Max and me
“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.” – Milan Kundera (Author, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
I keep saying that someday I’m going to make a photo album of all the dogs that have been part of my life. That might take a few pages for a dog lover like me and also for how I passed on that dog loving to a couple of my children. So besides the dogs that have been mine or my husband’s, I have quite a few dogs I’ve loved that belonged to my daughter, my sons, or my grandchildren. But tonight I’m thinking more about the dogs I claimed as my own.
After Jodie, my cockerspaniel, go old and passed away, it was time for a new dog. Jodie had been a wonderful companion and walking dog and the only dog we actually bought. Out in the country here back some years ago, a person who wanted a dog could find somebody else who wanted to give away some pups. And that’s how I got Max. My husband somehow found out about this guy whose Retriever had a date with a Labrador that resulted in twelve pups. So we drove out in the country, found the guy’s farm, and took a look at the pups in his barn. Do you know how hard it is to decide on one pup when twelve are running around looking cute? Well, believe me, it’s not easy. I had one picked out when all at once another little fellow caught my eye when he stormed out of one of the corners and into my life. I picked him up and that was that. We didn’t have the greatest ride home since Max didn’t like riding and lost his supper in my lap. I don’t know what it is about dogs I get, but they never like riding in a car.
But Max settled in here on the farm and started walking with me when he was so little that sometimes I felt sorry for him and carried him home. When he was about six or seven months old, he disappeared out of our yard on a stormy day. Totally disappeared. Gone. I walked the farm looking for Max with the other dog we had at the time, a sweet runt of a Brittany Spaniel named Sam, short for Samantha. We didn’t find him. I was sad. I think Sam was too. I thought Max was gone. I didn’t think he ran away. I thought someone had stolen him. I still think someone stole him. He was a friendly fellow who liked people so he wouldn’t have been hard to catch. But then three days later, I heard something at the back door and there was Max, ready to be fed. He’d found his way home from who knows where since he never did tell me where he’d been. But I kept to the idea that someone had stolen him and that they had taken him to have a truck dog. At the time, lots of guys liked having a dog in the back of the truck when they were driving around. But remember, Max wasn’t a good rider. He always got sick when he had to ride in a car. With that thought, I figured whoever took him decided they didn’t want him and the good dog found his way home. I was happy. Sam was happy.
Max was a good dog. He loved to go walking with me and he would get so excited that he’d try to hold my hand when we started off on our walks. He wasn’t a gentle hand holder, but that was one of his few faults. He lived to about ten when suddenly he broke down and couldn’t walk. I brought him in the house and nursed him but he was never able to stand again. Nothing for it but to let the vet put him out of his pain. I cried and cried over that dog. We had already lost Sam too, but I wasn’t without a dog for long.
Oscar
Max introduced me to the sweet nature of labs. So, when someone needed a home for a chocolate lab that was full bred and already maybe two, I said okay. I’d take him here on the farm. His registered name was Coffee W. Crutcher. That ended up Dub. Dub was a dog magnet. Every dog in the neighborhood liked to come visiting Dub. Sometimes when we went walking I’d have four or five neighbor dogs walking with us. Dub was an independent character. Maybe because I didn’t get him until he was older, he never seemed to be all that interested in pleasing me. But again, he was a good walking dog and we did a lot of exploring here on the farm together. As he began to show some age, my husband decided I needed another dog and found Oscar online. A lab mix. He belonged on the farm and in my heart from day one. I’ve written several posts about Oscar and how he was odd in some ways but a perfect dog. Here are two of the links, Odd Dog Oscar and My Very Good Dog Oscar if you’re interested in reading them. His only fault was getting bone cancer when he was seven and heading off over that rainbow bridge years before I was ready to tell him goodbye.
So that catches me up to Frankie and Marley. Good dogs too. But no Oscar.
Thanks for reading my dog stories. I think I could write a hundred of them about all the many adventures and misadventures I’ve had with my furry buddies, and then I could talk about all my fictional dog characters too. But you might get tired of dog stories. Maybe I’ll find more dog pictures and have a caption game for a new giveaway this month.
Do you like reading dog stories? Like dogs showing up in the novels you read?