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.