These lyrics are repeated and repeated with one letter of the name replaced by a clap with each chanting. Little kids love it. Parents soon learn to hate it. At least, my parents did.

 What started out as a shoebox-sized puppy soon grew into an ungainly creature with the legs of a Greyhound, the body of a Labrador and the head of a German shepherd. I fancied him as a sort of pony, since I was also thoroughly enamored of horses.

 Bingo was a crackerjack of a dog - big and kind of dopey. He never seemed to figure out that he had grown larger than a shoebox and was constantly knocking things over.

 As usual, the burden of care fell to my mother, whose priorities gravitated to babes in arms. Bingo did not care. There were plenty of other houses, garages and backyards for him to investigate. It was when I started following him that Bingo’s travels became of concern.

 In those days, there was a government agency that followed up rigorously on the placement and care of adopted children. Since we gradually grew into a three-child family, a child services worker visited a couple of times a year, especially when there were children younger than two in the house.

 These visits caused terror in my mother’s heart. An exact date and time were not usually stipulated, just that “Mrs. White” or “Mrs. Smith” would be in our area such-and-such a week and would be dropping by. At the beginning of that week, my mother had the Dutch cleaning lady come in and do a scrub-down of the house, so that it smelled of Bon Ami and Johnson’s Wax. The dolls I never played with were cushioned against the plethora of pillows in my bedroom, where the pink wallpaper featured black line drawings of ballerinas frolicking in tutus.
Everything had to be spruced up. I went to the hairdresser to have my bangs trimmed to mid-forehead and the rest of my skimpy, blond locks clipped evenly to ear-length. The salon smelled strange and was filled with plastic aprons and baskets of hair rollers. My mother got a “cut and perm,” emerging from a row of hair dryers as sheared and curled as a Standard Poodle. I was horrified. The mother I knew had thick, jet-black hair that swayed around her shoulders in luscious waves. She looked like a beguiling Snow White and I thought of her that way – brightly innocent, even when dealing with peckish or scandalous dwarfs like me.  Now she had become as tightly kinked and bobbed as all of the other women on our street.

A baby brother with brown hair and amazingly long eyelashes occupied my freshly modernized mother, so I retreated into play with Bingo-dog, Having taught him to roll over, shake a paw and bark when I raised one finger, I decided we should take our show on the road, literally. Next thing you knew, I was knocking on the neighbors’ doors asking if they would pay a nickel to see a dog show. This came to an abrupt conclusion when Jimmy Soliskie’s mother called my mother and asked her to retrieve her barking daughter.

Mother was beside herself. If word got out to child services that I was rolling around with the dog on the doorsteps of strangers there could be serious consequences. It was left to my father to convey the importance of being a “good girl” when our case-file worker came calling. Manners were important in our house. Things like excusing oneself from the table or saying, “Pardon me” when something was missed in conversation came naturally with enough repetition. Now I was to understand that barking was unacceptable behavior.

Bingo was banished to the basement when the lady in the blue suit showed up to inspect my baby brother and “assess” my progress. After much cooing over the carefully swaddled and impeccably clean infant, we sat down for tea at the dining room table. All week long my father had been on alert to leave his dental office and come home as soon as the inquisitor appeared. I imagined him hunched over a patient in the middle of a filling, receiving the call, pounding filling compound into a hapless tooth and bolting the office leaving a rather surprised patient. Sure enough, my father’s Pontiac was soon in the driveway.

The assessment went well, although I know my parents considered it invasive. They liked nothing better than to go out with their “children” and have people comment on how much we looked like them. I found that amusing, but it pleased them endlessly. After an hour or so of polite conversation, I was allowed to sing and clap the Bingo song and the poor dog was heard barking from the basement. This sparked the interest of our visitor, who wondered how such a large sounding dog fit into a household with such young children. My mother’s lips began to quiver.

“He does tricks,” I said. My father gave me a look that growled.

Released from the basement, Bingo came bounding up the steps as though chased by the monster I knew lived under basement steps. He wanted to sniff and lick this new person. In his enthusiasm, he managed to shift the tablecloth, sending my mother sprawling to catch a glass of water before it tipped into our guest’s lap. Father stood back primly, avoiding dog slobber, while Bingo made his best effort to become a lapdog.

I ended up showing off Bingo’s tricks, without a single bark out of me. As I always suspected, the children’s services lady was quite pleased to see children placed in the home of a “professional,” who had an enthusiastic wife and middle-class everything. We waved her off for another six months.

Then disaster struck. It happened because of a newfangled thing called television that had dominated the family living room for a couple of years. I liked television well enough. Watching Roy Rogers gallop around beating the bad guys on his golden horse, Trigger, was a favorite pastime. I even had a special cowgirl outfit to wear while I watched the show. This was not unusual in the early days of television. We had a neighbor who said, “Excuse me,” to quiz-show host Groucho Marx every time she left the television room - something which a Marx brother would have appreciated. I made Bingo watch Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie on TV, but none of their smarts rubbed off on him and he usually ended up sleeping with some part of his warm brown body draped over me.

The problem was that I had become obsessed with the story of Peter Pan. I had a picture book of J.M. Barrie’s famous children’s story that had been poured over so frequently it was in tatters. I loved Never Never Land - that place where dreams that do come true are born and all you need to fly is “trust and a little pixie dust.” When a live version of the stage play aired on television, nothing could have kept me away from the set. It was magic to see Peter “flying” with the Darling children. I longed to be just like him - riding the wind’s back and following the second star on the right “straight through til morning.”

One fine summer day, I decided to practice flying, while my friend Gregory looked on and Bingo bounced around the backyard. We had a metal swing set, and I climbed up on the horizontal bar that served as a brace; one I used to hang upside down from while making monkey sounds. This time I stood on the bar, facing the elm tree in the open field. It was a hot day and I imagined that flying into the shady boughs of the great tree would be a satisfactory first flight.  I balanced carefully, all the while chanting, “I believe in fairies, I believe in fairies.” Then I reached into the pocket of my shorts and pulled out a pinch of sweet-smelling powder pilfered from my mother’s toiletries. I smeared the makeshift pixie dust on my face.

My arms were raised and I could feel lightness in my diaphragm. As I launched toward the tree, arms flapping, Gregory and Bingo ran by me and I looked down. Mistake. It seemed to me that I fell a great distance. Landing hard on the baked ground, I heard a horrible crunching sound.

Bingo was on me in an instant, washing my ears while I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Gregory ran from the yard screaming. When my frantic mother arrived, I was standing with my right arm dangling at an impossible angle. It scared me. It did not work.

Thank goodness my father had insisted on making his new Pontiac a station wagon. He whisked me into it and drove full tilt to the hospital, managing to pick up a police escort along the way. It was exciting, but my mother kept crying. I remembered Peter Pan telling Captain Hook, “I am youth. I am joy. I am a little bird that has broken out of the egg.” The operative word was “broken” and I heard it said a lot that day.

Mother sang to me while I lay on the hospital gurney in the hall. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” She only left me alone once, when she and my father had to sign papers allowing the doctors to amputate if there was nothing else to be done. I had fallen with my full weight on the arm, bending it backward, not just breaking it, but also severing many nerves.

Then, in one of those happy coincidences that have permeated my life, a young surgeon suggested trying a daring procedure involving some new materials to reconnect damaged nerves and veins. They operated for hours and I came out of surgery with a huge cast covering my right arm. It folded across my chest with my hand resting over my heart.

A lot of fuss was made over me in the days that followed. A steady stream of toys and tears flowed freely, especially when I was able to wiggle my fingers. After a week of close observation and an endless number of doctors dropping by to see my moving digits, I was sent home with severe mobility restrictions. Anything that jarred the cast or caused the arm to shift could negate what was being viewed as either medical genius or a miracle.

Bingo was gone. My parents told me he had gone to live on a farm. The only farms I knew of belonged to my uncles, but Bingo had not gone to their farms. He had gone somewhere strange and I would never see him again. There was nothing I could do. I felt the helpless pain of a child, and I couldn’t see how sending my best friend away could possibly be “for the best.”

The arm healed gradually throughout that dog-less summer of sitting still. My mother, her friends and our neighbors read to me constantly. I memorized so many books that even I thought I could read.

The cast was itchy and smelly. When removal day came, I was taken into the bowels of the hospital to a room that looked more like my father’s tool table than a place of healing. The gray-white cast covered with the signatures of everyone I had met over the months of wear went under the electric saw while my father held me steady and I turned my head into my mother’s soft stomach.

Liberated, the arm stayed in position, frozen as it had been in the cast. My gnomish Godmother, known as Auntie Doris, gave me a sling with a picture of a Basset Hound that became my favorite piece of wardrobe. Months of rehabilitation followed, using sandbags to gradually straighten the arm. It hurt, and I had a long, angry, red scar at the joint. The only promise at the end of all that dreary exercise was getting another dog.

Fourteen years later, when I was leaving the family home to discover the world, I found Bingo’s puppy collar in one of my ancient treasure boxes. It still bore the scent of leather and dog. It sometimes seems to me that I grew up from dog-to-dog rather than year-to-year. Between kindergarten and the end of high school, three Dachshunds and a Labrador Retriever framed my life.

Princess, Duchess and Winston – the Dachshunds – were lovable red-brown characters, whose nails clicked sharply on the green linoleum in the old stone country house we moved into.  They followed each other in sequence as back problems inevitably ended their time with us. My sister once allowed Princess to jump out a car window. I am not sure that she was ever forgiven.

Those bright-eyed, little dogs would dance on their hind-legs to please and dig holes deeper than their body length. They had an acre of land to protect and clear of vermin, and they were dedicated souls. The mere prospect of a mouse hiding under a neatly raked pile of autumn leaves was enough to see them scattered to the winds by the pointy-nosed, deep-chested torpedoes on paws. As their muzzles grew gray and their focus faded, each one of them showed us the heart of a lion.

Charm the black Lab was to the water borne from puppyhood. There was a river behind the farm field and wood lot that backed our house. I rode to the river on Playboy, a bay Morgan horse my parents bought me when I was twelve. Charm followed and together we swam through a deep, fast-flowing stretch of water with me clinging to the sturdy horse by the mane and Charm happily at our side. Then we fell exhausted on the riverbank, Playboy to graze quietly, while Charm sought out sticks for me to throw until my arm hurt.

The dogs went everywhere with us. Sometimes my father closed his practice for six weeks during the summer. Hitching up a foldout camper to the station wagon, we headed off in whatever direction seemed most agreeable. Charm swam in both oceans and the Dachshunds visited deserts, climbed the footpaths of the Rocky Mountains and worried armadillos. Their sound and smell and the textures of their coats are favorite memories of a privileged childhood in which function largely won out over dysfunction. 

Education, career and simply finding a place in the world where I could responsibly have my own dog distanced me from them for almost a decade. Then I moved to the farm and a whole world of animal possibilities was opened. There would be dogs and cats, and sheep and horses, cows and chickens and ducks and goats that faint.

Throughout the adventure, there would also be a man, Stephen Williams. Together, we would find Wally the Wonder Dog, who shaped our life and saved it, too, in the way that only a dog can do.