Pearl River      There are cat people, and there are dog people.  Some are probably both.  I’m with the dog team.  I’ve had dogs almost all my life, at least when I had something to say about it.

Mitzi was a small, who knows what breed mutt dog, my brother and I had her while we were living in Irvine, Kentucky, where I started first grade.  Later, she was run over by a car in that tiny town.  When we begged for another dog, our dad said we would get another dog “when we moved to a ranch.”  I was born in Wyoming.  My brother was born in Colorado.  It seemed reasonable to us at the time.  We had been in New Orleans a couple of years, before we realized, there was likely no ranch in our future.

My next dog, while living in Arkansas, was an American sheepdog.  Cute as she could be.  She went the other way in the divorce.  Then I was gifted a cocker spaniel named “JP” for Justice of the Peace, after we had won a surprise election in Pulaski County around 1974.  I lost her somehow in New Orleans later in the 70s  She made the papers having barked at the fence where a homeless man at died in the church yard.

Older with a family, we had yard dogs.  We named the German Shepherd, Sandia, after the mountains hovering over Albuquerque.  Jogging in the neighborhood, I let her off the lease for a minute, and she was hit by a car.  I buried her behind the house in Bywater.  We had a black Labrador, we named Kalayaan after a mountain in Alaska.  She kept jumping over the fence and hurting herself, so we gave her to a neighbor.  We got another shepherd, Blanco, for some years who ran with me.  She had hip dysplasia, common to the breed.  Sometimes, I had to carry her home from a run. I also buried behind her the house.  We got serious and bought an Australian cattle dog, we called Cheyenne.  Our dogs were getting smarter, and we were getting better.  Cheyenne aged out as well.

Then we bought a puppy around 2011, an Australian Shepherd, we named Lucha, Spanish for struggle.  Mi companera had protested before we drove across lake to pick her up from the breeder.  We didn’t need a dog.  I was out of town too much to take care of her.  I bought her for my birthday.  I put Lucha in her lap to drive back to New Orleans.  It was love at first sight, and I never heard another word about Lucha being anything other than a part of the family.  She doted on Lucha.  If the temperature went below 50, Lucha was in the foyer, breaking her iron law about no dog ever being in the house.

I used to joke that for the first time I had a dog and a phone “smarter than I was.”  My running days were over, but we walked every morning, until a week ago.  We had gone from her pulling me forward to me pulling her along, as we went around the block.  Over almost 15 years, she went from jumping into the truck to needing a dog step ladder to get up there and help getting out.  From the shepherds on, we had yard dogs and barkers.  I traveled, and their job was protecting the house and whoever lived there as some came and went.  Lucha was a nipper, if strangers made the mistake of reaching down to pet her, they paid the price.  She was a herder, pushing your legs in the direction she wanted you to go.  It was part of the breed.  One eye was blue and one eye was brown, bred, we were told, to trick sheep into thinking she was two different dogs.  When her buddies, like my daughter would come over, she would try to jump up on them.  People would say she was untrained, but she was fine with me, so I would just nod.  As a puppy, she liked to canoe with me.  Once grown, she jumped off the dock, and I had to jump in the bayou to pull her back to shore.  She was too smart to ever get near that water or the canoes again.  She was always ready for the road, whether we were driving to Arkansas, the Gulf Coast, Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana.  She was a great partner for me, and well loved by the whole family.

Lucha was getting slower and slower, and having trouble getting up the steps to the porch.  Sleeping more and more.  I knew the end was near.  This week she was spread eagled on the patio.  I managed to get her in the truck to go to the camp.  I had warned everyone that the end was near.  At the camp, when I helped her out of the truck, she lay there for hours.  I brought her some water, which she eventually sipped, but for the first time she ignored the treats I offered her.  In the evening, I put a heating pad in the kennel under the raised deck of the camp.  I had trouble getting her into kennel, so, as it got colder, I put a blanket over her.  Later that evening, I saw that she had crawled into the kennel on top of the heating pad.  Before dawn, I checked on her.  She was head first in the kennel, but in the dark, I couldn’t tell if she was breathing.  Once there was light, when I reached in, I knew her heart had given out, and she was gone.  I buried her between the tree line and the big oak behind the camp.

Karl Rove in his column in the Wall Street Journal recently wrote about his family’s dog dying after 8 years.  Lucha was with us almost twice as long, and likely about twice the dog. Her story deserves to be told and remembered.  She was a good friend to me and mine.  She will be missed by all who knew her.