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My bedroom was in the basement of our house, and we didn't have a bathroom downstairs. On the night before my 10th birthday, I had to make a trip to the bathroom. I found Mom and a couple of my sisters in the kitchen looking very guilty about something but didn't think much about it. The next day, I got a Beagle puppy for a birthday present. Turns out that they'd given it a bath and were drying it out in the oven. When they heard me coming upstairs, they shoved it into the oven and slammed it shut. Poor little Beagle! We gave our Beagle the rather long name "September Tones," but we always knew her as "Toni." I was in 4-H, and used Toni as my project. I trained her as best I could, and entered her in the fair. I took second place. Of course, there were only three entries. One didn't show up. Toni was very sickly for her first year. We ran up a number of vet bills trying to cure her each time she got sick. Finally, Mom and Dad decided that it just wasn't worth spending so much on her if she was just going to be sick all her life. The next time she got sick, we didn't take her to the vet. She was very ill for a long time and we didn't expect her to survive. But one day, Mom offered her a tablespoon of gravy. She hadn't been showing any interest in food, but she sniffed the gravy and sat up and lapped it up. Mom gave her some more. By the next day, she had pretty much fully recovered, and she was rarely sick after that. I guess she just needed to fight off her illness without the help of medications. We had a ratty old couch in the dining room, and that was the only furniture Toni was allowed on. Then we decided to have it reupholstered, so we let her take over the oldest rattiest chair in the living room. She eventually learned that she wasn't allowed on the couch anymore and she stuck to her chair - at least when we were home. Whenever we left her home alone, we'd return home to find her defiantly lying on the couch. Just her way of telling us that she didn't want to stay home alone! Toni hated to stay alone. When we'd go to Flathead Lake, she always wanted to come out on the boat with us rather than stay behind. She seemed to hate the boat, though. She'd climb under the covering at the front of the boat, and would just seem to endure the trip. She looked so miserable sitting there while the boat bounced around in the waves! I remember one time we wanted to go visit friends who had a couple of large dogs, and we didn't want Toni along. So we gave Toni her dinner and tried to slip out the door. Poor Toni! She looked so torn, wanting to eat her dinner but also wanting to tag along. In the end, she went for her dinner, and we went for our boat ride and visit. When we returned, the neighbors told us that Toni had bayed constantly while we were gone. We never left her behind again when we were at the lake. Toni certainly knew her way around town. One time after I had gone off to the University, I was visiting home and took Toni with me when I went somewhere in my Model A coupe. Suddenly I realized that Toni was shivering and shaking in fear - and realized that I had come within a couple blocks of the vet! She was so happy when we went on past that hateful place. |