Skamper Gone a Decade

Curse you Google calendar with your accurate reminders. Curse you for being so prim about it. Especially when I really need to just get a night of sleep longer than 5 hours.

~~Curse you..~~ Well, I cannot really go down that route. But I just got a little pop up message and it says it has been ten years, a decade for poops sake, since my dog Skamper passed away

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

That photo was him as a puppy, and me with a lot less years and miles on me. 1996, heck that was the first round for me and a ponytail. He was a birthday surprise, intended as a frisbee chasing classic labrador, but turning out to be a bit more… shrunken as he was apparently mixed with a Chow.

He was both sweet and quirky, and right now I am getting dimmer on the qualities. He was a bridge dog for our canine family tree; we had him and Fudge at the same time; she the greatest dog I’ve partly owned (lab doberman mix from the pound). Fudge passed away in 2001 with stomach cancer. Skamper was then the elder statesman when 2 weeks later we brought in the new generation, Cadu and Mickey.

Ten years, yikes.

As rational as I can be in the math, it can still baffle me that we humans can have our short time span on this blue marble, but still live through 5? 7, 10? generations of pets. It distorts time to some degree. It ought to give me perspective.

The reminder is a reminder.

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by emma.kate

I have this calendar set up because of my Mom. She maintained for many years a giant wall calendar in her kitchen. It was one of those blank ones, and each year she would faithfully carry over births, deaths, anniversaries for friends and family… and she also included dogs in there (as well as events like my sister’s broken nose and Mom’s own hysterectomy, I kid you not).

When we cleaned out her house in November, it felt like a family archive, soe I transferred the key dates (left off the nose and hysterectomy) to a shared Google calendar. Which now triggers reminders for all these events.

As it did today.

And I am more thankful for the memory trigger, the “cursing” is only sarcasm

Here’s to you little buddy, that little white dog who never quite was what I thought he would be, meaning he was who he thought he should be–