Kishka Thoughts

Dear Sundown sent me an e and I shared some musings on Kishka with him. Wanted to share it with all of you since I received so many heartfelt well-wishes on Kishka's passing. For those of you who are dog people, you'll understand.

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I can’t remember feeling as bad about anything as I do about this dog. My other dogs have been older when they went. My dogs always live forever. The labs were both 15. Ali the basset is going on 16. Hadassah is a youngster at 7. I miss a couple of my previous dogs a lot. Odd that in a group of 3-4 there is one that really touches you. Saffron was my first basset and he was exceptional. Henry was the one on this last set that got to us all. But Kishka..man oh man, Kish was something special. What a character in such a small body. He was the one responsible for my smile every single day, no lie. Such trouble, that dog. The only totally NOT housebreakable dog I’ve ever had. He just didn’t care. Thank heavens for tile floors and pine sol. He would steal something every day. An equal opportunity thief, he would get people’s socks, underwear, and ball point pens. He had a collection of stuff in my sewing house from old thread spools to…heaven knows what. All carefully accumulated in his doggie bed and destroyed at will. I had to buy bags of small squeakers since he would get a new toy and immediately go for the squeaker, leaving great puffs of polyester filling everywhere. I would replace the squeakers and sew the thing back up on a special machine I got to leave in the house primarily for that purpose. Average life of a store-bought toy…10 minutes. He could find the squeak in anything and spent a lot of time trying to find the squeak in Shmata, the wire hair dachshund, who eventually would grab Kishka on the snoot to say QUIT that. He slept next to me, pretty much velcroed to my leg under the covers. If he got too hot, the tip of a nose would poke out for fresh air. In the morning I’d uncover him and he was always upside down with a tail wagging furiously looking at me with one black marble of an eye. Soft as velvet and totally kissable. He would gobble his breakfast and spend the rest of the morning trying to steal breakfast from the other dogs, particularly poor Ali who is very old and very blind. He was the alpha of the house, but a big chicken at heart. And he never EVER missed an episode of House.

Funny..Hadassah the red and white basset is my comfort dog. She is the one I talk to and stick my face in her fur and sniff doggy smell and things seem ok. Shmata is a wiry bag of needs who looks at me with such love I think she may explode. Ali proves every day, as old and blind and hard of hearing as she is, that loyalty means something as she follows me like a hovercraft from room to room. But Kishka? Kishka was my sunshine.

I don't even know how to look for another Kishka. Where do you look for sunshine?

m