Casual
BARNES, FRED
Casual SOPHIE'S CHOICE This is a dog story. You're not required to be a dog lover or a mystic to understand it. But it'll help if you at least like dogs and don't dismiss mystical occurrences out...
...She spent a week in March in Florida on vacation with Grace and Walton, sitting in the surf and learning how to retrieve a ball...
...There was no evidence Sophie had sent the dog, but that idea lingered in my mind...
...We figured she'd been abused by a man...
...At the Target store near her home, she had encountered an abandoned dog, a mutt...
...Had the dogcatcher grabbed her, she'd probably have been put down in a few days unless someone had claimed her...
...At age one, she made a life choice...
...All we knew was that she was a female who looked a bit like a small German shepherd with a tail that stuck straight up...
...Sophie was gentle and affectionate...
...I now regard Annie as the luckiest dog in the world...
...The following morning, Grace called from Tuscaloosa...
...I hadn't seen the dog...
...She had been called Foxy by the friendly Target workers because she's the size and sleekness of a fox...
...It took the entire three-day weekend for her to come close to me...
...FRED BARNES...
...She loved us, but she missed Grace...
...Did she want to spend her time with other dogs or with people...
...Now comes the mystical part...
...Grace, who had married right after college and moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with her husband Walton, rushed home...
...Barkley bites...
...We suffered too...
...They quickly sense she's their friend...
...Seven years ago, my daughter Grace got a Golden Retriever puppy and named her Sophie...
...She spent a week in February homeless in a parking lot...
...The next week, Mary Ellen Tasillo, a makeup artist at Fox News I'd become friends with, sent me a condolence card...
...On hearing about this from Grace, my first thought was: Sophie sent us this dog...
...Barbara was inconsolable...
...The Target folks had put out food for her to eat...
...She died in three days...
...But it was merely the dark coloring of her snout...
...A year later, Grace left for college and Barbara and I became Sophie's main companions...
...She was with Barbara or me most of every day...
...But it'll help if you at least like dogs and don't dismiss mystical occurrences out of hand...
...And as fate would also have it, Barbara and I were going that weekend to Tuscaloosa, where I was giving a speech and going to a basketball game...
...We renamed her Annie, after Little Orphan Annie...
...This week, Barbara goes to Tuscaloosa to pick up Annie and drive her to our house...
...But Grace has a way with dogs...
...But at night, she still slept on a small, round bed on the floor of Grace's now-empty room...
...So did our son Freddy, a junior at Auburn University...
...He was named after basketball star Charles Barkley, who once called himself a "bad dog...
...Annie soon warmed to Barbara, but slunk away when I approached...
...In truth, I didn't understand it until two months ago when Sophie died, killed by rat poison that someone had thoughtlessly put where a dog could get at it...
...We cried...
...But she finally did, rubbing up against my legs as I softly rubbed her head and chin...
...Grace rescued her from that fate...
...Every few hours, when I'd think of Sophie and her pure innocence and the cruel way she died, I'd suddenly gasp...
...Grace learned from Target employees that the dog had been living in the parking lot for a week and had repeatedly evaded the Tuscaloosa dogcatcher...
...On spring and summer mornings, I'd sit on our deck, drinking coffee, reading the paper, and throwing a ball for Sophie...
...We took her to the beach and got great pleasure out of watching her splash in the surf and chase a ball...
...She seemed to be terrified of men...
...When she approached, the dog had skittered away in fear...
...We already had one dog, a feisty peekapoo named Barkley...
...Her face looked dirty, as if she'd been digging in the ground...
...She wrote that Sophie, somewhere in the mists of the afterlife, was even now finding a new dog for us who would assuage our grief...
...I won't describe how badly she suffered as her lungs filled with blood and her body slowly failed...
...She had no collar or ID...
...I was touched by the sentiment...
...This is where she belongs...
...We loved her and she reciprocated...
...Sophie sent her...
...Until Sophie arrived, I had no idea how deeply attached one could get to a dog...
...And within a half hour, she had picked up the dog, plopped her in the car and headed back to her house...
...She bonded totally with Grace and her father (me) and her mother (Barbara...
...As it turned out, the most important part of our visit was meeting the new dog...
...She chose people...
Vol. 11 • April 2006 • No. 27
