I just finished watching Marley & Me, knowing I’m probably the last dog lover to watch it. Memories of my own dog growing up flooded back.
I got a puppy for my twelfth Christmas, a gift from my uncle, who found a mom and her pups under his barn. I’m not sure he consulted my parents. My dad wasn’t particularly talkative on the hour drive home—with the dog we named Sam in a cardboard box at my feet in the car.
Sam loved to run; after all, he was born on a farm. One day he slipped out the front door while my dad opened it and ran into the street and got hit by a car. I looked out my bedroom window to find a car speeding off and my dog lying motionless in the street. I was inconsolable for days. And the days turned into weeks, until my dad couldn’t stand it anymore and one Saturday morning, he told me to get dressed and we were going to get another puppy. It was February and cold and grey as we drove into the country to a puppy breeder (most likely a puppy mill, now that I’m an adult and know the difference). I wanted a basset hound, but in the cage above them were beagle puppies, born December 2nd the year before and were $75—as opposed to the bassets who were $300. My Dad let me pick out one of the beagles, who was the runt of the litter. He was supposed to be a “small” beagle—the thirteen-inch ones, as opposed to the fifteen-inch ones. It didn’t matter to me. I had a new Sam and swore to my mom that I would feed him and walk him and take care of him. (Every mother roll your eyes now.)
Sam grew to a whopping seventeen inches tall and thirty-five pounds. He had the sweetest face. He didn’t bark—he howled and yipped when he picked up a scent. We didn’t have the money to take him for training, so we tried to follow a book from the public library. (Remember those? Before the Internet.) We also had never heard of crate training. Since we didn’t have a fenced-in yard, he was attached to a run line from the oak tree outside our kitchen window to one end of the laundry line. It gave him ample space to run, but the squirrels soon learned to torment him by dropping acorns on him. They never did become friends, or even amicable neighbors.
Sam went everywhere with us, from our grandmother’s farm to camping grounds from Virginia to Michigan. He loved the water, especially the Chesapeake Bay, where he’d dive off the pier straight into the water and paddle around with a grin on his face. He was lovable but a handful. He regularly escaped out the front door and headed to the same place every time. Two blocks up and one block over, a man had a huge vegetable garden in which he used real cow manure for fertilizer. Sam would roll in the fertilizer and it was my job to go and pick him up, walk him home, and then give him a bath. He had more baths the first summer than most dogs get in a lifetime.
As he grew up, he was more incorrigible but managed to get out of trouble with a cocked head and those big eyes. My brother threw keg parties on weekends when my parents went camping, trusting their two teenagers would behave. My mom later said she knew fully well we were having parties, because the police showed up to each of them. This was the ’70s, when kids drinking beer and smoking pot at a house party was met with a stern warning that everyone go home. My brother’s friends would feed Sam beer and laugh as they watched him drunkenly wobble around the house. I would never condone this now, but at fourteen, it seemed pretty funny. Which is why my son will never be left home alone at fourteen or even eighteen.
