Our Dog Sparky

I had a dog once. Sparky. When we got him, we asked our grandmother "Nana", who was the matriarch of the household, to name him. She wanted to name him after Agador Spartacus, the flamboyant butler from the movie "The Birdcage" with Nathan Lane, (the one that follows two gay men as their straight son comes home engaged and they prepare to meet the fianceé's family. Yeah.) So, as a compromise, we officially "named" him Agador Spartacus, but we all just called him Sparky. (I sometimes even called him Sparkle, because he really could be quite flamboyant much like his namesake.)

There was always something a little... well, off about Sparky. My house is configured in a way that you can loop through the kitchen, family room, laundry room, and sunroom endlessly if you wanted. Sparky wanted all the time, but especially after bathtime. For some reason, soap was Sparky's personal crack, and once clean, toweled off, and placed on the floor, he would run through the loop over and over and over again. I guess he thought it was fun. I would be watching tv, and every 30 seconds Spark would tear through the room, skid or crash into the couch, and then fling himself through the laundry room/sunroom, only to do it all over again. One time he did this over 20 loops. For a little dog, that was a big run. Then he would call it a day and pass out in the laundry basket. It was a tough life.

There was the fact that Sparky, while only 8 pounds (that was mostly hair anyway) was able to jump extraordinarily high. They say that grasshoppers can catapult themselves to 20 times their own height. Sparky was kind of like this, but in furry maltese form. He was pushing a foot tall (if that) and sometimes when we came home we'd find him on our counter. Our counter that is 5x as tall as he is. Of course, after he jumped up, he was afraid to get down, so he'd be whimpering by the time we got home. He would look at us all with what I definitely felt was an accusatory stare, as if his own bizarre habits were somehow our fault.

I've heard other dogs casually wander the house or nap. I'm sure some of our dogs did too, but since it's been years since we've actually owned a dog. All I can remember is that Sparky would sometimes get stuck in the Lazy Susan or locked in a cabinet. Then you'd realize that the house had been too quiet, and that you hadn't seen the little white dog in a while. If you paused in the kitchen, you would inevitably hear his little whimper coming from somewhere in the cabinetry. The Lazy susan was the most impressive, I think. It puzzles me to this day how he did this.

Sparky ruined my family from ever being a simple happy pet-owning family. My mother is so afraid that another dog will be like Sparky that we haven't even owned so much as a hamster in over a decade. There was this incident with a bat last week in my parents room, and while that was exciting, that was the closest thing I've had to a pet in a long time. And since my sister tried to beat the bat with a dust mop, maybe we shouldn't try to get pets any time soon. (Bad karma?)

We did have some nice dogs in my childhood. There was a pair of Greyhounds when I was growing up at our first house. Right across the street was a big field where we used to play, and Thumper, one of the greyhounds and a retired racetrack dog, would run the length of the field and back, circling Rachel and me a few times, and then run the whole field again. Since we don't have a field at our new house, I suppose life would be a little unfair to the greyhounds, but I'm sure we could make do. They were good dogs. There was also Mickey, our black greyhound, who weighed 40 pounds but thought he was no bigger than a teacup (and just as cute). On more than one occassion I would woke up not being able to breathe only to find Mickey would be lying across my chest, his eyes saying "love me." When he wasn't constricting you air flow, though, his unending adoration was wonderful. Sparky the crackdog seems to have erased all these happy pet memories from our lives.

In 9th grade I was sitting in English class, checking my email (a usual facet of my english class). My mom had been issuing vague threats that Sparky would be shipped away for months, and we all- my dad, my twin, and I- took it as an affectionate jab at our special puppy. My mom would complain about the lap running through the house, the fact that sometimes the toilet paper off the roll would wind up trailing through the room with puppy-teeth marks ripped through it (he was framed.) and other such trivialities. He may have been weird, but he was ours.

No one took my mom's threats seriously. So the shock of reading her email that she casually sent out informing Rachel and me that she had given the dog away to some "nice people" who had stopped by. She sent me an email. They lived in "Indianna" and owned a "farm" where he could "run free." It's not as if Sparky's little legs could really take him much farther than a few laps around the house loop, why did he need a farm? Who were these people? And she did told us through email. To this day, we have yet to fully forgive her. (Or at least I have.)

My best friend Shelley questions the whole transaction. She wonders who these "people" were. How did some people randomly happen to stop by our house that one time? Why did my mom invite them in? Why did Sparky need a farm to run around on, if he couldn't successfully walk down the street?

Shelley thinks my mom put Sparky down, the "farm" being a euphemism for that big puppy palace in the sky. I tell her again and again about the post cards we used to receive from these people at Christmastime, where "Sparky" would write and tell us how happy he was. As I was 14 at the time of these postcards. Talk about throwing the added salt on the wound: I was already decently upset that I didn't have a dog anymore, but now I was getting letters from people pretending to be my dog and telling me what a good time he was having. What was I supposed to be, happy? Amazed at the clarity of his handwriting? I'm sure the postcards were well-intentioned, but I hate them anyway (on principle). Besides, I am fairly confident that it is against the law to put down perfectly healthy pets. But what if Shelley is right, and my mom did put Sparky down? What if she has been sending postcards from "Sparky" from the (imaginary?) couple with the farm? That's much, much worse.

It's been years since Sparky's sudden departure. But sometimes I can almost hear his whimper as I come home, echoing through the Lazy Susan as I walk through the kitchen...