Our Tribute to Miss Loretta.

So, you’ll have to excuse a really mushy post about my dog.  I am not a big fan of blogs that don’t stay somewhat on topic, and my topic is generally personal reaction to pop-culture, Christianity, college ministry, and related humor.  But today I have to give my sweet dog a shout out.

Sweet, yes.  Bright enough to avoid traffic, obviously not.  Saturday afternoon (right before my Tar Heels lost another one) Loretta was hit and killed by a car on the highway in front of my in-laws’ house.  One minute we are playing ball in the yard, the next minute I am digging a Retta-sized hole in the yard, with tears streaming down my face.

We adopted Retta from the pound here in Asheville on January 21st of 2007.  They found her highly malnourished, underweight, and scared.  We quickly helped to pack the pounds back onto her, and stuffed her into our small apartment.  Lucky for her, we didn’t do much research before we went to the pound, and had to foot the $350 non-refundable pet fee.

I’d pay 3 times as much to have her back tomorrow.

We didn’t even know she knew how to bark until one day in the early spring when a man was painting our patio.  She only barked when necessary.

From day one Loretta was allowed on every piece of furniture in the house.  The best was when we had guests already on said furniture.  Unaware that she weighed around 50 pounds, Retta would make herself comfortable, often at high speeds, sometimes from behind the couch, right in the laps of our visitors.

She loved Little Ben.  The two of them had a mutual agreement to share food that he didn’t want, and from the very beginning of his life he’d love to have her lick the food right off of his face.  Despite our best parenting efforts, there were times we just had to stop and laugh at the two of them.  By far the hardest moments since she died have been when LB has called for her, unable to understand why she’s gone.  He’s going to miss having that dog around to tackle.

We are going to miss having that dog around to lick up all of our messes.  We’d perfectly trained her to follow a toe-tap on the ground in the direction of a treat we were too lazy to clean up ourselves.  We’re not going to miss the terrible (and I mean terrible) room-clearing gas that the addition of human food to her diet (via the little man and our laziness) rendered in her gastrointestinal system.

Since the addition of LB, Retta’s favorite time of day was after he went to bed.  We’d curl up on the futon in the office to watch TV shows via the internet, and she’d curl up right there with us, eager to get some affection.

Soon it’ll be back to normal content here at benandjacq.com, but for today, we wanted to remember our sweet (but stupid) pooch.  Anybody with a dog knows, there’s nothing quite like their unconditional excitement.  We loved that sweet dog.  It’s going to be a really rough couple of weeks.  We’d appreciate your prayers.