Autumn Night in Chicago: A Lesson in Perception

There are some stories which are hard to write. This is one such story. Truth be told, for all of the English teachers out there, this may be more of an anecdote than a story. In the first case something happens, in the latter case, a story, someone changes. I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

I was in Prosser Vocational High School when this transpired. Beyond the fact that this establishes the time frame, Prosser has no more to do with this tale (besides, it is always nice to mention the high school one almost graduated from). It had to be right around the autumn of 1975, or 1976.

I was hanging out with Tim. We weren’t exactly hanging out. We were kind of cruising. In actuality I was tagging along with Tim at the end of a pallet run.

A pallet run was an adventure where time would crab as many pallets as he could find around our section of Chicago. He would drop the pallets at the refurbrusher’s who would fix them up, and sell them back to the store
suppliers who were just ripped off. It is a very Chicago thing.

He had a van full of wooden pallets which needed offloading. Tagging along with Tim gave me an excuse to get out of the house for a few hours. It was late autumn, and it was windy.

Chicago is a rail hub. It has been such almost from the invention of the
railroad. I don’t remember exactly where we were in the Northwest side of Chicago. It was a run down industrial area on the wrong side of all the railroad tracks heading west. The street ran parallel to the tracks, then took a jog over the iron rails, and around to the back of some dimly lit industrial buildings.

Just as we took the turn, we spotted something by the tracks. It was a dog’s severed head. It ran afoul of one of the day’s freight runs.

The dead dog’s head moved. We saw it move. We were sure we saw it move.

We just stopped. We both saw it. I know we both saw it because Tim said to me, “You didn’t see what you thought you saw.” We were transfixed by what we thought we saw. I don’t know how long we sat there with the engine running, and not moving from that spot. Then, we saw it move again. Ears flopped. Tongue lolling out the other side of its mouth.

Then we noticed it, under the dog’s head was a trash bag. When the wind swept the yard, the dog’s head moved. We did see what we thought we saw, but there was nothing more supernatural than gusting autumn winds at night and shadows in the dim streetlights.

Maybe one can call this a story. That night, in those few minutes, both Tim and I learned: it is good to take a second look no matter what one thinks one has seen. That lesson makes it a story after all, doesn’t it?

To be Continued