Getting Over Sheba
A true story of a man who loved a dog.
My fiancé had recently left me for her college basketball coach because, she said, she wanted to be with someone more her intellectual equal. I was managing my grief by listening to Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger over and over again late into the night while drinking copious amounts of Pearl beer and eating fried chicken livers when my uncle stopped in one evening to check on me. Eyeing my growing empty beer can pyramid and pile of greasy tear-soaked wadded up napkins, he said simply, and convincingly, “Boy, you need a dog.”
The truth is he needed to get rid of a dog. He had two grown Irish Setters and a live-in girlfriend who thought the house wasn’t big enough for two indoor ponies, so he tricked me into relieving him of one of his four-legged problems. “You can have either one,” he said, “but you have to make your decision and take one today.” I studied the male, a really big Setter named Big On’, and the female, a somewhat smaller and sweet beauty named Sheba. The decision was easy; Big On’ enthusiastically mounted everything, but Sheba acted like a recent graduate from some canine charm school in Charleston, SC. She had a presence about her and carried herself with great dignity.
Sheba was beautiful. She was svelte and wore a chestnut brown and orange coat that never matted. She had perfect teeth, always held her head up straight, rarely left her tongue hanging out and dripping on the floor, and sat, stood, even slept, in a gracefully poised position as if she knew she was about to be discovered as the model for an up and coming gourmet dog food label. She was my Rene Russo and I loved her. Apparently Big On’ did too, for he tried to mount her one last time as I stepped off my uncle’s porch to lead Sheba to my car. My uncle laughed, his girlfriend none too discretely celebrated, and Sheba looked at me gratefully, as if I had just rescued her from a life full of misery and annoyance.
I took Sheba home in the first car I ever owned, a nearly worn out ’68 MGB with holes rusted through the floorboards. The plastic rear window of the canvas top was sunbaked nearly opaque yellow so I kept the top open most of the time, and Sheba loved it. She recognized the jingle of my keys and lunged toward the door of my apartment as soon as I picked them up. We would jump in and barrel around Macon, GA, looking for signs of the Allman Brothers and nibbling on fried drumsticks purchased from the Pig and Whistle. Sheba nearly always sat in the seat up on her hindquarters with her front paws draped over the windshield, her long ears flapping about in the wind ever so elegantly. I loved red lights back then because at nearly every stop, some gorgeous woman would roll down her window and ask about my dog. Sheba was both my Rene Russo and my wingman. And one of the best things about her is that she did not care a lick about basketball.
Sheba was my constant companion. Had service dogs been a fashion necessity back then, she surely would have worn a bejeweled service vest. She served me loyally, keeping me happy throughout the time of my pursuit of a Master’s degree and halfway thought my PhD program (funny how a few cruel words can set you on a course). When I lost her suddenly and tragically, I was heartbroken. I was living in Athens, GA at the time and courting a tanned and freckled tennis-playing redhead who I had just convinced to go skinny-dipping when my telephone rang. It was a neighbor from up the street calling me to say he had just found my Sheba in a ditch, lifeless. Guilty of self-indulging distraction to the point of parental neglect, I swore off dogs forever as I covered my beloved Sheba, the one soul who had loved me unconditionally, higher education or not, with tear moistened earth.
I was true to my oath; I did not want anything to do with dogs for years. I even avoided relationships with dog owners, including willing virgins, so you can see that my conviction was quite serious. One Thanksgiving eve while with my extended family back in Macon, I was telling stories to my cousins’ children about their parents’ youthful mischief and misdemeanors and stomping my feet to keep the bounding mongrel puppies someone brought to dinner from climbing up on me. “You used to love dogs,” one cousin scolded me, and my sympathetic sister defended me by observing, “He’s never gotten over Sheba.” And she was right; I had buried my heart with my precious dog.
Years later and one evening just after my 25th high school reunion, I sat in a bar with a cheerleader from back then with whom I had become reacquainted. We were drinking cold beer and competing with one another about who could tell the best hard luck story, sharing the details of our failed relationships and other disappointments and tales of misery, when she suddenly said to me, “I know the perfect woman for you. She never wants to get married again either.” Of course, when I met said woman, a redhead (there is a pattern developing here), I fell in love immediately and only fourteen days later asked her to marry me. I could not help myself; she was nearly perfect. I say “nearly” because she was, I’ll be damned, a dog owner. “Meet Princess,” she said, holding up a rescued, gnarly, bug-eyed Pekingese who promptly bit me with what few teeth she had left in her head when I reluctantly reached out to pet her.
My wife Jill was wholly enamored with Princess, who she swore to be a brilliant dog of a fine upbringing. I disproved this myth one day by squatting down to call out, “Here mayonnaise, come here mayonnaise,” to which that brilliant dog came running. Princess and I endured what can best be described as a love-hate relationship for almost ten years – she loved to annoy me and I hated her for it – until I saw my wife in tears, stroking the then frail little dog asleep and snoring in her lap. Jill whispered, “Please don’t die on me yet.” Immediately, I felt sick. Actually, my heart hurt. From that moment to her last breath, I saw Princess differently. She was someone my wife loved dearly, so I had to love her too. Not long after, I received a text message at work that said simply, “Princess got her angel wings.” I cried for my wife, and I cried for Princess.
Naturally, it did not take long for Jill to bolt upright in bed one Saturday morning to proclaim, “Today, we are getting a new dog.” I raised a bit of fuss, to no avail. On our way to the county kill shelter, we discussed what we did and did not want in our next dog. We easily reached agreement on one thing – no Pit Bulls, nadda, no sir, none whatsoever.
We entered the shelter of some two hundred dogs on death row and moaned about how difficult it would be to pick the single best dog. But as soon as I turned the first corner my eyes locked on a small dog in a crate among a wall of similarly situated dogs, this one curled in a knot, shivering in abject terror, and looking at me with pleading yellow eyes that obviously communicated, “Please save me.” That afternoon, we went home with Buttercup, a fawn coated little Pit Bull about eighteen months old, a Pocket Pit they called her (they lied, unless you wear a hunting jacket with a pocket large enough to carry a medium sized nanny goat) who had been found abandoned and tied to a tree with no water and food.
Buttercup imprinted on me and followed me everywhere about our house and around the neighborhood where I spent considerable amounts of time trying to convince anxious neighbors she was not a vicious breed, that she was too damn small to be a Pit Bull. The more I defended her, the more she was mine, and one morning I found myself cupping her gorgeous resting bitch face in my hands and professing my undying love for her. Except for one thing. I was not going to stand on our front porch calling out, “Buttercup!”, to get the attention of our dog. Inspired by the color of her eyes, we revised her name to Sunshine Buttercup, Sunni for short. Yes, that’s spelled with an “i”. A smart man must yield to his wife every now and then.
In a stroke of brilliance, Jill suggested we get Sunni’s DNA tested on the hope there were non-vicious breeds in her family tree that we could refer to when explaining what kind of dog Sunni is. We eagerly opened the report when it came and read what we had known all along. There it was, all scientifically verified and displayed in a pie chart, Sunni’s ancestry – 25% Staffordshire Bull Terrier, 25% American Staffordshire Terrier, 25% Bullmastiff, 12.5% Boxer, and 12.5% Undetermined Mixed Breed. “She’s a mutt,” we insist when asked, “and we can prove it”.
During the last three years, my days have been filled with Sunshine. Jill and I walk a few miles before sunrise each morning and again after dinner, with Sunni, my vicious dog, rolling over and going belly up whenever we are approached by neighbors who no longer fear her. We’ve eaten gallons of crunchy peanut butter and thrashed about for hours fighting over lengths of indestructible rope that never lasts long, and we go for drives along the Gwinnett County backroads. Today, I drive a Porsche and keep the top down nearly as often as I did on the old MGB, and like Sheba, Sunni likes to put her face in the wind. But unlike Sheba, Sunni is too squatty to stretch from seat to the top of the windshield, so instead she hangs out over the passenger door, ears and tongue flapping wildly as we go, and drool splattering across the flank of the car. Sunni looks nothing like Rene Russo, rather a lot like Babe Didrikson, and when we pull to a stop at red lights, folks in other cars roll up their windows and lock their doors.
One recent Saturday morning, Jill, convinced Sunni had reignited zealous dog love in me, bolted upright in bed again and announced, “Sunni needs a sister.”
It’s a bit of a rollick having two dogs vying to take turns hanging their faces out the window of a speeding Porsche convertible, but somehow Sunshine Buttercup and Polly Petunia, 75% American Staffordshire Terrier, 12.5% American Bull Dog, 12.% mixed breed, probably including a Beagle (so we answer “part Beagle” to explain her), manage to get equal flying time. And some days, wind in my hair, sun in my face, dog hair in my nostrils, a trace of slobber on my cheek, I like to think Sheba is riding along with us too. I image her riding high above the windshield, smiling in that way elegant dogs do, and occasionally looking back at me, reassuring me she still loves me.
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