A bonus Lacy story: Halloween.
Each year, my wife would hang up this terrible pumpkin-headed man outside our door. It would rattle and sway in the breeze, catching Lacy’s attention like a rabbit1.
The pumpkin-headed man had a carved pumpkin for a face, and a wispy body made of soft black fabric that had no weight, making it easy to catch in the wind, swaying back and forth. Each day, Lacy would freeze at the top of the stairs, hackles raised and growl and growl at it like it was a true threat. It was one of the few times I ever saw her upset. She hated the pumpkin-headed bastard.
I kept asking my wife to put it away, but she liked it. When our first foster child moved in, he remarked that it kept spooking him. “I catch sight of it out of the corner of my eye, forget it’s there and see it move. It startles me!” I told him he was in good company.
The first Halloween we were here, Lacy dressed as Wonder Woman. Or rather, my wife pulled a dog’s Wonder Woman costume onto Lacy, and Lacy, being Lacy, didn’t really object.
She was the delight of the streets. One little girl, 3 or 4 years of age remarked “Lacy is my favorite dog!” and asked if her family could take her home with her. It should be noted that this girl had several dogs of her own, including a Chocolate lab. We promoted her to be the president of the Lacy Fan Club. Whenever she spotted Lacy on one of her walks, she’d ask her parents “Is that Lacy?” fully knowing the answer. This would lead to follow-up questions. “Can I pet her?” She was rarely denied.
As Lacy grew older and frailer, we subjected her to fewer humiliations. Last year she did not get a dog costume, but a simple blue collar with a large tag reading SD. A different young girl came to the door, looked at the dog with wide eyes and asked, “Is that REALLY Scooby Doo?”
Yeah, kid. Tonight she is.
This is the final Lacy mourning post. We now resume to our regular programming, missing her none the less.
-
Or rather, entirely unlike a rabbit. Lacy didn’t have what you’d call a “prey drive”. The rabbits would see her, fear-hop ten feet further in the same direction, and repeat. They were not bright rabbits, and Lacy was wholly indifferent or oblivious to their existence.2. ↩
-
So it’s more accurate to say that the pumpkin-headed man would catch Lacy’s attention the way a rabbit might catch the attention of a more typical, chasey kind of dog. I’d say that Lacy was not a typical dog, but I’ve never had one before, and I’ve been told that she was “very dog”. ↩