Penny and Me

So, I just finished reading "Marley and Me", and yes it made me cry at the end when Marley dies. Anyone who has ever loved a pet would cry, I think. There is a lot of variation on the spectrum of human relationships to pets, from outright hatred to over the top animal rights activists. How we treat and feel about animals says a lot about us, I think. But that's not what I was going to write about--reading about Marley got me thinking about the 2 main pets I grew up with, specifically Penny, our basset hound. As I read "Marley" one of my first thoughts was "my God, what a nuisance this dog is! How did they put up with him!" The more I thought about it however, our sweet adorable Penny had some pretty inconvenient quirks of her own!

So my dad brought home Penny the pup right around the time I was born, much to the chagrin of my non-dog loving mother. So she has a newborn baby, her first, and a puppy to deal with. My dad was busy with his job, and did his best to train her--you would think that my mom being home all day would've been a great help in the puppy training department. However, a combination of my mom's lack of affection towards dogs, her lack of knowledge of training, and her preoccupation with a newborn led to some gaps, shall we say, in Penny's training. I think she knew my mom wasn't a dog person, (somehow dogs always know, don't they?) and for the rest of her life took complete advantage of that.

Penny was a notorious escape artist. In our first home, one day my Nana was babysitting me, and looking out the window holding me. She sees a pretty little brown and white basset go trotting by the house--"Oh, that looks like Penny!" she thinks. Well, hours later they all finally realize it is Penny, and somehow someone finds her trotting across the bridge into Hudson, miles away from where we live. In our Hudson home it was the same--she had this big pen in her backyard, and she would dig and dig and dig under the gate until there was just enough room to squeeze under it--like Peter Rabbit squeezing under the gate into Mr. MacGregor's garden. We would often be coming home from somewhere just in time to meet her as she was ambling down the driveway off on some adventure. Most of the time she would head down the street to our friends the Caldwell's home, so at least we knew where to find her.

Apparently she was also very appealing to the dogs in our neighborhood as well. When she was a younger pup my dad had bred her with another basset, producing an adorable batch of long eared darlings who looked the epitome of cute hanging in my dad's hockey skates like the most perfect stocking stuffer ever. My dad hoped to replicate this same litter at least another time or two, and yet he was thwarted twice by the neighborhood ruffians who could not resist Penny's charms. Her second litter was a toss-up--would they be pure bassets, or a mix of the big sheepdog we'd seen hopping out of her pen one day? My mom tells me that when the puppies came out black and white (obviously a tribute to their black and white sheepdog dad), we were lucky my father didn't take his shotgun and hunt down the poor creature that had defiled his darling girl. The next and final litter was a lovely mix between Penny and Molson, an Irish Setter from 'round the way who swelled her belly so big it literally looked like she'd swallowed a watermelon.

In an effort to get back at my dad any time he'd leave, Penny took to peeing (we called it "piddling" for some reason) around the house if he was gone. If dad was at work or away we could never have her up in the house with us because she would ALWAYS pee all over the place, just to spite my mom and dad for upsetting the balance of power between them. My sister and I were always very sad when this would happen because we loved having her up and around with us, but there's only so many oceans of pee you can clean up in an evening.

She could be a scrounger too--my dad tried to make her lie down in the dining room whenever we were eating dinner, but she would scooch forward little by little by little until she was right at someone's side, awaiting a handout. One Christmas we left our bags of chocolate coins in the living room while we ate breakfast--when we returned she had torn open the little mesh bags and eaten the coins, foil wrapper and all. For good measure she had also torn open her box of "Liva Snaps" and eaten most of that too.

One year as she got older she developed this calcification on her neck, and for a long time (6 months maybe?) she couldn't lift her head but a tiny bit off the floor. She spent most of that time lying on a pillow, we had to feed her off of a paper plate and give her this medicine that we had wrapped in a piece of American cheese. My dad had to carry her around everywhere, one time this almost was the death of them both as he carried her down the basement stairs, tripped and fell halfway down the unfinished stairs to land hard on the concrete below. Somehow they both managed to avoid getting hurt. Also as she aged she began to get all these tumors--we were constantly having her in to get them removed. In our state of near-bankruptcy I'm not at all sure how we managed to pay for all her medical treatment, but she was such a part of the family it was just something we did without thinking about it.

I have so many warm and happy memories of Penny--taking her for a walk in the fall down to the field near our house--she was always a big sniffer and walks took a long time! Lying with my head on her near our wood stove, her fur all hot from the heat of the stove, reading a book while my dad watched hockey on Channel 38. Her curled up like a croissant in a sunbeam, saving pizza crusts for her to eat after we'd eaten at Bob's Pizza. Her licking my arm, just licking and licking and licking until I couldn't stand it anymore...towards the end it was just so sad because she couldn't really control her peeing at all, not even when dad was around, so she spent most of her last months in the basement. My dad turned his workshop into a place for her, he built a little platform up off the cold ground, and there was a red heat lamp and fresh wood shavings all around but it wasn't like being upstairs where everyone else was. I would just go down to her room and cry and hold her because I felt so bad. As much as I hated to have her put to sleep, I was almost glad because I felt like her life had become so pathetic in the end, it was better for her to be at rest.

We buried her in the side of our yard, a little space where the rock wall went out and came back--we'd had our sandbox there when we were small. I was almost 17--she'd been around my entire life and it was awful to imagine life without her, plus my parent's marriage was in the midst of self-destructing, I was getting ready to leave for college, and our house was in the process of being foreclosed on. It was a terrible time in so many ways. I remember thinking how small she looked in the box we buried her in--old age had truly ravaged her body. Her once-copper colored fur was pretty much white all over. We wrapped her in a blanket--I know we put some kinds of mementos in there, I just can't remember what. One of the things I hate the most about not having our old home anymore is knowing that she and Daisy, our cat, are buried there in the yard. They've probably been dug up for that stupid pool the people have in the backyard now. It felt like a betrayal to leave them. The summer after we had to move I went back to the house several times--it was empty still--I tried to drag out her old dog house and clean out all the cobwebs and dirt and grime that had settled in there over the years. I don't know what I planned to do with it, and I never did get it out of there.

So, here we are years later, and we're talking about getting a dog for our family, and while I can't imagine putting up with stuff like peeing and breaking things and chewing on things, the main reason I want to add a pet like that to the family is because I think having a pet makes you a better person, I really believe that. Being able to love and care for another creature is enriching, and I miss it, and I want my kids to know that and to have that as a part of the fibers of who they are. I do hope that if we do get a dog, its not like Marley in his rambunctiousness, and I do hope I can do a better job of training a dog than my parents did with Penny, but I also hope that whoever he or she is, that they bring the love and joy and fun to our family that both Penny and Marley brought to theirs.