Ah, those childhood memories!
Back when I was a kid, Mom was not a pet lover, but Dad was. He must have done some fast talking to get her to agree to a dog. He must have pointed out that having a pet would be a character-building experience for us kids. He must have promised that he would see to it that we would take care of the dog, and she wouldn’t have any responsibility for it. I don’t know what else might have gone on between them, but there he was – a little black and white mutt that Dad named Spotty.
One day, we were at home playing in the front yard when Spotty ran lickety-split out into the road, right in the path of a car. There was a screech of tires and some yelping. Poor Spotty didn’t make it. Mark, my younger brother, saw the whole thing. He was distraught.
Soon, there was another little black and white pup. He looked uncannily similar to Spotty, and Dad named him Sputty.
We had Sputty for a little while, and then he disappeared. He must have either run off, been picked up, or come to some other fate. We just never saw him again.
Time passed, and Dad decided to have one more go at it. He brought home a spindly-legged brown puppy that you could hold in one hand. The little thing was so tiny he couldn’t even get up the two steps from the back entrance to the kitchen. Dad named him “Dinky.”
As the weeks went on, Dinky grew and grew and grew some more. I suspect Mom put her foot down. We had a friend, Cheryl, who went to our church and lived on a farm about a mile down the road. Dad asked her family if they would take Dinky. They agreed, so Dinky left our lives. Life went on, petless.
A few years later, my brother and I entered our teen years. I was an introvert, but he was a real social guy, and he suggested that we go down the road and visit our friend Cheryl. When we got to her house, Mark knocked on the door. We heard a heavy thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump, and vicious growling and snarling on the other side of the door. Then we heard Cheryl’s voice shouting, “Down, Dinky, down!!”
Dinky had grown up. Turns out he was mostly Doberman.