The Goodest Boy
On March 21, 2009, my sister and Andy and I did something crazy and drove up to Maine to pick up two Golden Retriever puppies who were suddenly in need of a home. We took the boy with the big white blaze on his chest, and they took the boy who was constantly interested in interacting with people.
That need to interact and play with people never left him, and to be around Ojo was to have a dog staring at you and just wishing you’d talk to him, play with him, or scratch him behind the ears. He was so desperate for attention, especially at first, that they had to teach him to go and settle instead of going around the room and staring at people.
Though it meant getting Jax right on the heels of losing Gus, it also meant that my sister’s family had our dog’s brother, meaning we got to talk about their milestones when we were apart and got a chance to see them play when they were together.
Jax was always too intense about toys, and sometimes he’d yell at Ojo for taking them, looking at them, or just being in the general vicinity of them.
Sometimes we got to dogsit Ojo for a few days or a week when my sister’s family went on vacation, and we enjoyed taking him to our favorite hikes and haunts. In fact, those three-dog days may have been the root of how we ended up with three dogs full time.
Ojo was born a month before our nephew, and they got him a little after our niece’s 5th birthday. I worried a little less about all of them growing up in this sometimes cruel world, knowing that a boy and a girl had a good dog—the goodest—to go home to, and that a good dog had a boy and a girl to wait for and dream about until they came home.
But like all things that are too good for this world, Ojo had to go. Bone cancer appeared in his upper jaw, and they bought him the time they could. And then, there was no time left to be bought.
“But the wild things cried, ‘Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!’”
But he couldn’t stay, so they let him go, the goodest boy. Sleep soft, you truehearted prince.