Jaspie's eulogy
Once upon a time we had a dog called Tammy, and in the fulness of time she died, and we were very sad and thought we'd never have another dog.
After a while we began to miss having a dog around the place, so we decided to go and look for another one. Not to replace Tammy, but as well as Tammy. My mother said that she was looking for a female dog, because all her dogs up till then had been female, and she wanted a short-haired one, because they're easier to comb. But this was not to be.
One day, we all went off to Kimpton dogs' home. They have enormous cages you can walk into, with lots and lots of dogs all hungry for adoption. One dog, though, a middling-large brown-yellow male, ran up to us and followed us around. It was more like he wanted to adopt us. We ended up taking him home, of course. I named him Terebinth until he had a proper name.
His name on the adoption papers was "Solo". It wasn't a very good name, because he was terrified of being left alone. He would pick someone out and follow them close by their heel, and when nobody was close he would cower under tables. I did think of naming him Underdog. My mother considered calling him Curdie, because he was her fourth dog (think "cur D"). She also called him Garm, like the dog in the legend (but I think she was actually thinking of Farmer Giles of Ham's cowardly dog of that name). In the end, my father picked Jasper, which is a kind of brown quartz: his fur was the same colour as the stone. People called him Jaspie for short, and I called him Jasperdistra for long.
On the first night he stayed with us, we all turned out the lights and went up to bed. Tammy had always slept on the landing where the stairs turn the corner, so we put Jaspie there and left him there. Of course he wouldn't stay alone, but he crept up the stairs after us and lay quivering at the foot of my parents' bed. Eventually they gave up sending him downstairs again.
Oh, he could run! I think he must have had some greyhound blood in him. When you let him off his leash he'd be off like the wind to the other side of the field. Shortly after he came to live with us, we took him to Norton Common and let him off the leash for a few minutes. He ran away and didn't come back. We spent hours walking around the common and the neighbourhood calling "Jasper! Jasper!" When we gave it up and went home we found him waiting for us. Apparently my mother had had to pick him up from the vet's: he'd run all the way there for some reason only he knew. The pads on his feet were sore.
Early when we had him, Andrew and I were playing a game where he was an adventurer and I was a robot guard-- he was still a child. Because I was a robot guard, I shouted, "Guard! Guard!" Jaspie thought I was shouting "Garm", which my mother was still calling him, and rushed in to see what I wanted.
Another time Andrew asked me to play him a sea-shanty on the guitar, so I played it and sang very loudly, and Andrew and Lucy joined in. Jaspie came into the room, stood beside me and started barking along to the music.
Even though Jaspie eventually accepted the idea of being left alone every so often, he was always very snuggly. He used to love to jump onto people's laps when they sat down and curl himself up like a doughnut. This was despite the fact that he more than filled most people's laps and weighed about eight stone.
He used to love getting bones from the butcher. He would sit on the kitchen floor and gnaw away at them until they were just little pieces.
He had the strangest ears. They stood up like a cat's and bowed over at the end. My sister Taika used to say that he was a cat trapped in a dog's body, and that when everyone was asleep he would take off his collar and put on a blue one with a little bell attached and run around the house in it.
He was wonderfully good-tempered. He never scratched or bit or even growled as long as I knew him. When he was really happy, you could swear he was smiling.
Eventually I moved to Cambridge and only saw him every couple of months or so, but he would still jump up and lick me when I came home and welcome me back. And then I moved to Pennsylvania and saw him no more.
Of course, I have no idea about the existence or composition of a doggy afterlife. But he will certainly live on in my mind and memory until the day I die.
Rest well, prince among dogs. We are blessed to have known you.