My Dog Annie

ANNIE

I remember all the research done in our house about what kind of dog would fit into our family and our lifestyle. It seems to me that almost every day I was being educated about one breed or another. About which one would be just right.

So I didn’t pick the breed and once that was decided, I didn’t choose the pup. She was a flat coated retriever we called Annie but, she wasn’t my dog. She was my wife’s dog really and if she wasn’t around, the kids’ dog.

The problem was that no one told Annie that.

I don't know what happened. Some suggest that Annie just saw me as the alpha male. I’m not so sure. I think it is more related to Annie’s love of good food. I’m the cook in our house and the more I stopped being on the road, the closer Annie got to me. So, at meal time Annie never strayed very far from the kitchen.

We developed a kind of routine. When I was cutting up salad stuff she got the ends of the tomatoes and bits of red pepper, she got to test the pasta to see if it was cooked and of course any bits trimmed off the edge anything tasty I was cooking were hers.

After a while she decided that she’d have to be wherever I was, no matter what was going on. It became hard to get up from the couch without stepping on her.

She has been slowing down these last few months and found the winter tough. We figured that spring would  give her and easier time of it then, to our surprise, things got worse. We hoped she’d rally but she went downhill pretty fast. Then her liver shut down.

You don’t decide how you fit into an animal’s pecking order, they do it for you. So as it turned out, she definitely was my dog and a pretty good one at that.