Grace refuses to look at photos, but Harriet is starting to worry that she will forget Velvet. I want to write down as much as I can for her before I do forget with my increasingly forgetful brain. The dogs have been in the old-age phase for so long now, I haven't thought about some of these things for years. Going through old pictures has helped. Velvet spanned the transition to the digital age, so there are several years of her life on paper photos that have to be scanned. It's so weird to think that we used to only take photos a few times a year and not 50 times a day. Now we take pictures of what we eat for lunch to post on facebook so our friends we knew 15 years ago can be jealous?, and I don't have a single photo of the first 2 weeks we had with Shadow when she was a super tiny fluffy adorable puppy. If that was today, I would have no less than a hundred pics in 24 hours time, I'm sure.
Here are a few things we need to remember about Velvet:
She used to LOVE to play tug-of-war. She would play with anyone, including Shadow. When David's friends - usually big strong guys - used to come over to our house, Velvet would grab her rope and bring it to them and challenge them to a duel. She won every time. She would dig her back paws in and tug in strong bursts until they either fell over or gave up. She would drag Shadow all over with the rope.
Velvet loved all things dairy, especially cottage cheese and ice cream. She would take the "empty" ice cream bucket or cottage cheese container and put her whole head in until it was licked clean. When she came up for air, she would have a ring of cream around her face and eyes. Sometimes she let Shadow have the lid.
She loved RED VINES. Oh my goodness. She could smell a package of red vines being opened anywhere in the house. To share a red vine with Velvet was pure joy. David and I might have gone "Lady and the Tramp" with it a couple of times on our red vine sharing with her. She was always very gentle and a fair sharer. We often get red vines for Friday family movie night. I was going to buy some for tonight, but decided I couldn't eat one this soon.
Speaking of opening packages... Until she lost her hearing, she could hear you opening a bag of chips from miles away and would be at your side before you got a hole big enough for your hand to go in.
Velvet loved anyone who would feed or play or adventure with her, but she especially loved guys. She loved the grandpas, the boy cousins, the young men David used to hike and camp with. She was a total guy's dog.
Having said that, Velvet also was a fierce protector of our family and home from men of any sort. I mentioned some of that in the last post. Even our best friend and close neighbor, Steve Guenther, was not welcome if we were not home. One day on garbage day, we forgot to put our can out. It was behind the gate and Velvet was in the yard. Steve tried to be a good neighbor and come over to help us. He opened the gate and then barely escaped with his life and did not get the can out of the yard. He assured us that no one would be breaking into our house with Velvet around.
Velvet is one of the very few dogs I know who are not scared of loud noises. Fireworks, no problem. Thunder? Is it raining? Let's go out in it! Smoke alarms screeching... can't I just sleep? Maybe this explains her hearing loss later in life, that she never avoided it. But, she was not a 'fraidy cat of anything.
During the last year or two, Velvet figured out that if she flicked the springy doorstop with her paw by the back door that we would hear it and let her out. She invented her own doggie door bell. Speaking of... she really did suffer from a bit of dementia. She would ask to go out about 20 times a day, right after she had already been out. In, out, in, out. Again, I didn't realize that it was just Velvet doing this all day. Shadow has asked to go out twice today. My list of daily doings got shortened by quite a bit.
You would be standing in the yard or the kitchen or just about anywhere, and all of a sudden, Velvet would appear with her head between your legs and a tennis ball in her mouth. She did not take no for an answer when it was time to play fetch. David once threw the ball to her 147 times to see how many times she would go get it. He tired before she did. We once saw this thing called "Go Dog Go." It was a mechanical arm with a bin of tennis balls underneath that would continuously throw tennis balls to your dog as long for as she returned them to the bin. It was like $150. We were too poor for that then. We planned on some day buying Velvet a go dog go. We never did. I'm sure she has one now if Heaven is all it's cracked up to be with eternities of joy and all.
Obedience and TRICKS! This dog knew some tricks! She was so dang smart. Again, it has been a long time since she did any tricks. Arthritis and going deaf definitely put a damper on things. I remember, she used to respond to our voices so well. We could walk her off-leash anywhere, and she would always obey and come back. I remember the day we had to stop doing that because if she got too far away from us, we couldn't keep her safe. Anyway, back to tricks. Here's a little list of the things Velvet would gladly do on command, either by voice or by hand signal:
sit, sit-stay, down, down-stay (yes, these are different... we had to repeat doggie school because of the sit and down stays), wait (also different from stay - could be done standing up), come, off (meant get down off of something or someone), shake, up, turn around, roll over, speak, and BANG! You could point your finger at her like a gun, say bang, and she would fall over and play dead until you said "ok!" Until the very end, she would still lie down and stay if you gave her the hand signal for it. Good dog.
I didn't write this in my blog post yesterday, but I should probably include it for the kids. Just before we left our house for the vet Wednesday night, we decided we should say a prayer or give Velvet a blessing. The kids voted for a blessing. It might seem weird to bless an animal, but the pioneers used to bless theirs, and their animals were no more important to their journey than ours are to our journey - maybe just in different ways. Anyway, David gave her the sweetest blessing a boy could give his dog. I only mention it because it was another faith building moment for me - that God does care about us and even our animals. He blessed her that she would have some pain relief on our way, before the end. As we were driving on the freeway in the car, she suddenly stopped breathing so hard and laid down in the back and relaxed a little. The kids kind of freaked out for a minute and said, "Wait! She's ok, she's not breathing so hard anymore." I reminded them that it was part of her blessing and that they had already been told what we needed to do tonight. She did have a few minutes of pain relief, it seemed. How cool is that?
Ok, I've got a bunch of freshly scanned pics to post. I guess I'll do a separate post for those. These are getting too long.
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