news-record.com

Yesterday I received an email from a reader, Karen, who had read my story in Tuesday's News & Record about remembering my first dog Cassie. Karen wrote a beautiful story about her sister's recent loss of her beagle and the other wonderful dogs that have come into their lives.

Please take a few moments to read Karen's story below.

Look At My Dog
By Karen B. Ingram

My sister is a 42-year-old academician who, until recently, was the single mom of an aged beagle. This is a tribute to Royster D. Brown, an old dog for whom our whole family mourned at his passing this summer.

Ours has always been a family of long-lived dogs. Tippy was a terrier mix that my father brought home in his coat pocket 4 months before I was born in 1961. She died just as I graduated from high school in 1979. Two years later, my mother brought Rags home from the pound. We thought Rags would grow up to be a 12-pound lap dog, but she turned out to be a 35-pounder who still thought she was a lap dog. Rags died just after my daughter’s arrival in 1995. My husband and I got Mac, who can best be described as a cartoon dog, given his very questionable parentage, in New York right after we got married in 1986. We brought him back to North Carolina and raised him as a Southern dog. Mac died in 2001, at the ripe old age of 15. We currently have Licorice, a Border Collie/Dachshund mix, if you can imagine. He came from a shelter in 2006.

My sister got Royster from a shelter in Virginia, where he’d gone after he’d been left on the side of the road, presumably because he would not hunt. He was hunkered down in his cage, cowering, afraid, and clearly not happy at his situation. When she brought him home to her apartment, he howled. He howled at the doorbell, at visitors, at anyone moving about the room. He did not like men, and he howled at any movement that our father or my husband made. Our mother had a career in special education, and we classified poor Royster as a BEH beagle (behaviorally and emotionally handicapped). Then, slowly but surely, due to my sister’s love and devotion to this crazy dog, he became a wonderful part of our extended family. He learned that we all loved him and would not hurt him, so he gave up howling at the men.After he had flown the coop a couple of times, my sister learned that, in true beagle fashion, he wanted to explore. When he was young, even in a fenced yard, he had to be walked on a leash, or he’d make a break for the open road, scaling the fence. He learned to get along with other dogs. Other than Tippy, he knew all the other family dogs, and one year, before Rags left us to chase tennis balls in the great beyond, we had a three-dog Christmas with Royster, Rags and Mac.

Royster was already reaching his AARP years when Licorice joined the family, so he had very little interest in playing with a young dog. But once in a while, during his last couple of years, we saw him leap and bark just a little in play. In his last year or two, he had developed a shuffling, old-man gait, and he looked like Tim Conway’s old character from the Carol Burnett Show. My sister, the great dog mother, nursed Royster through many health issues, including cancer and seizures. He had veterinary relationships from Charlottesville, Va. to eastern North Carolina, including the vet schools at NC State and Virginia Tech. He finally suffered a stroke this summer, and she had to let him go. He was her immediate family for 16 years, and I called him my neph-dog. All who know my sister knew this sweet, crazy beagle, who was her child and knew of their devotion to one another. When, in his dotage, Royster would do something silly and cute, she would say, “Look at my dog.” And we always did.

Royster’s last great act of dog-ness was at my house this past Christmas. I heard him in the laundry room and found that he had stealthily tracked, stalked and taken down a bag of Purina Dog Chow and had ripped open the belly of the bag. He was standing with one paw holding down the great beast and was woofing down chow for all he was worth. He was finally a victorious hunter.

I suspect that there will be another beagle in our family’s foreseeable future. My daughter observed that Mac was a pest to Rags, Royster was a pest to Mac, Licorice was a pest to Royster, and a new dog will be a pest to Licorice, who is approaching middle-age in dog-years. The canine circle of life continues in our family. I think very soon, my sister will be saying to us again, “Look at my dog.” And we will.