Since I was small I’ve grown attachments to pets, mostly dogs.  The first dog I remember as a child was our Border collie named Sport.  I believe I was five or six when Sport became a member of our family.  I was seven when Mama told me Daddy had given Sport to the Indians when Sport disappeared, and she claimed the Indians would make him into a stew.  I was devastated, but even at seven, I never believed her claim. 

     I was fond of my paternal grandmother’s dog, a black cocker spaniel she had named Blackie.  He always greeted me with a wag of his stub and licks to my hand when I trudged down the hill from the highway to Grandma’s rock house perched on the edge of the Oak Creek. 

     I became attached to kittens when I was about nine or ten.  Our landlord at the time had a barn cat with no name that soon became “cats” as she had multiple litters of kittens.  After awhile there were twenty-one kittens at one point, of various ages.  When they began to disappear, the landlord alluded to a mountain lion.  We lived in the picturesque Oak Creek Canyon in Arizona, where there was an abundance of wildlife, including wild pigs, bears, and the ever elusive puma.  I believed him when he claimed the kittens had become a meal for a big cat, which he said was the way of nature.  Later my mother scoffed when I told her I’d been told a mountain lion had eaten the kittens, she professed that instead the landlord had shot them and left them as food for the buzzards.  I was heartbroken and had nightmares for months about the fate of my beloved kittens, with my heart sinking every time I saw a buzzard circling overhead.  At one point when I played with one of the kittens before they all disappeared, I’d decided I would play like Davy Crockett.  I placed one of the kittens on top of my head as a pretend raccoon cap.  How was I to know that a kitten might carry ringworm?  Sometime later I ended up with a sliver-dollar sized ringworm right where the kitten had sat perched on top of my head.  Mama was furious and she threatened me to within an inch of my life if she ever so much as saw me petting a cat again.  I kept my distance from any feline after that.  That’s when I turned my attention to dogs and critters of the wild sort.  I brought home every wounded animal I came across, from birds, lizards, chipmunks, and at one time I even tried to sneak a baby skunk into the house, all of this to my mother’s chagrin.   (Written about in my book, Growing Up Parker With Mama, a Memoir.)

Over the years I have been owned by a multitude of canine fur-babies.  The first year my husband and I were married we adopted a bright, energetic, black and white Border collie we named Pepe, fondly after Pepe Le Pew the Looney Tunes character.  His antics expressed how brilliant he was.  The layout of our rented house at the time was such that you could go from the kitchen into the first bedroom that adjoined the bathroom that adjoined the second bedroom, from which you could enter the living room, making it so that you could make a continuous circle through the house.  Pepe knew that he was not allowed in the kitchen because I didn’t want fur in my food.  He would sit in the doorway of bedroom number one gazing into the kitchen until I’d tell him, “Pepe, go outside!”  He would get up and run through the bathroom, bedroom number two and into the living room where he would hit the screen door to make it bang so I would think he had obeyed, which he hadn’t.  He would sneak back through the living room, bedroom number two, the bathroom, and into bedroom number one and crane his neck around the doorjamb to watch me in the kitchen until I would admonish him again to go outside.  I would stand in the kitchen doorway that led into the living room and watch as Pepe ran out the screen door.  Moments later he would yank the screen door open by grasping a thread spool with his teeth that someone had nailed to the screen door, obviously to give a small child a way to open the door.  He would swing the door open and enter, keeping his behind in the doorway to deflect the screen door so it wouldn’t bang and give him away.  He would then quietly sneak through bedroom number two, the bathroom, and bedroom number one to again peer around the doorjamb at me.

Another dog that entered the family when our children were small was Tiffany.  She was an adventurer who survived a boat explosion, a rattlesnake bite, an encounter with a porcupine, temporary paralysis from a reaction to a tick bite, accidental execution from a defective battery charger, and the attentions of an amorous wither that thought she was his Mama (Tiffany’s story, as well as the stories of May, Buckets, Apache, Pookey, and Misty, all pets that have owned me over the years, are all in my book, Ramblings of a Mad Woman, Effervescence from the Soul).

At present our fur-baby is named Bitty (for Itty Bitty), a name given to her before we acquired her.  She was a street runner before she was captured and sent to an animal rescue.  As a result of her wandering ways, she has a penchant for climbing the fence as though it is a ladder in order to get out of the yard whenever she wants, or she weasels her way through the hog wire fencing between us and our neighbor, often having to be rescued when her dog tags leave her hanging from the fence by her collar.  Bitty is a terrier mix, but I swear they misspelled terrier.  It should be spelled t-e-r-r-o-r.  She is more akin to a Tasmanian Devil than a canine.  I wish I had 1/8 of her energy.  From her appearance, Bitty is most likely a cross between a Manchester and Australian terrier.  Within days of having to say goodbye to our little Jack Russell Misty, we adopted Bitty from a rescue.  After Misty crossed over the Rainbow Bridge, I kept expecting to see her coming into the room.  During the night I would hear her claws clicking on the laminate floor, her dog tags clinking against her water dish, and the sounds of the doggie door, all figments of my imagination; my denial through my sense of loss.  I needed to fill the void, to find another fur-baby to love, and when I saw Bitty’s picture on a rescue site online, I knew she was the one by the sparkle of mischief in her dark eyes.  She hasn’t disappointed me in the least.  She is her own “person” and fills our life with the pleasures afforded through being owned by a pet.  She is my shadow.  Life would be so dull without our beloved pets for certain.  My oldest son, being jealous of my attention given to a pet at one time, accused me of loving my pets more than I loved my children, I chuckled and said, “That’s not so, but my pets do love me unconditionally . . . not once have they complained that I’d forgotten to feed them.”  The love we hold for our pets is decidedly different from the kind of love we hold for our children, or any other human being.  I think God made it so.  There are so many different kinds of love, so much in life to cherish.