digger, part one

It occurred to me that we have no digital pictures of our first dachshund, Digger. I met Digger when he was already an old man, gray faced but still full of life despite the tiny ridge of spine that was already starting to make itself more prominent. He was very spy for his age, though I would not realize this til Kep and Padua reached their own less robust senior years. The old man that Digger was, I hope Baxter will be.

Little DigDog was my first introduction to doxies. I wasn't sure what to make of him, being so low to the ground. He was hard to pet, I remember thinking at first. But nevertheless he was a sweet dog and there was something so easygoing and familiar about his owner that I was sure I would be seeing him again. Digger. And his owner. Who is now Baxter's dad.

As Digger's owner and I started building a relationship, Digger tagged along on our journeys. We would go for walks, with Digger happily trundling about despite the fact that he would misjudge where the curbs were because of cataracts in his eyes, and he would end up jumping not once but twice to get up on the curb, the first time way in advance of the curb so all he did really was just jump for the sake of jumping, not that that was at all what he wanted to do. But Digger was a happy go lucky kind of fella and he took his double jump curb hopping in stride. Just like he did sleeping so hard that his little pink tongue would inevitably peek out of his mouth and he'd eventually have to wake up to remoisten things.

When we journeyed to places where we couldn't bring Digger, and friends couldn't drop in at the townhouse to check on him, we would deposit Digger at the kennel. Being small and older, Digger would be kept in a quiet, small space in the cat section, a humiliation we never really got to see in person though we imagine he ultimately handled himself well. Digger always seemed to have lost weight when we picked him up at the kennel, and he was of course, quite standoffish on the ride home, choosing to stick his nose near the car's floor vent rather than tell us about his stay. When we mentioned on a subsequent visit to the kennel about Digger's weight loss, the kindly folks switched him to canned food and suddenly things changed from picking up a svelte doxie to a picking up a newly fattened piglet. Digger became very happy about the notion of going to the kennel once canned food came into the picture.

There is more to Digger's story, but I'll save it for another day, when I've finally gotten around to scanning some of our favorite images of our first little red. Today, the best I've got is to show you is this, a dusty crafty retro rewind from 1996, when I first messed with polymer clay and first attempted to immortalize our first doxie, white paws and all.



Of course no day is complete without a bit of Baxter to brighten things up. It is still night as I write this post, with Baxter snuggled by George while he sleeps atop his cozy sheepskin. I didn't mean for these photos to be quite so similar in pose but I see now that they are. Life imitating art, I suppose.