Chapter 19 (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, cont.)

Toby

My first glimpse of Toby was when I saw the furry snowball of a pup at an A.S.P.A. in Boston. I had gone into Boston to pick up my High School pictures with a friend, John Y. from school. John was fond of animals, but would never pick up a mongrel. He instead had scrimped and saved to buy himself an A.K.C. registered Afghan hound of noble heritage. He also raised Siamese cats, and had given me my Siamese, Nikki Timbo.

While we were in Boston, having a little time before our train’s departure for Woburn, we did some window shopping. We couldn’t pass a pet shop or animal shelter without checking out the animals. When I saw Toby, I just had to have him. I gave no thought as to who was going to get stuck with house-breaking him. And little did I know he had contracted a disease, coccidiosis, which my mother had believed only infected poultry.

My mother was upset with me, but I figured that since I paid the fee for the pup to spring it from the shelter, had been my decision. Never mind that I had school to attend, and my mom was stuck with the job of not only raising the pup, but nursing it back to health. Plus it was a time in my mom’s life when she was beginning to feel her age. She was still recuperating from a hysterectomy, and this probably brought on early menopausal symptoms. I think she purposely complained in a manner where I overheard her, rather than lecturing me, a technique of hers to get a point across, that she was getting too old to be raising puppies anymore.

But Toby became my mother’s dog… named Toby because he was born in October. Toby ended up Mom’s companion, and she took him with her every time possible when driving, and would sometimes purposely go out of her way to where dogs could be seen from this miniature Spitz’s car window. Then Toby would bark frantically at these dogs as if to tell them they had no right to be on his road, jumping all around the back seat of the car practically snapping at the window letting all dogs know how ferocious he was! The king of the road! Right? Once, on a hot day when the windows were open and he was doing his frantic barking, jumping up and down threat to the offending animals, at a sharp turn in the road, he fell out of the window . Suddenly this white fluffy bully was a timid and reticent wimp. All of his body language was apologizing to the curious, threatening and angry dogs approaching. My mother had immediately pulled over, stepped out, and swooped up the quivering dog. No sooner had she gotten Toby back into his seat by the car window--his throne--when he again start yapping at these same fierce animals who previously going to make mince-meat of him.

We wondered about Toby’s sexual preferences. He’d go after a cat, a child crawling on the floor, your leg, but not after a female dog. My nieces, not realizing Toby’s intentions thought he was hugging them, and didn’t know why Grandma got so embarrassed and pulled him off.

Years later, when I was married and had children and dogs of my own, Mom came to visit with Toby in tow, of course. In my neighborhood, my girlfriend, Marlene also had a miniature Spitz--a female one. It looked so much like Toby I couldn’t wait for my mother to see Marlene’s dog. Toby was very old and in no way a young stud anymore, but when he saw this other Spitz, it was love at first sight. The female just happened to be in heat at that time, and Toby’s timing was perfect. The only time he ever mated, and it was with this “identical twin.” It must have taken all of Toby’s last energies, as he died in his sleep right after Mom took him back to her home in Rhode Island.

Marlene’s dog had a most beautiful litter of puppies, that even with lack of AKC registration she was to make a profit on those pups. My son August begged, pleaded, and cried in vain trying to convince us he should be allowed to have one of the puppies. Thankfully his dad did not give in to him, as we already had a dog at the time. (To be truthful, I never really liked Toby, and didn’t want to repeat the mistake I made that time in Boston. I always liked a big hound-type dog.)

When my father went blind, he had to retire from his civil service job at the Boston Naval Shipyard. And because of other infirmities he didn’t qualify physically for the program for getting a Seeing Eye Dog. For all my life he had left for work before we’d arise, and return at suppertime. The family conversed about our day at the supper table, then my dad disappeared behind a newspaper. He was an avid reader, so he missed a lot when he went blind. But having him home so much the last few years I lived at home in Woburn, Helped me to get to know this man better than I ever knew him before. He was a man who knew disability not as an obstacle, but as a challenge. He went with my mother several times a week to a Catholic organization for the blind to learn Braille, and became very proficient at reading the Braille Readers Digests. He also qualified for the talking books. But because he didn’t qualify for the Seeing Eye dog, he trained Toby to help him walk up Williams court. It was a challenge, but with the aid of Toby on a leash and his white cane he was finally able to walk up Merrimac street, across the tracks to School Street, and to the local store. Toby may have been a yappy little dog and a little hyper, but he was good for both my mother and father as the house got emptier and emptier as each child grew and became independent. Then when the youngest, Peter, joined the Air Force, my mother and father looked for a smaller house closer to the ocean, as my mother loved the ocean and swimming. She, Dad, and Toby settled on Connanicus Road in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Within a few years of the move, my dad passed away.

Mom said she was watching the Ed Sullivan Show, and Robert Goulet was singing “If I Should Ever Leave Thee” and my father said, “See, that’s why I could never leave you” agreeing with the words of that beautiful love song from Camelot. He got up and went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, and he had a way of stretching his arms up over his head when tired. He did that and lay back on the bed with a heavy sigh. My mother somehow sensed something wrong, and went into the bedroom to find that my dad had just died. She had resuscitated Dad several times before when Dad was very ill and almost died, but she couldn’t touch him this time. She knew that this was it… nothing would bring him back now, but in the aftermath, Mom felt his presence for several weeks, and even had a dream where he was looking into the mirror over the bureau in the bedroom, and saying something about how much better and younger he looked now. It was that following morning that Mom no longer felt his presence. She was a very lonely woman.

My brother Tucker and his family had moved from New Hampshire where he had an interim job working on a farm, to a cottage nearby where he commuted to a job in development, and had lived there several years before Dad died, so Mom wasn’t entirely alone. And Toby did what he could to keep her company, but next time I visited her, the loneliness was so thick it was palpable. She went back to nursing, updating her RN license for Rhode Island, and seven years later, met Rocky who worked in the same hospital as a part time janitor in his retirement. Rocky, like my dad, was ten years older than my mom. Whereas they had many good years together, she was made a widow again about a decade, (and several dogs) later.