The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Back in 1977 I bought a HUD repo house in the ghetto of Seattle. First house I ever owned and so, being a neophyte, I thought maybe I should go whole hog and get a dog too, a companion, a man’s best friend. I always had a fondness for boxers so I looked in the paper, found someone selling pedigree boxer pups and went over to take a peek at the litter. One of the little guys was far and away the most active so unfortunately I picked that one. I named her T’Ashi, which I was told by a Sioux Indian I shared a Greyhound bus and a bottle with a few months earlier, meant ‘friend’.

T’Ashi made the Energizer Bunny look like a rabbit on tranquilizers. She was a bundle of mindless energy with legs like pogo sticks and a brain the size of a pea. A dumber dog I never saw before or since. If I threw a ball out into the Sound, she would go under to find it and if she didn’t find it, would stay down until I rescued her. Not many animals lack even the minor brain activity required for self survival.

Couple all that energy with a love of chewing, you got a recipe for mayhem whenever I left her alone in the house. She chewed through drywall, she chewed through closet doors, she pretty much chewed through a post in the basement that held up the two stories above. I drove nails into that post when I discovered it eaten a quarter way through and T’Ashi chewed through those. In despair I took her to a dog training class where the woman with the German accent told me, when I mentioned I didn’t think T’Ashi was trainable, that all dogs were trainable by her.

Great, I thought. Maybe she can save my house from being nibbled to death. Four weeks later she told me not to come to classes anymore. My beloved brainless dog was incapable of learning. In defense, I had tried to tell her. But now I was tethered to the monster I had brought into my new home.

Some months later I threw in the towel. It was the dog or the house. I put an ad in the Seattle Times: Pedigree boxer free to good home. I got plenty of calls, but when I asked if they planned on leaving the dog alone in their house, I patiently explained that that would not be a good home for T’Ashi. Not for long, anyway. People tried to argue with me, but I was firm, I was stubborn even, I was trying to protect them from themselves. A week of declined offers to take my dog for free left me thinking suicidal thoughts. And then Linda Rae Starr called.

“Would you be leaving the pooch home when you go to work?” I asked and was surprised and ecstatic when she said she wanted a dog that would NEVER LEAVE HER SIDE. “Come on over,” I said. “T’Ashi is yours. You got the perfect home.” I told her why that was, told her she was eating my own home down stud by stud, nail by nail, every time I left the house. “I’d never leave her,” Linda Rae Starr told me sweetly. “I’ll take her everywhere with me.”

Linda Rae came right over to what was left of my ghetto house. I gave her dog food and dog toys and dog dishes and dog leashes, everything she needed. “Just one thing,” she said right at the end and I felt my heart crash into my guts, figuring she was backing out at the last minute. “What?” I whispered.

“I’d like to change her name, if that’s okay.” My heart soared, my mind spun dizzy little circles of joy. I told her she could name T’Ashi anything she wanted and she clapped her hands, put T’Ashi in her beat up car and the last I saw of the two of them was when they drove away. I did call Linda Rae up a week or two later, just to be sure, just to relieve my guilt at inflicting a hound of hell on her. “Oh no,” she said in response to my concern, all was well in the Starr House. “Cleopatra and I go everywhere together. I thought maybe you wanted to take her back.”

I assured her that was not my intent. “Cleopatra is yours, Linda, forever and ever.” Linda Rae thanked me again and again. And I thanked her. Again and again. And still do…..

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