My Dog Molly

“Not Carloe again!”I was tired of the name Carloe…

Dad had come up with the name the first time around. The pup was so cute and we couldn’t come up with a name that stuck until dad called out “Carloe” after one of his child hood pets. I always wondered why he called his dog Carlo because they had few cars in those days.

About a week later Carloe was prophetically hit by a car in the front of our home. She died as we all stood around her. I’d never seen anything like that before and the shock about ripped my heart out. Carloe was gone.

A few days later another pup appeared and again we were stumped for a name. Dad called out “Carloe” and again it stuck. Carloe the 2nd. It wasn’t but a month or so and Carloe the 2^nd was also struck by a car and didn’t survive.

It was a few dead Carloes later when a friend of mine offered me a pup. “No dad, his name isn’t Carloe.” It was past time to change the name. Besides she didn’t look any thing like a Carloe. She was a black longhaired mutt with some cocker and who knows what else. I named her a good dog name. “Molly, that’s her name Dad, Molly.” I had my own dog and couldn’t be happier.

By the time Molly came along I was probably ten or so and had experienced my share of misfortune with pets. You see, it wasn’t just a bunch of dead carloe’s, I had watched dad ring the kittens’ necks, and chop off the hen’s heads. We watched our friend Bud shoot one of our cats. When the last Carloe got distemper, Byron, sticking with the car theme, tried to asphyxiate the dog in his Buick. He rigged the exhaust so it would blow back into the car and the dog eventually kicked the bucket. Byron thought it would be the most humane way to die.

And that’s when I decided that the most humane way to die would be of some thing no one has to watch. So the next time we had to practice pet euthanasia with some of the cats, we decided to put them in a bag of rocks and throw them in the river. That gave me bad dreams also.

By the time we had to put Molly to sleep, we were all out of ideas. She was foaming at the mouth now and dad said she had a temper or something and felt it was too dangerous to have her around the house any more. Dad said he’d take care of her and I went off to school.

It had snowed hard all night and the back yard had a fresh 12 inches. I looked forward to playing fox and goose and making angels in the snow when school was over, but when I got home the whole back yard was red with the blood of Molly. She had moved as our neighbor took aim and had been grazed with the bullet and then ran crazed around the back yard until she bled herself to death.

From then on I never wanted another dog. I couldn’t imagine how our neighbor’s dogs lived such long graceful lives and all of ours had such horrible endings. Only our mother calico mother cat named Kitty managed to live a long life. It must have been in the name.