The Girl Who Loved Her Dog

An Interview

By Devan Sheridan

As a child in the twenty-first century, I’ve grown up with modern inventions like phones and video games. My grandmother was not born in our modern society. She did not have iPads, or iPhones, or Cocomelon. She was a child way before the television was even in color. Most of the time, her dog was her only form of entertainment. But she had a loving family. Her family is very different from modern ones. Everyone lived close together – grandparents, aunts, uncles. Her life was so much more than going to school and complaining about school. My grandmother is the reason I turned out the way I did, and this will show you why she turned out the way she did.

What was life like in your childhood?

When I was growing up, we essentially lived in the country. Not completely in the country, but there were not a lot of people around us. I spent a lot of time playing with the dog in the woods. She was my favorite companion. She would follow me around; she would eat mud pies that I would make; she would chase rocks like they were balls. She was a very good friend. 

We lived across the highway from my grandparents, so we spent some time with them. On Sunday afternoons, my cousins, who lived in town, would all come over and we would play together. We didn't have a lot when I was younger. I didn't do a lot of activities. It was quiet. We stayed at home most of the time. After school, I would come home and play school with my dolls and stuffed animals. In high school, I was in the band. We had practices, and then we would perform at the football games, halftime shows, and parades, and concerts in the off-season.

How did you make a mud pie? 

You get water and dirt, and you shape it in the palm of your hand, kind of like a pie. We called them mud pies. If you left it out in the sun for a little while, it would dry, and then I could feed it to my dog. She was something else, Lady. She was a German shepherd. 

Other things grew in the yard: grass, flowers, things like that. You could cut them and either add those to the mud pie or serve them with your dinner. We had one plant with big flat leaves, maybe three inches in diameter. They made great breads; you could make a sandwich between two leaves.

Who was your favorite aunt, uncle, or grandparent?

I don't have a favorite, but I lived next door to my aunt and uncle. I spent a lot of time with them at their house. They always had a bunch of dogs, sometimes chickens. That was entertaining.  My aunt would pay me a dime to wash dishes for her. I spent time with them because they were right there. My grandparents lived across the street, but it's not like now; they didn't play with us. They were there, they let us play in the yard, but they weren't playing with us.

How much could a dime get you back then?

The gas station, where my dad would go to fill up the cars, had penny candy bins. You could get more than one for a penny, so you could get quite a few pieces of candy for a dime.

Who has shaped you the most?

I think both of my parents shaped me. I spent a lot of time with my dad doing outdoors-related things. I gained my love of nature from him because I love to be outdoors now. He was also a very honest man. I learned about honesty from him.  My mother was a kind and loving human being. She taught me a lot about unconditional love. She did a lot of things for me. She liked to play games, too, and we would play games together. 

Did you have a TV? What did you watch on it? 

We didn’t get a TV until I was four or five. It was black and white. They were really big and bulky back then. Now, TVs are very thin. TVs had to be deep because of how they were made. They were very, very deep – not wide, but deep. It was not like now, where you can save things to your DVR. There were no DVRs. If you wanted to watch something, you had to be there at the time it was showing; you had to watch it then and there. There were only three major channels that you could watch. You could watch cartoons on Saturday mornings, and various soap operas and game shows during the day and in the evening. We had a subscription to a TV guide. It would list out everything that was showing for that week. You could read the little description on it and decide what you wanted to watch. If you wanted to watch something at the same time somebody else in your family wanted to watch something else, then somebody wasn't going to get to watch their show.

What was on the radio?

We had popular music stations. I didn't listen to the radio until I was a little bit older, maybe fifth or sixth grade. There was one radio station, WLS in Chicago, that was on at night. It was so exciting to be able to listen to a radio station that came from a place that far away. WLS played popular music, too, but you couldn't get that during the day because there was too much interference.