Snickers

I thought since the hair on top of his head looked like a poodle, he wouldn’t shed. I was wrong. He sheds and I still have to cut his hair every few months, which turns him into a Dr. Seuss character for a while.

Mom decided I needed a new dog about six months after I lost my seventeen-year-old poodle. We brought this 24 pound ball of fur home, and he latched onto Mom, staying by her side, sleeping with her, leading the way in front of her walking… then walking with her cane…. her walker… then in her power wheelchair.

His name is Snickers. Every person he meets, he’s their best friend and will lick their toes for good measure if they’re wearing flip-flops. That’s probably because he was adopted out twice and returned twice… he probably thinks the next person may be his new owner. But his third adoption took.

Snickers came from a hoarding situation in a town about 30 miles from here, but it made the news because the Humane Society rescued 144 dogs from one house. The owners had moved into a shed and let the dogs have the run of their home. The dogs lived and ate and slept in huge piles of feces. I saw a picture online that someone took when they opened the door. Dozens of eyes reflected in the photo, and yet that was only a fraction. I hope those people got professional help, because what they were doing to those poor dogs was certifiably crazy.

Snickers has nightmares. He’ll start howling the most pitiful-sounding howls. His eyes are open, but he’s sound asleep and it’s sometimes hard to wake him up to stop howling. I wonder if his nightmares are from his old life. I tell him regularly how glad we are that he lives with us now.

Snickers is deaf and almost blind, so it was no problem to take him to the fireworks show or the Christmas parade with the emergency vehicle sirens. His bark is extremely loud, but it doesn’t bother him a bit.

He has separation anxiety, and he won’t even stay in a room by himself. He would scratch at his metal crate until he either got out or his paws bled. We stopped putting him in it. He tore up the drapes and window shade in Mom and Dad’s room trying to get out of the house. He somehow scratched off the glass panels that held the built-in metal shades on the French doors in the kitchen.

But eventually, Mom had to stay home all the time, and he calmed down. He was on her bed the day ALS took her life, and he kept looking for her around the house. That broke my heart.

Then he latched onto me.

He even has to go with me to the bathroom and everywhere else around the house. When I’m doing chores from room to room, he wears himself out trying to keep up with me, getting settled, shutting his eyes, then getting up and moving when I leave the room. You can’t reason with him. I’ve tried. He just looks at me with those sweet, brown eyes and follows me anyway.

About five months after Mom passed away, we took in another little dog that had been rescued by some friends. Rolo and Snickers are great pals. He doesn’t read her signals right, though, and can’t hear her mad yips when he gets too rough playing with her. Rolo’s smart, and comes and tells me when she wants to go outside. She knows when I pick up my tea glass, that I’m going to get the soft ice from the garage freezer. The vacuum scares her. Snickers walks beside the vacuum as I’m vacuuming.

Twice she came into the house from the backyard and whined after a few minutes. She never whines. Both times Snickers had gotten out of the yard, and she was telling on him. Thank heavens. Our biggest fear is for him to be in the street and a car come along, assuming he’ll hear them and get out of the way. But he can’t hear them.

Snickers keeps his thinking pretty shallow, and he’s socially awkward. He’ll sometimes mimic what Rolo is doing, but he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing or why. He’ll fight another dog (my grand-dog Trixie), but only if provoked. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. If an intruder came into the house, he’d probably lick their feet and follow them from room to room. Rolo would act like she would eat them alive and bring the house down barking.

We can’t take Snickers anywhere without him feeling obligated to mark everything in sight, so we have to keep a diaper on him if we travel anywhere. He’s such a pain in the derriere at times, but he tugs at my heartstrings regularly, so it balances out.

 

As I type these words, Snickers is sleeping at my feet at this moment, lightly touching my right shoe so he’ll know when I get up.

I’ve stopped writing now, but I think I’ll wait a few moments before I move.