Trenchwork

Frankie showed up at the office where I was working during Christmas of 1991.  She hung around for a few days, and when I saw her chowing down on leftover refrigerated lasagne, I decided enough was enough.  I couldn’t do anything about it that day, but decided that if she showed up the next day, I was going to scoop her up, take her to the vet and have her checked out, then go from there.

She did.  And I did.

She was malnourished but there were no serious problems, so we gave her her shots, scheduled a day for her to be spayed, and I took her home.  The vet and I judged her to be between a year and two years at the time, but with no collar and no sign of having had one, we couldn’t tell much about her background.  She wasn’t wild, so we guessed she’d been dumped by a student leaving town for the holidays.  And if I ever come across that individual . . .

Frankie settled into her new home quickly.  Faster than I’ve ever seen a rescue adapt—especially when that new home has a full-grown GSD already in place.

He was a calm, laid-back fellow who took most things in stride, and her arrival was no exception.  They had some cautious introductions, and then she decided John was her new best friend.  (And yes, I named Johnny but one of the gals in the office named Frankie, so don’t blame me for the “Frankie and Johnny” thing!)

Her understanding that Johnny wasn’t an enemy seemed to translate to all other GSDs, and I had a few heart-stopping moments when she slipped outside and decided to skip along the top of the neighbor’s fence and “talk” to the neighbor’s GSD—who was decidedly anti-cat.

But she and John got along very well.  He probably thought it was the best thing since sliced bread—literally—when her arrival gave him access to the sliced bread.  She discovered that she could swipe the loaf of bread off the kitchen counter, rip open the bag, and then share her loot with him.

One night a small crash woke me up.  I got up to investigate, figuring that it had to have been something in the house since John would have barked at a threat and an intruder would have managed to get in only with a certain amount of physical damage and blood loss.  I found them both settled innocently in their respective places, Frankie’s tail twitching nervously, and the lid to the cookie jar on the floor.  It was a heavy ceramic cookie jar with a fairly fitted lid and normally sat far back on the kitchen cabinet.   I had my suspicions, but put the lid back on the jar, pushed the jar back in place, and went back to bed but kept my ears open.  Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I heard some odd scraping noises, so I slipped back out and peered around the kitchen door to see Johnny sitting attentively in front of the cabinet while Frankie was on the countertop, hooking a paw under the handle on the cookie jar and lifting.  I was amazed that she managed it; she wasn’t a large cat.

She never lost her obsession for food, and I blame that on those early years.  She didn’t necessarily want everything, but she wanted to know that she didn’t want it.  She continued to love bread, and she had a sweet tooth; she’d fight you for your vanilla ice cream.

She was stereotypically curious, and surprisingly fearless.  She didn’t understand the concepts of “danger” or “enemy.”

She was independent but loved attention, and was never more content than when she was sitting half on and half off your lap for a petting, regardless of what else you may have been doing.

I couldn’t subject her to the transport and quarantine requirements when I moved overseas, so she stayed home with my folks.  She was somewhere around 19 when she died June 20th, and I’d been expecting it for the past year or two.  She had arthritis, a serious case of calcium deposits which had fused together much of her spine, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find she’d become diabetic in the last year.

She will be missed, and I hope heaven has tighter lids on their jars or they’ll find the old team back in action.  I suspect John has been waiting for the opportunity these past twelve years.