I'm not sure why, but this photo evoked a powerful nostalgia when I stumbled upon it at random. I don't know who the fuck that is, and I've never had a dog of that particular specie, but I thought of my grandfathers and their dogs, in particular my step-father's father Grandpop, because he was big on training pups (he taught our beagle Gus how to wait for the count of three in his house before eating, for example). Grandpop lived in Shenendoah PA nearly his entire life. When we went there my stepbrothers and I would blow things up with M-80s out in the coal fields with their cousin the rustbelt weightlifter. I'd hike far up into the slag heaps and bring home handsful of trilobite and fern fossils (Mommie Dearest threw them all away years ago). Once BroJ and I found some old abadoned tires from Euclid trucks. We spent a merry afternoon sending them crashing down the steep slag slopes into groves of struggling birches which snapped like kindling under our heavy rubber onslaught.

Christ, were we ever bored.

Grandpop always had a joke or a witty story, even when Grandmum was declining rapidly into screaming and insensate incoherence. All day every day she'd scream his name in rage and not know where he was even if he was there. Screaming, screaming in a raspy agonized voice, and he still hummed old standards and worked his prayer beads and went to the Polish mass and changed brake pads at the family garage into his '90s.

Grandpop was born on the 4th of July.

I haven't stopped in Shenendoah nor Frackville nor Hometown nor any of those dead old coal towns in central PA since Grandpop's funeral. I remember Porkheaven and I seated in the limo with his casket, serving as pall bearers. This was after the solemn Mass and receiving the Body of Christ (I'm not even Catholic) in a baroque Polish cathedral with great golden spires and Porkheaven leaned over to me and said "I've got some extra Body of Christ in my pocket if you get hungry." Whenever I drive to Canada or upstate NY I pass the Frackville exit and think on these things. I have lots of coins I bought from Grandpop when I was mixing mud for a construction crew at age 11 and 12; his collection was astonishing, and his other son (not my stepdad) and his sons would steal the coins from him, and Grandpop gave me many of them and told me "I love you." I take them out occasionally, in particularly the 1804 half cent, and whilst holding them I think of Grandpop reconditioning a chainsaw motor while I fetched him tools, or Grandpop showing me the coal splinters still stuck in his arms from when he worked the chutes as a young teen, or pulling out a weirdo electronic gizmo that shot blue lightning out the end of a glass cylinder and into his muscles to relieve aches and pains.

He had a collection of Dickens that I wanted badly, but one of the other son's sons stole it while Grandpop was in the hospital and sold it. I would have bought it from him using the money earned as a carpenter/blocklayer/roofer/cement mixer/drywall hanger when I was a young teen.