RIP Sadie Dog…

OK, I’ve been terrible about updating my blog. I know. I just get so busy that I forget sometimes. I have a lot to write about the last week, but I’ll get to that another day.

Today is a sad day. My wife had the unfortunate task of taking our dog Sadie to her final veterinary visit today. Sadie had been a member of our family since 2001, when we adopted her from a family in New Jersey. We were her third or fourth family, so we were never exactly sure how old she was, but our best guess was that she was 4 years old when we got her. She was a yellow lab, so 14 years was a pretty good run.

She was kind of a pain in the ass from the moment we got her because she didn’t like other dogs and had some serious issues with food aggression. I think she may have been neglected or abused at some point before our family. She also didn’t like dark skinned men or mail carriers. In New Jersey, we had a black mailman that she would go ballistic over if she caught sight of him through the screen door. She was a virulent racist, but I like to think she renounced that viewpoint later in life. That’s what she was doing when she barked at the back door. Sadie was like Alabama Governor George Wallace.

Sadie would also shed everywhere. I think she must have been some kind of mutant strain of Labrador that has twice as much hair as normal and loses it at twice the normal rate. She probably did it on purpose, just because she thought it was funny. There have been clumps of white hair covering every surface in my house for the last 10 years. Her hair has caused ridiculous fits of sneezing, my wife to go to the doctor with a swollen eyeball, and has been responsible for the death of at least 4 vacuum cleaners. I suspect she had a wicked sense of humor.

She was an only dog for 5 years until we got Leia, our chocolate lab. Leia reminded her what it was like to be a puppy again, even though she had started to slow down just a tad. Sadie and I used to wrestle around on the living room floor when we first got her, but she was past that point in her life.  I think she just got fed up with me always being the dominant one. When we got Leia, she was back to being the full fledged Alpha Dog, and I think she craved that power and validation. She was like that guy who hangs out with High School kids just to make sure that someone still thinks he’s cool. Sadie was Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.

In the last several years, Sadie slowed down a lot. She developed lumps all over her body and her hips really gave her pain. She seemed happy most of the time, though. She was deaf, had problems with her balance, and had trouble standing up, but there was never any doubt that she was the scrappy old lady dog that would bite your fingers off if you tried to take her food away. She was Estelle Getty from The Golden Girls.

I hate it that I am down here in Mexico while my wife and kids have to deal with this on their own. It may not be the end of the world, but it’s certainly the end of an era. I’ll miss her and all of her idiosyncrasies. She was with our family for 10 years, which is nothing to sneeze at. That is, of course, unless you’re sneezing because you have dog hair in your nose. Oh, she would have thought that was just hilarious…