bumpers different, however, what made people decide that he was not ordinary but instead very extraordinary, very much unlike a beagle or on any ordinary dog they had ever known, was a strange set of events that occurred on the morning of his friend’s thirteenth birthday.
Rachel was Bumpers’s friend. Some people may have called her Bumpers’s owner but Rachel thought such a title wrong. People, she would say, cannot own other people so why should they own dogs? They can take care of dogs. They can watch out for them. They can even rescue them. But that can’t own them. Not really.
Rachel was an ordinary girl. She smiled, played, ran, jumped (higher than Bumpers), smiled, begged for food, slept, ate, slept, ate some more, smiled, and slept some extra more – just like other almost thirteen year-old girls. That’s what made Rachel and Bumpers such a good pair. They were two ordinary, perfectly normal friends. It is important to understand this or the events of Rachel’s thirteenth birthday may seem less extraordinary than they really were.
The morning of Rachel’s thirteenth birthday found her asleep. Since ordinary girls are often asleep at seven o’clock on their birthdays, especially ordinary girls whose best friend have just spent the night with them, this was also not out of the ordinary. Nor was it unusual that the friends had sat up stargazing before falling asleep in the bed Rachel’s mother had made for them on the screened-in porch. What was unusual was that Bumpers was not asleep. No, Bumpers was very much awake. Bumpers was with Rachel and her friend Thinky on the bed on the screened-in porch and Bumpers was wide awake.
It is hard to say why Bumpers was awake. Later, Mrs. Wiley, Rachel’s mother, guessed that because Bumpers did not get to sleep very often on the screened-in porch (exactly once a year, on Rachel’s birthday), and because he was the sort of dog that got a bit anxious when his routines were upset, he was probably up early, watching for squirrels and the like, and that was why he decided to check to see if the screened-in porch’s door was open. Since all of the humans in the Wiley house were asleep (Mrs. Wiley was awake but she was meditating so she doesn’t count), no one can say for sure why Bumpers woke up. But wake up he did. And check the door of the screened-in door he did also. And that is how he must have discovered that the door was open.
Some beagles, even ordinary ones like Bumpers once was, are smart enough to check to see if a screen-in porch door is open. It is pretty natural for a beagle or any other four-legged friend to decide that nature, visible and audible through the screen windows of a screened-in porch on a beautiful June morning, was calling and to nudge against the nearest exit in order to answer nature’s call. Thinky said that Bumpers could have remembered that the screen door latch didn’t work very well from the last time the girls slept on the screened-in porch and that he had probably observed, in the year since, that Mr. Wiley had not fixed it. However, as Mr. Wiley later noted, very few beagles, extraordinary or not, were likely to remember something from three-hundred-and-sixty-five days earlier and to keep track of that something for three-hundred-and-sixty-five days later. True to form, Thinky was not dissuaded by Mr. Wiley’s point. That was one of the things that Rachel liked so much about her best human friend. Thinky thought for herself.
So did Bumpers, obviously. Or at least he did so on the morning of Rachel’s thirteenth birthday. He was sleeping with the girls at six-fifty when Mrs. Wiley, her morning tea in hand, looked in on the girls and smiled. The beagle was neither asleep on the sofabed nor doing anything else inside the screened-in porch at seven because that was when Mr. Matterson, on a morning walk of his own, witnessed Bumpers’s transformation from an ordinary beagle to an extraordinary one.
Mr. Matterson was a man of routines. He had lots of them: eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time of day; reading in between breakfast and lunch; playing his piano between lunch and dinner; watching a game on television on his own screened-in porch after dinner. The routines kept him focused, Mr. Wiley told Rachel and Thinky. They kept him moving forward. Rachel and Thinky did not understand why someone who was retired needed to still move forward but they didn’t question their neighbor’s logic. They just knew what to expect if it was before breakfast (Mr. Matterson would be walking by Rachel’s house on Camelot Court), or if they were to walk past Mr. Matterson’s house mid-afternoon (Mr. Matterson would be practicing Shubert), or if they were to bring Mr. Matterson a cake or some such desert in the evening (Mr. Matterson would be watching a game). There was a right time to drop off a cake. There was a wrong time too. Rachel and Thinky had learned the difference.
Everyone in the neighborhood knew at least a few of Mr. Matterson’s routines. Neighbors are like that. It makes (usually) for congenial neighborhoods. The neighbors smiled about most of Mr. Matterson’s routines. But one of those routines, his morning walk, made them sigh. Mr. Matterson walked every morning, before or at sun-up. Up the road he went, on one sidewalk, and then back down the cul-de-sac, on the other sidewalk. For years he did this with Chester, his boxer. If a person was up early on a day that wasn’t rainy or snowy, and even on many of them that were, and that person was looking out the front window at the comings and goings of Camelot Court, Mr. Matterson and Chester were regular parts of those comings and goings. When Chester died, the walks did not. Mr. Matterson still made his rounds, leash in his hand, his lips still moving. Mr. Matterson had always liked to talk to Chester. Chester had always seemed to enjoy listening. That was why everyone sighed when they saw Mr. Matterson sticking to his morning routine, or when they thought about it later in the day. It made them sad to see Mr. Matterson without his dog. It made them feel heavy to think about the feeling inside Mr. Matterson when the man talked to Chester but Chester did not smile back.
By now it may be obvious how everyone later knew that Bumpers had left the screened in porch at precisely seven AM. Yes, Mr. Matterson was on his way down the street, completing the first leg of his morning rounds. He was there to see Bumpers.
Mr. Matterson did not see Bumpers immediately. No, he told Rachel later, “I didn’t see little fellow until, well, when I saw it all start to happen.” Apparently, Mr. Matterson had been looking up, into the trees. He had been noticing how many shades of green were visible in the birch trees lining the side of Camelot Court. “Do you know many shades there are, Rachel?” Rachel had not known. “Twenty-six, that’s how many,” Mr. Matterson told her. “I was counting them. I was walking along, counting the number of shades of green, going slowly so that I didn’t trip, because, you know, you can trip when you are my age and you’re walking along looking up and not watching the ground, and so I was walking along, and I was telling Chester about all the colors, describing them the way I always described them, on account of how dogs can’t see in color but only in black and white. He would have enjoyed the description, I think. Chester always did have an ear for that sort of thing.”
Mr. Matterson always enjoyed telling about the next part. And Rachel, no matter how old she got (because she got older too, in the years after the morning of her thirteenth birthday) enjoyed it too. She would listen to Mr. Matterson tell it, each year, on her birthday, or, when she was too old for Mr. Matterson to be able to still tell the story directly, she would get out the newspaper clippings, or open the internet articles, or even listen to the recording of Mr. Matterson’s voice on the TV news.
“So there I was, making my way down the sidewalk, my feet shoving along, my eyes scanning up, and my mouth counting out the different shades of green a seventy-six year-old pair of eyes can count in the trees on a beautiful June morning, and then, whoosh, there he goes, Bumpers, an ordinary beagle, shooting up through the trees like some sort of super dog. He was flying, he was. With a boomerang in his mouth. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I saw it with my own eyes. Little Bumpers, the beagle too ordinary to ever try to do anything unusual, such as get out from behind the little fence that wrapped around Rachel’s front yard, little Bumpers was in flight! His front paws were stretched out like this, and the back ones were hanging behind, with his tail pointing like it could help him steer. He had just taken off, and he was shooting up in the air, like a rocket. It was incredible. Bumpers was flying. Chester would have loved it. He probably would have told me that there had always been something extraordinary about that Beagle but then Chester did have a way of recognizing things that I couldn’t see.”
Stay tuned for future installments of Sir Bumpers, a story originally written (and subsequently forgotten) in 2013 about a teenage girl, her amazing dog, and the interesting events of one summer day in a town not as far away as you many think.