It's All About the Dogs

I have a dog. Her name is Summerlin. She should have been my baby girl, but I had two boys already, and to be honest, I was afraid that if I tried for a girl, then I would end up with another boy. But that is really a story for some other time. Summerlin is mine – if anyone else is in the room, she will leave them to come sit in my lap. You have to understand. Summerlin is half Yorkie and half Chihuahua and only weighs ten pounds. She is what could feasibly be called a “lapdog.”

My husband has a dog. Her name is Dixie. She is Summerlin’s baby sister; younger by just over a year. But something that she hasn’t learned is that she is not a lapdog. I agreed to Dixie with the understanding that my husband would take care of her needs. All of her needs. Somehow, many of those needs have fallen to my endless list of tasks. Dixie, instead of ten pounds, weighs closer to a hundred pounds and is a full-blooded English Pit bull.
 
The dogs get along grandly. Because Dixie was only six weeks old when we got her, she was close to Summerlin’s size. She was actually a little bigger than Summerlin, but they were close enough in size that it didn’t really matter. Essentially, Dixie grew while Summerlin stayed small, but Dixie never realized that. Things that we thought were cute when Dixie was a small puppy weren’t nearly as cute when she got bigger.
 
She ate toilet paper and magazines and books and toys and shoes. She ate tons of food and grew at the speed of light. Before I could turn my head properly, I found that instead of a six week old, fifteen-pound puppy, there was a fifty-pound puppy bounding up on the bed with me. My distaste for her grew. I did not want a big dog. I did not want to have to clean up after a dog that ate toilet paper. And it wasn’t like she ate just a tad bit of the toilet paper, but she would eat the whole roll! At least if Summerlin ate toilet paper, it would only take me ten seconds to clean it up.
 
Dixie has continued to grow. Growing along with her are her appetite, her streams of slobber, her muddy footprints and her wagging tail. She still believes she is a lapdog and doesn’t hesitate to jump up on your lap when you’re sitting on the couch. She still believes she should be allowed to sleep in the bed, even though she takes up the space of a grown person. Unfortunately, she hasn’t yet shown signs of stopping her growing.
 
I haven’t always disliked large dogs. I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t want to get her in the first place, or why I refused to have anything to do with her when she was very small. All I know for sure is that when I was younger, I had larger dogs. They were all dogs that were mine; I cared for them.
 
Duchess was a reddish brown Chow dog, who had little black dots on her tongue. She followed me everywhere. My aunt and uncle had her and passed her on to us. She always met me at the end of the driveway when the school bus dropped me off, but one day she didn’t show up. She was so old that she could barely see, and couldn’t hear us most of the time, but she was loyal and absorbed tears well.
 
I had a black dog whose name I can no longer remember, that got run over by a train. I yelled and yelled for him, but he wouldn’t come back to me. I cried on my way home that day and was so upset that I couldn’t even tell my mom what happened.
 
I had Daisy, a bulldog, who I carted around with me in the back of my truck. My dad accidentally hit her one morning before he went to work. When I came out later that morning, the day of my senior prom, I couldn’t get her to come to me. My mom told me that she had run under the house, so they thought she was okay. I spent all of my savings to keep her alive and she still passed away. The two fake fingernails that I snapped off trying to open my tailgate to get her to town were an afterthought. I didn’t even want to go to prom anymore.
 
Then there was Rajah, so named because he was brown and had a single white spot on his forehead. Rajah is another word for a monarch in a Hindu country, but the simple fact of the matter is, when I was in school, an Indian classmate told me that the dot on their forehead was a rajah. He had a dot; he was Rajah.
 
Together, we have had Spot, a Dalmatian, that I wanted to name Yvegeny. But when my son tried to say the name, it came out more like Airplane. I didn’t really want a dog named Airplane, so we made it pretty simple for my son. She just disappeared after a few weeks of living with us.
 
But Dixie is different. She’s not mine, she belongs to my husband. And the thing is, there are times when she isn’t so bad. She’s finally learned not to eat the toilet paper or magazines. She goes outside to use the bathroom if someone will open the door for her. And the best thing of all – if someone comes up to my house to break in, they’ll never know that danger is waiting on the other side of the door, because all they will hear barking is my little dog.
 
What about you, dear readers? What kind of dog do you have? Any memories of pets lost or found? I hope to hear from you….