A Good Dog

I’m not particularly a dog person. I’m a firm believer that it’s inherently no fault of the dog whether it becomes a good or bad dog, but rather the owner’s own tendencies reflected and amplified in the animal. I do know that a good dog is a great thing, but a bad dog is almost as insufferable as any miserable company you could possibly keep.

I´ve seen both sides and even around the corners and edges of this principle. I don’t take it lightly which is why I’ve probably never owned one myself.

My grandfather was always a dog person. From the time I was born until the day he died, he had a dog. When I was young it was a boxer named Rocky and later a mutt named Leo.

The last dog he had was a golden retriever named Sandy.

Sandy was highly energetic and had that long flowing underfur you would expect from a retriever. Consequently, as my grandparents got older Sandy lived exclusively at the lake. She loved the water too which meant long damp fur that smelled about like you would imagine.

She lived to swim, roam, and chase you off of the end of the dock as you ran towards the end to jump in the water. And then she would join you and sometimes right on top of you. She lived a life that most city dogs and even people would find enviable.

When my grandfather passed away she stayed at the lake. The lakehouse itself fell into derelict condition, but she was still there. She was forgotten in some of the same ways as the house, but an aging neighbor continued to feed her for a long time.

I still frequently visited to fish Dave Hise’s carp nasty fly for shellcracker bedding in the boat slip and the occasional carp that would cruise the seawall. Of course, Sandy was always there with me too. The moment a car door would shut she would come running from somewhere. She was always excited to see somebody. Anybody.

We plucked a lot of fish off that boat slip and seawall using all sorts of flies. There were plenty of ditch pickle bass and even a few long-nose gars. Sandy heard plenty of expletives come from my mouth as I missed, broke off, or just got flat-out rejected by carp cruising the seawall.

As our neighbor aged herself, she called me to come up and help with Sandy from time to time. I was glad to do it. I never considered Sandy my dog, and now that Grandpa was gone she wasn’t really anybody’s dog. She was her own dog, which as far as I’m concerned is the best kind of dog.

As Sandy got older she had trouble with her hips. She still got in and out of the water all of the time, but you could see on her face that it hurt climbing in and out of the water.

One summer I decided her fur had matted to the point that it had to be hurting, and as bad as her hips were the least we could do was get her a haircut. So I decided to load her up in the truck and bring her back into town for the first time since before Grandpa had passed away to get groomed.

Sitting in the driveway at the lake house that my grandpa built in the early 60s, with her head in my lap as I was scratching it, a revelation wrecked right into my soul. My mind was always halfway expecting to see my grandpa walking down the gravel drive toward the water. It’s a scene you’ve seen so many times in your life you can’t ever expect it not to happen.

That’s not what got me though.

What got me was that I knew that Sandy would know exactly who that was if it had happened in reality at that moment. Here were two animals with good and fond memories of the same person, hoping and longing to hear that baritone voice call out “Saaaaanddyyy…” that would be so recognizable and unmistakable if you heard it coming from the driveway.

It would’ve meant something to both of us, and in that moment I felt deeply that even though she wasn’t my dog we had a bond and shared experience that was so meaningful. A shared experience we intimately knew that was never coming back.

Sandy and I never got to fish again.

Several weeks later I came back to fish and found her dead on the bank of the water. It looked like she was on her way out of the water and possibly collapsed.

I choose to believe she had one last good swim in the Chattahoochee River before she heard “Saaaaanndyyy…” and one last time turned back towards the driveway and finally went home.