"They don't need spa treatment!"

The other day my mom texted me a picture of my dad in his 20’s holding their first dog like a baby. Anyone who knows me can be assured that I strongly endorse this kind of behavior.

For the record, this is the man who has been known to punt an underfoot dog out of his way, who never met a dog he would allow in the house, and no animal of his ever, EVER had its teeth brushed or nails trimmed. “They don’t need spa treatment!”

The Frank & Patricia Kalin family (est. 1970) have had many dogs over the last almost 50 years. My family had a habit of obtaining mutts from our neighbors’ litters and a tendency to name those mutts after the neighboring farmers. Living in the country with free range dogs, we went through a lot of them. Oliver, Fritz, Poky, Luca, Baxter and Taffy are just the ones whose names I remember.

But before my parents begot five children, they practiced their parenting skills on our only registered pedigreed dog, a miniature poodle named the fussiest name ever: Kalin’s Kalandra, a.k.a. Kandy. I think this was my mom’s first attempt at naming a child. Her next: Ted. And then, voila!: Shasta. You can’t really get a bead on my mom’s naming trends. She's all over the map.

Kandy was a beloved member of the family. She was so loved that my parents even took her to the bank to have her picture made with Ted and me.

Shasta, Ted and Kandy, aka Peckerwood.

And my dad called her “Peckerwood.” 

I'm not exactly sure why, and I'm not sure why my mom let him do that, because you can see from the photo that he was fond of, ahem, Peckerwood. But since he called her that, so did everyone else in the family. And when you’re retelling a great story for Kindergarten Show ‘n’ Tell, you say "Peckerwood" proudly and many, many times. 

The class giggled. (This right here, my friends, was when I knew I had the gift of storytelling.) I was disappointed when Mrs. Carter shut down my excellent tale and hustled me back to my desk. When I got home that evening and told Mom about my day at school, there was a distinctly chagrined look on her face; apparently she’d already had a call from the teacher. She and Dad disappeared into the back room for “a talk” that evening. Probably about how their two children resembled the milkman. (Ha ha, old Kalin family joke. My dad tended my grandmother’s cows and brought home a pail or two of delicious milk every week.)

There are other stories I could tell, like the day Oliver got tangled up in the barbed-wire fence. Despite my mother telling me in no uncertain terms to stay away from a large dog who was frightened and injured, she got off the phone with my dad to find me hugging him and sobbing in solidarity at his predicament, my neck exposed like the 8-year-old delicious prey I was. Oliver was licking me and wagging his tail. Now, that was a good dog.

Farm mutts Oliver and Luca

Or Gidget and Biffy, my grandma’s two dogs. A couple of bitches, if I’m being honest.

Baxter, the black lab mix, who was my parents’ “heart dog.” It’s been 20 years, and they still talk about him like he was their sixth child.

Dogs are precious. I have two snoozing here at my feet. They are creatures uniquely created to fill the cracks and crevices of our lives. Like they do when they share your bed, give them an inch of your heart, and they’ll take the whole thing.

My father with his grand-dog Daisy…my, how times have changed.