Way back when Patrick and Adrian were little, we lived in an apartment. The boys wanted a dog. They begged, cajoled, whined and bargained for a dog. I conceded to hamsters instead, and promised, "We'll get a dog when we have a house." (We went through several hamsters, actually, before we moved into a house. They kept escaping, but that's a story for a different time and place: preferably, a confessional.)
Then, when the boys were seven and nine years old, we moved into the long-awaited house. The first day after the move, the requests for a dog began again. This time, I put them off with a vague, "When we find the right one."
About a week later, Arline called to say, "I have the right dog for you." Mind you, I hadn't told her the boys were holding my feet to the fire. But at the time, Arline fostered rescued dogs. And, unlike my boys, my friend knew my secret: I was afraid of any dog that stood much higher than my ankle.
"Is it very big?" I asked. "Not that big" wasn't the most convincing of answers, but Arline insisted I at least meet her, and the boys begged, and what's a girl to do when she's caught in a conspiracy of kids, friends and promises made? I went over to meet Charlene.
She seemed big to me. She was pretty: an unusual mix of Sharpei and Golden Retriever. She was also unmistakably afraid of me and almost anyone else over four feet tall. Somehow, that seemed less intimidating. A little while later, I left with my newly acquired pooch on the end of a leash. Charlene spent that first night trembling under my dining room table while I sat in the living room and talked to her. We each felt safer, in separate rooms with a forest of chair legs between us.
By the third day, we were both convinced that the other was harmless, and Charlene abandoned the safety of the dining room table. She was still terrified of grown men, though. If my dad or brothers came into the house, my silly dawg would make a beeline for my bedroom closet.
She was also afraid of storms, anything with a motor, and hamsters. One night, as Adrian lay on his stomach doing homework, Charlene spied the hamster ball rolling down the hall toward her. She did the most sensible thing she could think of: move to higher ground. In a split second, my 50-lb dog was perched, all four paws scrunched together, on my seven-year-old's posterior.
She loved our menagerie of animals, only threatening to drown the hapless critters in doggy slobber. When John came into our lives, Charlene threw her fear of men to the winds and fell in love with him. The first Thanksgiving after we married, Char snuck out of our yard and found a treasure fit for a king... the half-eaten turkey from a neighbor's garbage can. She dragged the carcass home and proudly laid it at her hero's feet. John made a fuss over her, then placed the gobbler remains in a double plastic bag and put it in our garbage. Charlene found it, stripped off the plastic bags, and returned it to John.
In fact, she was an accomplished escape artist. On my way back from work, it was not unusual to see a brown blur dash across yards and down alleys as she raced me home. The goofy pooch would hide beside the garage until I hit the garage door opener. Then she would run into the garage, turn around to face me, and pretend she had been there all along. About twice a year, she would escape for a day or two. This involved, at different times, chewing through a closed cedar gate, unraveling a chain link fence, and squeezing through impossibly small spaces. John called them her "walkabouts". We never knew where she went on walkabout, but she always came home looking very pleased.
When John moved in, so did Ginger. Charlene was fascinated. The little Jack Russell had energy to spare, barked at everything, but couldn't figure out how to get outside on her own. Eventually, they worked out a system: when Ginger wanted to go out, she'd bark; Charlene would get up, slap the sliding glass door open, and go back to what she was doing. (We never could get her to close the door.) The problem of Ginger's squeaky toys was less amicably resolved. Charlene very much disliked noisy toys. One day, she gathered them up and sat on them while she watched Ginger work herself into a tizzy of frustration. Years later, when we lost Ginger, Char mourned for a week. Then she dug up all of the doggy treats that Ginger had buried around the yard.
When John died, Charlene mourned for months. Every time my nephew drove John's old truck up to the house, her ears would perk up and she'd do her happy dance.
Of late, Charlene's daily walks have been shorter, her naps much longer. At 16 years old, her ailments finally gained the upper hand. So today - because we love her - Patrick, Adrian and I took our dear Goofy Pooch to the vet and said goodbye. As she slipped away on her final walkabout, I thought of how she let go of her fears in order to love life. I thought about how incredibly gentle she was.
And I thought that if one believes, as I do, that God's breath of life flows through all creation, then Charlene came from the breath that He caught in the midst of laughter.
