Probably Correct

Me and Oscar

Son Jason and the Granddog were coming over so I was on my way to the grocery store to pick up a sirloin to grill, some Idaho's to bake and a salad to make for dinner.

I walked out to the truck and noticed a small, older Beagle dog trotting down the sidewalk. It was hotter than all get out and the pup needed water...so I brought him inside. Lucy and BoyDog were not happy about it. I set up a dish with water and a little food, but the Beagle didn't touch it.

All dogs raised the fur on their backs and it was a bit of an event, but with appropriate rubbing and such they eased off. The Beagle glommed onto me, looking for serious rubs. Good boy!

Crap. A lost dog, a lost shopping trip. Got to get this boy home, so I walked him out to the pickup, he jumped in and curled up on the passenger seat, and we took off on a slow drive through the neighborhood seraching for walkers and drivers who might be on the lookout for a lost dog.

Years before we had had the company of a part-Beagle, part-Lab who took her escape pretty often. I spent hours and hours driving the streets here looking for Winnie. So this didn't bother me. Getting the pup home was a priority.

I kept the AC on in the truck and the Beagle tucked right in and napped, with the driver's window down so I could talk to walkers and slow drivers. No luck. I drove through our subdivision for almost two hours trying to find the pup his proper place. AC in the truck and the window opened = HOT!

About eight years ago, I had twice found and returned to his home a small Beagle named Oscar, a dog who had run away (Beagles are little Houdini's when it comes to fences and barricades)...it never occurred to me that this guy, aged as he was, was my old friend Oscar.

Yup, it was Oscar. No wonder he had happily come with me! I checked with his old home, just a few houses down the street from ours, and they told me that they had passed him on to the kid across the street.

The saddest part of all this is that his new owners didn't even know that Oscar had bolted.

Look, if you're not going to love and care for your dog, let me know, okay? If I had known Oscar was going to be a Pet Light back then, I'd have kept him here.

But it was great to be with the old boy for a little while today, anyway.

On living with old dogs

     I've come to a very strange point in life. I'm an older human (57 this September) and I have a couple of dogs who are also my age or better (in dog years).

     Background:  We've always had a dog or two here (and once a cat, when daughter Jennie lived here briefly) since the late 1980's.  Conan (a Retriever mix, who passed from a vet's error before we moved into this house), then Maggie (an Irish Setter) and Winnie (a Beagle-Labrador mix), onto Lucy (a German Shepard-Yellow Lab mix), and onto BoyDog (a major mutt mix). 

     Dogs come into our lives as friends and companions and then eventually cross the Rainbow Bridge and are supplanted but never replaced by another.

     The reason we bought the house we live in was because it had a fenced-in yard and Maggie could have a place to run and play. A few months after we moved in, we adopted Winnie from a friend.  It took a few weeks but Winnie and Maggie became fast and forever friends.

     Winnie was a little Houdini who could escape from anywhere and I spent hours walking and driving around the neighborhood trying to find her when she got out of the yard. I always knew when Winnie escaped because Maggie would bark and bark and bark, telling on her.  Most often, Winnie ran just to find one of those great animal scents that dogs love to roll around in.  My car always smelled, well, bad.  But Winnie always came home with me.

     When Maggie died (and it was the worst day of my life, worse than the day I learned that my Father had died, in fact), a week later I brought home from the Humane Society a German Shephard-Yellow Labrador mix, whom we re-named Lucy.  She is now nearly nine years old and has, as so many of her breed do, "blowed up real good".  But she always got along with Winnie.  And Lucy has always been incredibly loyal to both me and my son, a very loving dog.

     Lucy is a giant dog, we call her "the dog you can see from Outer Space".  She weighs about 125 pounds these days and although we have done everything we can to get her to lose weight, nothing has worked.  Maybe she's like Cartman...big-boned!

     Then Winnie got sick. I had gone on a working vacation to Jamaica and when I came home I noticed a black spot on her upper gumline.  It grew alarmingly large over the next few days and our vet told us that it was cancer, and that, even if we did the surgery, it would grow back and there was no hope. 

     The day that I took Winnie to the vet to put her down she raced across the yard and almost caught a bird on the wing. Afterward, I sat in my truck in the vet's parking lot and cried like a baby.

     I scattered her ashes at all the places in the fenceline that she used to escape in our yard the evening of the year's last snowfall, dancing out there, a little drunk, with Lucy dancing and yelping behind me. It was quite a celebration of Winnie's life.

     Because we were used to having two dogs, I went back to the Humane Society and wound up with a dog who they said was 5 years old (but our vet said was probably 7 or 8).  His given name was Blackie but we re-named him to BoyDog and he joined the family. 

     He and Lucy have never really gotten along...in the first month he was with us, he crashed with Lucy about a bowl of dogfood and it cost me $300 to have the cut in his scalp mended.  There have been mix-ups since then, but none so expensive.

     And that brings us to the Summer of 2005. 

     Lucy has physical troubles now getting up and down the stairs from my office to the living area of the house, but she makes the climb every time I do and she will NOT be away from me when I sleep, nap, or sit on the couch.  BoyDog has no such climbing problems but he's always at my feet, somewhere.  Both of them insist on rub sessions to be made available at their convenience.  I do my best to comply with their demands.

     An aging fellow like me now has the care of two aging dogs, both at or over 10 years, at his plate.

     I'm not sure if I'm emotionally capable of losing and then replacing the pups.

     But I don't know if I could do without the companionship and love that a dog brings.

     I just don't know that I'm physically capable of it all, again.