Molly - T-C-L-D-W-A-G-A

This may be my favourite memory of Molly. 

It was the summer of 1996. Molly wasn't quite full grown, maybe ten months old. We were at Bruce's family's cottage up at Inverhuron, on the shores of Lake Huron just south of the Bruce nuclear power plant.  

There was a bunch of us walking along the narrow dirt road that ran behind the waterfront cottages: Bruce, me, Bruce's cousin and his wife and their two kids. The kids were young, maybe four and eight, fully ambulatory and energetic. We were taking Molly for a walk and one of us had a yellow NERF ball. 

We stopped in a small ball field by the lane that went down to the water. We took Molly off her leash and started playing keep-away.

The day was warm and partly overcast. The grass on the field was soft, green and dotted with tiny yellow flowers. We flipped the ball between us as Molly jumped, ran, and snapped at the ball, trying hard as only a terrier can to grab it in midair.

But she was a small dog, and even warm-hearted humans can be treacherous, so we threw the NERF ball just a bit higher than she could jump.

But then one of the kids flubbed the throw! Molly got the ball! She had it in her mouth (the ball was almost the size of her head) and she darted in and out of the feet of the slow-moving, inagile humans. 

Molly bobbed and weaved like a basketball star. She braked, zipped back, spun and ducked. Six humans trying as hard as they could failed to get the ball away from her. At one point I made a dive to grab her, did a two-point face plant, skinned my knee, and came up empty-handed.  

Finally, Molly ran to a spot about ten feet away from the clutch of defeated humans, holding the ball in her mouth, panting around it.

I looked around. We'd drawn a crowd. People walking on the lane and - I recall this very clearly - two guys sitting in the cab of a truck parked by the ball field, were watching us, laughing.

Molly also felt the gaze of adulation (more about which in the next post), lost her concentration and didn't see Bruce's cousin come up from behind her and snatch the ball out of her mouth.

Our dominance re-established, we put the dog back on her leash and carried on our way.

Recalling an earlier post, we imagined that Molly's secret name was The Fetcher. Molly, however, from that day in the ball park on, knew that her secret name was Molly: The Clever Little Dog Who Always Gets Away.

But even super terriers have formidable rivals, which you can read about here.

The Fetcher

We got used, over the weeks and months, to most of Molly's super powers. And I suppose she got used to ours.

For example, she learned, pretty darn quickly, that when the black, inedible thing on the end table made a loud noise, and we tore its head off and spoke at it and put its head back on, very shortly after that another big dog would arrive at the door of our den, and then it was party time.

She also learned that we would leave our den, walk a short distance, and wait for the door to another, smaller den, to open. Sometimes, when the door opened, that den had other big dogs in it and then it was party time. Sometimes the den had another dog in it. When that happened, depending on the dog already in the den, the door would either close and we would wait for it to open again, or we would step into the den, knowing the other dog would never do anything as reckless and unwarranted as challenge Molly.

After we entered the small den, the next time the door opened, the outside would have completely changed. Then we would take her to a place where she could pee and poo and we wouldn't yell at her.

Molly also learned that every once in a while we would climb into a den on wheels, sit in it for anywhere from one to five hours, and emerge in a very different place.

All of this must have seemed magical indeed.

None of it compares of course to Molly's special power, which was, I think, to sense, locate and retrieve any missing tennis ball in a 400 kilometre radius.  

We first discovered this power when Molly was very young. Maybe nine weeks old. I had her out for a walk, at night, and, as we passed some bushes planted along the side of one of the buildings across the way from where we lived, she pulled so intently against the lead, I let her have her head. She plunged under the nearest bush and came back out almost immediately with a tennis ball in her mouth. There it is in the photo below.

Again, we underestimated this capacity the first time we encountered it. But after a while it was impossible to ignore. Bruce took Molly to visit one day at his office. He put her down, took off her leash, and - zip - she was gone. Minutes later, she was back, with a tennis ball. One of Bruce's co-workers had lost it under her desk about three years before.

Another time, we had driven about four hours to visit friends at their cottage south of Algonquin Park. We'd been there two years before with Molly. We opened the car door, Molly flew out, ran down the steps to the cottage, disappeared inside and emerged, seconds later, with a tennis ball. It had been under the couch.

Along with the power to jump four times her own height and run at sub-sonic speeds, Molly was "The Fetcher" - the special operations terrier who could - so long as their evil schemes involved tennis balls - foil even the most desperate global criminals.

All of this, of course, is just our silly anthropomorphism of our little dog. Molly had her own notions of what her powers were, revealed in her secret name: "Molly, the Clever Little Dog Who Always Gets Away," about which you can read here.





  

Living With A Cartoon

In the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit the animated characters were called "Toons." This was a nickname, and not a nice one, for "Cartoons."

The Toons in the movie possessed astonishing capacities, as do all characters unconstrained by the laws of physics, the limits of anatomy, or the force of gravity. They could whip black circles out from inside their clothing, which they would then step into and disappear. They could jump several miles in the air. They could contort themselves around corners and bug their eyes out a full metre from their faces.

But the Toons were children in their judgement and behaviour. Their motives were not as great as their abilities. They were naive, feckless, unfocussed, irresponsible and impulsive.

They were in every way then very like a Jack Russell Terrier puppy.

And living with Molly for the first six months (or maybe six years) was like living with a Toon.

When she wasn't asleep, she was a gravity-defying, perpetual motion machine. She liked to jump on people the most, and, being a small dog, she generally got away with it.

She may have thought she was serving some purpose or other.

And when she was just too much to deal with, we found a way to keep her under control. We would pick her up and hoist her in the air with one arm. This worked. She would remain perfectly still for as long as your arm strength lasted.

This method was available to us until she passed the ten pound mark.  Then we had to try something else.

Click here for more tips and tricks on how to manage a super hero in your own home.

Living With A Movie Star

There was no getting around the fact that Molly was a cute, cute puppy. Tiny. Mostly white, with pretty black ears and a brown spot over her right eye. And the sweetest little face.

Bruce and I fell for her like a tonne of bricks, but it had not occurred to us that this would happen to others as well. I guess we thought that once she was ours, some kind of invisible barrier prevented others from being as smitten with her as we were.

Well, no. Molly drew attention like a movie star at a mall opening. We learned this while we were driving her home after we picked her up and then spent the weekend at Bruce's family's cottage in Inverhuron. It's a three hour drive from the cottage to Toronto and, hyperaware of Molly's eensy bladder, we stopped after about thirty minutes at a community playing field to take her out for a quick stroll.

We'd been out of the car for about a minute, watching our little puppy wander on the grass and keeping a wary eye on a turkey vulture circling overhead, when a couple on a motorcycle pulled up next to the field and walked, with purpose, over to where we were.

They'd seen us from the road and did not hesitate to stop, c'mon over and make a fuss about our dog and tell us stories about other Jack Russell terriers they knew.

After we waved goodbye to our new friends and continued on our way home, we barely remarked on the experience we'd just had. We were, in other words, completely not comprehending the new force in our lives and the impact it would have.

Bruce and I had lived at the same address - a 380-unit, two-tower condo highrise development - for about eight years and did not know a single one of our neighbours.

Little did we know, with our three-pound puppy and all her accessories, that that was about to change. Click here for more details. 

Molly wasn't more than eight weeks old when she climbed up on the windowsill in our bedroom and patiently waited for me to get my camera and take this shot.

First Steps

Because I'd lived with dogs before, I knew there were some VERY IMPORTANT STEPS to be taken with our puppy.

First, the little shit machine needed to be house and otherwise trained. Second, we needed to find a vet to give her her necessary shots. Third, she needed a place to sleep. Fourth toys. Fifth food. Sixth friends. More or less in that order.

The order in which these steps actually occurred: 

Place to Sleep 

We bought Molly a dog crate/bed and lined it with a pillow, a hand-crocheted blanket and an old shirt of mine, but she preferred to sleep in Bruce's old gym bag, stashed under the bed.

 Food, Toys 

The gift toys came almost immediately with the arrival of the dog.  None lasted very long, except for the green chew toy, which still exists and is in the possession of Molly's nemesis (more about which later).

Vet, Shots, Friends

This is our friend Angie, now Molly's friend, too.

Molly with her new friend Sandra.

And much, much later than the rest of these, we got Molly house trained.

Most of Molly's training was almost too easy. Russels are smart. By the end of our first month with her, we were calling her our little evil genius. I trained her not to bite in less than a day. She instinctively knew how to retrieve. From about the third try, she came when called. 

But, man, was she hard to house train. We got her at the end of September when she weighed all of three pounds, and it quickly became too cold to put a puppy that small outside. So we elected to paper train her and then figure out in the spring how to get her to go only out of doors.  

The shake out from that decision was we spent the winter hollering at the dog to not pee all over the place and, along with those plans to train her to go out of doors, we made plans to have the carpets cleaned come spring.

Click here to read how living with a Jack Russell puppy is like living with a movie star. 

    

Origin Story

Molly-the-dog was our little Jack Russell terrier. We had her in our lives from six weeks after her birth on August 16, 1995 to the day we put her to sleep on November 19, 2011.

This blog is my memory of her and the sixteen years she shared with us.

The idea of having a dog had been in my head since I was a kid. We had dogs - dachshunds - from around the time I was six to the time my parents died many years later.  

But, when I was a young adult living with the other young adult - Bruce - I'd hooked up with early on, life was too uncertain, living arrangements too temporary, to think about having a dog.

This is not to say I didn't have the conversation with Bruce, many times, about having a child together - or, failing that, a dog.

Then I made the decision, late in the 80's, that if I wasn't going to have kids, then I could go to law school, which I did, from 1990-1993. I served my articles at a legal aid clinic dedicated to environmental law, wrote the bar admission course and... after that, descended into a well of underemployment, loneliness and dreadful uncertainty.  There wasn't a lot of work for baby environmental lawyers then (or now for that matter).

But, I had a few clients, one of whom ran a kennel where she raised, among other breeds, Jack Russell terriers. Only half-joking one day, I told my client I'd take a puppy in lieu of one month's billing.

And so we came to have our little dog. Molly was the last-born and the runt of the litter of four, born to Maggie and Chief.

We picked her up on September 30, 1995.  Here's her first baby picture.

Click here for the next instalment of Molly's story.