We were married in July of 1972, and bought our house about a year and a half later in February of '74. Both Linda and I are animal lovers, and within a couple of months, we decided our new house needed a new dog. So one Saturday we went to the SPCA in Mattydale to find a puppy. The puppy presentation method at the SPCA back then was weird. All the available puppies were in a small, fenced-in area in the middle of the room. They were bouncing and barking and dying to be played with and hugged, but there was a sign that said, "Don't Touch the Puppies." Heck, the sign might as well have said, "Stop Breathing While in the Building." I and a lot of other people were reaching in and touching, unable to help ourselves.
Linda wasn't touching. Rather she was choosing. She picked for us a little black and white puppy who was hiding in the corner of the enclosure. Her reasoning was that this little one was more in need of a home because she was both cute and frightened. So, we got an attendant, who legally picked the puppy out of the pen, and shortly afterward, we took the sweet little girl home.
We loved her immediately. She was happy and affectionate and pretty good at becoming house broken. What we didn't realize was just how determined this little puppy was. Linda was also determined that our puppy would sleep in the cellar, because when we were kids, the dogs of both our families had been nighttime basement dwellers. So on night #1, we put her in the cellar. She cried and cried. We went down and got her and let her sleep by our bed. Night #2 progressed the same way. But on night #3, we were sure we would be strong. The puppy cried and cried, but we fell asleep. When we woke up in the morning, she was sleeping on the pillow next to me. Somehow she had made her way up two sets of stairs that towered above her and hopped onto a bad at least 3 times as tall as she was. From then on she slept at the foot of our bed. That was the first battle won by Snug.
That was her name--Snug. We were so literary at the time, both being relatively new English teachers, that we wanted a Shakespearean name for our puppy. First, we were going to call her "Mab," like Queen Mab in ROMEO AND JULIET, but then we found out that two doors down the street from us lived the Mabe family. We didn't want them to think we were mispronouncing their name and shouting to them when we called our dog. So, I thought a bit, and remembered the clowns, in particular Snug the joiner, in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. So the little black puppy was given the name Snug, which was much better than Mab, because she loved to curl up and get "snug" in a nice warm place, even if she wasn't supposed to be there.
Snuggy was both affectionate and darling. She was also voracious and suffered severely from separation anxiety. (Warning: If you pick the puppy hiding in the corner, you may be adopting both a puppy and its neuroses.) Not only did Snug like to eat, but she liked to clean up food with her sand paper-rough tongue! Snug worked a kitchen floor better than any maintenance man with a mop. Jan's high chair was always spotless because Snuggy cleaned every drop of dropped food off it. Jan also enjoyed feeding Snug with her spoon, when we were too far away to prevent it. It was a time in the neighborhood when there were lots of stay-at- home moms and new babies, so not only did Snuggy get to clean our floor and high chair, she visited the neighbors and worked for them as well. Her cleaning and eating prowess remain legendary in the Ellstrom, Smolnycki, and Gordon houses. One time, in a fit of voraciousness, she took a frozen pound of hamburger off the Gordon's counter, where it was defrosting, and ate it paper and all. Another time, when Sam and Jan had frosted little cupcakes while sitting on the porch, Snug snuck in when they went away for a moment, and licked the icing off every single one.
Snug didn't like being left home! Ever! But if she was going to be left home, there was no way she was staying in the cellar. So I figured out a compromise, I thought. I bought a sheet of plywood, used it to enclose Snug in the back hall, and off we went somewhere. This was when Snug was about 2 months old. When we got home, Snug was sitting on the chest that sits under one of our upstairs windows. Her tiny body had somehow scaled a 4 foot sheet of plywood.
This refusal to be anywhere but with us or in the house continued. We tried leaving her in the garage. She began to eat and tear the garage door apart. Later, I covered the bottom of the garage door with sheet metal. Surely, I thought, this would stop her. She tore into the corner of the sheet metal with such determination that we came home to find her bleeding from her paws and her mouth. It was then we decided that if she didn't come with us, Snug should probably be allowed to stay inside.
I wouldn't want anyone to think that because of her personality glitch that we didn't adore Snug. She was a wonderful dog as long as you didn't leave her. She was my first dog traveling companion. Because she so loved being with me, I took her in the car as many places as I could, be it the mall, Byrne Dairy, or the drugstore. And because we were young and relatively poor, we didn't like paying kennel fees. So Snug got to go visit our parents' houses on weekends and holidays. In fact, when at 11 months old, Jan took her first steps in front of my in-laws' Christmas tree, Snug was there to give her a congratulatory lick.
Even though she was hungry, Snuggy was healthy and sleek. She could run like a little black and white deer and loved to orbit around me in the front yard. She was a good leaper, too, and more than once leaped into Jan's crib from a standing position. In addition, she was a dog that people just liked. She wasn't an Einstein, but she could do the basic tricks for entertainment purposes, and the staff at the veterinary hospital, where she was occasionally boarded, always got a kick out of her sweetness.
When she was 6 or 7, the health problems began for Snug. There was a good dose of Black Labrador in the girl, and the bane of labs, dysplasia, struck Snuggy's back legs. The dog who had been so quick, suddenly couldn't run anymore, and instead, sort of waddled along. Still, she was happy, and the vet said she wasn't in any pain, just no longer a candidate for the track team. As the years passed, she put on weight because of her lack of activity. She also got an infection in her tail, which caused all the hair on the top of it to fall off. Snug was something to behold, a chubby, black and white mutt, with mutated tail between her legs, who slowly ambled along. Soon, we realized, that although she wasn't unhappy, she looked a lot like Eeyore, the perpetually gloomy donkey friend of Winnie the Pooh.
Snug's dysplasia and resulting inability to move quickly turned out to be bad for the rug in my office. When her legs were strong, she had always waited to go to the bathroom until we came home from school. But when waiting to go outside became a chore, she began, every so often, to urinate on my office rug. What to do now?
In good weather, Snug hated to have to be in the house while we were in school. Every morning, we would put her out the front door to go to the bathroom. When I would go to get her, she would be hiding. Always in the same place--behind the bush under the picture window, and always noisily--as soon as she heard me call for her, she'd begin to root deeper into the leaves and things in her hideaway. Remember, I said she was no Einstein. Every morning I would fetch her from behind the bushes. So, finally, we decided to leave her outside in the morning where she would be happy and wouldn't be wetting any rugs. It worked. She seldom left our yard. When she did, it was only to go a house or two away where she was welcome, anyway. When the weather turned bad during the morning, I would come home and put her in at lunchtime.
For the next few years, she spent fall and spring days outside, winter days in the house, and summer days, happily and constantly with us. With those years, her joints began to grow stiffer, and she moved more slowly, and we knew that it wouldn't be long before we'd have to consider the quality of Snug's life.
On New Year's Eve day, with a party at our house that night, Snug disappeared for awhile. When she got home, she curled up at the bottom of the stairs. Linda or I was first to notice a strange smell in the house. It smelled like some machine oil, kind of like the smell of a train transformer. We were concerned, and some of the guys from the fire department came up to help us search out the smell. We searched in the basement, sniffed at the wall plugs and by the furnace, and then, one of the firemen said, "Here's the smell." It was Snug. Some work was going on in the neighborhood and either Snug had rolled in some kind of oil or kerosene or someone had tossed some on her. Up we went to the bathroom, and I gave Snug a good scrubbing.
I guess that scrubbing on that cold day was about all that Snuggy's old body could take. A week or so later at breakfast, when I called her to come have a piece of toast, she couldn't get to her feet. Linda went to school, and I took Snug to Dr. Marshall's. When he looked at her old body and saw that she was over 13, he said to me, "Most of her contemporaries are gone. She's very old. Are you ready to let her go." I had steeled myself to answer "Yes," so I hugged the old girl and told her what a great dog she was and how much we loved her. I stayed with her to the end, and the only mistake I made, was not covering her eyes when Dr. Marshall administered the shot. If you've never stayed with a dog when she was euthanized, remember this admonition. Don't watch the life disappear from their old eyes.
I left her there, not yet tearful, but I didn't make it across the lobby before I sighed hugely and it turned into a sob. Then I cried all the way home and cried again when I called Linda at school to let her know, what she had figured was inevitable, that our old girl wasn't coming home.
I remember Snug in two different incarnations. First, I remember the swift black dog racing in happy circles around me. Second, I remember her Eeyore version, being brought home in a wheelbarrow by Phil Gordon, because she didn't have it in her to walk back up the hill. I treasure the memories of both those dogs, both our Snuggies.
