First published November 21, 2008
There’s something about pets that people just love. I have had a few pets in my lifetime: dogs, fish, cats. Yet I have never felt much of an attachment to any of them, save one: the previous pet that I owned, man’s best friend. From time to time, I still find myself thinking about her.
When I was barely even three years old, I remember going to the pound to pick up a new dog. If you’ve never been in a pound, it’s loud. There are dogs barking, cats meowing, and chaos in general. To a three year old, it’s a very scary place. I remember clutching onto my dad’s hand while trying my best to stay as far away from the barking dogs. We used to have another dog, Sammy was her name, but she died. I don’t remember why. I think she got hit by a car. Anyways, here we were going to get another dog. I remember not being interested in any of the choices we had. Sometimes you wish you could take every single one with you, but most of the dogs that were currently up for grabs were not what we were looking for. We wanted a family dog, not too big so that she could be a house dog, but not too small so we could play with her. Finally, the last dog we would look at. She was a shy dog, laying very still in her kennel. She was a pure breed sheltie, just about two years old. She was already spayed, and this was the dog we picked out.
You know how it is, when you get something new and you just want to spend all the time with it you can. In this case, that it was my new pet, Cassie was her name. I was not in school, being the three-year old that I was. I had acquired many toys throughout my few years, and I would play with them. I had a Spiderman, Batman, and superman action figures. I had Star Trek space shuttles, and huge stuffed animals of all varieties. Like Andy from “Toy Story”, I would act out scenes with half my toys being the good guys, the other half the bad. I also enjoyed playing the Super Nintendo my dad had bought for me and my brother. Mario and Donkey Kong were household names to us. When we got Cassie, I abandoned a lot of those toys and would play in the backyard with her, but that didn’t last long. Playing with the dog for a few hours every day got old very quickly.
While my brother had to go off to the second grade, I could stay home all day and play with Cassie. She wouldn’t fetch however, so I soon became bored with her. Her previous owner had beaten her with a broom, thrown various objects at her, and had practically made her afraid of anything that could harm her. My interests would soon be placed elsewhere anyways, as a baby sister was coming shortly.
My responsibilities for taking care of Cassie involved taking her out to her little yard area where she could answer her call. We lived in a house in Wenatchee, the very same house I still live in. It’s a small but cozy house, with a huge backyard to the south, and lot to the east. My brother and I played baseball, football, soccer, basketball, a lot of sports out there when we were younger. In the years to come, we outgrew our backyard, being able to hit a home run every time up to bat. We also had another little yard area to the west of our house. This was Cassie’s territory.
She had a dog house and plenty of room to run around. My dad stretched a line and to this we attached a leash to. This allowed her access to her entire yard. She was never supposed to be left outside for very long, but after taking her out and leaving her in her yard, I would soon forget about her, and the amount of time she’d spend out there would reach into the hours. Before I went to bed at night, I had to bring her in and get her ready for bed too. Before she was trained, this was a difficult task. Soon she would come in and lay on her bed all by herself, trusting us to let her sleep if she wanted, or roam the house if she dared.
My time was divided between my sister and my new best friend. Cassie was good to have around if you were roaming, or maybe you just needed your feet warmed. Some dogs will let you even use them for a pillow, but not Cassie. She was a dignified lady, and she had to let everyone know it. We took her to a family reunion in Montana one summer, where my uncle thought it would be comical to place those weird glasses with a big nose attached to it on her. She did not think this was so funny, but it made us laugh so she kept them on.
School would soon begin, which meant that I would have even less time to spend with my dog. Kindergarten only lasted until noon, and when my mom left the house to come pick me up, Cassie knew this was her cue to get ready for me to come home. There she would be, every day, standing at the door waiting for me to show up. I would pet her and tell her I missed her, and she would join me for my lunch after school. She even would sit patiently while I did my homework, however when one of those times she knocked over a glass of water onto my book, she could no longer be trusted to sit still.
Weekends were the best. I would take Cassie out for a walk or play with her in the backyard. Try as we might, my brother and I could never, ever get her to fetch. The pine tree in our yard provided a lot of fetch material, but those scared her even more than a ball. The pine tree is the only tree left in our yard. When you’re little, the tree seemed immense, and it still can give you that feeling now that I stand six and four inches off the ground. The boundaries of our back yard were set by the house on one side, a fence on two sides, and a hedge on the last side. We couldn’t have been happier with it. We could set up bases and still have a big outfield. In fact, we hosted quite a few games of wiffle ball back in the day. When playing baseball, Cassie would very rarely retrieve a foul ball for us, but only by lots of encouragement and through great difficulty. It would have just been faster to go get it yourself. Friends of mine had dogs that would fetch, and I could spend hours just sitting there, throwing the ball and waiting for it to be brought back to me. Since my dog didn’t do this, I always felt a little resentful of her.
As I grew up, so did Cassie. As she grew older, the things that she would do, while so very few, continued to dwindle. Even at a very young age, Cassie stopped enjoying taking a walk or even playing in the back yard. Just about all the exercise that she got consisted of roaming the house looking for whatever food scraps she could find on the floor. This made her even more lazy, and even worse, heavier, which contributed to her unhealthy lifestyle. It was a chore to get her to get adequate exercise, and monitoring her diet became quite a hassle. I was still relatively young.
I can only recall a few vague memories of Cassie, other than more recently. However, one memory of mine sticks quite well with me. Cassie was afraid of noise. She hated the vacuum cleaner, cars, thunder storms, and her worst enemy, fireworks. Every Fourth of July and New Years, fireworks would go off and there would be Cassie, gnawing at the piano legs or tearing up the carpet. We never could figure out why this eased her pain, but it did. We quickly learned that we had to stay up with her during those nights, holding her to make sure she wouldn’t get in trouble. When I was younger, thunder storms and fireworks scared me also, so I could empathize with Cassie. We would sit next to the fire on New Years Eve, watching Dick Clark and the gang on TV. She’d sit next to me, shaking. The faint glow of the fireplace provided enough light for me to look over and see she was doing okay.
My best human friend moved away when I was seven, which was hard on both me and Cassie. When he came over, Cassie would always follow us around, even play with us. We copied what Jem and Scout did in To Kill a Mockingbird, reenacting plays and various other things our minds could conjure. Cassie would sometimes be the main villain, sometimes be the hero. Getting her to play the part was always a struggle, but when she shined, she did so very brightly. However, as soon as we would release her from our clutches, she ran off and hid in her dog house. This led to minutes of coaxing her out, because she couldn’t be left outside unattended.
One of Cassie’s few restrictions, was that she wasn’t allowed to be near us while we ate a meal. She would always jump around creating a ruckus, one time nearly pulling off the table cloth, which would have resulted in the destruction of my mom’s set of plates. Every once in awhile, she would forget her mandate and sneak on over. Even though we would scold her and tell her to go sit on her bed, after the meal she would soon be ready to spend whatever time with us she could.
Middle school was a big change, and Cassie eagerly awaited helping me make the change. She remained faithful, waiting for me when I came home. However, the hours that it took me to get there grew longer and longer. Sometimes late into the afternoon would I finally make it home, and still there she would be. Since I lived en route from the school and a lot of the other kids’ homes, Cassie was also a neighborhood dog. Everyone knew her, and she would wait outside next to her house, waiting for someone to come by and pet her.
Those days would not last longer. About two months into seventh grade, Cassie developed this weird wheeze and cough. Most of the time, she would be fine. All of a sudden, she’d spring into action. She would cough a very heavy cough repeated several times, followed by the grand climax of a motion and noise that looked and sounded like she was expelling the contents of her stomach. The first few times it happened, we thought she was getting ready to throw up in our house, so we’d drag her outside to avoid having to clean up such a mess. We soon learned that this wasn’t anything like that. The vet didn’t know what it was. He speculated it meant some heart problem, common in shelties. But that was all. She never seemed to be too affected by it, so it just became a weird habit she had that we put up with.
For some reason, I remember the day very well. It was a very cold Tuesday, five days before I was to turn 14. I came home from school, wet because of the snow. My mom was sitting there, and so was my sister. They were both crying. I called for Cassie because she hadn’t greeted me at the door that day. She didn’t respond. She had been strangely clingy that morning, which we thought was normal because it was bath day. She hated having to go get a bath, but we made her do it because she would smell very badly if we didn’t. A friend of ours is a professional dog groomer, so she did it for us. During her bath, she let out one bark, and collapsed on the table. My mom got the call, and even called my brother out of his classes at the college. They rushed to get her, and brought her to the vet. Without a very expensive procedure, Cassie wouldn’t live, and even then it would only be for a few more months. I had no idea that this had happened until I came home almost four hours later. Cassie would never greet me at the door again.
That was nearly three years ago. Cassie wasn’t just a pet to us, she was a member of the family. In some ways, she was more than even that. She was always faithful, the one person you knew that you could count on. As us kids grew older, she received less and less attention from us. I regret that sometimes. My priorities changed, but hers never did. She always knew that her owners came first in her life.
Now, almost three years later, my mom decides that we need another dog in our house. This one is quite different from Cassie. She is a Chihuahua dachshund mix. I got to name her, I chose Lacey as a name. We got her the day after she was spayed, and she was very calm. However, several weeks later she surprised us all. We hadn’t heard a noise from her until I moved the garbage can while cleaning the front room. She let out a very high pitched bark, and now she does this every time the garbage can is moved. She also won’t sit on your lap anymore. You can pick her up, sit her down, and seconds later she’ll jump up and be roaming around the house.
You never do realize how much something means to you until it’s gone. It took me awhile to be used to not having Cassie greet me at the door when I came home. At times, it was even a luxury to not have her around anymore. This freed up a lot of time, and also took a big worry off my mind. Cassie’s dog house is still outside. We never did get rid of it. We tried to see if Lacey will use it but she won’t. Lacey does greet me every day when I get home. She wags her tail and jumps up on my leg. However, she’s no replacement. In time, I will learn to love her as I did my previous dog. But I will never forget my first best friend.
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