My family is a dog family. The jury is still out, but I have nothing against most other animals. Do spiders count as animals per se?
My point is that we’ve had mostly dogs as pets for as long as I can remember, and today I would like to introduce you to all of “my” pets, past and present.
When I was a baby, my parents had two pets. The first was a golden lab named Tennessee. The second was a black Vietnamese Pot Bellied Pig. His name was Spike. We lived in Carolina Beach, North Carolina and our two closest neighbors were either never in or didn’t care.
I don’t actually remember Spike. When I turned three, we moved to the suburbs and had to relocate him. He ended up at my grandfather’s farm. Eventually he got loose and reverted to a feral state in the nearby marsh. He was a gentle pig, back when he was under my family’s care. My parents once told me of a tale of his compassion.
I was somewhere in the vicinity of one-year-old, because I was walking. I was in the backyard, where we kept Spike and Tennessee. My Mom watched me as I began to toddle up to Spike, and she was understandably anxious. Even before he went feral, Spike ate a lot and was far from thin. He also had grown long tusks. She began to cross the yard but I had already reached our pet pig. Luckily for us all, he seemed to understand that I was young and easily injured. I reached to pet him, like I was learning to do with the neighborhood dogs and he kept his razor sharp tusks out of my way. I got to pet his nose, without injury, before I was picked up by my concerned mother.
We had Tennessee for about a year longer. He was my first real buddy and he absolutely loved me. He was my protector after we had to give up Spike.
We were at our new house, in Wilmington, North Carolina. I was somewhere between three and four years of age. This is the age where children enjoy taking off their clothes, without a care in the world.
This trait didn’t pass me by.
The story goes that one morning, out of the blue, I decided I wanted to play a little differently. There is little telling if this was my first time, or if I had done this before and no one noticed. Because, on Saturday mornings I was always the first one up and I happily let my parents sleep in. I had the remote figured out by the time I was three, and often spent my Saturday Morning watching cartoons. Except this morning was a little different. I decided to strip off my pajamas and play with Tennessee out in the back yard, completely nude. Our nearest neighbor took note and came over later to alert my mother. She meant no malice because she thought it was entertaining.
Sometime after I turned four, Tennessee suddenly fell ill. He died in my father’s arms, while I was away at daycare. We buried him in the backyard, under a garden swing.
The next few pets all came at the same time. I am writing this from the faded memory of a four year old, so bare with me.
It started with a trip to the local pet shelter. We were presented with a litter of mutt puppies who had been dumped into the mail slot overnight. My Dad immediately picked out a brown male and they bonded quickly. We named him Rommel.
I remember my mother picking me up from preschool one day. She told me to look in the back of the car. To a kid, it was like Christmas had come again. Because, we finally had a dog again.
I have countless sweet stories involving Rommel, but I decided to share this one. It happened when I was somewhere around five. My youngest sister had already been born. Her infant months all kind of blend together so I can’t accurately age her. She was old enough to sit up unsupported for a time. I was also learning that my sister was not like my lifesize baby doll, and couldn’t be played with as such.
Knowing this, I set up a beanbag chair next to Rommel and persuaded him to stand up. Ellie was all too happy to play my games. I think. She liked Rommel, because he was gentle around her. Our Dad was watching from the couch. I picked her up and sat her on Rommel, like you might do on a rocking horse. He stood still and she began to play with his ears. Something happened and she lost her balance. Instead of falling to the side, like I had set up for her, she began to fall backwards. I caught her, but she wasn’t the least bit upset. She thought it was part of the game and began to laugh.
Around that time, we began to look for a Great Pyrenees dog, brand specific. We found a rescue group but our plan came with a hitch. There was a sweet female Pyrenees available, but she had a sister and we were advised to adopt them as a pair. We followed this advice and came home with Bess and Tess.
My Mother never really liked Bess and Tess. At All. This is probably why she hated “Marley and Me”. She didn’t even want me to mention them (for a reason I’ll mention later), so I apologize. I know I loved them. They saved me.
We used to go for hikes in the woods behind our neighborhood. It was one of my favorite things to do. Those woods, like my childhood, are long gone. They were destroyed in favor of an unsightly suburb and apartment complex.
I remember that all seven of us were out for an unleashed walk in the woods. The four Carroll’s and our three dogs. My sister was still in a stroller, on the far side of the path. I was walking on the other side, overlooking a sharp drop into the woods. The edge of the path was sandy and crumbling. Danger meant little to a kid like me. I mean, I knew the basics like “Don’t play in the street” and “Stranger Danger”.
I began to teeter on the edge. I had dropped back, yet unnoticed by my parents. One of the pyres, Bess or Tess, had dropped back with me. She came along my right side and guided me back to the center of the path. Pyrenees are less herding dogs, and more guard dogs.
It was also around that time that we got our fish. We had a family friend who worked in a local pet shop. She somehow convinced us to add to the brood and I became the proud owners of three goldfish. Well one was black. I was also well into the Harry Potter fandom by this point, so the names were very obvious. Harry was our black sheep. Ron and Hermione became the names of the orange goldfish.
Harry did not last very long. I’m not sure what happened, but it might have been shock from the store to our home tank. That was my first experience with death, first hand. I mean, it had somehow been explained to me that Tennessee was with us one day and buried in the backyard the next. This was different. I came into my bedroom, where they lived, and found him belly up in the tank.
“Mommy, come look, Harry’s swimming upside down! He looks silly.” Is probably how that conversation went down. I was somewhere around five-years-old. He was fished out with a net and hitched a ride on the porcelain express.
Ron and Hermione managed to outlive Harry by several years. They lived longer than most pet goldfish, I have been told. We cleaned their tank, but we somehow messed up. This was shortly before we were set to leave for Mexico. They died of shock, within days of each other. I have the strangest memory that they were buried in the back yard, but I could be wrong.
It was also around this time that we had to re-home Bess and Tess. It was a heartbreaking decision, that we did not enjoy. I know the lady we returned them to was far from happy. I really hope they found a happy home together.
In Mexico, we rescued another dog. This was where we adopted Ribsy.
It was early in the morning. I was doing my homeschool project. Ellie was outside playing, as she did all day everyday. Ellie suddenly burst through the screen door, carrying a small dog like a baby doll, yelling for our Mom. She had found this black and white spotted stray outside. She thought it was a puppy, because she had been around medium to large dogs her entire life. There was little way to tell how old Ribsy was. We agreed to adopt her, mostly because my sister was head over heels immediately in love and because she had this puppy dog expression.
We named her so because she looked like the Ribsy from the Beverly Cleary “Henry and Ribsy”, original edition. She and Rommel bonded easily and we brought them back to the States.
We began to settle into Nags Head. We had two dogs. I was beginning to struggle in school. We “rescued” a “stray” cat from the ice cream shop next door. We cared for the cat for a few days, putting up fliers. It turned out that she belonged to a neighbor and was an aloof outdoor cat.
Our next rescue flew into our hands. Well he landed on my dad’s shoulder while he was enjoying our porch. In the area, we are used to seagulls and crows. A lovebird is definitely not something that you are supposed to see in the wild. Of North Carolina, that is. We took care of him and put up posters. It turned out that his name was Solomon and he was owned by a family across the highway. They took him home.
Except, a few months later, they were back. They were moving away and could no longer care for him. They sought our permission and we were eager to take the task. Solomon was a sweet yet grouchy old man of undeterminable age. He often flew free around the house we rented.
Unfortunately, Rommel began to decline mentally. I love the old boy, but it’s true. He was snapping at strangers and had pulled a few of us to our knees. He also took a few snaps at Solomon.
One night, Solomon was free flying. We were going out for ice cream. We were supposed to put him back in his cage, but we couldn’t catch him. We weighed our druthers and decided that he was probably fine. We were wrong. I won’t go into descriptions, but I think you can read between the lines.
This was one of among many instances that led my father to make a difficult decision. With a hurricane bearing down, he made pretend he was taking Rommel to the vet, for shelter, before we ourselves evacuated. That wasn’t the reason he took Rommel to the vet. He told me as soon as he got home, but chose to wait to tell Ellie.
I had fallen out of love with Rommel, after what happened with Solomon. I was angry, but I didn’t celebrate that he was no longer with us. It took me a long time to finally grieve for Rommel, but I finally came to terms. I remember when he told Ellie, about a week later. Her grief could be heard through the house and she refused to even acknowledge our father for days after the fact.
It was a somber time, but we came back. We had Ribsy. She was like having the pet cat I had kind of always wanted. She ignored me about 95 percent of the time, hated baths, and other cat like things. We went and got a second lovebird.
We named her Asparagus, though we call her “Gussie” or “Chicken”. She has a gimp leg, from an accident before we adopted her. As I write this, she’s chirping to the TV.
I wish I could say I was done with the sad stories, but I have one more. T'was the night before I was set to move into college. I had just finished work. I was driving around, playing a game on my phone (called ‘Ingress’. Trust me, I pull off the road when I play), when I got a frantic call from my Mom. She wanted to know where I was and told me to come home immediately.
Forthwith, every possibly wrong I had ever done came to mind. Every thing that could possibly go wrong, was also making itself known. I may or may not have raced home. I rushed to the stairs, trying to calm down and prepare myself for anything else. The lack of emergency vehicles certainly halved my list of worries. My Mom met me at the top of the stairs, in tears, and told me Ribsy was gone.
She had not been feeling well that day. We gave her an end of summer bathe and shave. She ran away and hid twice, which wasn’t totally weird. But the fact that she was panting and breathing hard for hours afterwards, had my sister concerned. She begged us to take her to the vet, but we didn’t really have the time before work. We convinced her that if Ribsy was still acting weird the next day, that we’d take her to the vet.
She appeared to go peacefully, in her sleep. My sister found her, when she was going to take her for nightly walk. We buried Ribsy that night, between two bushes in the side yard. It was a sad ceremony, in which many a tear was shed. A beautiful flower was growing there this spring.
We said we would wait until summer to get a new dog, and we did. It was a spur of the moment trip to the SPCA, to play with the kittens and look at the dogs. While back with the dogs, we found five puppies up for adoption and immediately texted the folks.
We arranged to return that afternoon. Four puppies remained, as the tan one had already been adopted. One of the four was already called for, so we had three to choose from. After much debate and a delicate game of “Pass the puppy”, we decided on the sole female. Because we liked the “tradition” of Dad being the only male. Because she had the cutest expression. Because she loved to hand out kisses.
We picked her up today. Her name is Schuyler, after the Schuyler sisters in Broadway’s “Hamilton”. It’s going to be interesting raising and training a puppy, but I think we can do it as a family effort.
She already picked up a dead frog, on her night walk, and chewed on it before we realized that it wasn’t matted grass.
Why do we attract the weird ones?
