Tres Bien Amie

Pardon my quite possibly butchered French, but today I must use the language to celebrate the birthday of Amie (French for friend), my childhood beloved mutt (alas, no digital images; you'll just have to imagine the craziest dog you'll ever not meet). Amie was born the runt of the litter 36 years ago today, which in dog years means she is quite long dead. In sheer pre-PC little girl innocence, one of the girls into whose family Amie was born named her Little Black, after her right front paw, which unlike her three other white ones, was black, like her coat. The mythology is that the same little girl also accidentally dropped the little puppy down the stairs once; I certainly hope that is true because it would go a long way in explaining just how Amie (my sister, who received the puppy on her 14th birthday as a gift from my aunt, much to the chagrin of her sister, my mother, named Amie Amie) became one of the most paranoid and goofy dogs of all time.

The little pooch could bark up a storm, but never out of anger or a sense of protecting the family manse; her bark was omnipresent, her bite non-existent. No, Amie barked only out of her own fear. Except when she was too scared to bark and then she would whimper and quiver as if Noah himself had just denied her passage onto the Ark. You'd have thought the end of the world was nigh whenever we had to force Amie to get in the car and go for a ride. In her later years, as she developed gray hair and a beard (I'm telling you, as lovable as she was, Amie was a basket case), and her primary care fell to another runt of the litter--yours truly--I would be awakened at night by the whimpers emanating from Amie as she suffered through some kind of nightmare, her legs whirling dervishly as she slept. I'd have to call her name out several times to wake her so I could get back to sleep. Of course, the nights she slept soundly were the nights she'd jump up onto my bed and find the most comfortable spot (after about ten minutes of fidgeting) for her to fall asleep--usually right on my knees, which in turn caused me to have to somewhat violently stir her when I needed to roll over in the middle of the night. Although it was dark, I can still see the look poor put-upon, paranoid Amie would give me when I had to wake and evict her from pitching her tent on my knees, a look that said, et tu?

She loved to fetch a tennis ball, though, and in her younger days even loved the indoor variety where we'd set up some couch cushions in the hallway for hurdles and she'd fearlessly hop them chasing down the ball. Outside of such fetching or baking her black coat in any available patch of sunlight or licking the remnants of my father's ice cream dish, Amie didn't do much else except sleep and get scared.

In addition to celebrating her birthday, I always think about Amie this time of year, like today when the snow continues to melt rapidly. One of my least cherished boyhood chores would be to take a stick and an old red children's snow shovel we had and traverse the grounds on a day like today and de-manure the lawn. One would think dog crap would be a little quicker in bio-degrading, but no. I chalked it up to Lent and looked forward to even sunnier, warmer days when I would be throwing or sandwedging old tennis balls off into the distance and watching Amie scamper after them. Only in a kennel of rabid curs would Amie ever sniff Best In Show, but she was my only boyhood dog, and I wouldn't trade her for all the pure-bred labs in the world.

Happy Birthday, Amie, you paranoid pooch.