Pets I Have Known and Loved

In the months since I lost Lancelot, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the many animals I've loved. Most were dogs, since my dad hates cats. And honestly, we had as many dogs as my parents had cars. We always seemed to be trading up for the next best thing. Over the holidays, I asked my parents what they remembered about these dogs. In some cases, we remember little. In others, I'd rather forget.

Dog: Snowball
Breed: Samoyed
Length of time with Guglielminos: Several weeks/months

Snowball came to live with us when I was a little girl, sometime before my eighth birthday. He was a huge, sweet, gregarious ball of fur. (This photograph, by the way, is not the actual "Snowball" but one of his compatriots, courtesy of the Westminster Kennel Club.) Snowball would bound out of the house at the sight of anything that looked fun, including the arrival of our neighbors, who found his boundless enthusiasm a bit frightening. He knocked over objects and people unable to contain his Herculean energy: Dad remembers edging his way up the stairs in our split-level house so he wouldn't trip over the dog. Mom and Dad soon concluded Snowball was too much dog for our little suburban house.

Dog: Lady
Breed: Collie
Length of time with Guglielminos: Very brief

I can't remember whether Lady or Snowball came first, but whose bright idea was it to get two huge dogs? I have few memories of Lady, but my mother alleges the dog (thanks again to the Westminster Kennel Club for the photo) herded me around the house and refused to let my mother touch me. Mom complained to Dad, who (again, allegedly) told my mother not to worry about it—what could happen? As the family legend goes, Dad came home from work one night and tried to pick me up, but Lady herded me into the corner. That was the end of Lady.

Dog: Muttsey (aka Muttley)
Breed: Mutt
Length of time with Guglielminos: Several years

I consider Muttsey our first dog success—though his story ended unhappily. Muttsey came from an ad in the newspaper. We managed to mangle/forget his given name within 10 minutes of picking him up. Years later my mother saw the old owner, who asked after Muttley. I guess it didn't matter, since the dog didn't seem to mind what we called him.

Muttley/Muttsey remind me of Benji, which is why I picked out this photo from The Pet Press. We never knew about Muttsey's ancestry, but Benji was believed to have been part Llasa apso/part Shit Tzu. Muttsey had orangish hair, and he was kind of a mess of a dog but very cute. He was a good small size for our little family. Muttsey's only problem was that he was jumpy. The previous owner warned us not to surprise him.

Muttsey was the first dog I truly loved. We had a back yard with a fence, but sometimes I took him for walks. I'd throw him tennis balls and try to convince him to swim with me in the pool.

One summer my mother needed gall bladder surgery. Muttsey became my security blanket. I decided he and I would get "married." I wore my communion dress and veil, wrote vows and arranged the lawn furniture in aisles in the back yard. My grandfather performed the ceremony while my father and grandmothers looked on. Like most grooms, Muttsey had little to do with the ceremony. I did gave him a bone afterward, which seemed to please him. I'll leave the rest of the jokes to your imagination...

Muttsey was the central player in our most famous family Thanksgiving, the last holiday in which both my grandmothers and my Grandpa Ross were still alive. Every year Dad set up a reel-to-reel tape to record our festivities. In Thanksgiving 1979, Muttsey disappeared just as we got ready to sit down for turkey. In the confusion, Dad forgot to turn off the reel-to-reel. We caught the entire fiasco on tape. Grandma Betty thought Muttsey had drowned in the pool; Mom and I called out to him; Dad cursed and yelled at everyone to sit down and eat the turkey before it got dry. The tape captured my grandmother yelling at my grandfather to get out of the kitchen—something that could have happened at any number of family holidays. Happiness ensued when we discovered Muttsey in the attic and finally sat down for dinner.

The kids in the neighborhood loved torturing Muttsey. I never understood why. But with Muttsey's nerves, he was an accident waiting to happen. One day our neighbor, "little John," kept harassing Muttsey. I told John, "Better leave Muttsey alone, or he'll bite you." But he didn't, and Muttsey did. Little John's parents sued my parents in small claims court, and in the end my parents said we couldn't keep Muttsey. I was in the 4th grade. I remember crying at my desk and my teacher, Mrs. Marshall, came to comfort me. I was afraid of her because she made the "bad kids" stand in the corner. But when I told her about Muttsey, she was compassionate. It was my first lesson in how animals bring out the best in people.