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Dog day
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June 24, 1999 |
He was only 10, and only a dog, but he was a dog of a dog; and we loved him. He belonged to Brian, who is Sam's Big Brother, and to Diane, Brian's wife. No one has ever quite figured out why Charlie's last name was Conners, since that is not Brian and Diane's last name. If you ask me, Charlie's name has to do with Brian and Diane both being alcoholics of the very worst sort, although between them they have 40 years of sobriety. At any rate, Charlie Conners was the name of one of their dogs. He was gentle, elegant, serious, young, old, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, small with soulful brown eyes and a dappled coat, creamy white with reddish brown markings. His people, by the way, are not called Cavalier because they are haughty or uncaring -- "So another cat got run over on Willow; so what?" Cavalier refers to the members of the court of King Charles II of England. Mary Queen of Scots is supposed to have had one of these small spaniels hidden in her skirts as she was led to her beheading. The dime-sized marking Charlie and certain King Charles spaniels have on their foreheads is said to be the memory of Mary's bloody thumbprint. Anne Lamott Anne Lamott's column appears on the Mothers Who Think site every other Thursday.
This is how Charlie came into our lives, eight years ago: Sam was 2 years old at the time, and Brian had been his Big Brother since birth. He had helped to raise him, mother him, father him, brother him. I had just seen "The Silence of the Lambs" and come to the conclusion that I either needed a guard dog or an armed husband, and for reasons I won't go into here, I opted for the dog. I quickly tired, however, of auditioning the bad dogs listed in the want ads of our local paper. A Gordon setter, for instance, billed as "Great With Kids" actually lunged at Sam. So I put an ad in myself, like a dog personals: "Mellow, low-energy guard dog wanted for family with small child." Lo and behold the first response brought us Sadie, whom I have described elsewhere as Jesus in a black dog suit. At first Brian and Diane were delighted for us, but then they became bitter and jealous, so I offered to find them a dog, too. They were dogless, in Gaza, at the time. I ran another dog personals in the paper, and Brian immediately got a call. He was grilled over the phone for an hour and a half by the dog's owner, as if he were asking for her daughter's hand in marriage. It was brutal, but he stuck with it because he had a hunch. Then there was a follow-up call. This time Brian got to do some of the talking. Charlie's original owner apparently had tiny little unresolved control issues. "Why are you giving him away?" Brian asked. "I have too many children and too many pets," she said. "And I can't give away the children." Finally the woman agreed to meet Brian and let Brian meet Charlie, her 2-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Brian said it was an awful scene, with Charlie jailed in a crate underneath a bird cage in the woman's living room, feathers floating down onto his head, which seemed to startle him every time. "It was like the Chinese water torture," said Brian. After elaborate hostage negotiations, the woman gave him Charlie. They drove home to meet Diane. Charlie had never been for a ride in the car before, except to go to the vet, and he climbed onto Brian's chest and sprawled there like a bearskin rug, staring, unblinking, up into Brian's eyes as he drove. "It was like he was trying to communicate with me telepathically, but I wasn't enough on the ball to make the connection. But he was such a sweet, gentle little guy. And we were friends for life."
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