There's nothing that can bring tears to many people's eyes faster than losing a dog and listening to the soundtrack from Willie Morris' My Dog Skip.
We lost our Buffie three months ago Monday, and the vacancy left in our hearts seems to be just as large as it was that Sunday aftertoon we drove back from the emergency clinic in Flowood minus our 13 1/2-year-old cocker spaniel.
Although Morris hailed from Yazoo City, I never had cause to be around him all that much. All I knew about him was what I read in magazines and newspapers, and what I heard folks saying.
All that changed, though, when he published My Dog Skip. It was during a vacation in the mountains of North Carolina where I read what I now consider the best book ever written. Hands down, my favorite.
In the book's acclaim page, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass. wrote, “This is the kind of book that makes readers smile.” Smile? Yes, but this reader did a whole lot more tearing-up than smiling.
This past Sunday, for lack of a better thing to do I suppose, I Googled “My Dog Skip” and listened to the soundtrack. No sooner had the music begun, but the tears began to flow.
Only dog people can understand the emotions involved in losing a pet.
“They had buried him under our elm tree, they said—yet this was not totally true,” Morris wrote of Skip in the book's final paragraph. “For he really lay buried in my heart.”
Those aren't the words of just a writer. They are words of one who loved harder than most people can ever love.
Skip was a talented dog, to say the least. I firmly believe that Morris wouldn't exaggerate. Well, not much any way.
Skip could shake hands, communicate as well as an Oxford University-trained scholar, which Morris was, drive a car, lick Morris awake every morning, hunt, play football, open packages and, no doubt, do simple math. The old saying, “Like master, like dog” was true when it comes to Skip's intelligence.
Morris was blessed with a superior intellect, and Skip, no less the same. As dogs go, they are able to peer into the souls of their masters and search for their masters' needs humans couldn't possibly imagine. Then, they make it their lifelong aim to satisfy those needs, regardless of whatever personal sacrifices they may be called upon to make.
That's the difference between dogs and humans. Life is all about their masters and precious little about themselves.
Buffie wasn't of the elevated mental prowess as was Skip. Rather like her master, you might say. Just a plain cocker spaniel who, like me, was given to excessive enjoyment at the dinner table.
As with Skip, she loved to run and sniff around in cemeteries. She couldn't drive, but she loved to ride with her head stuck out my truck window even though veterinarians all said it wasn't good for her eyes. Most afternoons around dusk she would stand in the garage by the truck and tell me to crank it up and go for a ride which, of course, I did.
Buffie caused quite a stir for some of the town's more proper citizens as she rode either in the front passenger seat or in my lap while guests, including my wife, rode in the back seat. When it came to truck riding, she was the queen who would not acquiesce to anyone. As she sat in my lap and had her head stuck as far out the window as I would allow, she would occasionally look back at me and her eyes would say, “Thank you for a wonderful life. I love you so much.”
She had the same look in her eyes as she took her final ride in my truck to the emergency vet clinic. I wanted to somehow assure her that I loved her just as much, so I hugged her and tried not to cry, but failed miserably.
We decided to have her cremated and her ashes now sit in the bookcase in our den. Yet that is not totally true. For she really lay buried in my heart.
