The first one was V. V was our first dog when I was a kid. V had a lot of Chihuahua in her, and I think some cocker spaniel, from the looks of her later puppies.
Not V, though. V looked like a little pig. Real Chihuahuas looked sharp next to V.
I never quite got it clear about how V got her name. Named after Queen Victoria? After Thomas Pyncheon’s book of the same name, perhaps?
This was back in the 60’s, and Mom didn’t spay V. We didn’t understand the pet overpopulation problem back then.
V was a pretty laid-back dog, though. She’d only go bolting out the front door and run off when she was in season. She did this quite reliably.
There were several rounds of puppies. One of the first included one who was born with its abdomen split open, as I recall. Now there’s an experience for kids learning the Miracle of Life from their pets giving birth. That’s pretty impressive, coming up with a mongrel pig-dog who mates randomly and has puppies with reverse spina bifida.
I have other stories like this, like with the hamsters. But that’s for another diary. Eventually we and V moved to the country, where she continued to be courted from time to time by dogs, at times much larger dogs, it being the country and all. I remember somebody commenting once that they must have had to nail her to a tree in order to do the deed.
V eventually went back to the city again, in another move, having lived a long and productive life. Meanwhile, Cindy and Harry came into my life.
Cindy was supposed to be somebody else’s dog, this involved one of those ill-fated attempts to ameliorate the pain of a child involved in a divorce. I hope that child wound up with another great dog later on down the line, because we got Cindy.
Cindy was a Newfoundland. Harry was a blond collie. Harry just showed up. I was about 14-15 and doing a lot of gardening out in the country. I’d see this dog hanging around the fringes of the woods, looking at me. I’d look at him, I’d try to approach him; he’d run off.
Eventually I stopped looking at him. After a number of weeks of this, he crept up behind me and stuck his head under my arm. We heard later that he’d run off from a settlement down the lake where he had been beaten.
He was our dog after that, along with Cindy. They would both accompany me in my nightly rounds of the domain. We had seven acres, ninety-odd feet of lake frontage, bunches of trees including some very tall ones, and all the time in the world, if not all the money.
Harry was especially assiduous about following me around, being a collie and all. There weren’t a lot of roads, but as I got more adolescent, I took to walking them. You know how that goes.
One evening, very late, I lost track of him on my way down some rural route, and in returning, found him dead on the road, struck by a car. I was doing a lot of psyches back then (though not at that moment) and this was a most seminal experience in that regard, as I instantly learned that though acid may make reality seem more real; you’re still not there yet.
This was reality.
I pulled him off to the side of the road, and ran all the way home. I don’t know how far it was; miles? Several? All of it on acid, except I wasn’t on acid.
To their everlasting credit, my mom and the other people we were living with did not guilt trip me about this; quite the reverse. I still hated myself, but at least I didn’t have help.
Cindy fared better. She hung in for years after I moved on, along with the rest of my family. Two of the other people living there stayed, and are there still. I was back in Los Angeles from the late 70’s to the mid 80’s, and then went out with a friend back to the woods in the east, where Cindy still lived.
She was old by then. Her hips were all screwed up, she was on steroids, all medded up. Newfies are big dogs and they don’t last as long as some of the smaller ones.
But she remembered me. She still loved me.
Her coat was horribly matted. I took her on as my personal chore. It never occurred to me to clip her, and in retrospect that seems a peculiar omission.
Instead I teased it all out. I worked on her like some sort of living avant garde art project, and cleaned out all her hair, made her pretty again, made her smell good again.
They still had to carry her upstairs at night, and downstairs in the morning, but at least she was pretty again.
And I know; of course they didn’t have to do that. We didn’t any of us HAVE to do any of this. But we did.
One of her people was still gardening, and he was having a lot of trouble with gophers. Cindy could barely move anymore, but she would hang around the garden. One day, he came home and there was old Cindy, next to a gopher hole, watching over a dead gopher. Amazing! She must have just waited it out. They buried the gopher in the back lot, the part we jokingly called the South Forty, the part with the decaying root cellar with the melting green glass windows.
I moved on yet again, after several months, with my friend. We heard sometime later that Cindy had died. They buried her next to the gopher.
Meanwhile, I and my friend had acquired two more dogs. There was Bob, the medium-sized black dog we got from an ad in the paper. Bob was like a Kelpie; a black border collie kinda, a really fine dog.
And there was Kinnick, who was a malamute with wolf blood. I really didn’t want a malamute with wolf blood; I wanted a shepherd/sled dog cross, but puppies were scarce those months when I was in dog-acquisition mode, and there was money, then.
The dogs got along great; my friend and I ultimately did not. He got Bob, I got Kinnick.
And then he went nuts, and Bob got lost. I got lost too, I had to give Kinnick up. I’d been living in an unimproved garage in Los Angeles so I could keep her, being on the poor side. I had to take her everywhere. I’d ride my bike down Lincoln Boulevard holding her leash. She was great with this. She learned everything she wanted to do immediately, stuff like sled dog commands.
Everything else, she pretty much ignored, though. Fortunately I’d socialized her well. I took her to work at the Co-op and she loved everyone, but I couldn’t keep her inside because of the health regs. There were too many things I couldn’t do, overall. And then she got sick, and I gave up and took her to the pound.
We walked there, the death march. Her illness wasn’t incurable. I knew they’d probably put her down, though.
I brought her in, this incredible, gorgeous person I’d learned to love, and told the people there I wanted to give up my dog.
I filled out some forms, and we put her through a little dog door in the wall of the antechamber of the dog pound. She howled, she yelled at me, complained bitterly.
Then I broke into tears, totally broke down right there in the antechamber, in front of all those people behind the counter, all those people behind their desks, all of whom looked at me, all of whom radiated emotion and caring for what I was going through. And here I’d expected them to hate me for it.
I left, and didn’t get serious about another dog until a few years back. I have a rescued border collie now (I never learn, do I?) but I can spend a lot of time with him, which is good since he is really phobic about thunder and firecrackers, etc.
They warn you about border collies, too. So far so good with Casey, though.
I wouldn’t have gotten a wolf hybrid if I’d had a better sense of how difficult they can be to work with. I’d say it was a mistake, except how can I say this wonderful person who shared my life for six years was a mistake? How can I say any of them were mistakes? They were my dogs. I’d be a different person without them; they’re part of me, always will be.
