There are some windows that you look through only when you already know that something unusual is happening. They’re difficult to get to, so you only make the effort to reach them when your curiosity drives you to investigate some inexplicable sensation (like an unfamiliar sound, smell, vibration, or similar). Over time, you come to associate these scenes of strangeness with your Windows on the Weird.

A bank of these special windowpanes ran narrowly across the top of my bedroom wall, and they faced a busy suburban street. I got that room when I was ten years old, and it wasn’t until after I had moved away to college that I understood that this view was extraordinary.

In fact, the only person who ever truly appreciated those windows was our dog, Scooter. He loved them. (That and cheese.) I should have paid more attention to what he was watching; in fact, I should have paid more attention to him, period.

You know those bookstore ladders with the wheels or hooks at the top, the ones that run along a track? Well, that’s what Scooter was like, except with paws at the top, and he didn’t have the little sign saying that he was for use only by bookstore employees. He also looked a whole lot more like a Lab-Shepherd mix than a ladder does, with his broad white bow tie and expressive eyebrows. Still and all, the metaphor is apt because my bed ran underneath those windows, and he would stand with his front paws on the sill, bouncing on his hind legs left-to-right along the wall and then back again. He would intently absorb all of the neighborhood action, and grin like a mad fiend.

The only real problem was that he didn’t distinguish between bouncing on the bed, and bouncing on my body. Plus there was that whole anal gland thing. His, not mine.

I wasn’t too worried about the bouncing part, except for the salty taste of dog feet, and the claw marks on my face. I mean, it wasn’t like he did it on purpose. And every rare now and again, he’d stop bouncing, because he’d see something so interesting that he’d have to stand in one spot for a while, but unfortunately, that spot was always on my hair. Eventually I got tired of being tenderized, and I turned my bed so that only its foot was under the window. He’d still come charging into my room, leaping over the headboard, tromping once or twice on my stomach on his way to the window, but after that, his bouncing would only happen around my feet. I could live with that.

But every week, before I was awake, these guys in snazzy white jumpsuits would stealthily roll up to our house in a glimmering truck, eerily intent on stealing our garbage. And every week, like calendarwork, Scooter would alert me to the presence of these nefarious intruders by trampolining all over my legs. And then…

Sweet.

Mother.

of.

Mercy.

Have pity on my nose.

Imagine skunk smell. Now imagine funkus tyrannoskunkus shot straight into your hapless sinuses as the offending eighty-pound, hackles-raised whirlwind of fury is frantically pummeling your defenseless body, barking loudly enough to wake the very, very sleepy. Finally, imagine further that there is nowhere in the house that you can go where these eye-curling, crop-withering fumes do not penetrate to an abysmal depth.

I’m telling you, light has nothing on the speed of stench.

But on the bright side, we never had a bug problem in that house.

Anyway, I believe that we were talking about windows.

I could have looked out those windows more often, but it never occurred to me that I was missing anything interesting. I must admit, it’s not like Scooter didn’t try to tell me. “Woof,” he said, but I ignored him. “Roooo,” he would sagely opine, and, “Muhya,” keeping up a running commentary so I wouldn’t feel left out.

Besides, it wasn’t like I never looked out the windows, it’s just that it usually took some sort of odd sound to catch my attention first.

One day, I heard a bus shufff to a halt, which was unusual because we were blocks away from the bus stop. I looked out just in time to see the bus pulling away, revealing my dad standing on the sidewalk across the street. As it turned out, he was coming home from work, and was the only one left on board, so the driver took a shortcut off the regular route on the way back to the depot, dropping my dad off at our front door.

I wondered what the neighbors thought.

Scooter let me know that this wasn’t as strange as some of the stuff I missed on a regular basis. “Roor-oor! Hnff,” he gossiped.

I also poked my head up one day when I heard a whole bunch of horns and sirens going off. Max Rosenthal was an elderly, wealthy, local eccentric, and I saw my dad get out of Max’s carliope, toss a handgun on the seat (which my dad later told me he had sat on, presumably on accident rather than to hatch it), and then casually wave good-bye. He was acting like this happened every day. I turned to Scooter, whose eyes were glued to the scene, “You’re telling me that this sort of thing happens all the time?"

“Woof.”

“Well then, warn me next time.”

“Sigh.”

Frankly, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see my dad beamed down from a saucer in a garish green tube of flickering light, as long as he was coming home from work, and as long as I saw it through that window.

But even that wouldn’t have been the most exciting thing that I ever saw there.

* * *

The whole episode started out simply. My dad has always been in charge of strange sounds, and my mom takes care of funny smells. A rattling in the engine of the Buick, for example, would fall under my dad’s domain, while Scooter’s glands would be my mom’s problem.

So one night, after my brother and I had gone to bed, my mom was wandering the halls, trying to figure out where that “warm” smell was coming from. She narrowed it down to the hallway outside Jeff’s room, and running her hand up the wall, she found it to be hot.

She realized that the circuit breaker panel was in Jeff’s closet, right on the other side of that wall.

In short order, she threw off the main breaker, put Jeff in my room, and called the fire department.

Jeff and I watched all the excitement through those windows. We heard the sirens get louder as the engines roared up the street, and we marveled at all the lights, especially the way that they reflected on my bedroom ceiling. We watched the neighbors come out (not of the closet) in their robes and pajamas.

More of them would have shown up, but they probably just thought that my dad was coming home from work.

As we were watching the show, firefighters came into my room because the access to the attic crawlspace was in my closet. One of the circuit breakers had melted (kind of a design flaw there), and they wanted to get up over the box to see if there was an actual fire in the walls, and take care of any smoldering material that could burst into flame later on. I remember being impressed with what an incredibly good idea that was. Loads of people know enough to put out a fire, but far too few of them make sure that they haven’t left anything smoldering in the walls. (Don’t you just love a nice relationship metaphor?)

As I write about that early impression, it occurs to me that I have had a lot of experience with incompetent people, but I have never found a firefighter to be less than absolutely professional. In fact, I have never spoken to anyone else who has had any complaints about the way that a fire was put out, a kitten pulled out of a tree, or a child rescued from a well. As far as I can tell, everybody loves firefighters. That might be a big part of why they have the highest level of job satisfaction found in any profession (or so I am told).

Let me put it this way: they didn’t even tell my mom about the fireworks that Jeff had hidden in the crawlspace above the fuse panel. They confiscated them, of course, but that was it. Jeff went to look for them the next day, and they were simply gone as if they had never existed, and we weren’t in trouble. The alternative is that they told my mom, and she let us live. Science fiction, I tell you.

And as it turned out, there was no actual fire, which meant that we had all of the excitement and none of the disaster.

What more could you ask for?

Every now and again, typically when you least expect it, life is perfect.

Or at least it would have been, if Scooter had been able to watch the whole thing through the windows with us. At least he got to see the trucks pull up, and he was able to watch the firefighters start to walk up the drive.

That’s when Scooter rushed to the door to let us know that we were under attack.

At that point, it suddenly seemed like a much better idea to let him run around out in the backyard, in the fresh air, especially since there were going to be a whole lot of very large strangers tromping around the house.

Despite the distinct lack of smoke, they offered us gas masks.

“But where is the conflict resolution?” you ask. “Did I just read all that about your dog’s anal glands without earning any right to a sense of closure?"

Fine, fine, fine: he died about seventy dog years later.

Happy now? I can’t believe that you let your obsession with story grammar elements put such a damper on the emotional tenor of a nice little story like that.

But I forgive you. Consider the incident forgotten.

Endnotes

I thought that this might make a good place to put a couple of other incidental notes about Scooter.

One time when he got away, he went swimming in one of the nearby creeks. When we got him home he smelled so bad that he went to lick himself and gave up. Now, if a dog won’t put its tongue on something, it’s got to be pretty awful. (Or a vegetable. He’d suck the dressing off of salad and spit it out.)

He used to get little treats, sometimes in ritualized form, such as a small bit of my folks’ breakfast bars. He knew which box they came from, and he’d wait politely for his bit. One day my mom left a bunch of rolled up change on the counter in one of those boxes, and when I got home I saw bits of coin-roll paper and change strewn about. I’m not sure how much money he actually swallowed, but have you ever tried to feed a candy machine by holding a large dog’s butt up to the coin slot? Me neither, but that was my first thought when I saw the mess.