Saffy’s Adventure: Growing Up

by Bruce Peterson

LaShay crashed through the door; a dark, curly-headed, young man following her into the house.  He looked a little like the Zohan.

“Dad, this is Mike.  We just met today down on Mill.”

Mill Avenue has the shops, the used bookstores and the watering holes of Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona; it’s the West Bank or the Greenwich Village of the West’s largest party college.  Mike looked like a he could have been a Mill Avenue fixture.

“Hey,” he grunted toward me as he immodestly drifted to my bookcase.

It only took him a minute to grab a book on the Great Pyramid of the Giza Plateau, Smyth’s book.   At least he grabbed a classic.

“Dad, Mike is taking a busload of people to the Winter Solstice Festival.”

“The what?” I replied.

“You know, the Rainbow People’s winter celebration,” she retorted in her “Dad you’re a Hippie” voice, and she was right, I did know.  I just didn’t want her to know I knew.

“Come out and look at Mike’s bus.”

Outside, parked in front of my meticulously crafted moose mailbox, was a badly whitewashed old school bus with “Church of the Chosen Few” printed across the side in black paint.  Of course, I wanted to say something like,

“Are you nuts!  You can’t go with this vagabond,” to my artist, musician, seventeen-year-old daughter.  Instead I said, “Nice bus.  I used to have one too.”

I actually had owned two of them over the years: one to move my belongings to South Texas where LaShay was born and another to transport Christmas Trees from Minnesota to Texas and watermelons from Texas to Minnesota.  LaShay had grown up with a roadside-peddler, traveling across the country in old school busses.  How could I argue that she shouldn’t go with this hobo?  She had a transformed hobo college professor for a father.

“LaShay, if you are in New Mexico for the solstice, you won’t be here for Christmas.  You want to be here for Christmas, don’t you?”

“Dad, you have been telling us every Christmas that Jesus was born on Rosh Hashanah in the fall, not on the winter’s pagan celebration of Saturnalia!”

LaShay will turn eighteen in one month.  She will be an official adult.  If I say, “No,” she could just go anyway with hard feelings and be hesitant to call home.  I decided to say,

“Okay, but call if you need anything, and call when you get out of the mountains after the solstice.”

Her look of exultation calmed some of my trepidation, but one look over at my wife Pinky told me I was in for it as soon as LaShay climbed aboard the dingy, white Church of the Chosen Few.  LaShay quickly loaded a backpack, hoisted her guitar case and called her dog Saffy.  When Pinky and LaShay brought Saffy home as a puppy, I thought they had paid the musician selling puppies out of a guitar case five dollars for a blind dog.  Saffy has big, light-blue spots covering her dark-blue irises.  She timorously hid in corners and walked into things when not hiding.  It turned she just needed time to adjust into a high-strung white and brown-spotted Australian Shepherd.  I found out the eye spots were just the breed’s genetics.  

LaShay and her silky dog headed out to the bus, calling for Mike who hadn’t taken his long nose out of Smyth’s Great Pyramid book since he had walked in the door.  I watched the bus head down the street, shook my head and turned to my wife for my scolding.  Pinky is an expert communicator, especially in describing her feelings.

LaShay did the only thing she knew to do; call home for her parents to rescue her and her dog.  Fortunately, I have a number of old preacher turned back to rock and roll musician friends in Austin.  Pinky insisted we call the more stable Bianca and Meng, instead of my Jesus-Freak buddies.  Bianca, a girl from our days as youth ministers in South Texas, liberated LaShay from Guadaloop and put her on a bus for Phoenix and home.

Even before LaShay made it back to Arizona, I emailed a “Lost Dog” handbill, with Saffy’s picture and “Reward” as the dominant elements, to one of my most treasured former students, Christina Abreo, with Christi’s phone number at the bottom.  Christi lived in the Saint Rose Parish outside New Orleans.  She went into the French Quarter after receiving the handbill and posted them around the Quarter.  She also called the New Orleans Police Department, explained the situation and sent them the handbill.

A few days went by, when she got a call from a Tarot Card Reader on Jackson Square.  Christi told me the Reader said,

“I saw your dog last night.  She was with a vampire chick and a group of street-waifs who were having a wedding ceremony down here.  The white and brown dog wore a white dress, and they were marrying her to a Pit Bull.”

Clearly, Robin the Goth-Chick had found her way to New Orleans.

Christi went down to the Quarter to meet the Tarot Card Reader.  He didn’t want any reward for his information; he didn’t know where the “vampire chick” was anyway.  He hadn’t seen her since the night before.  Christi wandered the Quarter asking people about the girl and Saffy.  Some had seen her; one said she had seen the black-garbed girl in an alley off Bourbon Street throwing up the night before, but no one knew where she was staying or had seen her that day.  Christi went home with little more information than when she had left home that morning.  A little after supper the phone rang.  It was Robin the Goth-Vampire Chick.

“Why the fuck are you trying to steal my dog!” Robin exclaimed.

Christi tried to calmly explain that she was LaShay’s friend and had a reward for the dog’s return.  Robin said she might call back later and hung up, still sounding irritated and even incensed.

Another day went by, and Christi heard nothing.  She decided to head back down to the Quarter.  She spent the day asking people with no definitive results.  Finally, she decided to eat at her favorite Quarter restaurant and then go home.  She had just paid her tab and was walking out the restaurant’s door, when Robin the Vampire-Goth Chick and Saffy came down the street and panhandled Christi for “spare change?”  Christi fished out a dollar, knelt down to pet the dog, and said, “What a gorgeous animal.  What’s her name?”

“Saffy,” answered Robin.  While Christi pet Saffy, she looked at the tags on her collar.  One tag had Saffy’s name and my address and the other her Maricopa County registration number.  Christi got up, said goodbye and watched them go down the street.  She took out her cell phone and called the police.  She then followed the girl and the dog at a distance.  The police showed up when Robin and Saffy were halfway down Bourbon Street, where the culture turns from straight heterosexual to gay homosexual in nature, where window boxes with flowers appear outside upper-level windows.  Three police cars came from two directions and surrounded Robin.  They handcuffed her, and turned the dog over to Christi.  As the Police were guiding Robin the Vampire-Goth Chick into the police cruiser, Robin turned to Christi and asked,

“What about the reward?”

Christi didn’t answer.

It turned out that Robin was a sixteen-year-old runaway from a well-to-do Scottsdale family.  She got put on a plane home the next day, after a learning-experience night in the New Orleans City Juvenile Detention Center.  Christi took Saffy home to spend a couple months with her dog Bongo.  Pinky and I drove out to Chisti’s over Spring Break to pick Saffy up and enjoy a rich reunion with a wayward dog and treasured friends.

We didn’t hear from LaShay until Christmas Eve.  She called to portray her feelings about the magnificent celebration, the warm people and the majestic mountain views.  I listened for her to say something about coming home.  Finally, I had to ask,

“When will you be home?”

“Dad, we’re going to keep going to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras.”

Stunned, I said, “LaShay, Mardi Gras is in February!”

I don’t remember what LaShay said after that; I only remember the “I told you so,” look Pinky honored me with when I told her LaShay’s plans.  It was at least another week before LaShay called again.

“Bruce, get up.  LaShay is on the phone, and she is crying.  She is in Austin and someone has taken Saffy.”

By the time I wrenched details out of a distraught wife and a frenzied daughter, the story went something like this; one of the guys on the bus stole a backpack from a non-bus, street urchin on “Guadaloop.”  Guadalupe Street is the heart of the University of Texas bohemian, beatnik, hippie, intense-scholar, poet, and gamer subculture.  It’s the UT version of ASU’s Mill Avenue.  Mike, the leader of the Church of the Chosen few bus, “lost it” when the police showed up at his bus; he threw all the Rainbow kids off the bus, and headed toward Kansas City alone.

While all this drama was going down, LaShay was taking a shower at “some chick’s apartment.”  They had met on Guadaloop, and the Good Samaritan offered LaShay a shower and a soft bed for a night.  When she got back to where the bus was supposed to be parked, the few remaining lost sheep said,

“Robin the Goth Chick took your pack, your guitar and your dog and decided to hitchhike to New Orleans.”

By this time, LaShay had celebrated her eighteenth birthday by moving to Denver to live with her older sister Sari, husband Matt and their two dogs Haley and Saga.  When I called LaShay to tell her we had Saffy back, she asked if we could drive to Denver on our way home and bring Saffy to her.  I said,

“Are you crazy?  You can get your dog the next time you come home to visit!”

Saffy spent the summer doing research on Indian ruins in the Superstition Wilderness with me.  She didn’t seem to miss her owner, Christi’s Bongo, Robin the Goth Chick, her husband the Pit Bull or roving around the country at all.  She slept next to me in the high Superstitions. She watched over Pinky and my bed every night, when we weren’t in the mountains.  It was an endearing summer for Saffy, Pinky and me.  We had all grown in grace.  LaShay was becoming even more independent, and just as the Monsoons drove us out of the mountains LaShay came home to pick up her adventurous dog.  I miss them both.

LaShay Saffy Christina