Hello,
I have returned from the hospital, and am doing much better now. I should be able to return to work shortly, but in the meantime I will keep posts here coming.
My hand is healing, but my heart has not. It pains me to learn, so soon after I have gotten well, that my good friend and coworker Oswald O. Lynch has lost his life... especially after he has been having such trouble lately. The trouble is, he is not the sort of man who would do this and leave his family in that sort of deep pain. I will most assuredly be attending his funeral in order to pay my final respects to the man he was, but I am feeling... conflicted about the media's report on his cause of death. Call it part of the grieving process, but something about his death just doesn't sit right with me...
I feel the need also to correct some faulty statements the Washington Reporter has made about my accident this spring. I was not, in fact, bitten by someone's pet labrador retriever puppy as the article claims - I was bitten by an adult animal. The dog in question was a black labrador mix of some sort, and was feral and clearly diseased. We suspect the animal to be a stray that somehow got onto the Country Club grounds where the charity event was being held. We had kindly asked people not to bring pets unless they were service animals, seeing as my youngest daughter, Emma, is terrified of large dogs and we didn't want someone's pet to frighten her. Any articles you may have read claiming that it was due to me "hating animals", online or off, are little more than bald-faced lies.
I don't recall anyone pointing the animal out to me until I heard my youngest say something about a puppy in the yard. I had barely more than turned to ask her what she meant when I saw the feral animal standing not more than five feet from her. It wasn't snarling at her, and in fact was more or less staring at her, and she was approaching it. I remind my readers that this dog looked mean, injured, in poor health, and possibly dangerous - and Emma was heading straight for it, trying to pet it, as everyone else stood and watched.
Seeing this and fearing she'd be hurt, I immediately ran over to grab her and pull her back, but at that instant the dog's reddened eyes shifted to look at me and it started growling. Not because it was cornered, or because it was scared... because it saw me. Emma apparently didn't notice that the animal was upset, and tried to reach for it anyway. It was at this point I pulled her hand out of the way, and that was when the animal attacked, snapping its jaws onto my hand and just about breaking my finger. I felt something snap in my hand, and then pain, and immediately knew something was badly wrong. I hastily bandaged my hand to control the bleeding, my wife took me to the car, and we drove to the hospital to figure out what was wrong. You know the rest from there, thanks to Mary Anne.
I don't understand why that dog bit me, even now. I've never had this issue with dogs before - I've owned my fair share in my life, and would definitely own another if Emma weren't so touchy around them. But the fact that the animal bit me isn't what gets me. It's what the dog looked like.
Call me crazy, but that dog looked and sounded just like the one my late friend Ozzie said had been wandering around his property, howling all night and keeping him awake. He said it had been some sort of feral mutt or something before...
It's probably nothing, even if his death does feel... fishy to me. But then again, I don't particularly expect accuracy in reporting from the kind of shock articles the Washington Reporter publishes. All the same... I think being able to see the suicide note he left might clue me in on what happened, and help me come to terms with losing him so suddenly. I'll definitely have to ask one of my acquaintances at the police department to allow me access to the evidence on file... being a politician does have its perks sometimes.
- R. S. Pinne
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