Unconditional Loving
Three and half years ago my daughter called me at work to tell me she had found the most perfect little baby Chihuahua in a new pet store at the mall. You see, I often told my daughter Jacki stories about my childhood dog named Cookie. Cookie was a little white Chihuahua with brown spots who was the love of my family's life. She was a babysitter, a best friend, a loving companion to us all. My mom worked at the local hospital as a nurse and befriended another nurse who happened to breed Chihuahua's as a hobby. I was six years old when my mother picked me up from school early one day and took me to her friend's house to pick out a new puppy. My mother told me I could choose from any of the puppies and I could name the puppy any name I wanted. I remember how easy it was to select and to name Cookie. I picked her because she was so smart, she was like a little miniature sheep dog, herding and corralling her brothers and sisters together into their pen and then pulling the string on the door to shut them in. Once captured, she would promptly pull the string open, release her siblings and then start the process of containing them all over again. It was like a game to her. I sat and watched in amazement as she performed this trick over and over again. I knew she was the one.
I named her Cookie because at 6 years old, cookies were my favorite thing in the world, and so became a little white spotted Chihuahua named Cookie to each and every one of us, throughout all of our lifetimes. She would never be forgotten, and we would often reminisce about things she did at family gatherings for decades to come. She seemed to know the youngest, most vulnerable child in the family needed her for nap times and for putting to bed at night. She would follow into bed the youngest child and stay until they fell asleep, then leave the room to go off to her own little bed or be with the rest of the family. She knew her job was to ease that child into sleep, and she happily obliged. She loved my mother because my mom often fed her chicken from our plates and my mother swore to us Cookie would call out to her "mama" whenever chicken was for dinner. Cookie knew when we came home from school and would sit patiently on the front lawn waiting for our arrival at the same time every day.
When I became a teenager, Cookie was a very old dog but still so full of life. She loved life. When I first got my license, I drove Cookie in my old Ford Galaxy 500 car to Malibu beach. I would buy her an ice cream cone and sit on the beach with her. I will never forget how she sat perfectly still in the warm sand, taking in the scenery. She sat silently absorbing the warm summer breeze, while her eyes moved in a slow poetic fashion , meticulously scanning the hemisphere. She seemed to be aware that her days on this planet were numbered and she just wanted to enjoy the scenery one last time for as long as she could. It was like witnessing a person captivated by a beautiful sunset, only it wasn't a person that was captivated, it was a tiny Chihuahua. My mother told me years later that she had demonstrated the same behavior with her many times before she passed on. Cookie had an old soul.
And so I told my daughter Jacki the many Cookie stories of my childhood…so apparently my daughter Jacki was on a mission to find a Cookie of her own. She called me at work to come meet her at the pet store, that I must see this little Chihuahua puppy that she knew would be a Cookie dog. The next day was Father's day, the first Father's day of my life I no longer had my father. Just months before, my dad had passed away and I knew it would be a hard day for me.
There is something about a death in the family, especially if it is a parent, that makes us reminisce for yesterday. We become flooded with memories both good and bad. We remember family pets, holidays, birthdays, days when we were all together through the good and the bad times. Little Cookie was a part of this family. I missed my Dad and I missed my Cookie, so after having a father's day dinner at a restaurant, my sister, Jacki, and I went to take a look at the tiny Chihuahua in the pet store window.
She was adorable, she was just one and a half pounds, she was brown with white spots, and had ears bigger than her body. She had a little feisty look on her face that I should have recognized as a warning and she had a little runny nose that really should have been a red flag, and she had a price tag that could have taken me to Bermuda and back two times, instead I seemed destined to be lost in the Bermuda Triangle, but I was determined to have her anyway. I didn't even have the credit or cash to buy her, but I had to have her. There was no rationale to it, no logic, no sense at all…yet I had to take her out of that pet shop that Father's day. My sister loaned me the money to buy her. We bought her or should I say financed her for $3500.00!
When we brought her home, within hours, it was clear she was not healthy. She had a fever, she was trembling, coughing. My head told me to bring her back. To demand my sister's money back and to walk away, but my heart told me something different. My heart told me that I could not walk out on her. If I brought her back, she might not be cared for properly..or worse, she might be put to sleep. I remember looking at her thinking that I had to go the distance and that she was mine, and so with that one thought, at that very moment in time, she became all mine.
