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It was National Dog Day this week and I was posting old photos of my dogs on Facebook and reminiscing about the good old companionship that I received from them. I also have been enjoying Heidi who stayed with me during July and some parts of August and who is on loan to me right now as there have been two armed robberies on my block in the last week. But National Dog day goes to Loca – my most difficult relationship other than Blacky – the cat.

Loca came to me at a time when I was resource limited – in the sense of emotional stores – and she needed a home. She had black eyes that would stare a hole in me and I felt that I couldn’t turn away from her. After all, there I was in 2007 with only one dog, and she was a geriatric, and everyone after Katrina was opening their home to all sorts of destitute animals – cats and dogs – it was raining them for a while.

I took her in, and in a one on one situation she was a good dog. She loved Arlene, and almost treated Arlene as if she was her long lost mother. And there I was, a mess. A royal mess and trying to get unmessed and there was Loca, crazy with energy and just wanting to be loved.

And I took her in. Took her into my heart. Took her into my home. Despite the fact that our love didn’t come easy. But we did eventually bond and that was our life, until it wasn’t.

Our life changed with the entrance of many other people and pets that came into the household and made Loca even more nervous and anxious than she had been before and then when things got really squeezed, when we moved to the back of the house to rent out the front to ride the waves of change yet again, she became impossible.

I had always thought that with all that energy, Loca should live in the country, like the dogs that used to populate my grandmother’s house that got fed out the side of the kitchen and lived a life of independent and wanton discovery rather than the passive existence of urban pets. And on Thanksgiving day 2012, Loca found her country home among the creatures that populated my cousin’s country Dr. Dolittle Farm. She would join Julio the goat along with cows, bulls, sheep, rabbits and Jake, the little black lab puppy, in the biggest romp of her life.

In February, my aunt said that Jake had died suddenly and so Loca became top dog there. She also became a fat dog, and spent her afternoons running across the holler to my aunt’s house to sit at her feet as she rocked on the front porch. Something about that image, of Loca being with my aunt, of her living on a farm, of her being in the country that is a landscape that continues to haunt me from my childhood, made me happy and less sad about having to part ways with her.

Then today I learned Loca died. She had developed a nasty habit of chasing cars and got hit by one. Much in the same way that my mother’s dog, Max, had died when she left my dad and ran away to her childhood home with Max in tow. My mother was a dog lover and I had my friend, Kim Frohsin sketch the likeness of Loca for my mom’s headstone because one time when Mom was watching the animals, she tripped in my bathroom and couldn’t get off the floor and Loca came over to her and laid down beside her and looked into her eyes with that stare of hers.

When my mom was dying she told me she would return as a dog. That’s how I would know her presence. Which dog? Hard to say – there have been so many in my life. I’m convinced my father came back as Samm, but which dog will be my mother, I’m not sure. It might even be Heidi because she’s such a stunning beauty and puts on her makeup every day.

But National Dog day is about Loca, who is now in dog heaven, may she run in peace.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 28th, 2013 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.