Good Bye to Lucky the Dog

My blog was called "Chancelucky". The two border collies in the photo are Chance and Lucky. Lucky is the brown one. I have no idea why the main character in my novel also happens to be named Lucky. When my five year old daughter got Lucky as a puppy, she named the animal for one of the more active puppies in A Hundred and One Dalmatians, her favorite book/movie at the time. Had we waited a few years, the dog would have been called "Hermione" and my blog would have been Chancehermione.blogspot.com.

In any case for the twelve years since, Lucky's been a pretty good dog. Okay, she had a habit of killing chickens and finding ways to sneak out of the yard, but people still always commented that she was very sweet-natured. Dogs don't really smile, but it was easy to inerpret the expression on her face as a smile. A year ago, Lucky suddenly slowed down. I took her to the vets where she got shockingly good, cheerful, and attentive care at a more or less reasonable cost. They did make me pay on the spot, but it felt worth it. It especially felt worth it after Lucky suddenly and seemingly miraculously recovered from lying around and being uanble to eat to return to being bouncy though somewhat slower than she had been as a chicken-chasing young dog.

That same weekend, my wife got a terrible migraine and we had to visit the emergency room. The care at Kaiser that weekend was dreadful to the point where the various errors and delays (the Doctor sent the prescription to the wrong pharmacy) compounded with the fact that the various people who saw my wife there kept asking the same questions as if no one was writing anything down. In any case, I wound up posting about the odd matter that veterinary care in America appeared to be a whole lot better than human medical care. For one thing, the people at the vets actually seemed to care about the patients.

In the last few days, Lucky stopped eating again. She seemed alert, but listless. It got to the point where she couldn't move her hind legs. Quite by coincidence, on one of those days I accidentally deleted my original blog (please blogger help me rescue it!) This time the vet had bad news.

Although she's home right now so we can spend another day or two with her, I'll miss Lucky.

Soon the Lucky in this novel is the only surviving being in my real and imaginary family who answers to that name, I am quite aware of the coincidence of timing. The loss of Chancelucky the blog, the rededication and setting a "hard" goal for the completed draft of the novel, and the imminent passing of Lucky the dog all happened in a forty eight hour period.

I just hope that dog heaven has plenty of fences to dig under, things to bark at, and things like birds that don't feel pain to chase. I remember throwing the frisbee in our backyard with Lucky. For years, no matter which dog got the thing, Lucky was the one who insisted on being the one who returned it to me, though when she did she'd play tug of war with the frisbee. We were lucky to have you as our dog.

I don't know if the dog cares, but I did finish a new opening chapter. Of course, the second chapter is always the hard one, but I suspect Lucky the border collie had and perhaps always will have some mysterious relationship to my writing.