Thank you everyone.
In her youth, she was a lot more energetic. She loved tug games; we could literally lift her entire body into the air by the tug toy and she’d hang on. When we played, she looked into my eyes with a kind of pleading gaze, “This is…everything. Don’t stop just yet.”
She was always awkward in her back legs – foreshadowing her developing neurological issues – but she could run. I would run her up and down the sidewalk in our development, even in bad weather, and she learned to wait coiled up for the words, “Simone…RUN!” She had a friend at the dog park for a while named Simon, a little white terrier of some kind. Simon was slower than she was, but he cornered better, and she never quite caught up to him. Later she found a long-term friend named Kylee, a black-and-tan Rottie mix. Kylee would grab Simone’s collar and fling her roughly onto her side…Simone would get up and march back over and present her collar again, waiting.
She’d been found starving on the street by my wife’s nephew. At first my wife’s mother tried to take care of her, but she was a wild thing, and when my mother-in-law’s illness complicated the situation, we took in the zoomy puppy and named her Simone.
The first night she was in our house she was hyperactive, paying little attention to us humans. So I barricaded the two of us in the kitchen (waterproof flooring – she wasn’t housetrained) and sat down on the floor with a book. She played and explored and fidgeted for 22 hours straight before falling asleep in my lap. When we both woke up, she looked directly at me and waited, finally ready to start learning.
We thought we were fostering her at the time; I worked with her to try and get her ready. Later, my wife asked if I wanted to stop listing Simone as available. “Why?” I asked, uncomfortable. “'Cause it looks like you want to keep her.” “Does it show?”
And so my little project became my little shadow and confidante. And we had adventures that are too mundane to interest readers, but seem like lost mythology to me now.
When my own mother was succumbing to Parkinson’s-linked dementia, there was one visit when I held Simone up so they were face-to-face. My mother returned her steady gaze and clearly said, “Very much so. Very much so.”
Here’s a good profile from ten years ago:
Here’s Simone on one of her Meet-Up walks. She loved walking with other dogs in charity events so much we started a Meet-Up for her three years ago (wish we’d done it earlier!). She had 1,485 Simone’s Friends signed up on the day of her death, and she’d joined them for adventure 160 times – more than once per week. You can see by her expression what she thought of these trips:
And here she is just about two months ago, older, wobblier, grayer, but still game to go where her pack went.
Very much so, my girl. Very much so.