I’m coming clean. I got my dog at a puppy mill. But I need you to give me a break because she was born in 2008, which is basically before the internet and I didn’t know about puppy mills. Alex and I were 6 months into marriage, moving our married life to a new city with new jobs and new dreams. We both wanted a dog but Alex wanted a big hunting dog and I wanted a teeny tiny dog that I could fit in my purse. We were at an impasse so we just decided not to get one. We went with my parents and some of their friends to Canton First Monday Trade Days, which is acres and acres of antiques and junk and MLM schemes and tater twisters. We meandered over to a section of Canton called Dog Alley, which definitely hosts a variety of various unsavory animal operations.

We looked down into this box and there was one puppy with a sign that said, “$25”.  We asked the purveyor why the price was so low and the breeder gave us some bullshit about her parentage being mixed the wrong way to be worth anything. She was so docile and sweet. Also, she was adorable. So we brought her home.

We had a backyard, but it was basically for emergencies only because it was just an irregularly shaped scrap of land with ugly landscaping rocks and weeds. Instead, we doted on our girl and took her for regular walks. This led to us meeting Susan, Richard, and their dog Max. They introduced us to Lori and Sabrina with pup Cisco. Soon, the dog owners in the complex gathered at the back of the complex and let our dogs run and play. We gathered more- Rick and Sarah, Diane and Jesse, Jay, Adam. We had dog park almost every evening. We lived in that community for almost 3 years. Those people became our Dallas family and they helped us through those first few years of marriage by giving us a community.

That’s because of Gracie.

We then moved to a duplex and started hosting large events for international students from a local university. We had mustache parties and pumpkin carving parties and Easter egg decorating. Gracie was always there, lurking in the background hoping that someone would drop a scrap of food or that she’d get a chance to tuck into a trashbag. Gracie’s presence soothed students who were living in dorms and missed their animals.

Imagine that you are a dog who has lived a cushy DINK-OG life (dual income no kids- only dog) and then one summer day, your people bring home a 9-year-old kid who is nonstop action all day, every day. Gracie took to the new energy in the house like a champ. She was a playful bestie who was always up to get some energy out.

When The Baby came home 18 months later, we really upended her world. There was this new squirmy potato hooked up to several machines-ones that beeped and oxygen tubing all over the house that tripped us. She quickly learned that the little potato had quite a strong grasp so she stayed out of reach, but she was always there to hoover up whatever he left on the floor after eating.

She was usually a very good dog, but she had some quirks. She tore up miniblinds at several homes trying to get to the UPS man. She ate the carpet off our bottom stair at the apartment. Food kept going missing from our countertop so I set up a laptop camera and caught her using the bar stools to hop up on the bar and eat a veritable buffet of leftovers.

My favorite story is from the duplex. She was tearing up carpet again (only when we were gone) so we kept her in our bedroom when we were gone. (We had tried crate training when she was a puppy but she shat in the kennel constantly and the incessant baths and cleaning the kennel got to be too much so we gave up.) I came home to the duplex and opened the bedroom door to find a dog who was sopping wet, which confused me because she had been inside all day. I looked around and found a dog-shaped hole in the wings of our window-mounted air conditioning unit. She had gnawed her way through, galavanted in the rain, and then come back inside. She was only naughty when we weren’t looking.

She moved with us into our new house, weathered COVID with us, suffered through a rotating menagerie of birds, fish, and now a cat. She saw our worst moments and our best. She lives in almost every memory that I have of my married life up until this point- new jobs, new houses, new kids, new adventures. She was such a good and loyal companion. 

We face a new chapter without her.

Well done, good and faithful pup.