Three Colors in Peoria
Growing up white,
black friends, best friend Junior,
sharing back yards,
watching beagles being born,
playing with pups,
we knew color meant everything and nothing.
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For any and all who wondered: “Why three colors?”
Beagles are almost always a mixed pattern coat of white, black, and brown.In my case, we always had beagles as I was growing up in Peoria, as house pets who also went out pheasant hunting with my grossvater, dad & uncles.
I was given a 4/10 gauge shotgun at around 12 years of age, then after just a couple times out in the winter-ploughed cornfields and hedges gave it back to my dad, saying, “I’ll just run with the beagles.”
And of the several first houses I lived in as a baby and then just after kindergarten with my two sisters having been born two and three years younger than me (when my mom & dad won a church lottery — St. Boniface, where I was baptized by Father Athanasius Ostermeyer — and long before my two brothers were born 7 and 13 years younger than me) there was the house on Armstrong St in Peoria that we rented from my great uncle Tom and his wife Rose.
That little house (now long destroyed having made way for an expansion of the local hospital, to which my dad more than once rushed me in quilts overnight during my frequent asthma, pneumonia, collapsed lung attacks) had a backyard sloping down to another house with a black family, surnamed the Browns, a little boy my same age — Junior — my then childhood best friend, long since lost in all family and my own moves.
Anyway, beagles are of three colors: white, black, brown.