Mr. Brady

I had never had a dog growing up. Well, never had a dog for very long. We took in a stray once, named him/her "Star" and then we had to give it back the next day. I grew up with cats. I know it's not a very masculine animal, but we had them and as I got older I would bring stray cats home and they would stay. By the time I graduated high school, we had Beavis (acquired in 1995), Hope (acquired in 1996) and Whitey (acquired in 1989). Two of the three are still alive...Whitey has moved on. I never really wanted a dog. It's not that I didn't like them, just never wanted one. I got my first dog in the fall of 2002 and named him Brady.

At the time, my wife was working 12 hour shifts on the oncology floor at the hospital. It was an emotionally exhausting job. I remember that she would come home at 7:00 at night and just crash on the couch. Luckily, she only worked three days a week, but the job was getting to her and had beat her down pretty good. I thought it would be a great idea to surprise her with a new puppy. I asked the lady what breed the dogs were and she had no idea...she just knew the mom was a lab. They all looked like labs in the face and they were all golden. I picked the smallest one because we were renting a house then and had no fence around our backyard. I picked up Brady that night and had home and in the bathroom before Davina got home. I told her to go open the door and see what was in there. Initially, she wanted to take him back, but that night she ended up sleeping with him on the couch. In a moment of foreshadowing, he peed on her in the middle of the night. This is the Mr. Brady that we would come to know.

We moved into a new house in March of the following year and while Mr. Brady's body had grown longer and his head had grown bigger, his legs had hardly grown at all. We waited and waited for him to grow, but he only stayed in limbo between a full grown lab and a puppy. Mr. Brady enjoyed his new home and I would let him swim in the pond in our neighborhood in the afternoons. On a trip to the vet that spring we discovered the shocking truth: Mr. Brady was mix of dotson and lab. How these two breeds of dogs managed to physically pro-create is beyond my imaginiation. Many times I have tried to work out the logistics behind this mystery and I cannot wrap my mind around it. Mr. Brady was a half-breed and by this time behavior bordered on insane.

Over the next couple of years things got a little busy. I didn't walk him as much, but we would still let him in the house when we decorated the Christmas tree every year. He liked that, I think. During this time, Mr.Brady developed what weather.com calls "thunder phobia". Basically, he is insanely scared of storms. This is probably due to the fact that he has been outside during two tornadoes. Davina and I were both locked down at work and couldn't get home to let him in the house. Regardless, everytime it thunders Mr. Brady will hurl himself at the back door like a linebacker diving for a tailback. It's such an awful thud that we always end up putting him in the garage. This past August Mr. Brady decided he was too special not to be able to pass his genetic make-up on to another unfortunate mutt, so he bit and dug his way through our fence. We called the vet to get an appointment to get him fixed, but the next appointment was more than a week away. We poured quickcrete concrete in the hole where he dug out. We flipped the boards, so he no longer could squeeze through the hole in the fence that he had eaten through. Still, he struggled. He had scratched up his paws and legs. And, yes, he did manage to get out. A week later, he was fixed and settled down quite a bit.

In December of this past year, I decided Mr. Brady needed someone new to play with, so I went to the local humane society and purchased Nacoma. A husky, pit bull, and some other things mix. She is a whole other story that I will tell later. In short, they get along great and even though they don't know it, they are getting ready for another move to our new house at the end of the month.

Last night, Mr. Brady slept in the garage because it was lightning outside. Nacoma whined and whined because he wasn't outside. And sometimes, when I want to get strange looks, I will take Mr. Brady to the high school soccer games or football games. Some kids say he's cute, some kids say he's ugly, some smaller kids are simply scared of him. The high school kids in my class tell me he's the ugliest dog they've ever seen and he might be. He's been a pain in the ass more times than not and to be honest I can't really find a redeemable quality about him. The only good thing about him is that I've never seen any other animal that looks like him. He is one of a kind on every level.