Doggone but Not Forgotten
by Karen Williams | August 05, 2005
Seminole Chronicle
How can people become obsessed with their pets — doting on them, pampering them and buying gourmet treats for little Fifi or Bobo? “I bet some pet owners actually fetch slippers and the newspaper for their animals,” I marveled recently to a friend.
Then I sensed an invisible paw tapping on my shoulder.It was the ghost of Susie-the-Wonder Dog! How could I forget her, I asked myself, bursting into a torrent of tears.Yes, I had adored my one-time loyal companion. But there was nothing excessive about it other than the continual belly rubs the Lhasa Apso demanded of me, visitors and even the UPS guy.
It was a fateful spring day when son Smitty, daughter Emily, and I first laid eyes on Susie at the animal shelter. While other dogs bounced around their cages saying, in bow-wow-ese, “Pick me! Pick me!”, Susie lay listless and moping. An attendant told us that Susie’s elderly owner had died and thus the purebred princess had ended up at the facility.
“What’s wrong with her? Is she sick?” the kids asked.
“We’ll take her,” I interjected, recognizing in Susie an energy level akin to my own. This dog would require little work. She’d merely lie by the sofa and look pitiful.
Alas, Susie changed radically when we got her home. Upon meeting my elderly mother, the animal began running joyfully through the house at breakneck speed, apparently reading the message, “I will feed you table scraps,” in my mom’s body language. Talk about a pet psychic.
Susie proved to have an appetite as big as all outdoors — a place, incidentally, that she had to visit often. At each meal, my mom and the kids would cave in to Susie’s yelps for people food, as I chided, “The vet says not to do that” while slipping her a chunk of meatloaf or two myself.
We had never seen an animal so focused on food. After dinner, Susie would try to hurl herself on to the table to snag leftovers. Despite her short legs and ample girth, she found death-defying ways to access the kitchen counter, tall picnic tables, even ice cream trucks. A neighbor once commented, “I bet if we experimented and covered your kitchen floor with plates of food, Susie would never stop eating!” Susie perked up with a yap that said, “Yes, in the name of science, let’s try that!”
Overindulgence and sparse exercise — she insisted I carry her when we went for walks — eventually got the best of the Wonder Dog, and she was diagnosed with diabetes. It became necessary for me, who hates needles so much that I can’t sew on a button, to give Susie shots of insulin. It was a twice-daily ordeal, but we persevered, and the following years were marked by carries around the neighborhood, expensive low-cal dog food (she despised it), and doggie diapers for incontinence.
Once, after an especially rigorous carry, I held Susie like a baby and we kissed. My mom, observing, exclaimed, “Arggh! How can you kiss a filthy animal?” Susie looked up, puzzled, as if to say, “Hey, she’s not that bad!”
Susie went peacefully to the great dog biscuit in the sky two years ago. Thank goodness I’m not a weirdo who buys a doggie tombstone or visits the taxidermist. I merely keep a big pan of table scraps, like an eternal flame, ever on the floor by the fridge.
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Copyright 2005, Karen Williams
