So we were just taking a walk in the neighborhood, Gail and I, those dozen years ago. We were still in our own block—with its gentle slope, its tree-shrouded sidewalks, its feel of innocence and freedom from threat.
Photo Above: Hiking companions Gail Rheinheimer and Cookie pause on the trail.
And then, from within a house just a few doors down sprang a neighbor we barely knew, since she hadn’t lived there long.
“I just can’t,” she wailed. “One baby and another due any day, what was I thinking?! I just can’t!”
She was carrying a small, black, lab-looking puppy. And she was crying.
And Gail’s former ol’ kinda-mean dog Gunnar had died—peacefully and gracefully—a few months earlier.
From above or even beside, the most casual observer would have seen coming what I did not.
“Just hold her a second,” said the distraught neighbor to Gail.
Many coos later, Gail spoke the same words to me.
Being a generally polite person, I took the tiny, excited puppy, pulled lightly at her ears and, while eschewing actual coos, made stupid, sympathetic noises in the direction of the dog.
“Just let her visit for a night,” said the neighbor who had seemed—before brazenly moving in for the kill within two minutes—to be a kind and normal person.
Female heads tilted pleadingly in my direction. It would be up to that would-be observer to inform as to whether it was two heads or three.
These 12 years later, the neighbor has three sons, the eldest of whom is taller than I am, and seems to be very nice to his mom, despite her treacherous tendencies toward neighbors.
And Cookie, the black-with-white-details lab-looking dog who turns out to be mostly Norwegian elk hound with some boxer and pitbull mixed in, is at work, right here next to me in my work-from-home office, on getting in her 20 hours of sleep for the day.
I did not have a dog as a child—the family did have a cat that liked to walk backwards—and thus grew up somewhere between wary and afraid of them, a situation that did not improve well into adulthood, owing to encounters on rural runs with big, loud, protective dogs bounding across a big green space as if to gain enough momentum to jump the fence and have me for lunch.
Then came Gunnar. Generally good, but occasionally unpredictable. And then a series of other dogs owned by our sons. Good dogs all.
And so when the dog from down the block came into our house for the sleepover, I was susceptible, as of course I am to the wishes of her owner, whose affection for dogs is a reflection of the dogs’ own loyalty and unconditional love.
In fact, I named the dog. She came to us with the name Pinot. Elegant, heard in one manner, but also, in those days of training, a sort of admonition when heard another way.
“Cookie”—diminution of “Oreo Cookie” owing to her coloring (ain’t I clever)—was immediately embraced as the name by Gail, with the imaginary observer again called upon to judge whether the motivation was for the name itself or for immediate ammo—”you named her, Kurt”—in the early skirmishes of the adoption battle.
Cookie—85-pound hater of squirrels and fervent lover of grandchildren and their parents—has been many things to us over the years, not least of which is a food-pesky hiking companion on non-summer hikes, as well as a mammoth drainer of bank accounts owing to a series of leg operations on par with those of NFL quarterbacks Joe Theisman and Alex Smith.
She has had the good taste and discernment not to seek to visit down the block.
The story above appears in our November / December 2020 issue.
