1 Year Without “T”

Well, today is the 1 year anniversary of losing the “T” Man.  It seems like just yesterday that we brought this little bundle of energy home.

At the time we had 4 cats, and if you want to know what disrupting a household is like – just throw a Vizsla into this mix – Luckily Tuck always loved the cats, only one of them actually came to love Tuck though, but I can’t blame them for that – they’re just stupid cats after all.

Tucker was always willing to learn, and fit right into our life perfectly – we took him everywhere that we could, and he learned to be a big part of things without getting in the way.  To this day we still have people that tell us that he was their favorite dog ever – and some of them have dogs in their lives at the time. Tuck always loved all of our friends and in return they loved him too.

Tucker was the most sensitive soul I ever knew, if Nancy and I raised our voices he would get upset, start to shake and eventually would leave the room to hide out, of course this made it difficult to watch sports, since we would be yelling at the game and suddenly notice that Tucker wasn’t in the room with us, and we would have to go find where he was hiding away from our yelling.

The easy thing was that we always knew if there was a problem, because Tuck would never be out of the room that we were in – so, no Tuck, and you knew something was up.

This sensitivity really came into play whenever one of us was hurting, Tucker would become the biggest cuddle monster and would go out of his way to be there for us.  When Nancy went through breast cancer Tucker spent many a day wrapped around her making sure she was OK.  He would walk up and put his nose on your nose and just look into your face, an incredible boy to say the least.

We’ve had our own business for quite a while now, which makes it easy to bring our boys with us, Tucker was always the star of the show… We had clients that we would call to confirm a meeting and they would ask if we were bringing Tucker with us, and would make sure to let us know that if Tucker wasn’t coming, there really wasn’t any reason to meet at that time, and we could wait until Tucker could be present.  The best part is that they would have a chair at the meeting table for Tucker so that he could crawl up in the chair and crash out while we conducted our meeting.

The memories stream back quickly, too quickly at times as they bring tears with them.  The time he was brain-cramping and hit his leg on a hidden rock – we thought he had broken it – he just stood there holding it up and crying for us… The time he was doing his brush surfing (hopping through the deep brush so he could see above it) and we watched him jump up and then disappear as he went over the edge of a ravine and landed in the creek about 15 feet below, we had to hang over the edge and pull his wet butt back up to the trail… Coming home one time after leaving him inside for about 12 hours (we got stuck somewhere) and finding a little bit of pee tinkled throughout the house as Tucker ran from the back door, to the kitchen door, to the front door, up the stairs – everywhere, trying to find any way out, finally ending up in the upstairs bathroom where he finally releaved himself on the tile (We felt so bad for that one, he tried so hard to find a way out!!!)…

I think of all of the nicknames we had for our guy, I could go on about the Tucker forever, but we have to save those for another time.

Tonight I will raise a toast (and please, everyone reading this, do the same) to the dog that really thought he was human, to the dog that taught us about true commitment and love, to the one and only “T”…

These Pics (except the one with Nancy) were all taken the last morning that we had Tucker, they are tough to see at times, everything comes flying back – but they are the last ones we got and will always show that even on his last day he was the most gentle soul possible.