My first dog.


I got Timmy when I worked for a dog breeder. The little guy had problems - cleft palate, bowed front legs, a heart murmur, etc. The other puppies in the litter ganged up on him, so my first job when I was hired was swabbing out this disgusting massive abcess on his butt where they're ripped him open.

What's sad was Tim had the best personality of just about any dog I've ever seen. He just wanted to constantly cuddled and petted. All you had to do was look sidelong at him and his tail would start thumping. The breeder was going to put him down, but I begged her to let me have him instead. It just seemed too cruel, after all the disadvantages nature had given him, to just snuff him out like that.

I didn't name him for the ukelele guy, although that would have been funny. It's because when he was a puppy, he had to wear splints on his front legs. At first he refused to move, but when I put down a dish of food he immediately got up and clomped over to it. I looked at my boss and said, "God bless us, every one!". And the name stuck.

He was a smart little guy, too. He liked to curl up on a beanbag chair while I did office work, and he learned the noises of the various programs closing, at which point he'd jump up and run to the patio door, waiting to go out. He stayed with me in the kennel, too, and once he was big enough not to be picked on, he acted as the "guard dog". Loved letting the little puppies clamber all over him. He even had a distinctive warning bark he would use when he saw someone walking up the driveway (which usually meant trouble, as opposed to a customer coming up in a car), which I called his werewolf bark - if you didn't know he was the sweetest dog in the world, your blood would run cold.

Tim passed away in 1999, when he was two years old. I knew it was coming but I think he had a happy two years. I'm glad I had him while he was here.