Sadie

It’s been a rough week ‘round these here parts. Finbar was in a car accident on his way home last weekend. Thankfully, he’s not hurt, but his car is. The other driver is also being a pain. He was stopped at a stop light, waiting to go straight. The green right-turn arrow came on and the woman behind him hit the gas, plowing right into Finbar. He’s pretty sure that she was on her cell phone, which is against the law in that part of the country. Anyway, he got out of the car to assess the situation and check with the other driver. She immediately started screaming through her car window that he better stay away from her, she’s friends with the chief of police (oh, spare me), he’s being belligerent and she’s calling her close friend, the chief of police on him.

Did I mention that she looked to be in her late 30’s and was wearing a cheerleader’s uniform?

Finbar called his mom (who’s got her own political connections in that small little town) and waited for the police to show up. The report was filed and the police forwarded her insurance information to Finbar. However, it does not appear that she was cited and her insurance company is not returning his phone calls. We had to borrow his dad’s car to drive home in.

Speaking of Finbar’s dad, he’s back in Buffalo and was doing pretty well... until they discovered that their dog needed to be put to sleep. He’s very attached to the dog and the stress of the whole thing put him back in the hospital. He was given some extra drugs and monitored for a couple of days, but is back home again. Sam tells us that he was more active at Thanksgiving than he’s been in years, so that sounds good.

The whole family is taking the dog’s death pretty hard, though. Finbar and Sam are especially mad because his mom just took her to the vet without telling anyone, so they didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her. I guess she did it that way to spare his dad the agony of making the choice and possibly feeling obligated to take her there himself—which would obviously have been a bad idea, considering his weakened state. But Finbar and Sam are still angry over the suddenness of it all, though.

Sadie Van Meer was 16 years old and lived a very pampered life. She was coddled in every possible way. Back when Finbar and I first started dating, Sam was only 14 years old and she would paint Sadie’s claws with nail polish and made little beaded bracelets for her to wear. The dog had a large wardrobe, including a little leather bomber jacket and a silk smoking jacket (compete with tiny fake cigar in the pocket). She was bathed in the tub in the yellow bathroom—a privilege denied to all the humans living and visiting in their home—and given a small spritz of perfume afterward. She didn’t sleep on the floor or in an ordinary doggie bed—oh, no... she had a wrought iron daybed. Finbar’s mom always made a tiny little plate of whatever they were having for breakfast—eggs and toast, cereal—for the dog to eat. At holidays, the dog was given presents, got to lick the bowls when the food was being prepared, and always got a huge plate of leftovers at the end of our dinner. This lead to the phenomenon dubbed “Bowling Ball Belly”. By 10 pm on Thanksgiving, the dog was usually curled up, snoring heavily as she digested the gluttony of the day. We would always find it funny to open the fridge and crinkle the lunchmeat wrappers while calling her name—an act that normally would get her to come running from wherever she was at top speed.

Not that she was a little angel. The dog was sly, sneaky, and greedy. If food was involved, there was no love. She was also called “Python” and “Alligator” for her tendencies to swallow her food whole and for the snapping noise of her jaws. You could not simply offer the dog a treat. There was an elaborate ritual involved, with the treat being held far above the dog’s reach and being slowly lowered while the human repeated “EASY! EASY!” in a loud, firm voice, all the while keeping a close eye on the dog. You would, ideally, be able to get the dog to gently take the treat, but you always had to be prepared to yank the treat and your hand back at the last minute, just in case. She actually bit me once, when I wouldn’t give her my rib bones before I was finished eating dinner. The dog was also an inveterate beggar. When Finbar and I first started dating, she was still young enough to actually get up on her back legs and hold her front paws in the classic pose—and there was no heart hard enough to deny her when she turned those brown eyes on you. When she got older, she started using her paw to tap you on the leg to get you to look down, whereupon you would be met with big brown puppy eyes that might make you cry. Eventually, she stopped begging and started “threatening”. She would bark loudly, even growl under her breath. If you denied her, she would go over to her water bowl and start slurping up water as fast as possible—an obvious allusion to the fact that she planned to pee on the floor somewhere.

And oh, my God, the pee. The dog, love that she is, was banned first from the upstairs, then from the basement, then from all areas of the first floor other than the tiled floor of the kitchen and breakfast nook. A baby gate was installed to keep the dog from straying. She was never particularly good about waiting to be let out into the yard, regardless of what training tricks the family tried. But as she got older, she began to flat out refuse, especially in the winter. One can hardly blame her—she was only a little dachshund and they measure snow in feet in the City of Light. In the last year or so of her life, she found it so hard to navigate the steps to the backyard that the family started buying puppy pads for her to use. I will never be convinced, though, that the dog didn’t also use this “gift” maliciously. I remember one morning when Finbar was eating a bowl of cereal and ignoring the barks and growls of demand. After a few minutes of this, the dog trotted over and started loudly schlecking up water, pausing every few seconds to look over at Finbar, as though to say “Sure you don’t want to reconsider that decision?”. She would walk back over and bark, he would tell her “no!” and Sadie would trot back over to the water. I laughed until I had tears coming down my face—she was so obviously ticked off that he would dare to eat something and not give her any of it.

Sadie and I shared a special bond, born of the fact that I like to sleep and she likes to burrow under the covers with people. We spent hours sleeping on the couch in the basement, on the floor in front of the fireplace, in Finbar’s bed. I’ve never known an animal to generate as much heat as Sadie, either. She was like a furry little nuclear power plant. There were times when I would have to throw off the covers and strip down to my tank top and shorts, even in the dead of winter, if Sadie was sleeping in my bed. Sometimes she would have “dackl dreams”, smacking her lips and making little grunting noises in her sleep. Once, she got so bad that I jumped out of bed at 3 am and yelled “Go get a drink of water!” at the poor thing. (Finbar still thinks this is hilarious.)

Sadie and I shared a box of powdery-sweet krusciki every Christmas. I was always the biggest sucker out of the family, giving her half my dinner sometimes, and Sadie knew it. If she wasn’t sitting on Finbar’s dad’s lap, she would make her way to my lap whenever food was in the offing. I think my all-time favorite Sadie moment was during my first trip to the City of Light. It was my last morning there and the whole family was eating breakfast at the table in the breakfast nook—an unusual occurrence. The food was gone, but we were drinking coffee and chatting about this and that. Sadie was on Finbar’s dad’s lap, resting her fuzzy head on his arms. Suddenly, she sat up, leaned forward, and started drinking out of his coffee cup. She didn’t look around to see if anyone was watching or act like she was doing anything wrong at all—she was just drinking her coffee, what’s so strange about that?

It’s hard to believe that I’ll walk into the kitchen in a few weeks and there won’t be any doggie treats on the floor, no smelly pink binky, no puppy pads in the corner... and no toenails clicking on the floor as Sadie trots over to see if whoever just came in brought her any food. It will be so strange to eat dinner without the usual barking and growling in the background. How can we make breakfast without setting aside a little plate for Sadie? Who’s going to eat my pizza crusts and finish the last slurps of coffee in the pot? I’m glad that she won’t have to suffer or be in pain any longer, and she had a long and good life. I’m certain that she’s sitting on Bocha’s lap, eating walnuts right now. But I’ll miss that funny little puppy dog and her evil ways.