Friday, August 24, 2007

Dog Days of Summer





I don’t know exactly when Molly’s birthday is, but some time this summer she turned twelve years old. I got her in the fall of 1995 as a three or four month old puppy.

For the first year that Molly lived here, Carlotta the cat was terrified and stayed in my bedroom closet. The only time she would come out of the closet was when she heard Molly being put into her kennel before I went to work. At that time Carlotta would fly out of the closet to her litter box where a look of relief would come over her as she stared out into space. Eventually Carlotta realized Molly wasn’t going to eat her and within a few years they even have been seen sleeping on the same sofa together.

Molly has been bad at times. She almost killed a neighbors Maltese once because she thought it was a danger to her and her friend Sophie. That cost me $750 and was really scary. Then there was the time Mark thought Molly was a convenient garbage disposal and fed her all, yes ALL of the leftover turkey from Thanksgiving. A dog will eat something like that until it explodes. She did. This resulted in one of the only two times she has pooped in the house. Of course it wasn’t ordinary poop. It was the worst of the worst diarrhea, which of course Mark didn’t help clean up.

But mostly she’s been very good. The vet says she is as healthy as a much younger dog. I hope I’ll be writing about her thirtieth birthday someday, with many squeaky toys and chewy strips in the interim.

5 comments:

  1. i'm lucky, my breed of dog holds the record for the longest living dog. 29 years. they're 11 and 12 now, but i keep telling the 12 year old she's got to make it to 30.
    i tried to post a photo for you, but this thing is not letting me. maybe your blog spot is trying to tell me that no one really wants to see photos of my dogs but me. point taken, blogspot.

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  2. You didn't mention how Marlena Your other cat) took to Molly.

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  3. Happy Birthday Molly!!

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  4. Happy Birthday Russell!

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  5. Molly looks very much like my Annie, even to the gray muzzle. She was a "dumper dog", tossed out of a car at the end of our deadend street 11 years ago. the vet estimated her age at the time to be about 4 months. The only things she likes to catch are squirrels and skunks (worse than diarrhea!) She had to learn to get along with Laura's dominant cattle dogs.... good thing she is submissive! Happy Birthday, Molly!!! Somebody get her a Michael Vick chew toy!

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