Bespotted by Linda Gray Sexton

Author:Linda Gray Sexton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619024014
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2018-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

PART V

new beginnings

{IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE}

Breeze, a.k.a. GCH SunnyOaks Saint Florian Literati’s Compass Rose

thirteen

OVER TIME, PAT’S DEATH wasn’t quite so wrenching. Brad had helped. Gulliver had helped. By 2007, I was deep into work on what had turned out to be a book after all.

My days had changed radically. I was no longer living in the land of the bed or on the land of the couch—but was up on my feet again. Once again, I was back to writing about family. I began to accept that this might always be so.

I had reduced my sessions with my psychiatrist to once a week and took my medications with determined exactitude. I depended less on Gulliver for constant companionship to counter depression and more on his company just to spend my days writing, or reading a book, with him curled at my feet, rather than cuddling me on the sheets. Brad’s nurturing had taken hold, and I no longer dreaded waking. Every week I improved, and even the boys were encouraged, and told me so.

Yet I worried that Gulliver had grown too isolated and wondered if that might be the reason he was so aggressive with other dogs. We couldn’t exactly take him to the dog park, and even with Dawn’s dogs, he looked as if he was spoiling for a fight. So we enrolled him in a class at Planet Pooch called “Grumpy Puppy,” even though he was a senior citizen, and we practiced stuffing him full of cheese every time he made eye contact with another dog and didn’t growl. No big surprise that he loved going to that class, but if you didn’t have the cheese in your hand, he still looked as if he was going to kill the dog walking toward him.

I was also ready to have a second dog again, and Brad was quite eager for one he could call his own, just as I always called Gulliver my own, despite how much and how often we shared him. I missed the world of having a dog in the show ring, and though sailing was still a large part of our lives, I wanted more than just the wind in my hair every weekend.

We didn’t know if it would be too risky to bring another dog into our home, but we thought we would at least give it a try. It would have to be a female, and a puppy, for obvious reasons. And in this way, when Gulliver was eleven, Breeze came to live with us.

It took us quite a while to find her. We had been looking for a couple of years when old friends from the show world had a new litter. Ginger and Jack were the mom and pop, Jack being Ashley’s old rival and Gulliver’s grandfather—in a twist typical of modern dog genetics, it was ironic that we might now take a puppy from a litter Jack had sired. He was used so frequently in breeding programs that he had become a legendary force, even though he had died several years before.

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