Chapter 26 (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, cont.)

The Search for Kiyoodle’s Soul

When Time enough had passed so Al could cope with Kiyoodle’s loss, he, of course, wanted another Weimaraner. I think I was still in a state of grief, but my thinking at the time was, “Maybe if we found a litter of pups born around the time of Ki’s death, one may have Ki’s spirit--a reincarnated Kiyoodle." It was a few months later, and two months is about when one wants to find homes for their female dog’s litter of pups.

We found an ad for two month old Weimaraner pups, and ended up with, instead of another Kiyoodle, a pup we couldn’t even name, and simply called him Pup-up. All I remember about the family who owned the dam was their seven year old boy. I remembered the rhyme of what little girls and boys were made of… the boys being made of “…snips, and snails, and puppy-dogs’ tails,” as he had kept the cropped tails of the pups.

Now we had an AKC registered Weimaraner pup with papers… if we cared… yet in this dog we began to see there were notable differences between Pup-up and the quality Kiyoodle. Pup-up wasn’t quite as handsome, nor as intelligent, nor as loving, nor as …Well, he just wasn’t Kiyoodle, and we made a mistake in trying to replace a dog that was so very unique and loved. As for Kiyoodle’s spirit, I’ve since heard of the Buddhist belief in the spirit growing progressively through lives well lived. If that is a true thing--the spirit moving into a higher form of animal--Kiyoodle made it to a level either equal to the human being, if not above, as he had such a pure spirit.

We soon moved from Norwalk, Connecticut to upstate New York. IBM was changing from its being in control of the computers they were selling to big businesses. They moved their best service people to a more central location, Endicott, New York, where they transferred Al. From there he would help repairmen, perhaps hired from another company, acting as a trouble shooter over the phone. When it couldn’t be solved over the phone, he would travel to wherever the machine was to see if the problem could be fixed in person. That’s as close as I can come to figuring out that situation.

While having real estate agents try and find us a home, we moved into a cottage on Laurel Lake in a nearby community, Silver Lake, Pennsylvania. Our not so perfect pup moved with us, and we loved him as our new dog in his own right. But, maybe his problems were more real than just our judgments in comparing him with Ki‘, as, even though he had his regular shots, poor Pup-up came down with distemper.

With the help of our new vet in Vestal, we pulled him through the sickness. Dr. Norris was an old fashioned vet whose ways resembled James Herriot’s practice in Yorkshire, in in his book, All Creatures Great and Small. But despite Pup-up surviving the disease, he was left super-sensitive to noise and easily irritated. I then worried about how he’d be with children. August and Joanna were very young and not yet old enough to be careful of how they treated animals. But Pup-up seemed okay with them so far. Located on a dirt road, we were able to let Pup-up run free. I was more careful about my daughter who was at the crawling stage, and determined to crawl from the backyard through the lilac bushes directly on to the dirt road. I felt like I needed her on a leash.

At that time, it was the same cost for milk whether we bought it at the store, or we bought it from delivery, so we had the milk delivered. You could hear those old noisy milk trucks rattling over the bumps a half mile away. The first milk delivery after Pup’ had recovered from distemper was fateful.

The young milkman came yelling to the door, “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry… I’ve run over your dog! There was no way I could avoid it! He just dove under my wheels!”

He was horrified.. I had been folding clothes in the bedroom, and had run out to see what the commotion was about. I was upset, but not as upset as this poor man who had no way of having avoided the mishap. I had to calm him down, and explained that the dog just couldn’t stand noises. I assured him that it wasn’t his fault, and that Pup’ would have been miserable in this noisy world as a result of the side effects from his having had distemper.

Al had come home, and we put Pup’s body in the back of the new Ford Station wagon, and brought him to the vet in Vestal to be sure he was really dead, and Dr. Norris pronounced him so, and disposed of his body for us. We had no way of creating our own pet cemetery yet. I wasn’t sure we ever would. I had believed and still believe that pets have spirits that live on as do people, and their bodies are just a vehicles for those spirits.

I felt bad about Pup’, but we learned through experience that there is more to a well bred dog than just AKC registration. But we still loved that breed of dogs, and were to soon again get ourselves yet another Weimaraner.