?? - c. 1951
Gordo was the first dog we had in the house in Kingsbridge, and to be honest I barely remember him, not even what color he was. I have a dim image in my mind of a little white dog with a brown streak on his left side, and that's all. There exists somewhere a old film my mother made of a Halloween party: such a dog streaks through the frame at one point, and that may be him. Another old home movie shows my father washing a small dog in a laundry sink, made sometime around 1950. These are probably the only images ever made of Gordo.
Since we got Penny sometime in 1951, and Gordo was gone before then, I could only have been about 4, so my memory of him is necessarily faulty. I once asked my late father whatever happened to him, and the answer I got was, "Who knows? He left us as mysteriously as he came!" Given the absence of leash laws in NY City at that time, I imagine Gordo, like so many of his kind, died under the wheels of an automobile. Even so, I think the fact of his existence—however brief it may have been—should be at least recognized.
GORDO'S HAIKU
A ghost, a phantom,
A brief flash of memory,
And yet he did live.
| Susan | Tycho | Meg | Tessa | Toby | Tucker | Dante | Penny | Gordo |Lucy |Tehya |