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Yesterday when my husband and I were out for our morning walk, we stopped to read a poster that was tacked up on a telephone pole.
My husband commented that it was "that time of year," and Morris was probably just taking a stroll around the neighborhood. But the poster made me think about what happened to my dog, Moochie.
 When I was five years old, Santa left Moochie under the Christmas tree. Moochie was part terrier and part something else that must have had a very long tail, because when he was just a pup, the veterinarian said we needed to shorten his tail or "the tail will grow longer than the dog." And so we had his tail nipped.
I was an only child, no brothers or sisters to play with except Moochie. Even when I'd dress him up in a pink dress and tie a ruffled bonnet around his neck, he was a real trooper. He'd sit in the side basket of my bicycle, barking nonstop, "Look at us" and we'd ride up and down Main Street. I loved that dog, but honestly I don't know how my parents put up with the pooch. Moochie loved to chew blankets. He never touched a shoe, sock, or a chair leg, but every single blanket in our house looked like a piece of Swiss cheese. Perfect little round holes--they were a real work of dog art, and every blanket, on every bed, was a Moochie masterpiece.
I never tied him up when he was outside, there wasn't any need to, because Moochie never left the yard. So it was strange one day when he just seemed to disappear. Everybody knew everybody, and their pets, in the small town I grew up in. But when I asked the neighbors, nobody had seen Moochie. Months went by, I was miserable and I'd given up hope on ever finding him. The worst part was not knowing what had happened to him.
You know how things just seem to come together sometimes? There's no reason why a topic of conversation should come up, but it does when the time is right. And that's what happened one day when I was waiting for my mother to get off work at the Dime Store.
It was almost five o'clock, closing time at the Dime Store, and my mother was behind the register ringing up the last customer when out of the blue, the woman she was waiting on started telling a story about a dog who had wandered on to their farm a couple of months ago. She said it was a small brown dog, with a stump of a tail, and he just showed up one afternoon in their barn. He didn't look well, and was obviously a very old dog, so she made a bed for him and tried to get him to eat, but he wasn't hungry. She was so worried about the dog that she got up in the middle of the night to check on him. The woman was in tears by then, telling us the story, and my mother and I were crying too, because we knew who the dog was. Moochie died in her arms about three in the morning.
Why did Moochie run away? I've always thought about it this way: best friends never want to hurt each other and I imagine Moochie decided it would be just too much for me—he wanted to spare me the pain, so he ran away from home to die.
Lost Dog!
Brown, part Terrier with a short tail Moochie
15 years old and the best friend I ever had
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@EmailBookClub.com
http://www.DearReader.com
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