Gentleman Charlie

Our gentleman Charlie just turned 9. My mom named him Gentleman Charlie. She appreciated his manners when he visited their house and deferred to their dog and made his dignified rounds visiting everyone as we sat in the living room. He is much more rambunctious/obnoxious in our house where he is lord of his domain. I appreciated how expertly and elegantly he tempered himself as a visitor.

Everyone counts on Charlie. Easily rattled and spooked Clover is most relaxed when she's falling asleep on him. He's sprouting white hairs everywhere now but he is still in charge of what he believes is a farm, as right hand man to Dan who he believes is a farmer. He's so often worried, but no one can talk him out of that.

My parents' dog Moxie lives with us now. Three dogs is more than I would have taken on, but this is the right thing. She grieved my dad when he died. She was one of the few things my mom responded to as her dementia took off galloping after she lost her husband of more than 50 years. We admired Moxie for changing everything she knew and taking off on a road trip to a new house where she could visit my mom every day but it was all upside down.

She is an explosion of coarse long white fur and we had her groomed down to fluff. We called her PJ because she looked like she was zipped into white footie pajamas.

We mark our lives with dogs. My family always defined eras, no matter how brief, with dogs. Scooter. Peppy. Toro. Easter. Rogan. (Rogan Redbeare O'Dunboy, our pedigreed Irish Setter named after our ancestral family castle in Ireland! We all sat down at the dining room table and looked through history books and our genealogy and thesaurus entries for "red" to name him.) Shane. After the kids left home, one Christmas we bought our parents puppies to keep them company, Buster & Willie. Moxie was a stray who wandered up to my mom on Easter while she was watering the flowers in the front yard. The neighbors had all been trying to catch her for awhile. My mom let her inside for a drink of water and she never left. Until she made the sad, hard, drive with my mom to our house in Colorado after my dad's sudden death.

Gentleman recognizes gentleman.

St. Francis, who was quoting Job 12:7-8, said "Ask the beasts and they will teach you the beauty of this earth." St. Therese promised she would rain a shower of roses down on earth as a blessing after her death. In my life that shower of blessing is our R, who is named for St. Therese and for the Blessed Mother. But each of these doggie souls who come to us at a certain time and leave at another time, always much too soon and with so much grieving, is also a sign from God that he loves us. It helps, as I grieve the loss of both my parents in one year that is so hard I can't even talk about it yet, to see their dog obsessing over bunnies under our deck. She has wrecked some deck boards with scratching and slobber, but she is happy here. It still startles me to see her merry little dark eyed face in my house sometimes. When she so clearly belongs to theirs, which so recently isn't there any more.