Trixie was my earliest dog. I guess I was about 5 when she showed up. My father saw an article in the newspaper about a litter of dogs that were dropped off at the door of an animal shelter. A photo with the article showed a round wicker basket with the pups in it. I still have the clipping. My father went right away & took one of the pups.
Why she was named Trixie, I don't know. The only Trixie I knew was on the Jackie Gleason Show on tv. Trixie was a mutt & solid black. I don't have many memories of her. I do remember her running around the house & playing with her. She grew into a tall, slim dog with short & shiny black hair. I remember she had a litter of pups herself & I remember being amazed at that event. I remember it happening in the middle of the night & my mother telling my father that, oops, here comes another one. I can still see her in the basket with towel in it that she laid on with the pups nuzzled around her.
Trixie was pretty much allowed to run around outside. And that's when it happened. She was hit by a car. My father rushed her to the vet where she stayed for some days. When she came back home she had a metal pin in her right rear left. After she healed it was kinda funny seeing her run. Three legs worked fine, but that leg with the pin in it didn't bend. It operated like an oar when she ran. But she could still run fast.
I don't know what year it happened, maybe when I was about 8. Came back home from playing at a friends house & asked where Trixie was. My mother said that she was put to sleep. I don't know why. But I felt deeply hurt & betrayed. My folks thought it better that I didn't know what was going to happen, but they were wrong. They never gave me the chance to say goodbye to her.
Cindy came immediately after. I think she was named because of her color, the brown of her brown & white. She was a Cockier Spaniel with the typical colors of one. I don't remember much about her for some reason. I remember playing with her, being mean to her a few times & being in the car with her. Except for walks, she was a house dog. She moved with us to an apartment when I was 12. I came home from freshman or sophomore high school one day & found my mother crying. Cindy was dead on her bed. Dunno why she died Never got to say goodbye to her either.
There were no more dogs until I was 23. My girlfriend was given a dog. Supposedly it was the off-spring of the dog from a tv series back then - Longstreet, I think. It was a mixture of German Shepherd & Doberman Pincer. A formidable mix indeed. It had the slim, tall looks of a Doberman. The only German Shepherd about it was the brown/white coloring. And contrary to its parentage, it was the biggest fraidy-cat in the world. It was afraid of its own shadow.
Circe was her name. Named after the Greek Goddess who Odysseus dealt with. For some reason we started calling her Weasel & Mama Wease, mostly using Weasel.
(Mama Wease & Retard - no, not her, the cat)
She was super fast like a Doberman - I lost many races with her even with huge head-starts. She loved to play hide-n-seek - she always found me. She didn't mind us dressing her up either. I think that's where the Mama Weasel came from - she looked like a mother weasel when dressed. She loved playing in the snow & loved to catch snowballs we threw toward her. I found a small round rock & started using that. When she caught it I could her the clunk as it hit her teeth. I still cringe, but she didn't mind. One day the rock broke in half from too much use. Inside it were all kinds of fossil shells. Neat. I still have that rock.
One summer day my girlfriend & I were lying on the bed & were heard this horrible howling. Turns out that Weasel was hit by a car. We caught up with her. She had a large gash on her right rear above the hind-leg. We rushed her to the vet & she was stitched & patched up.
One time we had this large expensive pot roast for dinner. Almost. My girlfriend took it out of the oven - juicy, crispy, yummy smelling. She put it on the kitchen table while we did other prepared other things. We turned to the table...no pot roast. Hmmm. Weasel had stolen it & ran into the other room gloriously chomping on it. It was so funny that we really didn't get mad. So weasel had the whole pot roast while we had spaghetti or some such treat.
After we married (my girlfriend, not the dog, wise ass) & she became pregnant (don't even go there) Weasel started acting strange. She started snapping occasionally which was unheard of. She also began to walk in circles a lot. It reached a crisis when she went after my wife, snapping & growling. This was not good, especially since she was pregnant & especially since Weasel was a cross between a German Shepherd & a Doberman. We took Weasel to the vet. Turns out that she had epilepsy. I never knew that a dog could have that. The vet said there was only once thing to do - put her to sleep. The next day my father-in-law & I took Weasel to the vet after my wife said goodbye to her. I said my own goodbye at the vets. It didn't take long after she was led away. The vet let me see her. I cried silently. We got home & my wife & I sat on the sofa & cried. Circe, Weasel, , Mama Wease wasn't a dog - she was a soul. I still moist up when I think of her.
The Twin Terrors are next
We got our next dog because of a skunk. Yup. We were in a pet store at the mall & saw this cutest little skunk for sale - $60. Don't know why, but we bought it. Named it Pepper. When it walked across the floor it looked like a Slinky in motion. And it really, really, really loved to hide under things. But when you found it, it was so adorable. We had it about a month when the pet store called. It seems that the first case of rabies from a skunk in 40 years was reported in New Jersey. As a precaution all skunks were being recalled. Huh? Buicks get recalled & Toyotas get recalled, but a skunk? Well, we took it back & instead of getting our money back we spent 4 times that & bought a cute little Keeshound. Say what?
A Keeshound. It's a Dutch dog. They are very affectionate. They are small to medium sized dogs. Their standard color is a long-hair salt/pepper mix. The black is a bit courser than the white. The white is very soft. When the dogs shed, the white hair can be pulled out in chunks & spun on spinning wheels to make thread, which is then woven into sweaters, etc. I kid you not. I've seen it done.
We named it Kutchen - Dutch for cake, I believe. When I say they are affectionate, an older couple we knew had 2 of them. They said that the dogs were so loving that they kept licking the couple's bare legs, to the point that the couple had to use salt on their legs to keep the dogs away!
Well, Kutchen soon had a playmate - Koffee, Dutch for coffee, I believe. So now we had 2 Keeshounds. They were so cute & playful & loving - & evil.
Every time we fed the dogs it was like they hadn't eaten in 6 weeks - they were in orgasmic throes of culinary anticipation. They wouldn't stop jumping at the food as we prepared it or carried it to their assigned dining area. They would quickly dive into their food, suddenly switch places, dive in again, switch places & dive in again. They could have entered & won a hot dog eating contest easily.
We had a bird at the time, Salem, which was an appropriate name for the witch. It hated us, but loved the dogs. It would fly down onto their noses & walk around with them.
The dogs started doing bad things ( I think Salem had something to do with this, but I could never prove it). We would come home from somewhere & find sheets of wallpaper taken off the wall. Somehow they used their little teeth to get the corner of a sheet &, I guess, then walk backwards to pull the wallpaper off until it reached the top of the wall & freed itself. Really, really annoying. They also used those little teeth to get the corner of the floor tile & pull back until the tile square was pulled up & out of the floor. That was even more annoying. It was like perpetual renovation with those 2 around.
The devil incarnate - Koffee, looking for a spot to pee, no doubt.
But what was really, really, really annoying was that they could not associate pee & outside. They were constantly peeing in the house - the rugs especially. The living room rug was so urine drenched we had to throw it away.
Finally, we could take it no more. We put an add it the paper - free, cuddly dogs (hehe, wink, wink). Well, soon some Scottish guy came & happily took them away. We were so happy. Peace of Earth. So we're sitting watching tv a week later & the doorbell rings. I open it & in rush the evil twins. Right behind them was the Scottish guy. You have to appreciate a Scots accent to appreciate what he said next - "I'm bringin' 'em back. I counna take it anymore, their peeing all over the place!" Hell on Earth was back.
Eventually we found a home for Kutchen - an older woman took her in & from what I understand the dog was no problem. It fact, it was treated like a little princess (right, princess of darkness). Koffee stayed on. After the divorce I didn't see much of Koffee ( the one redeeming value of the divorce). Eventually she went to that Home Depot in the sky where I assume she had an eternal supply of wall paper & floor tiles.
And those are my doggies - the good, the bad, the beautiful.
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