Scrappy
I woke up the morning of tuesday August 15th, 2006 at 6:45am, and after looking around for a minute, realized that Scrappy wasn't on his dog bed. As I had an 9am meeting that day, I went upstairs to find him, and discovered him on his side, having passed away probably in the early morning hours. He lived to be twelve years old, and his death was a great surprise and shock to us. Although he hadn't been eating well, and was on some medication, we never suspected that anything was seriously wrong with him. He had been acting fairly normally and was as animated as ever especially when any "people" food was involved. He'd been up to all his usual tricks, jumping on the couch, and trying to steal things off Niamh's plate whenever she might put it down for a minute. We decided to have a laboratory do a post mortem exam, and later that day, they called to inform us that Scrappy had a number of cancerous growths on his liver and pancreas. One of them had ruptured, and according to the lab, although it was a sudden upredictable event, it nevertheless was inevitable. They assured us that there was nothing we or they could have done, and that he wouldn't have suffered much.
We bought Scrappy from a Pomeranian breeder located in Riverside county, which is east of Los Angeles. We'd recently moved to an apartment in West Hollywood, and wanted a companion to keep Gizmo company during the days while we were at work. Tracy had spoken to a breeder over the phone and negotiated a deal for a Pomeranian puppy who they hadn't been able to sell and was now too big. My recollection is that he was already five or six months old, but perhaps a bit younger. It was a friday after work, and we jumped into Tracy's old VW rabbit, and headed out on what would turn out to be a two hour soujourn which included our getting lost, driving up and down lightless suburban streets, and giving serious consideration to turning around and heading home. At the end of a dead end street, I finally pullled the car over and got out. The address seemed to be in the vacinity of the one we were searching for, but we were expecting a ranch or warehouse rather than the rows of tract houses. We couldn't find a street number. Then I picked up the faint sound of dogs yapping. I followed it to the garage of a house and rang the doorbell. An elderly woman answered the door holding a tiny white pom in her hands. Continue reading "Scrappy"