Read Online The Dog With the Old Soul by Jennifer Basye Sander - Free Book Online

deprivation as a young adult, my wife and I rescuing first three shepherd-mix dogs and learning that I could deal with most low-to moderate-shedding dogs. When it came time to choose a family dog, I wasn’t sure which breed would work best. We were a family of four with a three-bedroom, detached Federal, and no one was home during school hours. We were two working parents and two pre-hormonal boys. The ideal candidate would be:
    Short-haired;
    Low maintenance;
    Agreeable, but not overly needy;
    Long-lived enough to stick around, God willing, at least until the boys finished high school and, preferably, college;
    Small enough to (a) manage, um, input and output efficiently enough to foist that and other chores off on the boys, and (b) be unable to do much physical damage above baseboard level when left alone;
    And large enough to fend off childhood diseases and to be willing to stand his/her own ground with the boys, as required.
    Those considerations, along with Geri’s imprinted girl-hood bias, led us to a litter of mini doxie pups who, it was mutually assumed, were somewhere on the other side of the AKC tracks—hence, the asking price and lack of complications. Frank was the only one not fighting, frisking and falling all over his outsize feet in that six-week-old way. He sat apart, motionless, and never took his eyes off us. He embarrassed and intrigued us into taking him home.
    Okay…about the name. I was against a precious, cutesy name for a small dog. My solution was a double entendre, played off the more familiar “wiener” or “weenie” dog, to wit, “Frank.” Geri agreed, but my self-satisfaction was short-lived. Not only did I have to explain its meaning, anyway, but friends familiar with my story would invariably ask, with Oedipal gravity, “Why did you name your dog after your father?”
    Frank’s childhood was a little rocky, attributably mostly to human error—mine. To train him, I combined two crude concepts, “papers” and “outside,” and spread newspapers both on the kitchen floor and outside the entrances. Unable to catch him with an urge, I created “sessions.” Reaching what I thought to be a respectable interval, I’d take him outside, place him on the papers and wait expectantly. He’d park himself in the middle of the pulp and give me his most tolerant look, as if to say, “Okay, Chief. What’s next?” I would stand there in the cold and wet, knowing my family was watching with amusement through the window.
    Eventually it all worked out, but this was a dog that wanted someone nearby at all times. Dachshunds are renowned for feeling separation anxiety and taking revenge, and if he felt abandoned, he would resort to his untrained puppy ways. We arranged for a pet sitter to look in on him while we went north to Delaware for Christmas break. On our return she sang his praises, took the check and left. It soon became plain that she’d left the door to the basement open, and he’d exploited that loophole; fortunately, the floor was vinyl tile. In the end, he swallowed his pride, to keep the peace, and trained us.
    Frank did us the courtesy of respecting Geri and me as the general governing authority, in that order—mostly because she hoisted him onto our bed one night at his first plaintive puppy plea, which he seized upon as a carte blanche entitlement. The eventual compromise was between our California king and a folded quilt on the floor nearby, which we called “Flap.” He’d ask routinely for the first, but if ordered otherwise, he’d plod glumly away, ears down, as though wading through molasses—followed by a grand and deliberate show of bedding down on the Flap. (Dachshunds are instinctive burrowers, having been bred to hunt badgers, and they like to sleep covered. Before retiring, they find it necessary to fashion a trench in which to recline safely, so they scratch, dig and hump up their spines while imaginary dirt flies out from under their haunches. Robert Benchley