Greatest American Dog and All the Dogs I've Loved Before

Congratulations to Travis and his boxer dog, Presley, crowned and given the golden bone title of the Greatest American Dog, with second runner up, Laurie and her cute underdog white maltese, Andrew.

As we came to the finale of the Greatest American Dog, I stopped to think about all the dogs I have owned and loved. My fellow loving, loyal companions of my past, two which rest in cedar boxes on my library shelf.

My only dog of my childhood was a beagle that we got when I was eleven and lived in Hawaii . Only a few memories linger from "Susie", like the one of the day I was taking her for a walk on the base, (we lived on Barber's Point Navy Base, Oahu), when Susie took the biggest snake of a poop in someone's calla lilies. I remember standing there frozen in sheer terror at the size and it's slithery ability of it snaking down the leaf to the stalk while the homeowner yelled at me from his front porch for me to clean it up! Of the time that Susie had gotten bitten from a centipede in the backyard and almost died and had for the rest of her days eat this horrible smelling dog food that my mother would extract from the can in a solid lump and cut it up into small bite size pieces. And of the day Susie died, my mother standing in the doorway in her blue nightgown and hair net, crying hopelessly. I had never seen her cry before.

The first dog of my young adulthood was Charlie, a mutt that someone was giving away in front of a mall in San Diego while I was attending college. She was smarter than most humans and could jump from a sitting position into your arms. She traveled with us from our house in San Diego to San Francisco, feeling at home anywhere she could sleep between us, head on the pillow, snoring. She would sit across the room by the fireplace staring at my dish because that was how she begged for treats, until one day she no longer did that and chose just to sit next to me barely breathing. When we took her to the vet, they told us she had lung cancer, to which I told the vet that I didn't know she smoked. The last day I brought her to the vet, she knew it was going to be our last day together and as I hugged her while the vet gave her the shot, I could feel her cold nose press against my cheek, her tongue lick my tears, and feel her swallow her last breath. Now I know how my mother felt that day in her blue nightgown and hair net, crying, hopelessly.

There after it was a series of dogs, mostly big goofy labs. A black one named Peppercorn, who insisted on digging up my roses in the back yard, until one day she made a hole so big it was almost in the neighbor's yard, that I put her in the hole and hosed her down with water until she was a muddy mess. She never dug again. A yellow lab named Fanny, hopelessly sweet and kind hearted, who had a benign fatty tumor on her stomach the size of a small football. A purebred Sheltie named Dottie. The day we went to pick her up at the breeder's farm in Livermore, she came out of the barn with her tiny tips of her ears taped down. She was stubborn and refused to be house broken, until into the 8th month, out of frustration, I held her over the balcony of my three story house and told her if she didn't learn to be potty trained she would end up in the garden. She never made a mess after that and her ears never did stay down. The past has been filled with lovable big dogs, sloppy in their affections. It hasn't been until now that we decided on trying out the likes of smaller dogs, which we are finding small in size but big in personalities. Two small dogs, chihuahuas, name Henry and Hazel, but that's another story.-Single D