Curly

1966 - Curly and one of my brothers

            She was one of four puppies pulled from the creek.  The water had been low and the puppies were stranded on a small island in the middle. Back along the creek, my Aunt and her family were about to move into a house.  We were just wasting time before everyone got there, and that’s why we were looking down off of the bridge and saw them.

            “Mother, look, there are puppies down there,” we yelled.  “Can we keep them?”

            “We can’t keep them,” she replied and glanced over the railing.  “We’ll get them out of there, though.  We’ll bring them to safety and find them good homes.”

            My older brother was the first to get down there.  He waded into the waist-deep water and one by one, he brought the puppies to us. 

            “How did they get there?” I asked. 

            “I guess someone didn’t want them,” Mother replied.  “That’s okay.  We’ll take care of them now.”
            My three brothers and I stood, each holding a puppy.  We kept asking, “Can we please keep them?”

            “No.  We can’t keep four dogs,” Mother said firmly.  But just as soon as she said it, her face softened and she seemed to have a change of heart.  “I’ll let you keep just one of them.  You decide among yourselves which one you want to keep.  We’ll find homes for the rest of them.”

            We still had to help our Aunt’s family with moving in and unpacking.  We put the puppies in a room to keep them safely out of our way.  We checked on them constantly, as we were anxious to get them home to play with them.  When the time finally came to leave, we each grabbed a puppy. 

            They were so cute.  They all had long black hair with just a little white under the neck.  They all looked alike, and that made it all the harder for us to choose which one we would keep.  Yet, upon closer inspection, one of them stood out.  It was a little female whose black hair was curly.  We all agreed that she was the one to keep and we named her Curly. 

            We found that giving away the other three wasn’t hard at all.  We lived on a farm and every farm could consider a dog to be a good asset.  So we asked around among the neighbors. I always got tickled when I overheard Mother talking to someone about them.

            “What kind of breed are they?” someone would ask.

            “They are mixed.  Maybe a little Collie or a little bit Sheep dog, or maybe a bit of Retriever.”  My mother wasn’t much read up on dog breeds.  Inevitably, she would end the conversation with.  “The dog is a Sooner.  It would sooner be one kind as another.”

            I guess it truly didn’t matter what kind they were because Mother gave them away rather quickly. 

            So that was how it came to be that we kids got our first Sooner dog.  We already loved that dog.  Even Mother expressed love toward our new family member.  The hard sell came with my Daddy.

            “We don’t need that dog here!” he’d say.  “You need to find it a home, too.”
            We had all kinds of livestock on our farm.  One more animal wasn’t going to make that much of a difference.  I wonder sometimes if Curly knew how Daddy felt.  From the start, Curly didn’t want much to do with us kids.  She wanted our Daddy.  He couldn’t go anywhere that she didn’t follow.  If he drove the truck across our property, she would chase behind him.  He often complained about her attentiveness. 

            “I wish that dog would stop following me,” he grumbled.  “You kids need to chain her up somewhere.”

            We knew that Daddy didn’t mean it.  He would never admit that he actually loved the attention Curly was giving him.  It was just in his nature to complain about it. 

            Every summer, we picked and sold blackberries.  We’d go in one direction and Daddy would go in another.  Mother didn’t like any of us going alone.  There was a danger of snakes around blackberries.  She didn’t worry so much about Daddy, since Curly was with him. Heroism is defined as extreme courage and although Curly never had to show any, we all knew that she would never allow any harm to come to Daddy.

            My Daddy married my Mother with a twenty year difference in age.  When I was born, he was 57 and she was 37.  Curly became our dog just before Daddy reached 70 years old.  I wonder to this day if Curly had picked my Daddy as her master because he needed her the most.  It just wasn’t safe for him to go places alone anymore, and Curly made sure that he didn’t.  If he went to the fields to work, she went along and stayed with him the entire time he was out there.  If Daddy helped some of the neighbors out by working on their farms, Curly was there.  She wasn’t about to let Daddy out of her sight. 

            Sometimes we were jealous, because she was meant to be our dog.  Often someone would ask, “Hey, where’s your Daddy?”

            Our reply was always the same.  “He’s off somewhere with Curly.”

            Daddy is gone now and so is Curly.  However, the fond memories of them still linger with me.  I can still see Daddy coming from the field with Curly bounding ahead of him.  I never once saw Daddy pet or praise her.  He always claimed that he never wanted us to have that dog.  Ironically, we never did have that dog.  She was his best friend.  Maybe when they were alone, he scratched her behind the ears a time or two.  I like to think he did.