March 14, 2013
5 of 65
WHERE ARE MY DOGS?
There were, of course, other dogs. For most of my school years we had two wonderful dogs named Lady and Smoky. Lady was a Cocker Spaniel Mix and Smoky an AKC Weimaraner. They had very good lives for dogs. We lived in a rural area where they could run free almost all the time. Whenever I would go hiking through the fields or ride our horse, Jeff, they would accompany me. I didn’t really think of them as pets. They were just these wonderful animals who were always around and always wanted to do things with me. We had a good time and I assumed they would always be part of my life.
Shortly before I graduated from high school, my father took a disability retirement from the Postal Service due to some lingering complications of malaria that he had contracted in the South Pacific during World War II. Having a monthly pension allowed my parents to take what would have otherwise been a large financial risk. They opened a sporting goods store called Sportline in the Arvada Plaza Shopping Center. Starting that business was hard work for the whole family, though I wasn’t much help after the first few months. I moved away to a dorm in Boulder to begin my education at the University of Colorado. Several months later my parents decided that it was too much driving to and from the store each day – it was about seven miles each way – so they sold our home and bought a smaller house in the City of Arvada that was only a few blocks from the store. One weekend I came back from college and was surprised that Lady and Smoky, who had become old dogs over the years, did not greet me at the door. I was told that they had become ill since the last weekend I was home and they had been “put to sleep.” A difficult thing about life is that it includes the transition that we refer to as death. Lady and Smoky had good lives, all the way through.
While attending college, I worked at the library to earn money. One of my co-workers was a wonderful lady named Annette who had two great dogs, Buffy and Blue. Buffy’s mother was a purebred Siberian Husky and her father was a coyote who happened to be in the neighborhood. Blue was Buffy’s daughter. They were both beautiful and looked more like coyotes than Huskies. Annette and I spent quite a bit of time together and I began to think of her dogs as my own. They felt that way, too. When Annette went to work, she would let the dogs wait for her on the large lawn in front of the library. It was usually not necessary to restrain them; they would simply lie under the trees and await her return. One day I was sitting in a classroom on the third floor of the building at the other end of that lawn when suddenly Buffy and Blue both walked through the door and came to my desk. The instructor was not amused and instructed me to take the dogs out of the building. I thought it was great that they could find me in the middle of a large, busy campus with thousands of students.
Annette and I split up after a time. I went to Oregon to start law school at Willamette University as she was preparing to begin library school at the University of Denver. I was dogless for over a year. After my first year of law school, I transferred back to finish my legal education at the University of Colorado. I was fortunate to be able to share a house with a friend of a friend who was an attorney and who had a dog named Clancy. We got along fine, but Clancy knew that he was not my dog.
Toward the end of my third year of law school, Blue had a litter of puppies and I was given one. That was Inua, who I wrote about earlier. (https://ralstoncreekreview.com/2013/03/day-two-waiting-for-the-vet/) Unfortunately, she only lived for about six months. A year later, Blue had more puppies and I got one of them. I named her Tasha. She was 3/8 Husky, 1/8 coyote and ½ Dog. I don’t know what breed her father was. Tasha was black and white with floppy ears and almost no one recognized her Husky-coyote heritage. She was the only dog in the house for about a year until I brought home a stray who looked like an orange and white border collie. My brother Jim saw her before I had given her a name and said, “Hello, Stranger”; so I called her Suzy Stranger. That was eventually shortened to just Suzy.
Tasha was a very intelligent canine, though she used way too much of her intelligence in devising ways to escape from the yard. She hated to be fenced and learned to open gates before she was a year old. I changed latches and locked the gates and she began digging under the fence. I filled in the holes and she dug more. Many an evening I would come home from work and find the dogs gone. Left to her own devices, Suzy might escape from the back yard, but she would simply come to the front porch to wait for me. Not Tasha. As soon as she got out of the yard, she wanted to explore. Suzy would tag along, but Tasha was the leader and mastermind. Most of the times they escaped, they would be back home within a few hours. A few times they were captured by the dog catcher and I had to bring them home from the pound – and pay fairly large fines. They thought they were just being dogs; but they often worried me, the human being of the household. Here is a poem I wrote in 1978:
I don’t care about your gods,
Don’t tell me of your ideals,
I have no need for loves or lives or limitations.
Your stories are meaningless,
Your streets are empty,
Your lady’s arms would depress me.
All I want to know is where my dogs are,
All I need to know is where are my dogs.
Tasha and Suzy were my dogs when I married Cathy and were the family dogs when our children, Michael and Suzanne, were born and during their early years. In another post I told how we lost Suzy to cancer. ( https://ralstoncreekreview.com/2013/03/day-two-waiting-for-the-vet/) Tasha grew old gracefully, never losing her adventurous spirit. When she was 16 (112 in dog years), Cathy and Michael and Suzanne and I went Ohio to visit Cathy’s family. My parents looked after Tasha while we were gone. She wasn’t ill, and did not become ill; she simply decided to make that transition called death before we got back home. Suzanne was four years old. A few days after we returned she told me, “Mommy says you are sad because Tasha died.” “Yes,” I said, “Don’t you feel sad that Tasha isn’t with us now?” Suzanne replied, “She was your dog.” Yes she was. Yes she was.