210619 Sentinel, Dogs

Dogs, dogs, dogs

This picture is me with my little Alley dog as we sat on the tailgate of my truck.

I have had many dogs during my lifetime and for the most part they were good animals. Why do people call an elongated, fat filled sausage a hot dog?
So far as I know, there is no dog in a hot dog. Crusty old sailors used to call unattractive women dogs. Why, I do not know. Ignorant men these days call women bitches, another thing I have never understood.
The first dog in my life was a female German shepherd. Her name was Leo. That sounds rather odd, but I was so young that I had a limited vocabulary and that was one of the few names I could pronounce. Leo had half-dozen puppies under the steps going down to our basement and my mother told me not to go near the dog or touch her puppies. Well that was not going to happen with me. I snuck down there and hugged every one of those pups. Leo was too tired to care and I had a great time with the puppies. Somehow Leo ran away and took all of her puppies to a farm in the country.
The next dog was a beautiful Boston Bull Terrier puppy my great uncle brought me for my birthday when I was still young enough I was yet to be in school. The dog had these tiny legs, perhaps 3 inches long. I put it in a box for the night before I went to bed. That must have been a really smart puppy because it managed to climb out of the box, escape from our fenced-in yard and then left for a farm out in the country.
My next dog was Brownie, she was a good one until she was run over by a car and then died shortly thereafter. She used to sleep at the foot of my bed.
When we moved back to Missouri we had several dogs, Oliver, a German shepherd that happened to be the runt of a litter, but somehow he managed to mate with every female within 5 miles. We also had an aging boxer we named Susie. She was a hoot; every time I was going to town in our old Ford van she would hop on the front seat of the van and loved being there. There was also Chico, an adorable Chihwawa that was a hungry little guy who once got into our dog chow and ate until his belly was so packed he could not walk. He just laid for days moaning until he could finally walk away.
We left Missouri and went back to San Diego for 10 years before returning to Missouri. We had the farm then and our daughter lived in a small town nearby. She found a little mixed breed dog someone had abandoned in an alley, so her name became Alley. She was a little dog with a voracious appetite. She was a sweetheart that loved being in the house or even the basement in the winter. At night the coyotes had a run past the house and the dogs from near and far would back at them. Alley would continue barking for hours afterward. I assume she was letting them know that she was here and they should not come looking for her on the back deck. No matter how many times I would wake up and tell her to stop barking, she would look at me like she was telling me that she was a dog and that was what dogs are meant to do. Sadly she died one day when we were off at work. I had to give her a Viking Funeral that evening.
Last on my list was Chance. She was an old dog that showed up on the back deck on the farm one afternoon, shivering, hungry and tired. I couldn’t turn her away. After our little Alley I thought I was done with dogs, but Chance wormed her way into my heart between beats. We had no idea of where she came from or why she chose to be at our home. She didn’t actually have a name that we knew of but a few days later our daughter came for the weekend and when we told her we had no name for the dog, she recommended Chance because the dog arrived by a chance. She was a funny dog. I put an ad in the local paper saying a missing dog was here, but no one answered the ad. She was a border collie and smart as any dog I ever saw. She would never come into the house even in the bitter winter cold. She followed me everywhere, except the garage or the barn. She would just stand there at the edge and wait until I came out. Her bad habit was she would lie in wait for farm trucks and then chase them. We found out later one man said she looked like a dog that lived up the road with an old farmer until he died. Chance finally got too old to chase trucks so she would lay on the front porch and watch them. She got to the point that she no longer came up on the porch and then I wondered why. Her hips gave out and she could no longer move. I picked her up and took her to the vet. He said there was nothing that could be done for her. I had to let him put her down. I cried all the way home and today as I write this my eyes are welled up with tears.
Dogs always eventually get old and die before people do and that is why I vowed never to get close to one again because I don’t want to feel that pain again in my lifetime. Putting Chance down was the most difficult thing I ever did in my life.