Beagles, tabbies and calicos

For the second month in a row, the Garden and Gun magazine contained an article about dogs. Last month, the magazine included an article about all of the dogs a young man had had over the years beginning with the first one he remembered from childhood, to his present canines.

This month, Rick Bragg wrote about his wife's dog, a black lab, with dubious pedigree. The moral of this article was that you don't question your wife's dog and ultimately he or she will grow on you.

Both articles got me thinking about the dogs I have had over the years. I expanded my thoughts to include the dogs my family had had over the years. A small confession here, we actually had more cats than dogs in my family when I was growing up. That might bother some of my in-laws. Cindy's family are real dog people. The anthropomorphising kind. The kind that wonders incessantly at the magic that a dog can create, sometimes at the expense of the humans.

Meanwhile, the first pets we had when I was a child were Buttons, the beagle, and Percy, the orange tabby cat. Both animals suffered from personality quirks which led to their untimely demise.

Buttons, as I said, was a beagle. Like all beagles, Buttons loved to roam. As a result, one morning Buttons found an avenue of escape. That morning, Buttons made his way into the outside world and found some young women riding horses on the main road outside our subdivision. Following behind the young women on horseback proved to be too tempting, and Buttons lost awareness of his surroundings to the point where a car hit him and sent him on to the fields of Elysium. The body of Buttons was laid to rest in the back corner of our yard.

Percy was an orange tabby, and I could probably lay claim to being his owner. Percy was a good cat, and loved to sit in my lap while I petted him and watched cartoons on the television. Unfortunately, Percy was oddly drawn to the sound of the garage door closing on our house. Whenever, the garage door was being closed, Percy had to run out from where ever he was and run under the garage door to see who was closing it and why.

Everybody knew that Percy liked to chase the falling of the garage door and the adults knew that when closing the garage door, you closed it to about a foot from the garage floor, allowing Percy to run under safely, then closed it the rest of the way. Unfortunately, Frank and his next-door buddy in crime, didn't consider this one afternoon, when the allure of the nylon rope which operated the garage door became so great that they just had to lay hand to rope and operate the mechanism.

As the two young boys began to pull on the rope, Percy jumped from my lap in the den and ran out the side door into the garage to investigate. As the combined power of the two boys began to work the door downward toward the concrete, Percy ran to stick his neck out and under the falling door. Unfortunately, only his neck found passage, and Percy breathed his last, with head on one side of the door and the rest of his body on the other.

To assuage the concerns of those who might opine that only the partially-formed brain of two young boys could create such mayhem and violence, consider that when I was a teenager, my family had a Siamese cat named Sam. Sam loved nothing more than laying out in the sun on the driveway behind the cars. Whenever someone wished to leave in a car from our driveway, the ignition would be started, the car placed in reverse, and the car would be placed in motion before Sam thought it was a good idea to vacate the driveway for the safety of the adjoining grass.

When Sam was young, this practice was never a problem. He was lithe and lean enough to wait until the last moment before he jumped out of the way of the vehicle. Unfortunately, Sam got older and his ability to escape the on-coming car was diminished.

One Sunday afternoon, I was sitting in the living room of my apartment at Washington and Lee, probably watching football, since that was about the only programming that would draw our attention on a Sunday afternoon. At any rate, I was watching television when the telephone rang. It was my mother. Her voice was very calm and low-keyed. I said hello and she told me, "I ran over Sam."

There was a pause as the thought of Sam's passing grasped my consciousness. Finally, I recovered my thoughts and said, "Is he dead?"

My mother responded, "No, I ran him over."

I couldn't quite figure out the response, so I asked again, "Is he dead?"

There was a slight bluster in her voice when she responded, "Oh yes, he's dead."

With that query answered, I tried to comfort my mother and let her know that Sam was an old cat, which he was, and that it was really only a matter of time before something like this happened, which was also true. I just offer this story to let you know that it isn't just young boys up to no good who perform such dastardly acts.

At any rate, after Percy died, he was replaced by a solid white, albino cat, named Holly. Holly was a Christmas present and lived with us, both in Indianapolis and Huntsville. Holly was a large white cat, and like most albino cats, was deaf. This fit in well with my family since my grandmother was deaf and there has never been a whole lot of listening done in my family anyway.

At the same time, my dad decided that we should have another beagle, so he bought us our second beagle, Baynham's hi-jinx, or Jinks for short. Jinks was a good-looking male beagle with a short pedigree. My dad then came up with the idea to get a well-pedigreed female beagle and breed good-looking, well-bred beagles. So that is where Baynham's Roxanne (or "Roxie") came into the picture.

Unfortunately, as the old Burns poem says, "The best laid plans of Mice and Men, gang aft agley." When Roxie first came into heat, and Jinks found an interesting reason to take notice of the young female inside the pen, Roxie's response to Jinks' ardor was to run into the garage and hide under one of the cars.

Picture this: a young, mostly-white female beagle, hiding herself under the chassis of a grey and white Hillman automobile, whimpering softly and sadly, while this studly, black and tan male, with his chin pressed to concrete, stares lovingly at the female, moaning and singing his song of love to the unwilling female ears. They never got to consumate the intended relationship.

So Roxie left us for safer havens and Jinks followed us to Huntsville, Alabama.

A year or so later, Jinks was staying temporarily with my grandparents in Tennessee. Finally given his freedom, Jinks did what every beagle yearns to do, he roamed the farm, roamed off the farm, and left the farm for other climes.

So we were without beagle companionship for several years.

Meanwhile, we had another cat, Patches, a calico cat, who followed us to Georgia.
Patches, as far as I know, is the only cat for which a dog was named, as our cousin Ed had a dog which he called Patches. I always thought that was pretty odd, but certain proof of the quality of our calico Patches.

Now at this point, you might think that you have heard the end of Jinks. Oddly, not, for several years later, Jinks dragged himself back up on the front porch of my grandparent's house on the farm in Tennessee. He seemed no worse for the wear, a little older, but happy to visit for several weeks, until his stay wore out and he headed back to wherever he had found to find peace and quiet and a little kibble in his bowl.

A clue as to why Jinks left the farm became evident several years later, when another younger beagle, very similar in appearance to Jinks, visited the farmhouse. I know that might sound fanciful, but I saw this young beagle, and he did look strikingly like Jinks.

We always thought that perhaps Jinks had told his son that the farmhouse was a good place to visit.