old friends and book ends

The style of the fourth in a line of girls can be summed up in three words (or one hyphenated word?): hand-me-downs. The worst, of course is when my mother decided to dress the last three of us all alike, so as soon as I grew out of my dress, I had tamis waiting for me, then kates; I would be wearing the same dress for the next seven years.

One of those days when I was a very small person, I was quite distressed about inheriting yet another sweatshirt. And when I say “quite distressed”, I mean I was throwing a tantrum. There was no one that had to wear my discarded clothes, (probably because they were so ratty by the time I got done with them, but that was aside my point). So my mother quietly took that horrid sweatshirt off me and put it on my dear puppy, cody. For the next few months, the clothes I no longer wanted were given to my dog. As for the wretched sweatshirt (it was spotted like a dalmation and on the front sat Pongo and Purdity in hot pink and fluorescent yellow), it then belonged to him and I could not have worn it if I had wanted to. (the unfortunate side to this story is that my mom also found it necessary to give him my old blankets. He soon caught on to this and would help himself to the blankets off my bed even before my mother had deemed them too ragged for me. One day, we even came home from school to find that he had burrowed into tami's bed, so that he was neatly tucked in, head peacefully resting on her pillow as he dreamed the afternoon away. In recent years, I got up one night for a late-night pee. Groggy as I made my way through the darkness, I was confused to find a white obstruction in front of the bathroom door. "A cloud?" I thought. I cautiously crept towards this strange object that occupied the stretch from my parents bedroom to cody's nook. Peering around the corner to that rascal's bed, i found him, again, so nicely tucked in underneath the large white cloud which i then identified as my parents comforter, stolen from them in their sleep.)

Cody was the only dog I ever loved (and at this point, I believe, the only one I ever will). Even so, it has been years since he lost interest in me, or I in him, whichever came first. Quite honestly in the last few years it has been on only our most desperate days that we would seek the others attention. This not including our favorite game of “one potato, two potato” which we loved to play with our feet/paws from the very beginning up until last weekend.

One night at dinner, (back when dinners meant six of us sitting at the table with an actual meal) my mother asked us to each come up with a prayer request.

Little Me: does Cody have to too?

Mom: No, because dogs don’t go to heaven.

Cody (from underneath the table): Aooo.

(if you did not catch that, it was a sad whine).

Alors, as it was on (the reassigned) St. Patrick’s day that my Poopsicle was put to sleep (with the taste of toast still lingering in his mouth, the details are hard to hear, but at least it was a treat-filled ending), I hope that Pat was able to take my dear old Poopsie somewhere wonderful, even if it wasn’t heaven.