5 Favorite Memories of Watch

I’ve been avoiding writing about my dog Watch.
Sometimes you feel you shouldn’t talk about the loss of someone you love, even the someone is a dog. But I’d like to share this with you, my readers, because you barely had the chance to know him. And the time that our family had with him was a gift.
Here are my five favorite memories of Watch.


His first 24 hours with us  My husband Mike and son Wyatt found Watch abandoned on a back road nine years ago. Wyatt named the puppy after the Alden children's pet in The Boxcar Children stories. We fed Watch, bathed him, removed no fewer than three dozen ticks, and flea-dipped him. He slept for most of the first three days. It only took one "Watch, NO!" for him to learn that he was to go outside, not in the living room, for bathroom breaks. And that dining room tables aren’t for jumping up on.


Tooting his own horn Watch found an old bicycle horn on the ground, picked it up in his mouth and ran around the yard with it, biting down the bulb, honking as he ran. That was one of the reasons he earned…


The name “Doofus” Watch is the only dog I know who came to two different names: “Watch” and “Doofus.”


Clunking heads We have a small house, so two people can often see the same thing when standing at the front door and the back patio door. One day, with Watch at the patio door and Tipper at the front door, both saw the same squirrel. We let them out. They converged. And we could hear the "clunk" of heads from inside the house.


His love of the chain saw Watch loved to go with Mike on his jaunts to the woods to cut firewood. Hunting dogs get excited when their master picks up his shotgun. Watch would get excited when Mike picked up his chain saw. One Sunday afternoon Watch was asleep on the floor as I was listening to A Prairie Home Companion. Sound effects guru Tom Keith imitated a chain saw, and the sound was so authentic Watch jerked his head up, rarin' to go to the woods.

Though he tries my patience at times, I love Jerry. And loving a new dog doesn’t negate the existence of the old one. As the mother of one child, I know what women with several children mean when they say “I love all my children equally.”