We spent the Thanksgiving holidays in northern Louisiana in a lake house overlooking lake D’Arbonne. It was a little place I found on the internet and rented for my wife, Danny, and me, as well as our daughter, Rachel-Johanna and her boyfriend, Robert. It was a nice long weekend, however the weather was not very cooperative, but we still had fun.
It was a hectic holiday week, though, and getting everything done getting ready to go to Louisiana Wednesday afternoon involved getting a lot of things done including early deadlines, early printing, early mailing...the works.
But, unfortunately, that isn’t what this story is about.
Having already done a good bit of traveling, Danny and I decided to lay over at the Ross Barnett Reservoir house Sunday night and then drive on back over here Monday morning to work. We do that sometimes.
This Monday was different, though. Typically when we were laying over I would bring our little dog, Dottie, back with me and drop her off at the house and get her tucked in early in the morning. She liked a heating pad year round. She also liked to eride shotgun.
Last week, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, we finally had to put Dottie down. Old age had taken over and she was having some seizures or something like that and the end had come. The ride this Monday without her looking at me through those big ole beady eyes from the passenger’s seat was a bit blue.
Dottie was originally my daughter’s dog in high school, and as daughter’s dogs sometimes do, she became mine and my wife’s dog. For years she liked to perch on my knee and rule her roost from there, but in the last couple of years she found her safe spot in Danny’s lap with a blanket.
She was a good dog. I think Danny put it best in a social media post Tuesday. “Dottie was 16,” Danny wrote. “She was an easy pup to have. As long as she had food, a heating pad to sleep on, Tim’s knee or my lap, she was happy. She did love her sister dogs and after they passed she was very lonely I think.
“Johanna rescued her from Lawrence, or Johanna said it was a rescue. Money did exchange hands! Our funniest memory of Dottie is of her chasing our neighbor’s bull across the pasture and over a hill. That was a sight to see!
“It was kind of lonely when I came downstairs this morning. Dottie’s care was the first thing we did every morning. And Dottie did like routine. Though she didn’t make much noise somehow the house seems quieter. Dottie is our last fur-baby. Tim and I have had fur-babies since day one of our life together. We are going to try life without fur-babies for a while I think. Just enjoy the memories we have had.”
That’s a lot of memories.
I have had at least one dog my entire life, or at least every bit of this 65-year-old life I can remember.
I suppose our old German Shepherd, April, was one of our best dogs. April went everywhere me and my friends went as a child. She was the best guard dog a bunch of neighborhood kids ever had. Of course you didn’t really need a guard dog in Newton in 1970.
My dog story would not be complete with-out the mention of Little Bit. I don’t know what kind of dog Bit was, but he looked like a miniature Pinscher though there were no miniature Pinschers back in those days. Bit was a traveling dog. He went all over town. He especially liked to visit the A&P where my parents and I worked. Bit would walk up on the automatic door mat, wait for the door to open, and march right on in. In through the front door and out through the back, that was Bit.
My dog Hairy joined our family from the dog pound when I was either a senior in high school or a freshman in college. For some reason, I don’t remember why, a couple of us ended up at the dog pound in Meridian and came home with a couple of new dogs. Hairy liked to go fishing and tagged along with me everywhere. She smelled really bad though.
In college I found another really good dog. He was half Shepherd and half Great Dane. I called him Buddy. My Buddy the Bear. He died early from Parvo and it made me sad.
After Danny and I were married we saved a beautiful Cocker Spaniel, Buffy, from an abusive family and she really appreciated us for that. Buffy got a sister dog, Butterbean, a pure bred Old English Sheep Dog, when we lived in Clarksdale. Butterbean had Hairy’s aroma but thought she was a short haired lap dog. She grinned a lot and would crawl her big old self up in my lap, roll back her lips and stick out her tongue. Her breath was bad too.
With Buffy and Butterbean still with us, Biff joined our family in the ‘80s. He was a half and half Shih Tzu/Lhasa Apso mix. I presented Biff to Danny for a birthday present wrapped in a paper sack one day. She screamed when she saw that little rat looking up at her from inside that bag and almost dropped him to the floor. He hung around for the long run. Or at least until he got bumped into the swimming pool while we were at work.
For my daughter’s third birthday she got Trixie Pearl, a black and white teacup Chihuahua. She kind of looked like a very miniature Dalmatian. Trixie was pure lap dog and liked to ride in the handlebar basket of my daughter’s bike. She lived to be 16.
Every list has a good and a bad column and on the very top of the bad list was Spec. Spec was a Bluetick hound we got from a family in the parking lot of Walmart. Spec worked hard to proudly earn his place on the bad list. He chewed up everything in the backyard. He ate the light bulbs out of the landscape lights. He ate flower pots, pool toys, chair cushions, shoes, flowers, firewood and on and on and on. It was Spec, we expect, that bumped Biff into the pool.
If he was not knocking down the fence to escape the backyard he was digging under it. He liked to visit the neighbor dog and was known to come home with cute little notes from the neighbor dog’s owner taped to his collar. I liked him, but he finally had to go live with a friend in the country where he could roam free and ride in the back of a pickup truck.
Then came Idgie Bella. She was my daughter’s Christmas present in 2006. Bella is the name she gave her pup, and Idgie is the name wife, Danny, and I added to her registration papers after the tomboy girl in the book and movie Fried Green Tomatoes.
Bella was what you might call a big-boned girl for a Yorkie, and she was quite the tomdog as a pup. She had more personality than a lot of people I know and she adored her family, especially me, I like to think, and I especially liked her. She, like me, liked to shoot fireworks, which is a plus for any dog, or human for that matter, in my book.
Bella grinned at me when I walked in the door and used to stand up on her back legs, stretching her front paws high in the air like a child wanting to be picked up. She chewed clean through the bathroom sheetrock one time proving quickly that she didn’t like to be shut up, but she was so loyal and pure in her love and affection that I didn’t mind fixing it. Much!
Dottie, the one that left us last week — the sometimes grumpy old lady of the house — joined our family next. Dot was also a tiny Chihuahua and Roxie, also a Chihuahua moved in after that. Yet another “rescue” according to my daughter.
We had to put Rox down last year after she developed cancer. She was the first dog we have ever had to have put to sleep. That’s a very hard decision to make. She was 14 and is buried in the side yard only because the ground was so dry and hard out front that I couldn’t dig a proper grave where the other pups are.
I would have rather not had to make the difficult decision again, but we had to do the same thing last Monday with Dottie. Then on Tuesday I buried her in the rain soaked side yard by Rox, in between driving rain showers.
So now we are dog free. We still reach to shut a gate, still look to make sure she is comfortable in her bed, where her bed no longer rests. We still think we should add water to her bowl, or make sure her supper is ready. We still look to see if her heating pad is on, even though her heating pad is no longer there either.
Like Danny said, she didn’t make much noise — she loved to sleep, eat, and poop — but it does seem quieter in the house and that drive into work Monday morning was really different without those eyes staring into mine.
Honestly, I’m not certain how long we’ll be able to hold out without biting the bullet and finding a new friend, finding a new family member...or maybe two!
Yes, it may just be too quiet around the old home place.
