A Birthday Gift of Love

I had a birthday last Friday. I love birthdays. I don’t particularly like counting them, but I like celebrating the gift of another year coming my way. The day before my birthday last week, I put a “Throwback Thursday” picture on my Facebook page of me with a dog named Jody. I mentioned that he was the best birthday gift ever and that I’d written a story about that once. I usually send the story out to those who sign up for my newsletter and request the story, but some of my FB buddies wanted to read about this perfect birthday gift. So I promised to post it here. It’s a little longer than most of my posts, but I hope the story will touch your heart. So here goes:

I was nine when I got the dog hunger. I wanted a dog with every inch of my fiber. So much that I would have traded Christmas presents for the next five years, maybe even longer, if I could just have a dog. I don’t know whether a person is wired from day one to be a dog person or not, but if they are, I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t have plenty of animals I could call pets on our farm. We had calves and lambs we bottle-fed and a barn crawling with cats. I loved my wooly lambs and the kittens, but I wanted a dog. A tail wagging, furry, wet nose in your face dog.

We’d had a dog, a big old hound we called Pup. When I was about six, he didn’t come home one day. We hunted him, but it was months before we found out he’d gotten hung in a fence and died. He was a nice dog, but he was never my dog. You dog lovers out there know what I mean. And maybe I was too young for the dog hunger then.

I don’t know why we didn’t get another dog right away. Maybe my dad thought dogs were too much trouble, especially when they disappeared and made everybody sad. Anyway, I wasn’t making any headway with him begging for a dog, but I kept asking. Years later when I wrote Scent of Lilacs, my young character, Jocie, says a dog prayer since she has the dog hunger like I did. That surely came straight from my own experience.

So after a few weeks of wishing and begging and praying, a dog showed up. Out of nowhere. A beautiful black cocker spaniel that was my dog at first sight. Only trouble was, my dad couldn’t see that. He said cockers weren’t good farm dogs and so we couldn’t keep him. But I loved that little dog so desperately my aunt took pity on me and gave him a home. I named him Inky. It fit and he fit in my heart. Perfectly. My aunt and granddad lived about a mile from us, and every day all through that summer I took the shortcut through the fields over to their house to sit on the porch with my elderly granddad with Inky’s head in my lap. I stroked his soft curly hair and was in love. My dog hunger was satisfied, and I was happy. Very happy.

Alas, the course of true love never runs smooth. One day late in that summer, I had been to town with my aunt. When we came home, at least a dozen dead hens were scattered around the yard. Inky was hiding in the woodhouse under a bench. He knew he’d done a bad thing. I knew he’d done a bad thing. He was a chicken killer. That’s probably the reason somebody had dropped him on the road by our farm.

My aunt loved me without reservation, but no farmwoman could keep a chicken-killing dog. We needed eggs for breakfast. I didn’t care about the chickens or the eggs, but I understood that Inky’s days were numbered in my life. They didn’t shoot him. Probably because that would have shattered my heart. Instead my aunt tied him to the clothesline and found him a home with someone who didn’t own chickens. And I lost my first love.

But the story doesn’t end there. After Inky, my dad relented and let me have a dog. Ollie was part Spitz and part Collie and I loved him as much as I’d loved Inky. Still he wasn’t a cocker spaniel. After Inky, cocker spaniels were my dream dogs. But cocker spaniels didn’t normally appear out of nowhere. They had to be bought. Something we never did when we wanted a dog. Something we couldn’t afford to do after I married and had three kids. There wasn’t money to buy a dog.

When we wanted a dog we found somebody trying to get rid of pups and whatever kind they were, we took one and brought it home. But my husband knew how much I loved cocker spaniels and because of how much he loved me, one year he sold his treasured high school class ring and bought me a cocker spaniel pup as a surprise for my birthday.

If that was the end of the story, all would be well, but three days before my birthday, my sister-in-law was killed in a freak auto accident. A friend was driving her to the doctor since she was only days, perhaps hours from delivering a baby boy to be spoiled and loved by the three daughters she and my brother-in-law already had. The tailgate broke off a cattle trailer and crashed through the windshield of a pickup truck, instantly killing the driver whose wife, I found out later, was also about to have a baby. That truck crossed over into the path of the truck Joy’s friend was driving. Joy was thrown out of her seat and under the dashboard. This was before seatbelts were in common use. The friend was not hurt, but Joy and her unborn baby boy died.

After that kind of tragedy, a birthday seems to be something to pass over, to not notice for this one year. How can you celebrate life when all you can think about is what death has stolen from your family? But my husband had already bought the puppy, and he brought him home to surprise me on my birthday in spite of the sadness that soaked clear through to my soul. Barely bigger than my hand, Jody followed me everywhere I went and lay on top of my feet whenever I was cooking or washing dishes. He was my dog at first sight. 

The sadness and grief didn’t go away because I had a puppy. I missed Joy and mourned the lost promise of the baby boy who never had the chance to draw breath. I was sad for her daughters who would grow up without their mother’s loving presence. I grieved for Joy who would not see those girls become young women and marry and have babies of their own. But a puppy can lick away a lot of tears and make you smile in spite of your sorrows.

My husband didn’t know such sorrows were waiting in the wings when he sacrificed something he treasured to give me a wiggling, yipping, wet nose in my face puppy. He just wanted to give me a gift of love. And he did.

(This story was first published in The Dog Next Door and Other Stories of the Dogs We Love edited by Callie Smith Grant.)