Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day.
~John Grogan
It’s been seven months since Riley passed, and it’s still pretty raw. My good friend and dog mentor, Judith Anspach, once said to me that the only bad thing about dogs was that they didn’t live as long as humans. Amen to that.
Research shows that dogs produce both mental and physical health benefits. Contact with a dog, even for a brief period of time, can increase our levels of oxytocin while lowering cortisol, thereby producing a calming effect. We also know that animal-assisted interventions are effective in helping those who suffer from depression, PTSD, trauma, and loneliness. And, petting dogs lowers both heart rate and blood pressure.
I think I know why I’m so attached to dogs. Growing up in a house where both parents were slightly off-kilter, I found dogs an island of calm and sanity. I still do.
My Dogs
When I was six, we moved into the house my parents built on a lot that had once been part of a farm. There weren’t many houses on the street at that point, and a lot of brush, trees, and raspberry and blackberry bushes surrounded us. Somewhere in the mess of that scrub, I found a kitten and picked it up. I clearly recall the resulting chaos as I carried the poor thing into the house as I coughed, hacked, sneezed, and my skin erupted in hives. Apparently, I was/am highly allergic to cats.
Dogs were another story, and luckily I was not allergic to them.
Sometime after the kitten incident, my father came home with a little black and white bundle of fur. Lady, a cocker-terrier mix, joined the family. She was my mother’s shadow, although she didn’t refrain from giving or getting love from any of us. Lady was a smart dog, and she quickly learned to do her business outside. My father also trained her to do a number of tricks; his favorite was putting a biscuit on her snout and having her wait until he told her she could eat it.
Some years later, Lady had a littler of puppies, and we kept one we called Snoopy. Snoop was smart like her mother, but unlike her mother, she was a timid little thing. We could never put a leash on her as she would freeze up and stand stock still until we took it off. She was, like Lady, devoted to my mother. Both Lady and Snoopy lived into their teens, and when they passed, I was already out of the house. While sad, I was able to deal with their passings a little easier being far away.
Bunker
Once I graduated from college, moved to Columbus, Ohio, where I taught at a junior high school. As the newest and youngest teacher on the staff, I was still trying to find my way into the established faculty cliques. It was difficult because I had very little in common with them. Most of them were from Central Ohio. Most of them were married. Most of them had children, and everyone had work friends.
At the time, I had only one non-teacher friend in the area, Dave, a guy I dated briefly during college. We were friends. He drove me around Columbus to show me where to find the best donuts or burgers, books or artwork, restaurants or bars…especially bars. While Dave could be very nice, he also could be very loud, immature, and drunk.
I was contemplating my predicament one Sunday morning as I sat on the stoop outside of my apartment building when an old man and his small hairy dog trotted by. “That’s what I need,” I thought to myself, meaning the dog, not the old man. He might drink; the dog wouldn’t.
To make a long story short, I went back inside and grabbed the Sunday paper from where I had thrown it earlier. I found “Dogs for Sale” in the classifieds, saw an ad for a free Welsh Terrier, and called the number. Having grown up with Lady and Snoopy and my cousins’ mixed breeds, I had no idea what a Welsh Terrier was, but she was free…and housebroken.
By that evening, I was mother to a three-year old gyrating black and tan, curly-headed dog with a rubbery black nose. Being so young, I never gave a thought as to whether she missed the old owners or not. She had hopped into my car and settled next to me rather quickly, so I guess she wasn’t too concerned about what happened to them.
My friend Dave was not wild about Bunk, which was fine because I had started dating Mike who did like Bunk. Better yet, Bunk liked Mike.
“It’s a good thing Bunker likes you,” I informed Michael, “or I’d have to rethink our relationship.”
“It’s good that she likes me?” he asked. “What if I didn’t like her?”
“We’d miss you,” I joked . . . I think.
I spoiled her. On her birthday, I bought her a McDonald’s burger, and we’d sit on the floor while I fed her pieces. When Mike and I married, I wanted to use her as a flower girl, but that didn’t go over well. My mother hid Bunk in the bedroom on the day of the wedding, and I forgot to take a photo with her. Before my brother’s wedding, though, I made sure we got that photo.
During my pregnancy, I was sicker than a dog (pun intended), and Bunk would put her had on my leg or foot and stay with me. Once Jason was born and home, we introduced her to him. She would sit under his crib, and if he cried, she would run over to me and look at me as though I was the worst mother in the world.
Corky the Wonder Dog
Bunk passed away suddenly when she was 10 years old. Not long after, we adopted a six-week-old Cairn Terrier. He could have been a body double for Toto in the Wizard of Oz, and Jason wanted to name him that. I was not wild about that name.
“We’re not naming him Toto,” I replied. “He needs to have his own name so he doesn’t get mixed up.” Jason, who was about three at the time, probably had no idea what I meant. “How about Corky?” I proposed. I have no idea where I got the name, but Jason allowed that it was a good name.
Going from a Welsh to a Cairn was relatively easy. As terriers are, both breeds are playful, social, and relatively independent (Read that to mean hard-headed). They quickly, though, become part of the family and enjoy entertaining everyone with their antics. That’s one reason I love terriers.They are all little clowns.
Corky and Jason grew up together, moving from Atlanta to Columbus to Las Vegas. We had a pool in Las Vegas, and Jason would take Corky for a ride on the floats a lot. Corky hated the automatic pool cleaner, which resembled a stingray. When hooked up to the pump, the “stingray” would moved around the pool, swishing its “tail” which would push sediment to the bottom where it would then vacuum it up. It was pretty cool, but Corky did not like the invader. He would chase it from side-to-side, barking and snapping at it.
Everyone loved Corky. Friends who visited would sneak him treats, and never one to refuse anything resembling food, Corky got a little chunky. The dog did not refuse anything edible.
When Jason was a sophomore in high school, we had an exchange student who did not grow up with dogs. A few days after Halloween, Corky became quite ill and vomited numerous times one day. It turns out that Catarina accidentally left a bag of candy on the floor under her bed. Ever the intrepid hungry hunter, Corky found it and consumed about a pound of peanut butter taffy. Luckily for Catarina, Corky had stopped vomiting by the time I found out about the candy or she would have been cleaning the floor instead of me.
About six months later, Corky passed suddenly. He was a little over 12 years old. His passing hit us particularly hard because we had lost both Mike’s mom and my aunt a few weeks apart just a few months before Corky. Silent grief hung in the air.
Next: Kasey and Decker bounce into our lives.
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