We’ve been married 54 years, and we got our first dog from the pound in Athens, Ohio in 1966, two weeks after we were married. That was Dog Biscuit, part long-haired dachshund, part mutt, a real sweetheart. She inherited the dachshund back problem which an operation took care of, more or less. We bought an Old English Sheepdog, Sir Lancelot du Lac, registered even, goofy. He loved to play hide and seek. We would go to the cemetery or the campus; I would slip away; his eyes were covered with hair of course, but he never failed to find me, though he did run headfirst into a tree on campus once when he discovered I had taken off. With these two dogs we still lived at 302 Jackson St. From there we moved to Fairway Drive, and they moved with us.
However, we had built a brand new house. And we screwed up. We made a nice house for the dogs outside, but it seems we loved the new house more than the dogs, for they lived outside. We spent a lot of time with them, but they were long-haired dogs and didn’t seem to mind. They had a house, bales of heaped up straw for warmth and comfort, and they came inside into the kitchen in the winter. I wish we hadn’t moved them outside when we moved to the new house, long-hair all over or not, for that is my worst memory of behaving badly with our creatures.
Our next dog was an outdoor dog too, Hollie the collie. She didn’t mind being outside either, and she was a lovely, playful dog as well. Thinking about them still brings tears to my eyes. After her, no more outside dogs. The rugs and house be damned. Dogs first.
PETS: AN IMAGE
There’s a hole in my soul
For each pet we’ve lost,
To the swiftness of slow time past.
My soul feels like a bent metal sieve,
With precious lives draining too fast.
Our Priest says, “No dogs in Heaven!”
How can that be, I say?
God made our souls to last forever;
Do our pets just get a year and a day?
And now it’s March 17, 2021. I’ve been in the hospital for several months with five procedures done on my legs and feet designed to save my legs. I had acquired gangrene from a wound on my right foot. I felt somewhat like the Hemingway character in Africa at the bottom of Mount Kilimanjaro. If in Heaven, however, our bodily scars disseminate glory, as C. S. Lewis said (I think), my body will glow all over.
At the moment I am home, Medicare cut me off. However, I still can’t walk, so I am mostly stuck in a chair until someone, such as my wife, comes to help me. [Gangrene really stinks!] The smell disappeared long ago, yet there is still some danger that I might lose a leg or two. The infection had gotten into the bone, but the antibiotic six-week infusion seems to have defeated it, probably.
ANOTHER LOST LOVE
Well, the real sadness took place last night. Our lovely Jack Russell terrier, Frollie, died last night, late, but too early; her cancer finally stopped her way-too-short life. Her picture follows. We had her all her life, from six or so weeks on. She was a wonderful, beautiful little dog and is still with us the only way the dead can be: in our memories, in our hearts, in our souls. Our tears still keep coming though in spite of that consolation.
