Lexington
“Have you spoken to your mother,” my dad asked me this afternoon while I had him on the phone. I was having a little medical drama (which turned out to be nothing) and had called him to talk me down from the ledge.
I told him that I hadn’t spoken to her in a few days, and then asked what was wrong. My dad is usually a very stoic person, and when I heard the tremble in his voice, frankly, it scared me quite a bit.
“Lexie’s gone,” he said after a moment.
Lexington came into our lives on March 26, 1994 when my parents brought her home from K-Mart. They had been out shopping for something or another, and on the way out of the store, they were approached by a little girl selling puppies out of a box.
The puppies were A.K.A. registered Golden Labradors, raised by a breeder who ended up with a couple more than he could handle at that moment. They picked Lexie up and out of the squirming mass of fur and yelping, brought her home, and plopped her down in the middle of our lives.
When she was a puppy, one of my favorite things to do with her was to take out a laser pointer and play “catch the dot” with her. This game ended the day she realized what the dot was and how it seemed to move around in concert with the direction my hand was pointing. A smart one, she was.
In the fall of 1999, she had an accident and broke one of her front legs. To this day, we have no idea what actually caused the break, but one year, three surgeries, and thousands of dollars later, she was mended and back to playing catch in the yard.
She was especially fond of my high school friend, Philip. When he came over to spend the weekend, he could always be counted on to bring a big bag of Jolly Ranchers which she (in spite of our efforts to keep it away from her) always managed to get into.
Over the last couple of years, her health had been deteriorating, leading to partial blindness and an inability to climb the house’s front steps.
Then, last Friday afternoon, my brother got home from work to find her laying on the dining room’s hardwood floor. He told me, “I didn’t even need to check her out. You could just tell she wasn’t in there anymore.”
When my dad got home from work, they picked her up, wrapped her in the blanket she slept on, and buried her next to the pond out back, under that watchful eye of our other Golden Lab, Bernard.
She was an awesome dog, a great friend, and a member of the family.
She will be missed.