Dear Reader Column 09-20-06

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Dear Reader,

Yesterday when my husband and I were out for our morning walk, we stopped to read a poster that was tacked up on a telephone pole.

Lost Cat!
Brown Tabby
Morris
20 years old and hard of hearing

My husband commented that it was "that time of year," and Morris was probably just taking a stroll around the neighborhood. But the poster made me think about what happened to my dog, Moochie.

When I was five years old, Santa left Moochie under the Christmas tree. Moochie was part terrier and part something else that must have had a very long tail, because when he was just a pup, the veterinarian said we needed to shorten his tail or "the tail will grow longer than the dog." And so we had his tail nipped.

I was an only child, no brothers or sisters to play with except Moochie. Even when I'd dress him up in a pink dress and tie a ruffled bonnet around his neck, he was a real trooper. He'd sit in the side basket of my bicycle, barking nonstop, "Look at us" and we'd ride up and down Main Street. I loved that dog, but honestly I don't know how my parents put up with the pooch. Moochie loved to chew blankets. He never touched a shoe, sock, or a chair leg, but every single blanket in our house looked like a piece of Swiss cheese. Perfect little round holes--they were a real work of dog art, and every blanket, on every bed, was a Moochie masterpiece.

I never tied him up when he was outside, there wasn't any need to, because Moochie never left the yard. So it was strange one day when he just seemed to disappear. Everybody knew everybody, and their pets, in the small town I grew up in. But when I asked the neighbors, nobody had seen Moochie. Months went by, I was miserable and I'd given up hope on ever finding him. The worst part was not knowing what had happened to him.

You know how things just seem to come together sometimes? There's no reason why a topic of conversation should come up, but it does when the time is right. And that's what happened one day when I was waiting for my mother to get off work at the Dime Store.

It was almost five o'clock, closing time at the Dime Store, and my mother was behind the register ringing up the last customer when out of the blue, the woman she was waiting on started telling a story about a dog who had wandered on to their farm a couple of months ago. She said it was a small brown dog, with a stump of a tail, and he just showed up one afternoon in their barn. He didn't look well, and was obviously a very old dog, so she made a bed for him and tried to get him to eat, but he wasn't hungry. She was so worried about the dog that she got up in the middle of the night to check on him. The woman was in tears by then, telling us the story, and my mother and I were crying too, because we knew who the dog was. Moochie died in her arms about three in the morning.

Why did Moochie run away? I've always thought about it this way: best friends never want to hurt each other and I imagine Moochie decided it would be just too much for me--he wanted to spare me the pain, so he ran away from home to die.

Lost Dog!
Brown, part Terrier with a short tail
Moochie
15 years old and the best friend I ever had

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
[email protected] 
http://www.DearReader.com

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Comments

[Gina Sanders]

I also had a dog for along time growing up. My dad decided to buy a grocery store in another state and said we were moving. Our dog, a boston terrier was a bit older and could feel something was going on. He went out one morning and never came back. We had to move without ever finding him. I'll always remember my dog Maggie so many years later.

[Prof. ML Pandit]

We too had a pet dog, Foxy, funny and good hunter. she had become an inseperable part of the family. Her love and affection had no human parallel. She showed it even when u were upset only to lighten ur burden of sadness and depression. The story is long but I wonder if all creatures spoke the same language, how better our lives would have been. Our pets are desperate most of the time because we can not understand their gestures fully. Nor can they.Let us pray one day it would be possible for our technology to devlop a language guide to enable us to understand each gesture of our loved pets.