My first dog was named Slipper. 

My dad had hunting dogs. Hounds, mostly, and utilitarian in his eyes.  

Slipper was a silver slip of a poodle, special, and all my own. I loved her with my whole heart. However, I was a kid and didn’t know the first thing about caring for a dog. The walking, the feeding, the cleaning-up after. 

The commitment. 

No one bothered to teach me how to care for her properly or thought to give me a chance. 

It was the 1970’s and I rode my banana seat bike to the public pool every day, ate Lik-m-aid candy out of a sweaty paper envelope, and waited for Friday nights to watch The Brady Bunch. Peter had the best hair. 

I don’t remember taking her for a walk, ever. My parents didn’t either. 

Slipper was an inside dog while our hounds lived outside in chain linked kennels. When we were away, my mom and dad left her alone locked in the bathroom. In protest she chewed up the turquoise and gold checkerboard floor. When we left her in the screened front porch, she ate the cushion from a wicker arm chair. 

She was bored and became destructive. My mother and father were angry. I wanted to help and protect her, but I didn’t know what to do. 

I came home one day, and Slipper was gone. My parents had given away my dog. No warning or explanation. She was everything to me. I was destroyed. 

I didn’t get to say goodbye. My first heartbreak, age seven. 

It was blind and unfair. A betrayal. 

My parents communicated by not communicating and ruled by passive authority. Their united front, in reality, was father-knows-best. No questions and quit your whining. It was a parenting model that made me scared.

Slipper went to live with a kind man who adored her, living the life she deserved.  

I visited her sometimes. When she saw me, she raced around with excitement, jumping and scratching at my skinny legs wanting me to pick her up. I so desperately wanted to stay with her, but I couldn’t, and it made my tummy sick. I sat on the floor and played with her in the man’s dim house, sunshine pushing through empty lace curtains dotting the flat looped carpet below. 

The man was calm and carried himself with respect, never giving away the burden of his past. In 1944, the man and his family fled Slovakia before the defeat of the German forces by the Soviet Red Army in WWII. He and his family lived under communist occupation for a time. 

The man was a Korean war era veteran. Military honors hung on the wall. A framed photo of a decorated soldier sat front and center on the hutch.  Pictured was his brother, killed in combat in Vietnam. 

The house was quiet. Tired. 

Aside from my dog.  

She was the delight in the man’s eye. The joy in the man’s house. 

He needed her, and she needed him. 

I could see she was happy. But it couldn’t mend my little kid heart.