Crash-of-the-Eagle
by Don Drewniak
For reasons
that have long since departed from my memory, my
wife, Dolores, and I began taking karate lessons
in the late 1970s. We each had progressed to an
orange belt after two or three months.
I was also
running five to ten miles a day, six days a week.
My favorite route was a near exact 5-mile loop
that began and finished at our home in lightly-populated
Princeton, Massachusetts. The loop was a triangle
formed by three roads. Both sides of the roads
were heavily wooded with no more than twenty
houses scattered along the route.
Running
clockwise, the final mile was predominately
downhill. Situated on the downhill was a house
set about thirty-feet back from the road that had
been unoccupied for well over a year.
I was about
halfway through the downhill on an early-morning
run when three small yapping dogs bolted from the
front porch of the house and made a beeline
toward me. Two of the three stopped at the edge
of the road, while the third (the largest of the
three) kept coming, caught up to me and bit the
back of the running shoe on my right foot.
Instinctively,
I went into the stance of the latest karate move
that Dolores and I had supposedly mastered, Crash-of-the-Eagle.
I’m
going kick the #@*&!$% to Chuck Wagon Heaven.
Instead, I
kicked the back of my left foot with my right leg.
Down I went as the dog continued its efforts to
use me for its breakfast. On the edge of the road
to my left was a thin tree branch about three-feet
in length. I grabbed it and swung it at the dog.
It was rotted and broke into pieces.
At that point,
a woman dressed in a housecoat materialized on
the front porch and yelled, “Why don’t
you run somewhere else?”
I hurled every
invective at her that I learned as a kid growing
up in Fall River, Massachusetts and often used
while in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s/early 70s.
A man (her husband) came out of the house wearing
only a pair of pants and called off the dog who
then retreated back toward the porch. He said
something to his wife and pointed to the front
door. In she went.
I am certain
that at this point he feared a lawsuit,
especially if I was hurt. With bare feet and arms
by his side, he walked slowly toward me. I was
standing at the time and was not hurt, but was
pissed.
“Did the
dog bite you?”
“No, just
my running shoe.”
“We’ll
pay for new ones.”
“Not
necessary. No damage.”
“Do you
run by here often?”
“Yes, I
live around the bend on East Princeton Road.”
“I
apologize for my wife. We just returned from
England two days ago. I promise you that I will
have a chain-link fence put up as soon as I can
get someone here to install it.”
“Good
enough.”
We engaged in
small talk for about ten minutes, shook hands and
I then completed my run. The fence was in place
four days later.
Karate lessons
ended two weeks later when the instructor was hit
and killed by a bus when walking across a rotary
in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts.
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