R.I.P.

This time of year is one of the saddest for me; November 6th marks the death anniversary of my Yellow Labrador Retriever (I hate people who say Golden Labrador, there is no such thing). Anyways, I usually like to commemorate this day by looking through all the photos I have of him, (not many digital photos, mostly prints) and trying to remember most of my life with him.

His name was Simba. It was the summer before 8th grade when my uncle took me to get him, we drove 240 miles to somewhere close to Sacramento to check out a litter of puppies. They were all small, running around awkwardly. I remember seeing this one puppy, who was leaner than the rest, the torso and everything were comparatively small, and he had long legs. His ears and ankles/paws were a darker shade of brown, almost as if he was wearing earmuffs and mittens. He was the most active, which completely won me over.

And so we brought him home. Mom, never really liked dogs, but was at first won over by how adorable he was. In subsequent months, that wore off. He drove everyone CRAZY. Always hyper, always barking/chewing/jumping, the most hyper dog ever. Attention-seeking, annoying, loud, badly behaved, but that didn't stop him from easily being my best friend. He was a TOTAL coward, especially for balloons, they'd scare the crap outta him, and he'd run to his favorite hiding spot, under the covers of MY bed. I'd wake up every night precisely at 2 am for the first 4 months to take him outside to pee, because as a puppy, his bladder wasn't very big...

As he grew, he got to be slightly more obedient, and well behaved. He grew oddly, his torso didn't grow very much but his legs grew alot, and so he was extremely fast. Most of you have seen my backyard, and the big slope. I used to throw tennis balls down the hill, with a slingshot type launcher, and he'd beat the tennis balls down the hill, and wait for it, and then catch it. It was amazing how fast he was. He also was never very smart. EVERY day, I'd come home, let him out of his crate, he'd sprint down the hallway, skid sideways nail's scrabbling on the wooden floor (mom hated that) and then sprint directly for the glass door to the back yard. and EVERY time he'd run smack into the glass door with Looney Toons-ish hilarity. And then he'd bounce back up and stare at the glass door with an oddly indignant expression.

But, as we know, all good things come to an end. We don't exactly have proof of what happened, but it's fairly obvious. My neighbor poured a whole bag of snail repellent all over his garden, and there was a small pile of it that had spilled through the fence. Simba, who chewed on anything he could get his mouth on, ate all of it, and then had to be rushed to the hospital, where he died on the operating table. I wasn't there for any of that, I was actually playing my first concert...


Clearly this has gotten easier to talk about over the years, but I'm still not quite ready to visit his grave yet, maybe I will next year..