Recovering My Memories: Snookie

Here's a picture of me and our dog Snookie from the early 70s. Probably 74 or 75, but I can't really tell.

I don't have any idea what kind of dog she was. Mixed breed to say the least. Probably a mix or two of three or four  mixed breeds. She was considered to be my brother's dog, as I had a chihuahua. My parents had heard from somewhere or another that chihuahuas were therapeutic to people who had asthma, so they got me one. I don't know if there's any merit to that or if they'd just been duped. I didn't even realize I had asthma, for that matter. But she was a good dog and so was Snookie.

The most unique thing about Snookie was that she was rarely at home.  We lived across the street from a wooded area, pastureland for a bunch of donkeys. Snooky would go over there and wouldn't come back for days. I'm guessing she killed her own food, as she did seem to have a bit of a wild streak about her. She'd do that for a few days then next thing you know she would turn up on the front porch and stay for awhile. I don't remember ever feeding her dog food or leaving water for her. I don't guess it mattered because she always stayed nice and fat (relative to how she would have been if she weren't being fed).

There was this one time when me and my brother had a fool notion to collect a bunch of glass bottles and take them to the storm drain (?) in the road and break them all against the concrete inside. That storm drain was kind of like a hide-out for us. We played down in it all the time. We'd broken a bottle on the wall a time or two, but never had we gone all out and smashed a lot of them at once.

So we hauled all the bottles in a box down into the storm drain and let her rip. We got a kick out of the sound of breaking glass and the echo in the hollow drain. Before we're even finished, here comes Snookie, probably looking to see what all the commotion was about. She runs through the place, all through the broken glass. I don't remember, most likely don't want to remember, how bad she got cut up but I felt awful about it. Remarkably she healed up very quickly and next thing you know she's back out on the hunt.

I recall the day she died, I looked out of the back window onto the driveway and saw her lying on the concrete. I thought she was sleeping. Her head was turned away from me. I'm pretty sure this was in 1977,  maybe 78. I called out to her a few times and when she didn't move I knew she was gone. My memory is very fuzzy at this point. So much so that I only now seem to remember walking out just far enough to see a small trail of blood coming from the region of her head. I remember it now, because I'm almost positive that I didn't get far enough to see her face. It was the blood that made me realize she was dead. I got on the phone and called my dad and he came and took care of the body, which he buried in a spot next to a shack he'd built in the backyard (it's where my chihuahua wound up, as well as my own family's pet Pomeranian several years later). It shook my dad up quite a bit, but then he had been through hell the last couple of years before so it was just one more thing to deal with.